Fighting the Good Fight for the Metaphor of It All

The Covenant is complete! Book 3 in A Covenant of Thorns, ROGUE'S PARADISE, is now out in the wild, walking its wild ways. Thanks to all for supporting this re-release of my very first dark fantasy romance trilogy. It's beyond wonderful to see these books finding a new audience after all these years. 

This week at the SFF Seven, we're talking about copyeditors and the arguments we have with them. We all have grammatical hills we'll die on - wisely or not - and we want to know what yours is! On what point will you refuse to give way, regardless of how the copyeditor might argue?

(I feel I should note at this point that the author/editor/copyeditor relationship is a symbiotic one. Even in traditional publishing - all rumor to the contrary of authors being "forced" to do x, y, z - seldom will anyone INSIST on a change. Almost always the author has final say, because it is their book, and they also bear final responsibility. It's in the contract. If an author commits slander or other blunders, the ultimate responsibility - financial, legal, and moral - rests with them.)

I, like most authors, have a love/hate relationship with copyeditors. On the one hand, they catch potentially horrifying errors. In fact, in the book above, the copyeditor corrected a character "peeing at her face" to "peering at her face" - something my editor and I had both missed and were hysterically relieved to have fixed.

We love them. We need them. As with all love/hate relationships, copyeditors drive us crazy. 

I won't fight about commas, as a rule. I really even don't care about the Oxford comma. I know people like to make jokes showing how important that Oxford comma is, but in most cases the context makes it clear. I don't get why copyeditors hate m-dashes so much, but I'll concede in many cases. I personally find semi-colons archaic and not all that useful, but whatever. 

You know what gets me, what I'll really fight for? 

Metaphorical language.

That's what kills me (yes, LITERALLY KILLS ME) about many copyeditors is that they can be so freaking literal. Some examples.

"His eyes can't really crawl over her. Imagine eyeballs rolling over her. Gross."

"Can a cloud really look sad?"

"I don't think this is a word."

I could go on. The thing is, as writers, we're often expanding the use of language. Dictionary definitions often include citations of first usage of a "new" word or expression. That's because language is our medium and we are the ones shaping it. Copyeditors are on the side of enforcing the status quo. So a writer ends up walking the line between bending to the regulatory insistence of correctness as the rules currently stand and being the iconoclast who breaks those rules to open up new worlds.

Guess which side I'm on?

Yeah, copyeditors hate me right back. 

But, I believe this push-pull is a part of our jobs, on both sides. We all want to produce the best book possible. We all love language and what it can do. I will say, however, to all the writers out there: believe in yourself and defend your words, because you are the fount of change. 

 

The Hybrid Life for Me!

 

ROGUE'S POSSESSION is now out!! 

     

This release dovetails nicely with this week's topic. We're asking, Traditional publishing, self-publishing or a fusion of the two. What works best for you?

This particular book is the second book in the Covenant of Thorns trilogy, which were originally traditionally published ten years ago! Those were my first fantasy romances and I was elated that Carina Press took a chance on my cross-genre novels. I went on to publish ten books in total with them. I've also done three traditionally published series with Kensington and one with St. Martin's Press.

I like trad publishing. Having a team working on my books is a great feeling, as is not having to front the money.

However...

As soon as I could get the rights back on these books, I did, and now I'm self-publishing them. The major reason? I'll make a lot more money selling them myself.

A secondary reason: by controlling the series, I have more options to discount book one, a potent marketing technique trad-pubbing doesn't allow.

A third, but super validating reason? At last I can give these books the covers they deserve!! I love these covers, designed by the incredibly talented Ravven, so much!

So, as you may have concluded, I'm falling in the "fusion of the two" category. Being a hybrid author gives me the best of both worlds. I aim to continue doing it that way. 

Jeffe's Top Three Resources for Names

    

ROGUE'S POSSESSION, Book #2 in my Covenant of Thorns Dark Fantasy Romance trilogy, is out in a week! It's been so fun to see readers rediscover this first series of mine.

