Author: Elizabeth Spann Craig

I spend a lot of time doing different promotional things to make sure I’m doing my part in marketing my book.

I purchase bookmarks and business cards. I make appearances and sign books. I do a lot of things online.

And then, sometimes, you find out that the most effective marketing is purely accidental.

My mother called me one day to say someone had stopped her at the YMCA to tell her that they didn’t know I wrote books…and they’d gone out to buy them.

They’d found out because my college had run a few paragraphs about me in the alumnae section of their magazine that goes out every quarter to alums.

The next day I heard from another alumna from my college—who didn’t know me. She tweeted me on Twitter that she didn’t realize we’d gone to the same school until she got the alumnae magazine. She was planning on buying my books.

Then I was at the church, volunteering last week, and the other mother in the kitchen with me remembered me from the alumni magazine and started talking to me about my books.

You’d think that I’d gone to a big school…but I went to a small, private, liberal arts school in Clinton, South Carolina. With enrollment at 1,100 students.

And yet, for that month, I think it was the most exceptional bit of marketing out of everything else I tried.

And I hadn’t even run the blurb.

The English department at the college had somehow made the connection, found a bio of me online and a picture, and run the update in the magazine.

My lesson in this? I’m thinking that we should all be thinking outside the box. Sometimes we’ve already got connections to potential readers—from our past—and those can be easier to tap than developing new connections (although those are important, too.) And not be too shy—who knows what opportunities we’re missing?

I think, though, that sometimes it’s harder for us to market to our connections. It seems more like selling. I’m not fond of selling, either. But I like the idea of things like updating my alumni magazine from time to time.

Here are some good resources for the reluctant marketer:

Conquering Book Marketing Fear—7 Tips for the Introverted Writer

How Authors Can Participate in Marketing Even When They Don’t Like Selling

A post I wrote for Hart Johnson’s blog on marketing tips I’ve learned

Marketing for the non-fiction author

A blog series on marketing lessons

Have you got any tips for painless promotion? How do you feel about marketing, in general?

Masterpiece Mystery is my favorite show on TV right now, and I’ve really enjoyed their recent airing of “Inspector Lewis.” It’s a spin-off of the old Inspector Morse series, based on the mysteries by Colin Dexter. The same actor plays Lewis in both the Morse series and the Lewis ones.

The new series renewed my interest in watching the old one again—and PBS came through for me once more when I discovered they were running the shows on Friday nights.

Inspector Morse is an interesting character and I really respect the late Colin Dexter for his creation. He wrote an amazingly intuitive detective with a brilliant mind and incredible deductive ability.

But the most interesting thing about the character and why so many readers fell in love with him is what he was like when he wasn’t solving crimes. He was difficult and quiet—a lover of crosswords, classical music (especially Wagner), art, classical literature, and beer. He spoke his mind. He was crusty, grouchy—and fascinating.

I think, actually, the success of the series is due in large part to who Inspector Morse was in his spare time…when he wasn’t solving a crime and wasn’t facing a crisis.

This really makes me think. So much of our energy as a writer is poured (and rightly so) into the conflict the protagonist is facing and how they handle it. How can we best fit in the tidbits about the character—the non-conflict-related stuff that makes us love them?

I think our character needs to have a little bit of downtime in our books. Not enough, obviously, to bore the reader or interrupt the progression of the plot to a large degree—but enough for our readers to really get acquainted with our protagonist. Enough for us to develop our character a little bit and show the kind of person they are when they’re not working out the book’s conflict.

Aside from that, I think dialogue helps. We can find out a lot about our character through their interactions with secondary characters.

Even sketching out our characters’ house can tell us about them. How do they live? Can we tell what’s important to them by their possessions? Do they have trophies on their mantel from sports’ victories…or middle school spelling bees? Do they have lots of family pictures in frames? Is their house spartan or cluttered?

What kinds of things does your character do…when they’re not busy saving the world? How do you slip it in enough to intrigue the reader instead of boring them?

Do book blurbs influence your book buying habits?

Apparently publishers think so because you’ll find blurbs on front and back covers of many books—and they’re hoping if you see that one of your favorite authors loved a book…that maybe you’ll buy it to see if you’ll love it, too.

The process of getting blurbs, though, is a little unusual—actually, there are lots of different ways to go about it.

I was delighted to get some great blurbs from several authors I really respect, who write books in my genre, for Delicious and Suspicious. My editor at Penguin asked me, months before the book went into production, if I had any ideas of authors I’d like to ask to blurb my book. And I did.

My editor did something I really appreciated—she asked the authors’ editors if it was all right if they blurbed me. A couple of the writers have more than one series and she was concerned that they would feel like they needed to try to fit in reading my book when they should be writing their own, instead.

