fantasy author

Most Valuable Writing Business Posts of 2012

January 3, 2013 by Marcy Kennedy • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: business of writing, ebook pricing strategy, fantasy author, Kristine Rusch, Lindsay Burkower, Marcy Kennedy, publishing contracts • 8 Comments

My blogging vacation is wrapping up. I’ll be back next week with fresh content. As we head into 2013, though, I wanted to provide you with some of what I think are the most valuable posts dealing with the business side of writing that I’ve read this year.

Also, don’t miss the special discount I’m offering on the January session of my Twitter course. It starts in two days!

Click here to register for the Silver Level.

Click here to register for the Bronze Level.

What Do We Need to Know About Publishing Contracts?

For those of you who plan to traditionally publish, you are doing yourself a disservice if you don’t read Kristine Rusch’s series on deal breakers. Before you sign with a publisher (of any size), know what you’re willing to compromise on and what will make you walk away from a contract.

Deal Breakers 2012

The End of Reversion Clauses

Non-Compete Clauses

A Tale of Two Royalty Statements

How Should We Price Our Ebooks?

For those of you going indie, this is one of the single biggest ongoing arguments.

Pricing in 2013 by Dean Wesley Smith

How Much Should I Charge for My Ebook? by Catherine Ryan Howard

$0.99? $2.99? $9.99? My Answers to EBook Pricing Questions by Lindsay Buroker

EBook Pricing for Short Stories and Novellas by Lindsay Buroker

EBook Pricing Strategy for a Stand-Alone Novel by Lindsay Buroker

How Many Books A Year Should We Be Writing?

No matter what route you’re going, you’ll feel the pressure of this one.

Here’s my opinion on this. (Not everyone will agree with me.)

There’s a saying in business that you can have it fast, good, or cheap—pick two. Books are now being priced “cheap” compared to ten years ago, so we’re all hitting that point on the triangle. Which means we have to choose between fast and good. Sure, maybe you can write four, five, or more books a year. But will they be as good as if you’d only written one or two?

I’m not going to tell you which choice is right for you, but make sure you actually make the choice rather than giving in to peer pressure.

It’s Not Just About the Numbers by Janice Hardy (She includes links to many other posts on the topic, so I won’t repeat any of them.)

What Happens After Writing 3 or 4 Books a Year by Elizabeth Spann Craig

What Do Readers Want More? Quality or Quantity by Jody Hedlund

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Want to Try Beorn’s Honey Cake from The Hobbit?

December 21, 2012 by Marcy Kennedy • Life at Warp 10, Lord of the Rings, Marcy's Blog • Tags: Beorn, fantasy author, honey cake, Marcy Kennedy, The Hobbit • 9 Comments

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

The Hobbit came out last week, so I thought it was only fitting to do a little digging and see if I could find a treat to celebrate the release. What I found was a recipe for Beorn’s honey cake.

Beorn is a shape-shifter (what J.R.R. Tolkien called a “skin-changer” in the book). He’s a vegetarian, but can take the shape of a bear. In the novel, he helps Gandalf, Bilbo, and the thirteen dwarves in their quest to regain the dwarves’ kingdom.

Here’s how Tolkien describes Beorn’s send off.

He lade them with food to last them for weeks with care, and packed so as to be as easy as possible to carry — nuts, flour, sealed jars of dried fruit, and red earthenware pots of honey, and twice backed cakes that would keep a good long time, and on a little of which they could march far. The making of these was one of his secrets; but honey was in them, as in most of his foods, and they were good to eat, though they made one thirsty.
The Hobbit, Chapter 7

What I love most is the line “but honey was in them, as in most of his foods” because he could take the form of a bear. (It makes me think of Winnie the Pooh.)

For those of you who want to try it, you can find the recipe for Beorn’s honey cake here.

And inquiring minds want to know, what’s your favorite kind of cake?

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Image Credit: MMNoergaar from SXC.hu

Do You Finish What You Start?

