Marketing Big, Wonderful YOU

Posted on March 19, 2012 by wftjourney

Based on a Passive Marketing lesson presented by Denise Miller Holmes, Director, WFTJ

You can’t wait to finish your book, right? You don’t know much about marketing, but you assume you’ll figure something out once the book is published.

Unfortunately, the assumption here is wrong. First, you need to start marketing NOW before your book is published, and secondly, you need to market YOU first, not your book.

But writers are shy and have a terrible time getting out there and letting people see them. What they want is to push their book in front and say, “Don’t look at me. See this fabulous book and buy it. It wrote itself.”

But, the biggest authors get their names out there FIRST, before they ever have a book.

Passive Marketing is about doing things that get your name (and later, your products) out there in the public eye without overtly asking for the sale. It includes things such as distributing business cards (yes, a writer should have a business card); speaking to organizations; filling out profiles for Yahoo, Google, Blogger, and any place that asks; a professional head shot to put on your blog, business cards, and your profiles; writing a blog; and actively presenting yourself on Facebook and Twitter, and, if you ghostwrite or speak–LinkedIn.

Please don’t think these things are a waste of time. They are very powerful. But, they are only the first step. You HAVE to get your name and presence out there in the public eye, or any active marketing you do later will fall flat. Of all the things listed above, I think speaking is the most powerful.

Overcoming your resistance to being SEEN is probably the hardest obstacle for you the writer to conquer. You may go through tough denial. You may think that you will be the one who writes the book that becomes the bestseller the minute it hits the shelves. It won’t happen!

But, you can choose to conquer your fear of being out there. When you do, the world will open to you.

________________________

For a related article, see Is Self Promotions Sin? You’ve Gotta Be Kidding!
This article is similar to an article on http://denisemillerholmes.blogspot.com/ called Writing Adventures: Passive Marketing Lesson for January 17th Writers’ Guild.

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What Can I Trust?

Posted on March 14, 2012 by wftjourney

By Kay Day

Psalm 52:8 But as for me, I am like a green olive tree in the house of God; I trust in the lovingkindness of God forever and ever.

Each New Year I ask God to give me a word to be the focus for the year. Last year He said, “Trust.”

I tried to argue. Tried to convince Him that I didn’t need that word, I already had trust down, but He didn’t believe me. He insisted.

I knew right then I was in for a ride.

And I was right. Last year had some rough spots. And in the midst of one of those the truth I’d been hiding hit me full force. I didn’t really trust God.

I lay in bed crying to Him. Telling Him I didn’t trust Him but I wanted to. I asked Him to help. I begged, “Show me what I can trust!”

The next morning I inserted “trust” into an online concordance. It seemed that all of verses said the same thing, “I will trust in your lovingkindness.”

I already knew that word. It is a Covenant word. It means that because I am in covenant with God, he treats me as family. It is a word that means love, compassion, gentleness, mercy, and welcome. I am His.

It’s easy to misplace our trust. We can place it in books about writing—If I just get the right education….

We can place it in representation—If I just get the right agent….

We can place it in sales—If I can just impress enough people….

The only secure place for our trust is in His lovingkindness. We are His. He loves us tenderly and totally. He knows our dreams and our hopes and He also knows what is best for us. We can trust that.

_________________________
This post was originally sent out to thousands of happy subscribers in our newsletter. Well, okay, maybe not thousands, but. . . a lot!
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Kay’s blog is Loopdeloops in La La Land

Posted in Devotion | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Greasing the Path to Getting Your First Novel Published, Part 2

Posted on March 6, 2012 by wftjourney

Presented to Words for the Journey as an Appetizer, February 14, 2012
by Denise Miller Holmes

Here are the second round of tips to help remove obstacles to getting your first novel published.

6) Create a layered protagonist who is the main character.

 Create a realistic and interesting personality that has the main p-o-v for the story and who carries the theme (Jeff Gerke’s Plot Versus Character is a great book to learn how to do this also). Give her a fire to reach a goal. Obstruct that goal. Make her change where she is flawed and face her pain where she is wounded in order to achieve success.

  • Makes sure, even if you have an ensemble cast for your story, that there is one true main character. You can include the other p-o-views in the story, but one of them should be on stage more often than the others and carry the main conflict and theme. This gives focus to the story.

