writing

Beta Readers; Handing Over Your Baby

~ ChanAtkins ~ 2 Comments

Sometimes I try and work out what the toughest part of writing a book is. Is it the first draft where everything is at its freshest, but also most fragile? Is it the second draft when you realise how much work your first draft needs? Or is it when you are edging closer to the finish line? When you are swinging between self-doubt and elation? I’m not sure, but I think handing it over to someone else to read for the first time has got to be up there as well.

Last Friday I finished the second draft of Elliot Pie’s Guide To Human Nature. This second draft took less time than I had anticipated and went surprisingly well. To be honest, it was more of a read-through than a rewrite. I’d left the book for some time while I focused on other things, so I needed to familiarise myself with the story and the characters. I found myself smiling whilst reading it. I genuinely love these characters and it was enjoyable and comforting to be back in their company again. Obviously I cut out words here and there, picked up on some minor plot holes and corrected any glaring typos. But generally, I have to say, this time around it was a pleasant second draft. I like this book a lot. I feel good about it. I feel like I had a clear and concise goal before I started it, and I feel like I have so far achieved it.

Of course, I’m not naive enough to think there won’t be major rewrites and frustration further down the line. If my other books are anything to go by there will be! But right now it all sits nicely with me.

Only now I’ve got to let someone else in on the secret. I’ve got to hand it over to beta readers and see what they think. Now it’s obviously up to the writer to decide when their book needs to be picked apart by betas, and with a lot of my other books it has been much further down the line. But handing Elliot Pie over now feels right. The basic plot is all there. I just need to know if it works. If it is believable. If they see the ‘twist’ coming. If the characters ring true. I need to know if it makes them laugh or cry. The structure of the book is also rather different this time around, and I might be completely wrong about it. I can’t say too much at the moment, but I have been slightly experimental in terms of point of view and tense. For me, right now, it works, but I am bracing myself for my beta readers thinking otherwise!

They are so important in this process though, so vital as the first set of readers to dive into this fictional world I have created. Will they see it the same way I do, or will they see plot holes and inconsistencies I’ve been blind to? Now feels like the right time, because if the particular layout and structure of the book doesn’t work for them, then I will need to do some serious thinking.

Handing your novel over to your betas is a strange and disconcerting feeling. It’s a bit like handing over a piece of your soul. When you write that first draft, you are writing just for you. You have no idea if it’s going to work or not. You just start and see what happens. Sometimes it’s a flop, other times it’s spectacular, but no matter how good you feel about the finished product, you can’t just rely on your own opinion. Handing it over to betas is the first step in what Stephen King so wonderfully describes as ‘killing your darlings’. Hopefully, if they are doing their job correctly, the betas will send it back to you with a long list of thoughts, feelings, corrections and criticisms. Of course you want to hear positive things about the book, but it’s the negative things you really need right now. What doesn’t work needs to be changed or cut out. Subsequent drafts after the beta response ought to set the culling in motion. If it’s not adding anything to the story, it has to go. Cut out the fluff, tighten it up and be ruthless. I don’t think I could enter this phase comfortably without waiting for the response from my trusted betas. It’s like once I’ve heard the good the bad and the ugly from them, I can start swinging my axe with confidence.

Having said that, I already have a rather long list of things I made not of while going through it. Things I need to amend or add or pay more attention to on the next draft. It will be interesting to see what else my betas pick up on. I’m so curious to know what they think of the book in general. I feel a mix of emotions right now. Impatience and excitement; will they love the characters as much as I already do? I feel anxious and nervous at the thought of them casting their critical eye over something I am rather in love with. I know I will have to brace myself for anything scathing that may come my way, and remember how much better it makes a book to have early critiques like this before you unleash it on the public. I’m also sure there will be things we disagree on!

It’s exciting though because it is all part of the process of writing and finishing a book. That first draft. The elation and pride when it’s done, when it’s written, when this thing that was once just inside of you, is now out and in story form! That second draft. You’re moving on, starting to get critical, cutting bits out, polishing it up. Sending it to first betas is another significant stage in the life of a novel. They are the first readers to tentatively enter the world you have created. They are part of the process of making it all the best it can be.

It’s a bit like this book is my baby and I’m watching it grow before my eyes. It’s taking it’s first steps and changing! It’s got so many more stages to go through and I know from experience that the road ahead is nearly always a bumpy one. Some of my books have had major rewrites at later stages, leaving them almost unrecognisable to what went before! It’s satisfying to have set it on it’s path though. I’ve given birth to it and set it on its wobbly way towards maturity! I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Please add your comments below! When do you feel the time is right to hand your work over to beta readers? Does it feel a bit like giving your baby away? What do you think is the toughest part of writing a book?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve Got A New Book Out!

