Tuesday, July 30, 2013

A Word from Beatrice Plotter…

 
 

“What pantsers don’t realize is that reading a book is substantially different from writing one.”
 
 
It’s not about making the writing experience mirror reading  a book but rather about writing a book that creates the best reading experience for the reader. The surgeon should not become the patient nor expect to feel the way the patient feels.
 
Watch Patients Being Saved at Seekerville
Perhaps Pantsers Will Get the Difference If They Come to the Seekerville Two-Day Plotter/Pantser Workshop onJuly 31 & August 1st!
 
 

 

Polly Pantser Sez…

 
 

“Plotters are like people who read the end of  romances in stores before they buy the book. They just don’t get it!”
 
Maybe Plotters Will Get It If They Come to the Seekerville Two-Day Plotter/Pantser Workshop on July 31 & August 1st!
 
 
Come Visit Seekerville
Plotters are Planning to be There.
 
Pantsers Don’t Where They’re Going to Be.

Sunday, July 28, 2013

A Word from Beatrice Plotter…

 

"Plotters will pantser as much as they can within the plot parameters while pantsers will plot as little as they can. within an editor's requirements.  
 
Even so, both plotters and pantsers will benefit from the  Seekerville, ,Two-Day, Plotter/Pantser, Workshop, July 31 and August 1".
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Polly Pantser Sez...

 


Come to the Two Day Pantser/Plotter Workshop at Seekerville on July 31 & August 1.
 

“I happen to know that Pantsers Rule!”
Polly Pantser

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Announcing…a Seekerville 2-Day Pantser/Plotter Workshop!

 



 
Vince Mooney will be Guesting a Two Day Virtual Workshop on “How Plotting & Pantsering Affects Everything You Write.”

Author Instructors Include:
Virginia Carmichael, Mary Connealy, Janet Dean, Clari Dees, Debby Giusti, Audra Harders, Ruth Logan Herne, Myra Johnson, Julie Lessman, Tina Radcliffe, and co-authors, Lorie Langdon and Carey Corp. 

Come Visit and See if you can’t learn more about Pantsering and Plotting than you ever thought possible. Many valuable Insights and observations are awaiting your attention.

Ideal for new and established writers. All Star lineup! So Big It Takes Two Days!

 

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Famous Writing Quote of the Day

 

“It’s fine to write what you know as long as what you know is also what readers want to read.”  
Vince Mooney

Famous Quote of the Day

 
 
“Sometimes the best way to be heard is to say nothing at all.”
 
Vince Mooney

Sunday, July 21, 2013

A Word from Beatrice Plotter...

 
 
“The advantage of knowing where the story is going and how it ends is that this knowledge allows the author to enhance each scene in the book to maximize the total emotional impact of the narrative. The layering becomes intrinsic rather then extrinsic. This difference can be felt even when it cannot be observed.”

Vince Mooney

Polly Pantser Sez...



“Plotters think they are omniscient even when they are writing in first person point of view.”
 
Vince Mooney

Saturday, July 20, 2013

A Word from Beatrice Plotter...




“Plotters have the advantage of knowing then what they know now.”

Vince Mooney

Aristotle Would Have Been A Plotter




“A true knowledge of any activity requires an understanding of what the end result is supposed to be.” (This is a paraphrase of Aristotle).

Thursday, July 18, 2013

The Pantser/Plotter Paradox...

 

Plotters can know in advance if they have a great story to tell. Their challenge is fulfillment. Can they make the story live and breathe? 

Pantsers, with their innate spontaneity, know they can make their stories come alive. Their challenge is creating a moving story that ends up being  more than mediocre.  

Writing then becomes a question of which cross you want to bear.
 
Vince Mooney
 
 

Polly Pantser Sez...

 

“Knowing how things are going to turn out and how the story ends makes plotters think they are omniscient. They can be worse than doctors.”

Vince Mooney

A Word from Beatrice Plotter...

 
“You can always tell the plotters in any writing workshop. They are the ones ready to teach the class if the instructor doesn’t show up.”
 
Vince Mooney




Wednesday, July 17, 2013

A Word from Beatrice Plotter...


“Pantsers are really readers at heart. They would rather read than write. Therefore they try to write, as far as it’s possible, as if they were reading and not writing.”

Vince Mooney

Polly Pantser Sez...


 
 
 
“Plots are where they bury dead people and non organic writers.”

Vince Mooney

If Characters in a Romance Could Speak...

