Jennifer Derrick~Finding the Absurd in Writing and Publishing

YA Author. Freelance Writer. Reader of everything. Board gamer & reviewer; contributor to iSlaytheDragon.com Sports nut. Owned by a dog. My YA novel, Broken Fate is available now.

[jenniferderrick]

Honest Marketing Template #5

Blankets are the most popular accoutrements for book marketing images. People love the idea of curling up in a fuzzy blanket with a book. If you can throw in a fireplace or candle, so much the better. This template covers both bases and invites people to envision passing those cold winter nights with your book. Instead of hitting the booze. 

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From Avenging Fate, by Jennifer Derrick

[jenniferderrick]

“What’s with all the books?”

I’m deep into book three of the Threads of the Moirae and I’ve hit a point where I need to do a lot of research. The kind that you can’t just whip through with a Google search. You know, the kind that requires actual books and archive material.

So the other day I went to the local university library and came out with a boatload of books. Someone I know saw me struggling with the load and said,

“What’s with all the books?”

I said, “I’m writing my next novel. I’ve got to research a few things.”

This person then said, “Yeah, but why do you need all those books? You just sit at the computer and make stuff up, right? It’s not real so why do you need to do research? And even if you do, that’s what the Internet is for. Nobody needs books anymore.”

Yes. That’s all I do. I just sit at the computer and make stuff up. And all the factual information I need that makes it all seem so real is magically delivered from above.

Or through the implant in my head.

Oh, and it’s great to know that no one needs books anymore. Nice to know that my occupation is a waste of time.

Awesome.

[jenniferderrick]

“...Except she’s successful.”

I love telling people that I’m an author and then hearing about all their other run-ins with authors. (I’m serious. I really do like it when someone says, “Oh, yeah, I went to college with so-and-so,” or, “I have a client that’s an author.” I get a kick out of hearing their stories about other authors “in the wild.”)

What I don’t love is when the conversation goes like the one I had the other day.

This person knows that I’m an author so she was telling me about someone that her brother met who is also an author. It was great until I asked for the author’s name. 

She said, “I can’t remember her name, but she’s really big. She writes young adult, too, except she’s really successful.”

The implication being that clearly I am not a household name. Or successful.

I really appreciate having that pointed out.

Thank you for contributing to my already over-large inferiority complex.

[jenniferderrick]

Honest Marketing Template #4

I’ve yet to figure out why books belong on dinner place settings, but it seems to be the thing to do. So put your book on this place setting and be the awe of the dinner social scene!

(The first template, with the humorous idea behind these posts, is here.)

[jenniferderrick]

Honest Marketing Template #3

Here’s another honest marketing image template! Perfect for attracting everyone who wishes they had time to read over coffee.

(The first one, with the idea behind these posts, is here.)

[jenniferderrick]

“Don’t you get jealous that other writers are doing better than you?”

First of all, let me just say that I am fully aware that there are other authors out there making a crapton more money than me and who have the name recognition of a mega-corporation. Thank you so much for pointing that out, though.

Second, I think you’re misusing the word “jealous.” Check out Homer’s explanation above. I think what my well-intentioned questioner really means is, “Am I envious of other writers?” 

Now that the grammar police have had their say, I’ll address the question: The big girl answer is, “No, I’m not envious. I don’t want someone else’s life or their success. Everyone has their own career, their own goals, and there’s room in the marketplace for all kinds of writers and writing careers. They have their lives and I have mine. Besides, even if I were envious, that’s not a bad thing because it pushes me to work harder.”

The honest answer, though, is, “Well of course I envy other writers, dumbass. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be human and I wouldn’t care about my work or my career.”

Yes, there are days when I see someone else’s success story about signing with a big publishing house, optioning a movie, selling out a print run, or having a huge crowd at their book signing and I want to crawl in a hole and die. I just want to give up because I feel like I’ll never get there, or even have half the success of that person. No amount of, “You’ll get there someday,” “Hard work makes you stronger,” or “Their fame comes with a price,” crap can take the sting out of knowing that someone else out there has the success that I dream of.