December 17, 2012 by Marcy Kennedy • Life at Warp 10, Marcy's Blog • Tags: Cornerstone, fantasy author, Marcy Kennedy, Misty Provencher • 27 Comments

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

Do you finish what you start?

In Cornerstone, an urban fantasy by Misty Provencher, Nalena Maxwell’s mother is the worst kind of non-finisher (or so Nalena thinks). Every week, Nalena stops at the stationery store to buy paper for her mom, an unpublished writer. Nalena hates “paper day” because their house is already filled with paper. (Imagine Extreme Hoarders: Paper Edition.)

Even though Nalena’s mom spends her whole day writing, she never finishes a story. She’s always writing snippets. Bits of characters. Random sentences. Ideas that she sets aside to write the next idea.

Nalena begs her to finish just one because they’re on welfare, barely able to pay their rent. Nalena resents her mother’s inability to follow through.

We later find out Nalena’s mother isn’t a normal writer, but when I first read about their situation, all I could do was pray, “Please don’t let that be me.”

I want to be a finisher, not someone who leaves a trail of half-finished projects scattered behind her.

I know there’s value in trying different things and experimenting to see what we like and what we don’t. We learn a lot from trial and error. But doesn’t a time come when we need to focus on one project and see it through to the end?

When we hop from project to project or continually tinker with the same project for years, we’re cheating ourselves.

We miss out on the satisfaction and sense of accomplishment that comes from finishing. By completing, we also prove to ourselves we can finish. And we overcome the fear that might be the real reason we haven’t finished anything. If we did it once, we can do it again.

Beyond that, what value is there in unfinished projects? I’m not getting any benefit from the half-finished projects around my house. (On the contrary, they’re actually in my way.) I’m not getting any benefit from the half-finished projects collecting virtual dust on the hard drive of my computer. Until I finish them, the time spent on them was, at least in part, wasted.

One of the changes I’m trying to make as the New Year approaches is to work on one project at a time, to force myself to complete one before I allow myself to start on something new. I don’t expect it to be easy. I’m hoping, though, that by sticking to one thing until it’s finished, I’ll develop the determination and perseverance to make it a habit that will mean I complete more in the long run.

Do you finish one project before you start another? Or do you tend to get bored and move on to something new, leaving a trail of unfinished projects behind you?

You can get Cornerstone free right now on Kindle. It’s also available as a paper copy. (The link to the paper copy is an affiliate link. If that bothers you, click on the Kindle link and you can select the paperback version from there.)

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Are You Going to Watch The Hobbit?

December 7, 2012 by Marcy Kennedy • Uncategorized • Tags: fantasy author, fantasy movie soundtracks, Lord of the Rings, Marcy Kennedy, The Hobbit, The Piano Guys • 19 Comments

Next week, the first installment of The Hobbit premiers in theaters.

In honor of the release, I wanted to share this beautiful instrumental compilation by The Piano Guys of Lord of the Rings music. (If you’re not subscribed to their YouTube Channel, you should be.)

Will you be watching The Hobbit in theaters or waiting until it comes out on video?

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How to Create a Truly Frightening Villain

November 28, 2012 by Marcy Kennedy • Marcy's Blog, Writing • Tags: anti-hero, fantasy author, Frankenstein, Marcy Kennedy, villains • 29 Comments

In my first-year English class at university, we dissected John Milton’s Paradise Lost—an epic poem set in heaven, hell, and the Garden of Eden during the creation and fall of man. I didn’t keep many of my English “textbooks,” but I kept that one. It was the start of my love affair with villains.

I knew how Paradise Lost would end before I started reading, but Milton’s Satan still managed to plant that tiny seed of doubt. Here was a truly frightening villain. One with believable motivation, smart, charismatic, deceptive. Was I really sure that he wasn’t going to win?

That’s what you want your reader to ask themselves. Nothing will keep them more riveted to your book.

Today I’m starting my new series on villains with an overview of how to create a truly frightening villain.