~ ChanAtkins ~ 2 Comments

Happy Friday everyone!

This is just a quick and cheeky post to let you all know I have a new book out. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook you will already be more than aware of this! But I wouldn’t be doing the whole social media thing right if I didn’t post the news to my blog too, would I?

Bird People and Other Stories is a short story collection I have been putting together for about a year now. In fact, I have another blog post and the very wise words of a follower on Goodreads to thank for this whole thing!

You see I wrote this blog post almost a year ago, which was all about getting my arse into gear the next time I had a novel out. I wrote a detailed plan regarding promotion, and some kindly fellow on Goodreads suggested writing short stories related to my novels as an added promotional tool. As soon as he suggested it, I got excited. Why hadn’t I thought of this before?

My mind went into overdrive over the next few days, and within the week I had several short stories already drafted. You all know how I feel about my characters, so the thought of writing extra stories from different character points of view was too enticing to resist. I had all sorts of ideas swimming around in my head, and the pen to paper was in overdrive. It was fantastic. I felt like there was no limit to where I could go with this.

Well, here it is and I really hope you like it. For people who have already read my work, you will find in this collection, two stories related to The Mess Of Me (one story from Leon’s point of view and one from Marianne’s.) You will find three stories related to The Boy With The Thorn In His Side ; one from Jack’s POV, one from Lucy’s, and one which is actually the ending I had in mind at one time! You will find a short story called The Collection, which is a teaser for my work in progress Elliot Pie’s Guide To Human Nature. (It’s essentially the basic plot squished into a short story.) You will also find two stories related to a book I wrote when I was sixteen and discovered fairly recently in a suitcase under my bed (blog post here) I have since plotted the book and titled it A Song For Bill Robinson. Nightprowler is a prequel to the novel, and Bird People a character snapshot. You will also find a short story called She Is… This is another fledgling idea for a novel, one that I do not have the time to write for a while, but writing the short story helped ease the pressure! And finally, Tales From Province 5 includes three short stories which are teasers for my next novel The Tree Of Rebels.

Hopefully, there is something here for everyone. For loyal readers, something new, something different, and lots to tease! And for newcomers, a genuine taste of the way I write and what I write about…all for the attractive promotional price of 99p/99c.

Enjoy! And thank you 🙂

What Comes First? The Characters or the Plot?

~ ChanAtkins ~ 8 Comments

 

What comes first? The characters of the plot? I guess the answer is different for every writer, and often different for every book. I’ve been thinking about this since one of my daughters showed a rare interest in my writing and asked me what came first; my characters or my plots? My immediate answer was the characters, as this is how it so often feels. But as I went through the novels one by one, I had to admit that it’s different each time. For example, The Boy With The Thorn In His Side was an idea that grew into a character, followed by a more complex plot. The Tree of Rebels, which will be my next release, was undoubtedly plot before characters, more so than any other book I’ve written. I’ve blogged before about how difficult this made the process, and how it has taken longer for me to understand my characters and feel comfortable with them. With Elliot Pie (a book only in its first draft) it was the character first, but his character, in being someone who was intrinsically curious about strangers, was the plot. So they evolved simultaneously.

Having thought about it for some time I realised that my novels, This Is Nowhere and The Mess Of Me both have something in common. They were both written in the same way. I had the character first, and then had to create a plot to go with them.

I’m not sure this is the best way to write a book, but it’s just the way it worked with these two. With This Is Nowhere, I had the character in my head for some time, and with the character came the whole feel and tone of the book. Slightly sombre, dark around the edges, yet gentle, confused, struggling through mystery. I knew the character was a male in his late twenties or early thirties, and I knew he was rootless and aimless, a drifter. He had never grown up, but why was that? I knew he had a bad relationship with his father but the rest of that came much later. I knew he had a recurring stomach ailment, and had turned his back on the religion he had been brought up with. I had images in my head of a boy running across a sun baked field, though running from what I had no idea. The whole thing seemed to evolve in my head through feelings and images. I got the idea for the plot involving his missing mother when I was walking my dogs in the woods one day. I’m pretty sure, though it is hard to recall now, that my daughter had spoken to me about a missing persons case, and that had set something off in my head. What if this drifter was to return to his small home town in order to find out what happened to his mother, who vanished when he was a child?

With The Mess Of Me it was harder. In this case, I would probably not advise coming up with the character before the plot, although in all honesty I had absolutely no control over this!

Lou Carling started talking to me when I was about half way through writing The Boy With The Thorn In His Side. This was fantastic to me at the time. Having had a long break from writing, in tackling The Boy I was giving it all a go again, seeing if I still had the urge and the passion. When Lou started talking and grumbling, I was overjoyed because I had that feeling again. Of fireworks and ideas exploding in my head, of panic and excitement knotting in my belly, of wanting to hurry home to the laptop, of needing to scrawl notes onto scrap paper so I wouldn’t lose a thing. Essentially, Lou let me know that it was back. Writing was back.