Unfortunately, envy is a human emotion. You can no more stop yourself from feeling it than you can stop yourself from laughing when your best friend falls on her face after a night of binge drinking. You know it’s bad and you shouldn’t do it, but you just can’t help yourself.

So it goes for writers. Anyone on the lower rungs of the success ladder who tells you that they don’t envy someone else’s success is either lying, quoting a press release, or they just don’t care enough about their own work for envy to register. Because if you care at all about your career, your work, or your readers, you’re going to envy those who do it better than you. It’s a fact of life. You just have to learn to deal with it and move on. (Easier said than done.)

The only bright side is that part of the big girl answer is actually true. Envy can push you to work harder. If you want to move up the success ladder, it’s your only option (short of having a major celebrity pick up your book and Instagram themselves holding it -- and I’m taking volunteers). Work hard and eventually things may happen for you. Or so you tell yourself...

Of course, in order to work harder, you have to crawl out of the hole you retreated into in the first place, so it’s kind of a crapshoot as to how it’ll all work out.

[jenniferderrick]

Honest Marketing Template #2

Here's another honest book marketing template! Perfect for those shill reviews you want to showcase!

(The first one, with the idea behind these posts, is here.)

[jenniferderrick]

Honest Marketing Templates

Since my book has been published, I’ve been studying book marketing/promotion. It seems to me that most marketing centers around sticking a book on a lovely image and then begging people to buy the book by posting the image every hour on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. (Note that the begging is artfully done and without actually using the words “Buy my book.” It’s classy begging.)

I’ve been guilty of this, as well, and I can’t help but feel a little absurd at times for doing it. But, it seems to be the accepted convention, so I’m in with everyone else creating over-filtered, downright odd, and thinly-veiled begging promotional images.

However, if you want to be a little more honest in your book marketing, I’m going to start posting some helpful templates for you. Still artfully done, but much, much more honest. 

[jenniferderrick]

“You wrote this whole thing by yourself?”

Someone asked me this about my novel, Broken Fate. The serious answer is, of course, “Yes, I wrote the whole thing. Took a while, but I did it.”

The answer I wanted to give was, “Well, I wrote some of it, but then one morning I work up and the aliens had written the rest of it. They left a note, so I know it was them.”

Either that or, “Well, I think so, but it’s hard to tell, what with the out of body experiences I keep having and all. Pretty sure it was me, though.”

Of course, there’s also, “No, I didn’t write all of it. I don’t know who did, but it sure was nice of them, wasn’t it?”

[jenniferderrick]

“Do you enjoy your work?”

Party conversation always throws me off. I know it’s customary to ask, “What do you do?” and then follow it up with chit chat. Now, for people who work for “The Man,” sometimes that chit chat entails asking whether or not someone enjoys their work. It’s a way to find out if they’re living their dream, I suppose, or if they’re as miserable as everyone else in the room.

I was asked this question the other day and all I could think was, “Duh, yes!”

I write novels. This is not work that you take on if you hate it. I chose this occupation. It’s not something that I stumbled into. No one comes up to you and says, “Hey, can you crank out this novel real quick for me?” and then realizes you have massive talent and sticks you in the novel writing department where you are miserable until the day you finally retire. I chose this. I’d damn well better enjoy it.

Fiction writing is not an occupation that you go to college for, only to realize once you graduate that you hate the actual work. Yes, there are creative writing programs, but if you hate the schoolwork, you’re not going to like the job. The mismatch will be obvious, unlike, say, getting a degree in economics which sounds really cool but is boring as crap when you’re tasked with figuring out the economic health of a company that produces dysfunctional widgets.

