If people find your writing offensive that is probably a good thing.  If you’re not turning people off, you’re not turning people on.  Think of your favorite actor or actress.  I guarantee that as much as you adore them, there are plenty of people who cannot stand them!  You have to put your authentic self out there to be judged, or no one will have ANY impression of you.  Do not be bland. Do not try to appease everyone.  Be true to yourself and your core demographic.  The rest is out of your control.

Characters are just like people—completely unpredictable!  At least they should be.  Ask me what I think my wife will do in a given situation, and I’ll have an opinion.  I won’t be right though, because inevitably, she always surprises me!  So how do we create unpredictable behavior?

We do it through character bibles.

Character bibles are the homework we do before we start writing our manuscript.  They are imperative in my opinion!  In our character bibles we write out, in narrative form, the most impactful moments of our character’s lives.  Everyone on this earth who has lived to the age of 1 has already had a series of successes and failures.  Failures scar us and victories provide that euphoric feeling that we spend the rest of our lives chasing.  You have to intimately know the fears and desires that battle within your characters every single day of their existence, if you expect to create characters who will surprise you throughout the writing process and surprise your readers as they turn the pages.

Consider this: I have a female character with a fear of being abandoned (based on a father who left her and her mother at a young age and was never heard from again). She also has a desire for wealth (to support her dream of opening her own clothing boutique). What will she do when she is propositioned by a wealthy gentleman who is crazy about her, but has a history of running off on the next great adventure?  Her desire for wealth and her dream of opening a clothing store battle her fear of abandonment.  Which will win out is based on the depth to which she feels the details of those fears and desires.

So in our character bible we explore the specificity of those fears and those desires.  We analyze the moments of her life that relate to her father abandoning her when she was young.  We write out three prominent memories of what it was like to not have a dad in their most painful reincarnations.  The day she went to a friend’s birthday party who was turning five and her father had built her a dollhouse from scratch. The day her own mother told her that she couldn’t go to camp that summer because mom was holding down two jobs and still couldn’t afford to send her.  The day that she finally felt the loneliness her mother went through and endured just trying to keep a roof over their heads.

Each of these moments is profound.  So we write a narrative three pages about each event. We explore what it looked like, felt like, smelled like. What stood out about the moments, about the players, about the setting. If we let ourselves go to these places, we begin to feel sympathy for our characters and that means the process is working.  We all have these scars. Everyone’s is uniquely theirs. Conversely we all have tremendous victories. Explore those with as much detail.

Once you have taken the time to develop the peaks and valleys of a character’s life through narrative, descriptive writing, your characters will start to take control of their lives.  It is that point that they are ready to start playing with other characters.  Like toddlers fumbling around, sometimes running, sometimes falling.  This is what you’re after. This will define their motivations.

A character’s voice should be found from the inside out, not the outside in.  Meaning that characters are created through a writer’s willingness to dive into doing their homework and truly bringing a character to life.  You can read my article on character development to see how I approach breathing life into a character.  The process is simple, and the results are profound if you’re willing to do the work.  The overall intention is not to impose your own voice onto your characters, but to unveil their own voices as a sculptor would reveal a form by removing clay from a mound.  Your characters are ultimately like your children. The goal is to raise them well and spend time teaching them about the world so that ultimately you can let them go and trust them to make their own decisions. We have to trust our characters and let them fall on their faces as they navigate our stories. If we have built them correctly they will have fears, desires and agendas of their own that they will fight for on every page.  That is their voice.  When you have found it—uncovered it—it will flow through you.  You will only be a conduit putting words to paper.

Almost ALWAYS!  Query letters are standard in the industry.  That being said, what is most imperative is that you do your homework when approaching any agent.  They each have a preferred method of submitting work to them.  Most of them begin with a query letter.  That being said, what makes a successful query letter?  In my experience, a great query letter is often not written as much as it is arrived at.  I usually write a pretty good first draft, but don’t really find that my query letters are working until around the sixth draft.  Remember that the goal of the query letter is to get an agent to request additional material.  So determining the quality of the query letter is done relative to the number of positive responses.  If no one is asking for your material, look to the content of the query – specifically the following:

1.       Very short personal and professional intro that demonstrates that you are not just mass emailing agents.
2.       An exceptional logline. One or two sentences at most that combine your protagonist’s goals, motivation, external conflict, internal conflict and the setting of the story to create an awe inspiring reaction.
3.       Your credentials – a BRIEF explanation of why you are qualified to write this book.
4.       A succinct and professional ending to your letter.

