There are so many ways to begin a New Year. We can look back on the previous year and make a list of all the things we are grateful for. We can look forward and make a list of resolutions of all the positive ways we are planning to change ourselves and our lives. What are we doing at the Blood-Red Pencil? The editors are giving you a month of (insert drumroll), their PET PEEVES! Let me dive right in with the one that has been plaguing me for most of 2022. But first some background. If you're reading this blog, you'll know I jumped into the Amazon Kindle Vella publishing platform early in the year. I love it more than ever, so that's not my peeve.  But my pet peeve is related to it. You see, I had to get a new laptop and new MSWord software. And I HATE the newest version of MSWord. In Word 365, the grammar and punctuation errors are relentless. I started making copies of some of the errors in Editor and here are just a handful: I see a capital, don't you? I returned it,...

A few days ago, Polly Iyer wrote about an ugly world that started for her in 2015. Those comments resonated on so many levels for me. I don't remember what I was doing in 2015, but, by 2016 and that dreadful presidential election, my creativity had waned to almost nothing. By the first quarter of 2017, I simply crawled under a rock with 43 J.D. Robb In Death books and read them all consecutively until I was caught up. That took until early April. Then I gardened. A lot.  And tried to paint again. The creative muse didn't like that. My work was simply dreadful. Finally I cooked for a few months. And gained a lot of weight! But I didn't write. Not until I started really thinking about how the country could heal some of its divisiveness. First I wrote some letters to the editor. Then some blog posts.  And then I started thinking about fiction and stories that might help me cope... and maybe also others. I thought about all those JD Robb books, and how they saved my soul and...

When I recently self-published my haiku books, I had to make many decisions that weren’t word-related. Like the cover designs for the books. I worked with Cathy Davis who I already knew to be an outstanding designer because she designed the covers and interiors for some of my clients’ books. First, Cathy and I, plus my VAA Janica Smith , spent half an hour on the phone talking about the general plans for the book. Because this was not just one book, but a series of seven, Cathy suggested that they all have commonality of design and color, yet could stand alone as individuals. Yes, that’s it, I said. Then Cathy emailed me a bunch of very detailed questions about my vision for the books, what I wanted readers to feel or know by reading them, what colors or images came to my mind when I thought about my books, and other great questions that made me think. I answered her questions as best I could. I said that haiku can be deceptively simple, deceptively plain, understate...

Last month, I talked about Amazon narrowing the gap between indie and traditionally published authors by making its pre-order option available to indie authors as well. Since then, I've tried the system, not only at Amazon, but at Kobo and the iBook store. As far as I can tell, there's no way to track sales at iBooks, so it'll be a matter of watching the sales reports when the book goes live in late October. Kobo doesn't track sales, but it does record rankings, so you can get an idea if you've been selling books by watching the rankings. Amazon reports pre-orders as a separate section of their dashboard. And, contrary to what I thought was their system, it turns out they regard these pre-orders as regular sales, so the book's ranking will reflect that. I put my newest book, Windswept Danger, up for pre-order on September 1st at all 3 channels, at the special pre-order price of 99 cents. Because I wanted to make sure everything was uploaded and working p...

Identifying facts about the subject of this case study have been changed to protect the author's reputation.  I recently found myself stranded for four days with only one great story and one poorly edited novel at my disposal. Unfortunately both were found within the same covers. The fact that its issues were easily fixable, yet still evident in a book already published, is such a crying shame I want us all to learn from this case study. It was exactly my kind of story, the back cover copy suggested. Great title, lush cover. A hardback, with a price of $25.99, put out by a major traditional publisher, by an acquiring editor whose name is known and trusted in the industry. I opened it with great anticipation. Problems emerged on page one. Unfortunate word pairings At the end of the first paragraph, the author used a phrase such as “ran like a hare” immediately followed by an introduction to “Tad O’Hara.” Like most of the following issues, this is a remnant of the wri...

Coming up with a good title is not easy. Ideally, it will attract potential readers, suggesting what kind of book it is and what makes it different from (and better than) other books of that kind. Good luck. My two absolute worst titles are my first Regency, Toblethorpe Manor , and my first mystery, Death at Wentwater Court , both utterly unmemorable. For the first, I have the excuse of inexperience. For the second: I had to come up with it quickly. My plan for the mystery series was to call the books Death in January, Death in February, etc., so that after sweating over numerous Regency titles, I wouldn't have to think up another title ever again. Each murder would be closely connected with the month. The first, for instance, involves a body in a frozen lake. That notion was swatted down by my editor (though I can't complain, as he bought the book), because the publisher had recently put out a month by month anthology. Just as well, in the end, as I'm n...