There…you have the START of an interesting character. But a Protagonist is only as exciting as her … Antagonist.

7) Create an absolutely frustrating and fascinating antagonist. The antagonist is the main obstacle of the whole story, so make sure he (or it) is almost as in-depth as your main character and has his own wounds that fuel his passion to hurt the hero. The antagonist is often a person, but it can be something else. Pick one of the following conflicts to be the main conflict of your story….

The Eight Basic Conflicts—Man versus….

  • Nature/Environment (Twister/Contagion);
  • Society (1984/Brave New World);
  • Time (Nick of Time; Out of Time; Cellular; anything with a ticking time bomb);
  • Machine/Technology (Tron/War of the Worlds);
  • God/Fate (Bruce Almighty);
  • The Supernatural (Sorcerer’s Apprentice; Any horror or ghost story you’ve ever seen);
  • Himself (Groundhog Day, which is also Man vs. God/Fate and Man vs. Time);
  • Man (Die Hard; North by Northwest; any story with a human villain that is out to get the protagonist or hurt the innocent.

8) Structure your story to increase tension, even if you have to rewrite true history.

  • Follow the 3-Act structure and know what is supposed to happen in each Act. Each Act has its own purpose. Know these purposes and follow them. (recommended: Save the Cat by Blake Snyder; The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler)
  • Rewrite and restructure true stories if the true story doesn’t keep the tension going. You can always call them “based” or “loosely based” on a true story.

9) Be cruel to your characters.

  • First, give them a past where at least one trauma occurred. This trauma has left a wound the size of the Grand Canyon and is now interfering with your character’s happiness. You should do a bit of this with the secondary characters too. Everyone should have a main issue that will rub against the other characters and throw them in a stew when the main conflict appears. THEN…
  • Make their situation just awful. It gets better for a while, then it not only gets bad again, it’s worse than ever before! Keep throwing obstacles and pain at your characters. The wounds are being stirred. How will they overcome with all the pain they’re in?

10) Avoid back story until you’re well into the book.

  • New writers love to tell the reader everything up front. A good rule is to hold back the character’s histories until the third chapter. If it’s a long book with thick chapters, you might introduce back story sooner, but remember that the reader’s brain is working hard just to learn the characters and the main situation.
  • Overwhelming your reader (and this includes an editor, publisher, or agent) makes her say “no thank you.”

Denise Miller Holmes is the director of Words for the Journey and writes blogs for her author blog denisemillerholmes.blogspot.com.

Posted in Writing Instruction | Leave a comment

Greasing the Path to Getting Your First Novel Published

Posted on February 27, 2012 by wftjourney

There are enough obstacles in your path as a first novelist, and you are wise to omit as many as you can. Here are five of ten tips to increase your chances of getting your first novel published. (You’ll get the other five in Part II when it’s published next week.)

1) Write in a genre that’s popular.

  • Don’t follow micro trends.

Any new subgenre or genre mix is something to wait on. I am comfortable writing SciFi, but not comfortable writing steam punk for my first novel. Steam punk is growing, but it’s new. I’ll wait on that. (Another example of this would be ‘no’ to chick lit, and ‘yes’ to women’s fiction. You don’t know when a fad will suddenly die out.)

  • DO follow long-term trends

In Christian publishing, “speculative” categories such as science fiction are growing and have been for some time. In the secular market, the overall genre of SciFi is solid. It’s a good bet the category will be there for me when I attempt to publish my first novel.

  • Google “publishing trends” to see what the trends are.
  • Look at bestseller lists and internet book reviews.
  • Look for the growth trend in your genre

Remember, I’m only talking about your first novel. Once you get a following, do what you want!

2) Don’t over-depend on dialogue. Describe body language and what is going on in your p-o-v character’s head.

  • Novels have subtext. People don’t always say what they mean, and their body language can say it all. They also think things and say the opposite. Break up your dialogue with description.

3) Use the most popular points of view.

The most-popular points of view right now are close third person and first person. Avoid Omniscient point of view unless that is what your publisher likes.

4) Don’t head hop. A writer head hops when she changes p-o-v quickly from one character to another.