This week at the SFF Seven, we're talking Naming Resources: Your top 3 sources for choosing names of characters, places, etc. Here are mine:

1. Jeffe's Big List of Names

I keep a list. A spreadsheet (of course! for those who know me) that I add to any time I encounter a name I really like. I save them for important characters. One #protip: there are few disappointments greater than discovering you squandered a really good name on a throwaway secondary character. Save those names for someday!

 

2. Behind the Name

 

BehindtheName.com is a great resource that lets you search for names in all sorts of ways. There's also a surname version, for those tricksy family names. 

3. Relevant Dictionaries

I also use archaic language dictionaries for whatever language family I'm using for a given world or realm within a world. These are easy to search for online, then look up word meanings and cobble together names from there.

 

Names are always important in my books - it's one of my themes - so I'm almost always choosing them for their underlying meaning. Something to look for!

 

MYOB - How Much Do You Know About Author Finances?

 

ROGUE'S PAWN is out now! This first book in my original Covenant of Thorns trilogy has been re-released with gorgeous new covers. Look for book 2 coming July 26 and book 3 releasing August 16. 

     

Read Excerpt

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This week at the SFF Seven we're MYOB - Minding your own business! 

Seriously, we're taking a long look at how we manage the financial side of being an author. There tends to be a wide range of strategies for managing author finances. As all authors are primarily creatives (with the small exception of the widget-makers who hire ghost writers to write for them, which is another kettle of stinky fish), not all possess the inclination to crunch numbers and balance accounts.

In truth, while I think all authors should have a thorough understanding of what they should be earning, not everyone needs to be a financial guru of their own writing career. In truth, the most comfortable place for an author - or perhaps any creative - to be is independent of the need to make money doing it. This, of course, requires either family money (marrying money counts) or a spouse with a great salary and benefits. In these cases, writing money is all "gravy" and I know many authors in this position who don't really track that income.

The major downside of this model is it means traditional publishing has favored those with this privilege and also takes shameless advantage of these authors. There can be a lot of funky tickling of the financials, both from publishing houses and literary agencies. Believe me: I've seen it.

Learn to read your royalty statements and hold those who handle your earnings accountable.

The flip side is if you're like me - someone who is supporting their household with writing income. This is the other extreme, where ALL finances are author finances. I track everything scrupulously, to the point of using mathematical models to predict my future income. That's the thing about writing income: it's super unpredictable. Sales wax and wane, often due to reasons beyond anyone's control. Traditional publishing pays quarterly if you're lucky and semi-annually otherwise. There's almost no way to predict what those checks will look like, so I end up behaving like the privileged writer as above - I treat my trad income as gravy.

Self-publishing income is what allows me to pay the bills with writing. That money comes in monthly and, because I can access my sales dashboards in real time, I can reasonably predict how much money will come in. The downside of self-publishing is that the author fronts the investment. KAK covered a lot of the nitty-gritty of self-publishing costs yesterday. Most self-publishing authors can implement the simple math of outflow vs. inflow. That is, what you pay to produce and market the book should be less than the money you make from it. Where it gets into higher math is managing that income so that you can cover the costs of being alive. 

With a salaried job, or even hourly income, the basic budgeting model is to figure your monthly income, subtract your expenses, and the rest is "disposable," meaning you can spend it on stuff you want vs. the stuff you need. But with a fluctuating monthly income, this simply isn't possible. 

So, my basic model is to try to keep enough money in savings to pay for two months of expenses should I have zero income in any given month. (Which hopefully will never happen, knock on wood. My backlist is substantial at this point, so the baseline backlist income is relatively steady.) Once I have that in place, I can pay for some of the things that make us happy. This is VERY important. It's tempting to confine oneself only to needs and funnel any "extra" money back into growing the business. This works okay for a while, but it gets soul-crushing over time. We work hard; we must also play hard. Anything else is unsustainable.

As a creative, maintaining your joy in the work is key!