Fiction writing is completely optional and intentional. Anyone who does it had better love it. Not only did you choose to do it (so you’re an idiot if you hate it), your dislike of the work will show and no one will buy your novels. Thus making you hate it even more and creating a never ending death spiral of psychic pain. Who needs that when you can get paid a lot more to experience psychic pain in the corporate world?

[jenniferderrick]

Christmas in July!

It’s time to celebrate Christmas in July with some giveaways! First up, a chance to win two signed copies of Broken Fate. That’s one for you to keep and one to give away. (I’ll sign the second one to whomever you wish, you just have to play Santa Claus and deliver it to them.) This one ends on July 12, 2016, so enter soon!

Visit http://jenniferderrick.com/current-giveaways/ for more information and to enter!

[jenniferderrick]

Career Advice Should Start With, “You’re Going to Die.”

I’ve noticed something. There’s a strange up and down to the advice you get when you announce that you want to pursue the arts for your career. It’s really no wonder that so many artists, writers, and musicians end up confused, a little bit crazy, and ultimately unfulfilled.

Here’s the progression of career advice for artists:

Stage 1. Go for it, kid. When you’re a little kid and you announce that you want to pursue some artistic profession like writing, painting, or music, everyone encourages you. “Sure, we’ll get you music lessons, buy you art supplies, and read all your stories and tell you how great you are and how far you can go.” If nothing else, this is educational stuff, so people feel free to encourage your dreams. They figure you’ll grow out of it.

Stage 2. You’ll never make a living. When you hit high school and the “vocational counselors” come out of the woodwork, you start hearing, “The arts are fine, but you need to pursue something practical so you can make money. The arts are for hobbies. Get a real job and do your art on the side.” You pack your dreams away in favor of more practical things and head off to college or the military, secure in the knowledge that, while you might not be happy, you’ll at least get to eat on a regular basis. 

Stage 3. You’re free to do what you want. Buck the system! Then you hit college (or, if you don’t go to college, you’re probably still hanging out with some like-minded artsy types) and suddenly it’s back to, “Pursue your passion! Explore whatever moves you. Screw the overlords that want to keep the arts down!” This is especially true if you end up in a liberal arts program or at college in a city with an artsy/hippie vibe. You drag your artistic pursuits back out and think, “Hmm. Maybe I can do something with this,” and you’re egged on by the supportive community of dreamers that college fosters. 

Stage 4. Keep up with the Jones's, fool! That lasts for the four years of school. Once you’re out of college, you get hit with the pressure to achieve, make money, and accumulate all those hallmarks of the American dream: Nice car, big house, 2.5 kids, etc. (Also, you really shouldn’t be living on your parents’ couch.) This is not usually compatible with an artistic life so you’re back to looking for a “real” job so you can give your family all the benefits of a consumerist lifestyle. At this point, you may find yourself going back to school for a degree in something “useful.”

Stage 5. You’re going to die soon, so you’d better live your dreams! Later in life, after the kids are gone and you’re on your own again, you start hearing people talking about their regrets and how they wish they’d pursued their passions while they were still young. All of the advice swings back to, “Get out there! Make your art! Don’t die with regrets!” The problem now is that unless you’ve kept up with your pursuits and practiced enough (and you’re healthy enough to work hard), it’s probably too late to do anything significant with them. You’ve run out of time at exactly the moment that you have the time and money to pursue your dreams.

Dammit.

Here’s a thought: Life goes by so fast, wouldn’t it be easier to start with, “You’re going to die soon, so you’d better live your dreams?”

It would save everyone a lot of trouble and angst. Sure, you might have to change your life plan to accommodate the vagaries of an artistic life, but isn’t that better than the constant stop-start approach that conventional advice encourages?

If a kid starts at eight and sticks with her art over many years, she has just as much chance of making a career with it as any other occupation. It’s the stop-start that kills the learning and momentum and makes it harder to earn a living the more time that goes by.

When artistically-inclined kids get to high school, the guidance counselors shouldn’t say, “Get a real job,” they should say, “You’re going to die, so do whatever the hell you want and enjoy it.”