In this equation it is the logline that agents care about most.  If that does not inspire them, then the remainder of the query letter becomes irrelevant.  Does your query capture the conflict?  Does it activate the imagination and inspire images in the mind of the reader?  For most people, that is a tough question because by the time you are writing your query, you probably have very little objectivity around your story.  So test your query.  Create a small focus group.  Ask them what images come to mind if any.  Ask them if they would want to read that book based on the logline.  Ask them if it had them at the edge of their seat.  Anything short of that, and you’re not there yet!

All of this being said, the average writer will send out 100 queries before finally getting represented.  So hang in there.  Revise until your query works.  And then stick with it once it does.  The focus then will move to the quality of the manuscript.

With unemployment on the rise and a recession not looking like an eventuality, but in fact, more like a bed partner, businesses have got to make some decisions to survive. What is imperative in an environment such as this is that communication be more clear, more effective, and more to the heart than ever.  Why? Because this is an environment of fear, and in such a state, people need to feel a sense of confidence with the people they are choosing to do business with.  The takeaway here is three-fold:

Communicate regularly with your clients and employees. Do not isolate yourself. Isolation breeds fear, and fear is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Over-communicate.

Be Brief. Your clients and employees are all worried about surviving. Respect their short attention spans by being crystal clear and using the economy of words and images.

Be Consistent. Now more than ever, you need to ensure that your message is being demonstrated repeatedly. What works for Barack Obama can work for you.

In times of trouble, there are great opportunities for those who can see above the low hanging smog of crisis. Keep your head on, keep your head up, communicate, respect your audience’s position, and be consistent with your messaging. Do it through articles, blogging, email marketing, press releases, and individual phone calls and emails. If you need a serious partner to guide you through this communication process, give us a shout.  Words are our business.

I’m not in favor of pen names unless you are moving outside your brand and are afraid of confusing people.  We all know what happened to Coke when they tried to redesign their image – it flopped.  So if you are a mystery writer who wants to take up travel books, you might consider doing them under a pen name.  Otherwise, if you are a first time author, you have to be willing to stand up for your book and be the face of your conversation.  Otherwise, who does the media contact?  Who is going to do the interviews?   Transparency is a big word being thrown around these days and readers want to be able to get to know their authors and see their faces, look them up on social networking sites and learn about their daily lives.  I think it is imperative, especially if you are in the earlier stages of your career, that you build a brand around your books.  That you remain consistent with your messaging, that you stick with a single theme and set of core values that guide your writing and benefit your reader. Let your name become synonymous with your message and do so with pride.

A great question.  The answer to that lies in your goals.  I typically work with people whose intention is to make a difference in the lives of their readers and to build an entire operation around their book.  They are not always writers per se; they are typically people who have a massive conversation they want to be the spokesperson of.  People like Robert Renteria and Bea Fields.  Robert’s book From the Barrio to the Board Room is a grass roots effort.  We don’t sell them in stores and though we do have an online presence and do sell copies that way, the majority of our sales are directly to organizations and individuals who want to make a difference in their community by inspiring at risk youth.  These sales are set up directly for the most part and done in large quantities at a discounted rate.  For Robert this makes sense. More of the revenue comes back to our partnership, which gets reinvested in spreading the message and inspiring greater numbers of kids.

For clients like Angelica Harris who is a writer first, her new book, Excalibur Reclaims Her King, needs to be sold through bookstores. While Angelica does have a coaching business and works with other writers, her first love is writing.  Her second love is marketing, but only out of necessity!  Her ideal situation would be a strong publishing partner that could invest in the promotions of the book so that she could continue with the writing of the sequel (which we’re actually almost done with!) and then the next book.

When you work with a commercial publishing partner, you’ll get the support of both bookstores and online outlets.  So the better question might be: self publishing, independent press, or commercial publisher?

As you can see, the answer is relative to your goals.  Some people are crusaders with a message like Robert.  Some people are writers whose imaginations is on the page, like Angelica.  Both require different approaches to sell their books. Consider your goals when considering your strategy.