Anyone Can Be a Villain

Often the first thing that jumps to mind when we hear “villain” is murderer, kidnapper, terrorist, or crooked cop. Technically, though, a villain can be anyone who has the potential to do serious harm to your hero. That can mean the husband stealer or the slanderer too. How much your reader wants to see them fail and get their comeuppance all depends on you. Just remember that sometimes the best villains are the ones we least expect.

(Unfortunately, even I have to admit that not every story needs a villain. If your story doesn’t need one, don’t add one in. He’ll end up more like Wile E. Coyote or the Prince from Shrek. Your readers will laugh at him, not fear him.)

Make Him Formidable . . .

The stronger your hero, the stronger your villain needs to be. Introduce doubt that your hero is going to win this one by showing how smart, resourceful, charismatic, or sneaky your villain is. Better yet, give him strengths that match your hero’s weaknesses. Your readers should develop a grudging respect for his abilities even if they can’t respect how he uses them.

Let your villain win as few rounds as well, forcing your hero to adapt and grow if she’s going to survive. A stupid villain who’s easily caught isn’t scary. Or memorable.

. . . Yet Also Relatable

No one is pure evil. Maybe she’s kind to animals or maybe he volunteers at a homeless shelter. Figure out your villain’s soft underbelly and you’ve not only added a new dimension to his character but also have something the hero can possibly use to defeat him. My co-writer Lisa Hall-Wilson once wrote a disturbing short story where her villain kept his step-daughter alive while murdering other girls. He felt that doing that proved he wasn’t a bad man. His kindness to her also led to his downfall, allowing her to eventually escape.

Aside from this, a really good villain should act like a darkened mirror, reflecting back the worst in ourselves and forcing us to face it. That selfishness, that jealousy, that desire to hurt…we’re all only a few steps away from it. We should relate to a good villain in the same way that we relate to a good hero. Both should make us want to be better than we are.

Give Him Strong Motivation

Despite what you see on Criminal Minds, most killers aren’t psychopaths, sociopaths, or suffering from a dissociative break. Criminal Minds has one hour in which to scare you, disgust you, and make you feel relief. A random killer who could target you next if he’s not caught works well within those restrictions.

In real life, most people are killed by someone they know. The killer has a good reason (in their minds at least) for why they committed their crime. To them, their actions are logical, perhaps even noble. Even if your villain isn’t going to be murdering or kidnapping, you need to know why she’s standing in the hero’s way. It shouldn’t be random.

Ask yourself some questions: Why is she causing trouble? What has brought him to this point? How does he justify what he’s doing? Why does she keep going even when she faces opposition?

The Anti-Hero: Taking the Villain’s Side

When we pick up a story, most of us have certain expectations about the main character/protagonist/hero. We expect him to be likeable and good. And instead, with the anti-hero, we step into the twisted mind of someone who could be the villain if we weren’t telling his story. For a classic example, think Victor Frankenstein.

You take a risk writing an anti-hero. Your readers might pity them, but they’ll never like them. If they see anything of themselves in him, they’ll be loath to admit it. For novels, it can sometimes be difficult to stay in the head of someone so disagreeable for hundreds of pages. But when they’re done well, they’re fascinating to read.

If there’s anything specific about villains you want me to cover, be sure to let me know in the comments (and sign up below to receive email updates so you won’t miss my answer).

What book or movie villain frightened you the most? Why?

Interested in more ways to improve your writing? Deep Point of View is now available! (You might also want to check out Internal Dialogue, Description, or Showing and Telling in Fiction.)

Image Credit: Svilen Milev (from stock.xchng)

Wreck-It Ralph: What Would Happen If We All Put Others First?

November 26, 2012 by Marcy Kennedy • Life at Warp 10, Marcy's Blog • Tags: arcade games, fantasy author, Fix It Felix, Marcy Kennedy, Wreck It Ralph • 12 Comments

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

Wreck-It Ralph is an animated movie starring the villain of the arcade game Fix-It Felix, Jr.

Ralph’s role in the game is to smash an apartment complex with his giant fists. Felix fixes Ralph’s damage using his magic hammer. If the player wins, Felix gets a medal from the Nicelanders whose building he repaired, and Ralph gets thrown off the building into a puddle of mud.