 
 
“I didn’t have the heart to tell her this but her tickets are for the Republican Women Authors Conference in Atlanta, Kansas.”
Vince Mooney
 
 

A Word from Beatrice Plotter...

 
“Pilots who fly by the seats of their pants have to come down when the weather gets rough. It’s called having ‘Weather’s Block’”.
 
Vince Mooney
 

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Polly Pantser Sez...

 
 

“Plotters are like people who play chess against themselves. What possible fun could that be?”
 
Vince Mooney
 
 

A Word from Beatrice Plotter...



 “Pantsers are like people who can’t keep a secret. If they knew how their stories were going to end, they couldn’t keep it from their readers.”
Vince Mooney

Pantser Quote of the Day


“Pantsers have plots just like plotters have pants. They just don’t put them on the same way.”

Vince Mooney

Famous Writing Quote of the Day



“Words are like ants. They can carry many times their own weight.”
 
Vince Mooney


If Characters in a Romance Could Speak...

 

"No, she doesn’t have writer’s block. She’s on Facebook showing pictures of what she is making for supper.”

Vince Mooney

Sunday, July 14, 2013

Pantser Quote of the Day

 


“If you must be a pantser, then at least start your book with a great situation – a situation so ripe with interesting potential that any one of ten different plots coming out of that situation would make a compelling  story. This way, it won’t make any difference which plot you eventually wind up with.” 

Vince Mooney

Famous Writing Quote of the Day

 
 
“It’s okay to write what you know as long as what you know is what readers want to read about. Otherwise,  readers don't care  what you know.”
 
Vince Mooney
 

Saturday, July 13, 2013

Famous Writing Quote of the Day

 



“Write a book that stays with the reader. A book that doesn’t end after being read.  A book that just hangs there in the ether calling the reader back.”
 
Vince Mooney

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Famous Pantser Quote



“Don’t blame me if you don’t like the ending. I didn’t see it coming either.”
 
Vince Mooney
 

Friday, July 5, 2013

Beware of Book Covers with Pretty Faces!

 
Why Graphic Designers Can Be Your Worse Nightmare!

 
There is no doubt about it: cover art design is very important because a bad design can kill book sales. However, the best designed cover, even one that has won awards for the artist, can also kill book sales. 
 

The lesson here is that you should not turn over your marketing to artists or designers.

 

Excellent: what you see
 is what you get cover.

 
Artists worry about ‘the look’. Marketing people worry about the selling power of the cover art. Artists may put type where it is almost impossible to read -- if it looks good. Artists will sometimes fight putting graphic elements in a cover that while they will sell the book  will also lessen the aesthetic appeal of the artwork. Many artists want to create covers that look great, win awards, and enhance their portfolios. That’s very good for them but not necessarily good for their clients. (I’m speaking with decades of experience here.)
 

How to Look at a Book Cover.
 

I believe it is best to view a book cover as a gestalt ‘moving picture’. The reader sees the cover in stages.


First, there is the instant initial impression. What is the cover about? Does the cover attract the right prospects – those are the readers who are most likely to buy and read the book? Or does the cover drive the best prospects away? A cover can do that. Even a beautiful award winning cover can drive away the best prospects while attracting non buyers. Does the cover create a favorable impression or a negative one? All this is happening in the reader’s mind in just a few seconds.  

Second: in what order is the copy read? The reader is most likely to read the biggest type first – that is, unless a clever artist has hidden the biggest type in the overall graphic design. Ideally, you want the reader to read the type in the preferred order. For example: small type above a large type newspaper headline is often never read at all by readers of that story. Thus type is not always read from top to bottom in the order it appears.The order in which the reader is going to read the type should be the order which best conveys your selling message. This is intelligent design.
 
Excellent: what you see
is what you get cover.

 

 

Readers See in Stages.

 
Readers see the cover art in stages. If you are a big name author, like Nora Roberts, you want your name to stand out and be read first.  A plain red cover with just the words “Nora Robert’s New Book” set in very large type would probably sell very well. A very famous author is the brand. If you are lesser known author, then what kind of book it is should stand out at once. The cover should  scream: “This is a book for you reader!!! This is just the kind of book you love reading!”

As far as reasonable, the artwork should put ‘the goodies’ on the table for the reader to see at once. If the book is a romance, it should look like a romance. If it is in a beautiful location that readers would love to visit, then that location should be on the cover. If the story features a garden and two little kids, that garden and those kids need to be on the cover. Perhaps there even needs to be a sailboat and lighthouse in the background. What you are doing here is ‘showing’ the reader that the elements that she likes to see in this kind of story are indeed in this particular book.   

