Tag archives for Creative writing - Page 4
Help me pick a Title Font for my new book cover
I need your help to pick the title font for my new book cover. I'm in the process of re-designing the cover for the paperback version of Themself. My work in progress cover is a choice between either a photo (see below) or a minimalist plain cover. I'll survey on that in a little bit when I have more time to produce the full minimalist cover. Pick Themself's Title Font Right now I need some quantitative help with choosing options on the title font. I need something that speaks to people as 'creative writing' and works. So can you please do this one question surveymonkey to help me out, and share it around as well please? Thanks. Draft Cover for Themself in Paperback Here's what the new cover looks like so far. This isn't the final version, it needs some more…
Book Marketing Plan – Part One
Here's my book marketing plan for my novel Perfects that I will publish in January 2017. My current planned publication date is over 11 months away. You could be forgiven for thinking that I'm jumping the gun a bit. However what I've learnt is that doing this properly takes time. Planning the Book Marketing Plan A book marketing plan is no different to any other sort of project plan. You need to work out what you need to do, break it into bite sized chunks and identify the dependencies. I've done that and also identified my critical path. Working back from the start you need to be able to send out advance reading copies to reviewers. Many of the more popular, and therefore more useful, review sites have a wait time in months. So you need to allow about three…
Themself – now available on kindle
Today is publication day for my latest book Themself - Confessions of an open university creative writing student. As the sub-title suggests it is about my experience of studying creative writing with the OU. Although Themself goes further than that and includes the things I've learnt from my experience of writing, studying and self publishing. Themself - Confessions of an open university creative writing student You'll find some of the content in Themself here on the blog, but only about half of it. You'll also find that I've edited it since I first published it on the blog. Although I've tried hard to keep to the original character of the contemporary blog posts about how I was feeling. The bits I've updated are where I'm summarising what I've learnt. There is also a lot of new material. All of the stories and poems…
Dialogue: Five Facts for Fantastic Dialogue
Dialogue can be difficult, but there are some things you can do to make it way better. Here are five things for you to focus on when editing your dialogue. If you do these then your dialogue will be amazing. As with everything, you need make sure the dialogue advances the plot or develops the characters. If it doesn't do either, or both, then cut it out. Dialogue Directions 1. Read it out loud 2. Show the emotions 3. Give each character their own voice 4. Use only 'said' 5. Keep it short Read it Out Loud This is how you know that you've got the rhythm right. If you can record yourself reading it and listen back. Don't take any shortcuts here. You need to actually say it out loud, reading in your head doesn't work. This is good advice for all…
Editing Perfects
Over the last few weeks I've been editing Perfects for a second draft. I finished it over two years ago and it has sat in the metaphorical drawer waiting until I had time between uni courses to focus on it and apply what I learned from A215 to it. As a re-cap, Perfects is an evolution of Exodus, which was my multi-threaded NaNoWriMo 2012 story of a mid twenty first century exodus of people from Earth into space as space travel became an order of magnitude cheaper. I decided when I re-looked at it that there was an interesting world there, but that the strands needed loads of work to knit together. One of the strands became the novella Crisis Point, which I released in 2013. Perfects followed a group of genetically engineered teenagers and twentysomethings living mainly in Cambridge.…