This post was first published here on November 27, 2013. Prior to the invention of the Internet, writers holed up in their attics, alone and palely scribbling, fantasizing about an elusive publishing contract. They spent sunny afternoons deep in the bowels of libraries flipping through the card catalog and paging through thick reference books. Scribes developed callouses on their fingers. They sported perpetual ink stains from writing draft after draft on paper they wadded and tossed in bins. They longed for someone, anyone, to talk to about their passion. They were isolated introverts with impossible dreams, often in desperate need of a critique group or at least someone to help with plot snags or elusive titles. Then some smarty pants invented the electric typewriter, which led to the personal computer, which led to the Internet. Writers were able to research from the comfort of their living rooms while still in their bathrobes. They could draft and revise a hundred ti...

Recently an author emailed me to find out if I’d heard anything about a publisher called knowonder! – she planned to submit a story I had declined though I really loved her work. I’d never heard of knowonder! but poked around the Internet a bit to get a feel for them. After researching and giving the author feedback, I decided my process was worth a blog post. Here’s my vetting approach and something any author looking for a publisher can do to get a feel for a company before submitting. Google the company name. In this day and age they should have a website as well as links to their social networking sites like Twitter , Pinterest ,   Facebook , and a blog . How do those sites look? Have they been around long? Are they active? They should give a solid and consistent impression across platforms. Next look for a submissions page , and read every line closely. Knowonder! has a very concise submissions page, explicitly outlining what they seek. Their focus is read-al...

In the first installment on Wednesday we ended the post with the following question and comment: What does a writer do who doesn’t want to hustle – just write? It’s a growing worry for many authors, and it will get worse. Now let’s fast forward to the year 2015. Let’s imagine self-publishing has matured. It’s accepted and respected in the publishing world. A lot of successful self-publishers have begun to ask themselves: what do I really want to do with the rest of my life? Become another J. A. Konrath and work 18/24 to boost my Kindle ratings? Or hype myself perpetually at Facebook, Google+ and Twitter? Or mount a thousand blog tours? Again, do I write or hustle? What happened to my dream of being an author, a person who writes fiction, not advertisements?  Maybe they thumb through that list of literary agents, long scorned. They decide that the traditional publishing route might have some merits after all. Goodbye to hard labour. Let the publisher do the hustlin...

By Dani Greer/Chief Red Pencil Welcome to the Blood-Red Pencil blog, readers. How's the year going for you so far? We have exciting news from Kathryn Craft this month about her new book, which she's been blogging about here, and it ties right into one of our new monthly features: Cover Reveal! Good cover art is so important to the success of your book, and you've probably noticed with e-books that a bad cover can sometimes keep you from buying, or even downloading a free book. I know I'm that way. But it's a lot easier to "re-cover" from a bad art choice with e-books than with a print version, and long-time BRP blogger, Helen Ginger, will share her before and after re-covery of Angel Sometimes later in the month. (I think that joke now qualifies as a "darling", don't you? Let's kill it and hope it never recovers.) I've kept my eyes open for good book cover artists over the past few years, and have noticed someone lately who ...

This month marks my fourth year participating as a contributing blogger for the BRP, and it's a ride that I've enjoyed immensely. I have connected with some wonderful editors, writers, and advocates of the writing craft here on BRP, and as I reflected on that and these last four years, I found myself pointed toward one topic for this post: the importance of community in a writer's life. Sure, we all know the saying, writing is a solitary act , but the success of that writing, the success of the writer is connected to the community the writer belongs to. And what community is this? Well, there are many communities, to include (My category titles are fairly loose; I apologize in advance for that.): The "familial" community, those in our family (and I would add close friends) who support our zany idea of becoming an author, who listen to our doubts and help to push them away, who put the pot of coffee on in the late-night hours, who clean the house and make d...

Please welcome Ginger Moran, author of The Algebra of Snow , to The Blood-Red Pencil today. When I was in graduate school there was only one door to publishing—the one that lead to the big commercial houses in New York. The only way in was through an agent and it was pretty hard to get one unless you had a guide or mentor who would introduce you to an agent. And those were the good old days. Those were the days when there were more than six commercial publishing houses, when the editor you started with was the one you had for your publishing lifetime, and they actually edited your work and helped you get it in shape for publication. In fact, they would take something that was relatively unreadable and turn it into—if not a bestseller, then something like a reasonable-seller. Make no mistake about it—publishing at the commercial level was never an easy process, nor did very many writers hit that level. I haven’t seen any statistics, but I’d hazard a guess that more writers got co...

It’s really a little too early to tell if the release of my first three books in the Sidra Smart mystery series makes any money or not, but when you change publishers mid-series, it seemed like a wise thing to do.   Philip Martin, at Crickhollow Books , published my national award-winning historical novel, A War Of Her Own , and did such a fabulous job, I asked him to publish the fourth book (The Swamp Whisperer) in my Sidra Smart Mystery Series. To do that, he and I agreed for him to pick up the whole series, re-release the first three, building new interest and energy for them, then release the fourth with a splash. In our decision-making process, as to what stays and what goes, we decided to not change the titles of the books, or the series, since Sidra Smart already has a strong following. Rather we decided to focus on tighter, cleaner edits, and fresh new covers. Also, we corrected any errors in plot, setting, and location that might have been overlooked in the first r...