I’ve also blurbed another book in my genre for another Penguin author and was happy to do so. But last week, I had a request to blurb a book…and there was just no way I can.

Right now I’m absolutely swamped with my own writing and promo-related stuff. I felt bad about it, but I knew that I would be really frantic if I fit someone else’s galley into the mix.

Reasons you might not be able to blurb a book:

There are only so many hours in the day. And it does take hours to read a book—and then more time to come up with a pithy blurb.

Your agent and/or editor(s) don’t want you to blurb right now. Because you’re under one or two tight deadlines.

Sometimes people ask you to blurb your book and it’s not your genre. I think it makes more sense for an author to blurb a book that’s in their genre—that’s what the reader is expecting. If Stephen King is endorsing a book, I’m not expecting the book to be a romance.

Sometimes people ask you to blurb their book and you aren’t sure if you’ll like it. If I’m blurbing a book, I want to be able to wholeheartedly endorse it. You want to be enthusiastic in your support of the book.

With some publishers, there might even be a problem with you endorsing a book at a competing publisher. I’ve never run across this—but I wouldn’t be at all surprised. This isn’t an area I’ve heard a lot of discussion over.

Sometimes you get requests and you wonder if the book was actually edited…especially if the email from the writer isn’t even well-written. And you wouldn’t want to endorse a poorly-edited book…you want it to be a professionally-edited book. If your name is enthusiastically endorsing a bad book, then it makes you look unprofessional, too.

What to do if you can’t give a blurb:

Remember that it’s a huge honor to be asked to blurb a book. The author is saying that your endorsement of the book is important enough to help sell it.

Remember that it can be difficult for an author to approach another writer about blurbs. Respond quickly and politely to the request and don’t make the author feel bad. Be nice.

The idea is to pay it forward—if you can. If you can’t, for whatever reason, respond quickly and professionally. Most writers, I think, want to pay it forward. After all, there were many different people who gave us help and support on our path to publication.

Have you blurbed or asked for blurbs? As a reader, are blurbs something you even notice when you’re book browsing?

There are, from what I’ve seen and heard before, two types of writer’s block.

There’s the “I don’t want to sit down and work on that book right now!” type of block. This is basically procrastination and just not wanting to make time for a difficult activity.

There’s also the second type…and I know they do exist because I received an email from one of them recently…of people who are staring at a blank screen with panic. And I think the problem is that they don’t know why their block is happening or what to try to do to fix it.

I’ve heard it said that there isn’t any such thing as writer’s block. That handymen don’t get handyman’s block and doctors don’t get doctor’s block. That’s true, but they’re not building worlds in their heads. I’ll admit that I don’t get writer’s block—but there are some days when I do hesitate a lot while writing. I know it’s all coming out wrong. I know it’s going to have to be fixed. I know it’s bad writing.

But I just keep on spewing out crappy writing because I know I’ll fix it later.

I think, though, that people who genuinely see a blank screen and freeze up for long periods of time are really just afraid. They’re afraid of failure. They want so badly to write something well that they just choke up.

I think the best way to deal with those feelings is to continue writing. To give myself permission to completely fail while expressing my ideas on paper, with the knowledge that I will make it all better with revisions.

These are some helpful posts on writer’s block that I’ve come across in the past:

21 Tips for Overcoming Writer’s Block
Writer’s Block—the Pros and Cons of just writing through it
A resource roundup to solving writer’s block
Overcoming Writer’s Block
The underlying cause of writer’s block—fear of failure

If you’ve gotten blocked before, how did you work through it. If you don’t get blocked, what advice can you offer folks who do?

I’m grateful to Elizabeth for allowing me to be a guest here on Mystery Writing is Murder. And I’m grateful to readers! I love my work, and I’d be nowhere without you. Leave a comment here, and your name will go into a daily drawing for one free book. The winner can choose any of my sixteen titles. Old World Murder, one of my American Girl mysteries, a Civil War novel—the choice will be yours!

Start Your Mystery With A Bang!

By Kathleen Ernst

There’s been a lot of talk over the past few years about the importance of having the actual murder show up quickly in a mystery novel. I recently heard a speaker say that having a body in the first chapter is good; in the first paragraph is better; in the first sentence is best of all.

This advice may, or may not, make sense for your novel. I’ve seen some mysteries turned inside-out in order to present a dead body quickly, with leaps back and forth in time. Sometimes this works wonderfully. Sometimes…well, not so much.