Test Your Book Cover Art!  

It is a wise procedure to test your covers on typical readers. Here’s how: 

Show the cover to the reader for just three seconds. Then take the cover away and ask these questions:  

1. What do  you know about this book from what you just saw? Can you tell me its genre? Is it a contemporary or historical?  Is it Christian fiction?

2. Where is the setting for this book? 

3. Who wrote the book? Do you know the author? Did you even notice the author’s name?  

4. What is the title? From the title can you tell what the book is about?  

5. From what you just saw in those few seconds, would you spend more time looking at the cover to learn more about the book or would you move on and look at a different book?  

The Cover Art is About Marketing and Not Art Per se.  

The job of a book cover is to get your selling message across in just a few seconds. Being beautiful is wonderful if the cover does that but to a marketing person cover art is ugly to the extent it does not do that.
 
Excellent: what you see
 is what you get cover.
 
The key to making cover art sell books is creating a design that instantly attracts the favorable attention of those prospects who are most likely to buy the book -- if they knew of the book’s existence -- and do this in a way that graphical lays the most ‘goodies’ (marketing vitamins) on display -- while at the same time being consistent with the graphic limitations of the medium.  Sometimes you can't do everything you'd like to do.

Important: When you do your cover art test show the artwork in the same size and format as it will see when it is in use. In other words, don’t show  the reader a 8”10” blowup of the cover art for the test.   

I’ve had to battle artists for years, decades even, and sometimes I have to remind them that commercial art is not beautiful or creative unless it sells the product.    

Well Designed Covers That Told Me Little   

I recently saw a series of well designed book covers that told me very little about what the books were about. For example, I could not tell what genre the books were. I could not tell if the books were mainstream, mystery, suspense, woman’s fiction or romance. I could also not tell if they were contemporary or if they took place in the 1930’s. One of the covers had a ‘cinema noir’ look which made me think it was a period mystery but I don’t know if that was the case.
 
Excellent: what you see
is what you get cover.

 
The thing here is that there was nothing graphically wrong with these covers – (except that some of the type was obscured by the artwork.) The artwork was very good which makes the book look professional and thus likely to have been well edited. However there was very little marketing directed at attracting the attention of the best prospects for these books. (At least none I could see.)  

Artists will tell you: “As long as the cover is creative and attractive, people will pick it up and read the back blurb to find out more about the book. That’s why there are back blurbs.”  

And some people will do just this because the cover did strike their fancy. Many of these will read the back blurb and decide it is not a book for them. In the meantime many good prospects for the book will have passed the cover by because they 'know' what they are looking for and when they see a cover that offers them  that, they go right to it.  As an author you want your book to be the one that the best prospects go directly to when they see many different books displayed in a bookstore or on a website.

In marketing today you really can’t afford to let the best prospects, who would most likely buy your product if they knew it existed, fail to notice your product for what it is when they are looking right at it.  

I’d like to leave you with my favorite slogan from the Leo Burnett advertising agency:

“It’s not creative if it doesn’t sell.”
 

 



Thursday, July 4, 2013

Famous Writing Quote of the Day

 



“The acknowledgement part of a book should never be added as an after thought. It should be written before the novel is even begun. Knowing the author has consulted the relevant experts can make the reading experience that much more enjoyable. Having no one to acknowledge is to have failed the reader.”
 
Vince Mooney
 

Monday, July 1, 2013

Hooks are for fishermen…

 
 



"A hooked fish will fight you every step of the way. However, if you make what you have in your boat attractive enough to fish, fish will follow your boat wherever you go and try to jump in."
 
Vince Mooney


Yes, but how to you do this?

Your first chapter has to be a great coming attraction of all the goodies to come. In each genre there are things readers look forward to; in fact, this anticipation is one of the reasons they selected that genre in the first place.
 
In an inspirational romance give the reader a great location they would love to visit, provide a highly sympathetic and worthy hero and heroine. Perhaps these two have suffered an injustice and are still hurting. Have an adorable child or two in need of the love a missing parent.
 
The key here is to lay your cards on the table up front. Show that what readers like best in a story is coming up soon in the story. Give readers a little taste of this and that. In short, make them hungry for what you are about to serve.
 
That’s how to do it.