[jenniferderrick]

“Short Stories Don’t Count”

I have a writer friend who makes a good living publishing short stories, both through self-publishing and traditional channels. She sometimes sells them individually and sometimes compiles them into anthologies, or contributes them to anthologies with other writers. She loves the work and excels at creating compelling stories in few words. It’s a gift that not many people have. 

Someone that we are both acquainted with told her that she wasn’t really a published author because, “Short stories don’t count. You have to write books to be an author.”

Okay. It’s good to know that all those writers writing shorts aren’t really authors. I’d hate to think that they were, I don’t know, telling stories, putting words on the page, creating characters and plots, and producing publishable pieces that readers actually buy.

(What’s funny is that as attention spans fragment, short stories and novellas are actually becoming more popular. People want something that will entertain them for a little while without a huge commitment. My friend is actually on the cutting edge of something huge.)

Still, it’s good to know that short story writers are not real authors. Maybe now they’ll get off their butts and try harder. You know, like the book authors who crank out 200,000 word tomes and sell one copy. To their mother.

Because that’s a real author, right there.

[jenniferderrick]

“Good to see that writing for kids hasn’t ruined your writing skills.”

This was said by someone for whom I recently wrote a technical/scientific piece. I haven’t worked for this person in a while, not since well before my YA novel came out. This person was surprised, though, to discover that somehow writing for kids has not turned me into a complete moron incapable of writing anything but gibberish.

I don’t know why this person should be surprised. Kids are intelligent readers and they expect intelligent writing. Just because they’re kids doesn’t mean that authors get to just vomit random words on the page and get a pass.

Sure, I’m not using words like antinode or scalar in my YA work, but neither am I writing, “See Jane run.” And even if I were, writing for kids and writing for adults are not mutually exclusive. It is entirely possible for the two skill sets to coexist. Writing for one audience does not mean losing the skills required to write for the other.

But the most important thing to remember here is what I mentioned earlier: Kids aren’t idiots and if you expect that writing for them is somehow easier or simpler, or that it requires no effort, intelligence, or skill, you are sorely mistaken.

It’s actually more difficult to write for kids because they can smell BS a mile away. They don’t want to be pandered to, and they don’t want you to treat them like idiots. If you do that, you won’t have many readers for long.

(Whereas in technical writing, my job is often to assume that the people reading the work are idiots and to write for the lowest common denominator. So it could be argued that my day job is actually “easier” than writing for kids, at least if you’re using the metric employed above.)

So while technical writing and YA writing are different in many ways, they are both demanding and require strong writing skills. Writing YA does not “ruin” writing skills any more than helping a kid with a science project or teaching a fifth grade science class “ruins” a physicist’s ability to engage in serious scientific inquiry.

[jenniferderrick]

“Are you a millionaire, yet?”

Now that Broken Fate is out, a well-meaning friend asked me this question the other day. At first I thought (hoped) she was kidding, but she was serious. 

She has bought into the idea that authors instantly become millionaires once their book releases. (If this were true, think how many millionaires there would be in the world!)

What she doesn’t understand is that the vast majority of authors work for peanuts. Or possibly something even smaller, like Tic Tacs. Most of us write for fun or, at best, as a side gig, not our primary source of income.

I explained this nicely to her and then told her that, once I hit millionaire status, I will gladly take her to Paris. Despite my warnings, she still got all excited at the prospect.

I suspect she’ll be waiting a long time for that trip.

[jenniferderrick]

Win a Signed Copy of Broken Fate!

To celebrate the fact that I've turned Avenging Fate (the sequel to Broken Fate) over to Clean Teen Publishing, plus the start of summer, I'm giving away a signed paperback copy of Broken Fate, plus some author swag!

Here's your chance to pad your summer reading list with a free book! All you have to do is visit my Facebook page and tell me your favorite part of summer on the giveaway post.