I let her babble on for a while, mostly because she really amused me. She had just finished her GCSE’s and had a long summer before A-Levels ahead of her. She was deeply cynical about everything and everyone, and had a rather filthy mouth. Her best friend was a boy called Joe, a lanky, hazel eyed boy whose mother was her mother’s best friend. I could see Lou and hear her. In fact she barely left me alone. She would have constant conversations in my head, really interesting little nuggets of dialogue I just had to scribble down for later. But I had no plot. What was this book going to be about? What was going to happen to her? What did she want? What did she fear?

It took a while, but I got there in the end purely by listening to her, and being witness to the world that started to build around her. The claustrophobic council estate, growing up without money, feeling exasperated and embarrassed by her family. Hating everyone, especially herself.

I’m happy to admit that large parts of Lou are based on me, on my own experiences, on my own views and feelings growing up. In many ways, she is the character closest to me, at that age anyway. But I allowed her more freedom, letting her express herself when I was too shy to. Immensely liberating, I can tell you. The plot I ended up with actually came from a strange childhood memory.

When I was young, my mother had a friend who had five sons. She was a larger than life kind of woman, large in build and large in voice. She would sweep you in for a cuddle and nearly break your bones. She used to make jokes about swapping my mum’s daughters for her sons, and I used to think she was serious, and I was just a little bit afraid of her. I loved going to her house to play though. With her two youngest sons, me and my sister and brother used to trespass onto the grounds of their local school and play games with their pet dog. We would climb and hide in trees and bushes and behind walls and the dog would look for us. I can also remember playing with a huge mound of cardboard boxes in their back garden, making dens out of them, climbing up them and leaping off to crush the boxes below.

Her three older sons were teenagers when we were small. They flitted in and out of the background, and as I was so shy I probably never spoke to any of them. I watched them get the odd clip around the ear. One even had his mouth washed out with soap one day. But they were like mysteries to me. Part of my life, and yet totally unknown. They could have been anyone. They could have had any kind of life without me knowing. I had no idea who they were, where they went to, what they did, or what they dreamed about.

One day we were coming up the front path and one of the teenage boys was sat on the doorstep with his head in his hands looking absolutely miserable. In the cool dark of the kitchen, I overheard my mother’s friend telling my mum he was in so much trouble. They muttered and murmured in there for some time, while he remained on the doorstep. I never did find out what he’d done wrong.

So somehow, for some reason, this all crept into Lou’s world. The house full of boys. The mother on the warpath, driven to distraction by her unruly brood. Having these people you’ve grown up with, and yet never really know. Mysteries that unravel just out of reach and over the heads of young children who are told to go out and play.

The drug running storyline was of course utterly fabricated. It could have been anything really, the trouble the boys were in. Everything else from here on was pure imagination!

In many ways the drug running activities of Joe’s older brothers, and the way both Joe and Lou get pulled into it all, is a sub-plot to the main one, which is simply Lou’s journey over that summer. Her determination to lose weight and get skinny. Her finding herself, without it sounding too much of a cliche, was central to it all.

So that’s the story of The Mess Of Me. Where it came from and how it happened. It is probably my most character driven book, with the plot almost taking a back seat to the characters.

What about you? As a reader, do you ever wonder what came first, the plot or the characters? Can you ever tell?

What about you writers? Is it always the plot first, the characters later? Or the other way around? Which way does it happen for you, and does it make it harder to write if it happens in a way you are not used to?

Feel free to comment below!

 

 

 

 

 

No More Free For Me

~ ChanAtkins ~ 10 Comments

There are many decisions to make about your book when you are following the indie route, and what to price it at is one of the big ones. When my first novel The Mess Of Me was about to be released in 2013, I made my decision regarding the price, by looking at similar books in the genre and also looking at the other authors who were with the same indie publisher. This helped me get an idea of how to price my debut novel. I didn’t want to make it too expensive and put anyone off purchasing it, but I also fully intended to make some profit after spending so much blood sweat and tears on it! I was also extremely serious about finally following my dream and making a living out of writing, and this was the first step on that journey. So never, in a million years did it occur to me to give my book away for free.

In fact, back then, as an indie newbie, I hadn’t even really heard of books being given away for free. I didn’t have an ereader at that time, and the way I bought books always involved parting with cash. It was quite a surprise to me that so many authors were giving their books away for nothing. Didn’t they want to make any money? Okay, not loads, no one should be in this game just to get rich. But didn’t they want some financial reward for all their hard work? Didn’t they at least want to break even after paying out for editing, formatting, book covers and promotion? Were they all nuts? It seemed like it to me.