At night, when the arcade closes and the game characters can travel between games, Ralph is still shunned by the other members of his game. He’s forced to live in the garbage dump, and they don’t invite him to the 30^th anniversary party for their game. The only friends he has are the other members of the villain support group he attends.

Unhappy with his life, Ralph takes off, abandoning his game. The next morning when the arcade opens, Ralph’s absence gets them an out-of-order sign and puts them in danger of being unplugged permanently. All the characters would be homeless.

Ralph’s attempt to steal his own medal results in a cyborg bug traveling from a first-person shooter game to a go-cart-racing game called Sugar Rush. The bug (like a computer virus) threatens to destroy the entire world of Sugar Rush, leaving those characters homeless as well and killing a little girl (Vanellope) who can’t leave because of a glitch in her programming.

Now two games are in jeopardy.

Vanellope steals Ralph’s already pilfered medal to use as an entry fee in a race that the other normal characters don’t want her in. Ralph accidentally sees other characters tormenting Vanellope because of her glitch and rescues her. He agrees to help her enter the race to win back the medal she stole.

And as Ralph helps Vanellope, he starts to care for someone other than himself for the first time.

When faced with sacrificing himself to save Venellope and Sugar Rush (and all the characters in it who’d been mean to them), Ralph puts their well-being ahead of his own.

With Remembrance Day (Veteran’s Day) recently past, I can’t help but think about what an admirable quality that is. We’re not all called to risk our lives for others, but we do have opportunities on a smaller scale to think about the greater good and to put others’ wishes ahead of our own.

I don’t think we should sacrifice our own desires to the point of being constantly miserable. What we want matters too, and in the movie, Ralph ends up getting his own little home and has friends the way he wanted.

But in the short term, we often need to set aside what we want and do what’s best for others. If everyone did that, the ripples would spread, and we’d all be better off.

Has there been a time when you put aside what you wanted to help someone else?

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Do You Need to Slow Down?

November 19, 2012 by Marcy Kennedy • Life at Warp 10, Marcy's Blog, Star Trek • Tags: fantasy author, Marcy Kennedy, moving too fast, Star Trek, Star Trek Voyager, Threshold, warp 10 • 27 Comments

Because I’m headed to Virginia this week to spend Thanksgiving with my husband’s family (and because I assume many of you will be feeling the rush of trying to fit a week’s worth of work into less than a week’s worth of days), I decided to refresh and replay one of my favorite older posts for you.

Are You Living Life At Warp 10?

I first heard about warp 10 through the Season 2 episode of Star Trek: Voyager called “Threshold.”

The starship Voyager is stranded in the Delta quadrant (Earth is in the Alpha quadrant). Even if they could travel at their fastest speed the whole time, they’re still 75 years from home. And more than anything they want to get home to the loved ones who think they’re dead.

Lieutenant Tom Paris, Voyager’s pilot, along with his two closest friends, comes up with a plan to get them home sooner—warp 10. Theoretically, warp 10 is impossible. You wouldn’t really be moving at all. You’d be everywhere at once. By traveling at warp 10, they could simply be home again instantly.

Paris, however, has solved the puzzle, and they’ve equipped a shuttle with warp 10 capabilities. Before he leaves, the doctor warns Paris there’s a two percent chance he could die due to a rare medical condition. He decides to take the risk. He argues this is his one chance to do something truly great, something that will go into history books.

He breaks the warp 10 barrier, and for a moment, it’s amazing. He’s everywhere. He can see Voyager and knows they’re looking for him, but he can also see home, their enemies, everything. The data he collects is invaluable.

And he’s achieved his goal. He’s made history.

Although Paris doesn’t die due to his medical condition, his time at warp 10 mutates his genes. He can’t drink water or breathe oxygen anymore. Before the doctor can treat him, his mind goes, he kidnaps Captain Kathryn Janeway, goes back to warp 10 to find a planet, and they both end up mutated lizards on a non-oxygen atmosphere planet with three lizard babies.

Living life at warp 10 is like that (minus the kidnapping and lizard babies of course).