  • Most writing gurus recommend that when writing a book with several viewpoints, you make sure a p-o-v gets ample time before switching to the next one. Writing experts say to restrict several scenes or even a whole chapter to one viewpoint.
  • However, I’ve seen some Romance lines still allow head hopping. Check with the line you are submitting to in order to determine this rule. Generally, head hopping is considered old-fashioned writing.
  • A good rule-of-thumb is to have no more than two characters as viewpoint characters.
  • Experimenting with p-o-v is great, but wait until you have an established audience and are known in the industry before you try it. Remember—you want to increase your chances for your FIRST novel to be published.

5) Avoid Prologues.

Jeff Gerke in his book The First 50 Pages has great instruction on writing good prologues. Editors and publishers HATE prologues because few writers know how to write good ones and use the prologue properly. Do yourself a favor and don’t write a prologue for your first novel. Wait until the industry trusts you and you are versed at writing a good one.

Denise Miller Holmes is the director of Words for the Journey and instructs writers on RedHotWritingTips.wordpress.com. 

Posted in Writing Instruction | 2 Comments

Is Self Promotion Sin? You’ve Gotta Be Kidding!

Posted on February 20, 2012 by wftjourney

Presented to Words for the Journey by Denise Miller Holmes, Director, 2012

Almost a year ago, I ran across an article on a Christianity Today blog for women entitled Is Self Promotion Sinful?

The writer cited the call for us to be humble and came to the conclusion that self promotion called too much attention to the person and not enough on God, and that we as humans had egos that could puff up and cause us to be in a state of sin.

She said it subtler than that, but that was the gist of it. I found it ironic that she’d come to this conclusion after her book had been rejected twice by editors who told her she was a very good writer but she didn’t have an audience. She wasn’t investing in building her platform. This annoyed her very much, as the resultant article showed.

While I was reacting to the premise of this article, this verse sprang to mind.

Matthew 5:14-16. You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it gives light to all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your father in heaven.

Another scripture I thought of was 2 Corinthians 5:20, where Paul says that he sees himself and his team as ambassadors for Christ, and he says it’s as if Christ were talking through them…

When we denigrate ourselves and hide, I think we are actually misunderstanding what humility is. When Moses called himself the most humble man, he wasn’t talking about denigrating his strengths and saying “oh, I’m dirt,” he was saying that he depended on God more than anybody.

Dependence on God does not go away when we self promote. In fact, you might argue that the dependence intensifies!

God has created each of us uniquely. We all are a special expression of God, and when He calls us to share those gifts with others, it’s okay to draw attention to ourselves, as long as when they look at us, they see Christ too.

I was trying to think of a real-life example of what I’m saying, and because I’m not a football fan, it took me a while before I thought of Tim Tebow. Here is a Tebow quote:

It’s one thing to score touchdowns and win championships and trophies, but at the end of the day that doesn’t matter. If you can affect people, change people’s lives and be a good role model, someone that a mom or a dad can look to their son and say, “Hey, that’s how you need to handle it,” then that’s my ultimate goal. That’s ultimately how I’d define my life as having success if I can reach that.

Tim is not shy about drawing attention to himself. He does it all the time. But his soul does not appear to be wilting from an inflated ego. On the contrary, he sees himself as promoting more than himself. When he draws attention to himself, he draws attention to everything he stands for—his values and his God.

When we self promote as ambassadors for Christ, we change lives because what we stand for also is promoted, and what we stand for as thought leaders is Christ-like values and Christ-like actions.

So promote. Let your light shine.

Lord, may we step out boldly in our calling as writers. Help us to shine our light for You, and draw attention to You in everything we do. Amen.

Denise Miller Holmes is the director of Words for the Journey and the writer of savvy articles on RedHotRead.com.

Posted in Devotion, Marketing Instruction | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Who We Are

Posted on February 18, 2012 by wftjourney

Our Mission is to support fiction-writing Christians in their quest to be published and multi-published. We understand a writer’s need to be perseverant in obedience to God’s Calling. We support the hobbyist “going pro,” and encourage the published writer in continuing with and growing in her professional writing career.

Our Values encompass group support of the Great Commission, and, in that vein, we teach our participants to reflect the Biblical worldview throughout their work. Our deepest desire and heartfelt prayer is that every word we pen will inspire others to seek and find His path–His Way.

Our Vision foresees Christian writers being held in high esteem and their excellence being a powerful witness for Christ.

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