I was a bit snobby about it for a while. I decided I would never do it. My books were worth more than that! I’d slaved over them, devoted my life to them, and they were good, damn it! Why the hell would I just give them away? People don’t choose a coffee and then walk out without paying for it, do they? You don’t do your food shopping and then waltz out the door without parting with your money. I mean, when did this whole free thing even begin? Where else does this happen??

So, I ignored it. I priced my books sensibly for a newcomer. Sometimes I reduced them a bit, especially if they had just been released. And all the time I was seeing this utter madness unfold around me on social media. It was everywhere I looked. Authors screaming FREE! FREE! MY BOOK IS FREE! GRAB IT NOW WHILE IT IS FREE! It was like they were all saying their own book was not worth paying for.

At the same time, I noticed another strange phenomena. The authors screenshotting their high rankings and declaring themselves bestsellers because they had entered the best sellers ranking with their free book. I found this really, really odd! But was this the reason they were doing it? To be able to call their book a bestseller, even though it had been given away? Or was there more to it than that?

Of course, I soon began to understand what was going on. The whole thing was a minefield. A quagmire of indies screaming and drowning and waving at the same time, and the ones shouting the loudest were all shouting FREE! ITS FREE! I’M A REALLY GOOD AUTHOR COS ITS FREE! But the truth is, what they were really saying behind the lines was something like this;

Look, in all honesty this indie author lark is not as easy as I first thought. I’m not selling anything and even my close friends and family don’t seem to give a shit! I need to be seen, I need reviews to get me noticed. I need someone to give me a chance! Once you read it, I know you’ll love it and then you’ll quite happily pay for the next one, plus you will review me and recommend me to all your loved ones! So just this once, just for you, just to lure you in and let you experience my genius, I will put my book for free.

And yep, you’ve guessed it, before long I was doing the exact same thing myself. I did wait at least a year and a half though, and then I went for it. I had nothing to lose. I was selling a few here and there, and I was getting great reviews, and people were going on to read the next books, but it didn’t feel like enough. Maybe making a book free would help?

Well, yeah, initially. It was exciting to watch The Mess Of Me sky rocket up the rankings in the week I made it free. Oh my god, all those people downloading my book! At last! This was it! Surely this would be it! Al those people would read it and review it and then buy others, and I wouldn’t ever have to do this again, would I?

Ah, what a dismal flutter back down to earth when the promo was over. How depressing to watch the book plummet back down to its usual position. And then came the waiting game. How many reviews would I get? It would be worth it, wouldn’t it?

Well no, because generally not that many readers bother to review! (And that’s a post for another day believe me) I had some lovely messages. I had some new followers. I had someone message me on my Facebook author page to ask questions about the book and tell me how much they had loved it. I asked politely for a review and they agreed but never left one. I am sure now that the majority of people who downloaded it never even got around to reading it.

I tried the same thing with two other books, and the same thing happened. Dizzying heights followed by depressing plummets and all for one or two reviews if I was lucky. My then indie publisher even tried to warn me. Free books don’t work like they used to, he advised. The time has passed.It’s not a great promo tool anymore, and he was very right.

Since then, I’ve released more books, grown my following, tried many other promotional routes and had my indie publisher go bust on me. I am now properly self-published and loving it. I am actually doing better than I was before. I’m not talking thousands of copies of course. I’m just saying things are heading in the right direction.

Will I ever give my book away for free again? Yes, but only to the right people. You see, here is the thing. Who is more likely to reward the freebie with a review, a recommendation and another purchase? Someone who is already interested in you. In other words someone who has subscribed to your email list, or someone who is interacting with your social media pages, keen to see what you come up with next.

So from now on, those are the people who will be treated every now and then to a freebie. A competition on my Facebook page, or a free ebook attached to my email newsletter. I know there is a higher chance they will leave a review and help me on my journey. Personally, I think it is time for the free ebook on Amazon to die. Readers should be happy to pay something in recognition of the authors hard work and dedication, and the only way they are going to place value on a book is if it costs them something to purchase it. Too many free books force other writers to lower their prices to compete, or to place their own as free, adding to the problem. I think 99p/99c is cheap enough, and from now on, this is as low as my books will go, and this will only be for countdowns and odd promotional days. After all, if I don’t value my own work, who else is going to?

What do you think about free ebooks? Please feel free to add your comments below. Is it time authors stood up and said no to free? After all, like a popular meme on social media points out, people are more than happy to pay a few pounds for a coffee, so why not a few pounds for a novel that had taken someone years to write? Has giving your books away for free helped you progress? If so, comment away!