You move as fast as you possibly can, and for a moment, it’s amazing. You’re able to be everything for everyone and do everything you need to. You’re doing it because you have a dream of doing something important, and that dream is worth the risks and sacrifices.

Except if you only stay at warp 10, you find yourself mutating into something you don’t like. I don’t like how tired I am and how I can’t enjoy the simple things that were once essential (you know, like Paris and his water and oxygen). I don’t like how I sometimes snap at my loved ones. I’ve been moving too fast for far too long.

So while I want the experience of life at warp 10, the discoveries it brings and the chance it provides to reach my dream, I’m trying to also come back and get a treatment of slowing down and enjoying the simple things in life. Being able to successfully live life at warp 10 requires finding balance.

After all, I don’t think my husband would really appreciate me having lizard babies with someone else.

What keeps you moving at warp 10? What do you love about it? How do you make sure you don’t miss the simple pleasures along the way?

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Photo Credit: Mat Mie (via sxc.hu)

Are You A Jerk Without Realizing It?

November 12, 2012 by Marcy Kennedy • Life at Warp 10, Marcy's Blog • Tags: fantasy author, Marcy Kennedy, MMORPG, online games, World of Warcraft, WoW • 15 Comments

By Marcy Kennedy (@MarcyKennedy)

How do you react to someone who’s not as good at something as you are?

As I’ve mentioned in a previous posts on “My Dark Secret” and “Why Every Couple Should Play Video Games Together” my husband and I play World of Warcraft, a massively multi-player online role playing game.

I love playing WoW. It’s relaxing and fun to escape into a story you participate in while completing quests.

But I have to miss a large chunk of the content because I won’t play with strangers. Whenever a quest requires a group, I have to wait for my husband rather than asking in the chat box if anyone else nearby is already working on the same quest chain. I never use the random dungeon finder, which would add me to a group of people to run a dungeon. I’ve never been a member of a raiding guild.

You see, I’m a casual player. I don’t have the time to study stats, crunch numbers, and do the theory building of a hard core player. It’s a game. Life takes precedence. And that means I’m not as good a player as many others even though I try.

In other words, I’m jerk-bait.

Jerks pop up enough in random groups that I’ve learned to keep my distance. They’re the people who verbally attack another player because they aren’t doing enough damage per second, they miss a heal, or they lose threat as a tank (the class that’s supposed to distract the bad guy from beating on the squishier players).

These people assume you aren’t trying and that you suck because you’re unwilling to learn. They refuse to play with you anymore, and they try to get you booted from the group.

It happens on the forums too when someone like me asks a question. The jerks assume the person asking the question is lazy rather than that they just don’t know what they don’t know.

It makes me stop and think now before I react to people in life, people who aren’t yet as good at something as I am or who don’t catch on to a new concept as quickly as I do.

Do I want to be the jerk who berates someone who’s struggling? Or do I want to be the person who takes a little extra time to teach them and help them be better?

I want to be the latter.

I want to be the one who goes out of my way to help a newbie learn. I want to be the one who keeps helping them find a new way to understand a concept that’s evading them. I want to show them mercy and grace and kindness.

I’m not always good at that yet. We all have a tendency to assume that if something is easy for us, it’s inherently easy, and anyone who doesn’t get it isn’t trying hard enough.

But I think it’s about every day trying to grow a little closer to the kind of person we want to be.

Do you get impatient with people who are struggling to figure something out? Have you ever dealt with a jerk when you were struggling to learn something?

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Photo Credit: Gabriella Fabbri (via sxc.hu)

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fantasy author

Most Valuable Writing Business Posts of 2012

Top 5 Science Fiction and Fantasy Posts

Top 5 Writing Posts of 2012

Want to Try Beorn’s Honey Cake from The Hobbit?

Do You Finish What You Start?

Are You Going to Watch The Hobbit?

How to Create a Truly Frightening Villain

Wreck-It Ralph: What Would Happen If We All Put Others First?

Do You Need to Slow Down?

Are You A Jerk Without Realizing It?

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