It is important to grab agents, editors, and readers quickly. But there are lots of ways to do that! Want to hook readers with your first sentence or two? Let’s look at a variety of techniques:

1. Grab readers’ attention.

“It was one hell of a night to throw away a baby.” (In The Bleak Midwinter, by Julia Spencer-Fleming)

“With the exception of a nine-week-old Australian shepherd puppy, sniffing and whining as if he’d discovered a treasure chest and sought a way inside, everyone was politely pretending Anna didn’t stink.” (Blood Lure, by Nevada Barr)

2. Drop readers into the action…

“January, as usual, was meat locker cold, and the girl had already been missing for nearly two days.” (Blood Hollow, by William Kent Krueger)

“In his last conscious moment, the burning man spoke three words.” (Wild Inferno, by Sandi Ault)

“I flinched as a rifle shot fractured the air.” (Mint Juleps, Mayhem, and Murder, by Sara Rosett)

3. …or into a revealing conversation.

“‘He was healthy yesterday,’ said Maude.” (Three Bags Full, by Leonie Swann)

“All of them? Even the children?” The fireplace sputtered and crackled and swallowed his gasp. “Slaughtered?” (The Brutal Telling, by Louise Penny)

4. Set the stage.

“The tale I am about to tell begins on a bright, clear, April-sweet morning in the Lake District village of Sawrey. (The Tale of Cuckoo Brow Wood, by Susan Wittig Albert)

“When Rachel Goddard turned onto Ben Hern’s property, she couldn’t see the other car barreling toward hers down the long, curving driveway. All she saw up ahead were the massive rhododendrons and trees in summer leaf that formed a screen on both sides.” (Broken Places, by Sandra Parshall)

5. Set the tone.

“The desert surrounds the moving bus like an earthly vision of hell.” (Panic! by Bill Pronzini)

6. Create a beginning that mirrors the ending.

Return characters to the first scene’s setting to emphasize their emotional growth. I did this in my children’s mystery, Midnight in Lonesome Hollow. I hoped that using the same setting would emphasize how the characters have grown and changed.

7. Simply state the crime….

“The bodies were discovered by Mrs. Trepol, widow, occupation housekeeper and cook to the deceased.” (Wings of Fire, by Charles Todd)

“Lyell Overton Minskoff-Hardy, literary light and cultural personage, perished a few days before Christmas beneath a stainless steel toilet on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.” (A Dog About Town, by J. F. Englert)

8. …or the protagonist’s take on it.

“I got there too late to save Jerome Santana.” (Wild Indigo, by Sandi Ault)

9. Set a protagonist up for a fall.

“Officer Bernadette Manuelito had been having a busy day, enjoying most of it, and no longer feeling like the greenest rookie of the Navajo Tribal Police.” (The Wailing Wind, by Tony Hillerman.)

10. Intrigue readers with introspection.

“At the end, there was so much blame to spread around that we could all have taken a few shovelfuls home and rolled around in it like pigs in stink.” (The Fault Tree, by Louise Ure)

“Till the night when the habit of killing returned to him, he had almost forgotten the quickening joy of it, how it scourged the smear of shame from the heart and made it live.” (The Burning Bride, by Margaret Lawrence)

**

I recently dug out the earliest version of my new novel, Old World Murder. Here’s the first line of my first draft: “Evenings, when the hordes of visitors had straggled to the parking lot, and the thirsty interpreters stampeded after them, were my favorite times on the historic site.”

Ho-hum.

Here’s how the published novel opens:

“As Chloe Ellefson walked from 1982 into 1870s Wisconsin, a white frame church emerged from the trees, prettily framed against a cloud-studded blue sky. The view alone was enough to make most visitors pause, appreciate the simple elegance of the restored church, perhaps even wonder about the lives of those women and men and children who had first worshiped within its walls. For Chloe, the historic site’s newest employee, the scene represented a fresh start.”

There’s no body. But I did manage to raise a question (why does Chloe need to make a fresh start?) and to squeeze some important bits of information (she has started work at a lovely and thought-provoking historic site, and her story takes place in 1982) into those three sentences.

There is, of course, no “best” way to open a novel. Only the author can decide what works for any particular story. I suggest that the very last step of the editing process is one final, thoughtful, and assessing eye at the mystery’s first sentences. Are they as strong as they can be?

If so, you’ll have readers eager for more.

Kathleen Ernst is celebrating the publication of her first adult mystery, Old World Murder (Midnight Ink). She has also written eight mysteries for young readers. Several have been finalists for Edgar or Agatha awards. For more information see her website, http://www.kathleenernst.com, or her blog, http://sitesandstories.wordpress.com.

Thanks so much for blogging on Mystery Writing is Murder today, Kathleen! Kathleen is a fellow Midnight Ink author who I was fortunate enough to spend some time with at the Malice Domestic mystery conference in April. Congratulations on your release!