From my initial announcement, you'll see I'm also republishing some of my trad-pubbed books. I did ten books with Carina Press and now have the rights back to all of them. Those royalties came in quarterly, so I'm eager to see how my income on those books changes for me. So far I only have ROGUE'S PAWN up again. Republishing meant paying for covers and formatting, so a bit of investment on my part. Hopefully it will pay off.

As with all businesses, writing for a living requires a lot of hoping for that pay off. Being smart about crunching those numbers provides the reality. A balance of both is best. 

ROGUE'S PAWN, Rights Reversion, Hybrid Authors, Dear Hollywood and Gateway Drugs

Available at these Retailers

     

Things have been busy in my part of the world...

So much so that I missed posting for the last two weeks - and I'm posting late in the day today. Madness!

This is my brilliant (one hopes) catch-up post. 

In book news, I got the rights reverted on the ten (10!) books I did for Carina Press. I started with my first dark fantasy romance trilogy, Covenant of Thorns, which meant new covers and new back cover copy (BCC). Done and done, times three. (What about the other seven books, you ask? I'M WORKING ON IT, OKAY?) I'll be re-releasing these three books over the next several months. 

Here's for Book #1, ROGUE'S PAWN:

Be careful what you wish for…

When I walked out on my awful boyfriend, wishing to be somewhere—anywhere—else, I never expected to wake up in Faerie. And, as a scientist, I find it even harder to believe that I now seem to be a sorceress.

A pretty crappy sorceress, it turns out, because every thought that crosses my mind becomes suddenly and frighteningly real—including the black dog that has long haunted my nightmares.

Now I’m a captive, a pawn for the fae lord, Rogue, and the feral and treacherous Faerie court, all vying to control me and the vast powers I don’t understand. Worse, Rogue, the closest thing I have to a friend in this place, is intent on seducing me. He’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen, enthralling, tempting, and lethally dangerous. He’s as devastatingly clever as he is alluring, and he tricks me into promising him my firstborn child, which he intends to sire…

I don’t dare give into him. I may not have the willpower to resist him. He’s my only protection against those who would destroy me

Unless I can learn to use my magic.

Exciting milestone, to be re-releasing these!

As for the actual topics I'm supposed to address:

What do you see in your crystal ball for publishing? Will the Big 5 become the Big 4 and what would that trickle down cause throughout the industry?

I doubt that the merger that would make the Big 5 become the Big 4 will be approved. Even if it does, there are still other publishing houses that aren't the "big" ones. Also, traditional publishing is only one part of the market and one that's no longer at the forefront of everything. I think there's value to trad publishing still, but I also think most authors will become hybrid, since we want to be able to pay our bills.

Dear Hollywood: Which of your works would you most like to see made into a movie or miniseries What makes it stand out above the rest?

My Twelve Kingdoms and Uncharted Realms series. I really want to see these books as an ongoing miniseries, primarily because I'd love to write the other POVs that are going on simultaneously with the 1st Person POV of these books.

Your gateway drug: the book that made you love SFF

DRAGONSONG by Anne McCaffrey. I found it in my school library in 5th grade and it opened up a whole new world to me. Possibly also the first time I glommed an author's backlist. 

The Best Title That Never Was

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week concerns the reality of having to change names. We're asking the crew if they've ever had to change the name(s) of a character or place in a book after we'd drafted it? Who is the character who will forever go by their "unpublished" name in our minds?

For me, it wasn't a character. As far as I can recall, I've never had to change the name of a character or place in a book. If I did, it never mattered enough to me that it stuck in my head. I *have* had to change titles, however, and the one that has never left my head is for the book that became ROGUE'S PAWN, book one in my Covenant of Thorns trilogy.

This was my first published novel - released in 2012 - and was the story that invaded my dreams and wrenched me from a nonfiction career and into fiction. It was, in fact, fantasy romance, but I didn't know what to call it then. I started writing it in 2005, querying it in 2007 and it took me YEARS to sell. 

All that time, I called it by another title in my head: OBSIDIAN.

The title has a lot of shades of meaning and symbolic layers in the story. That book is forever OBSIDIAN in my head.

Unfortunately, by the time Carina Press bit on the book and published it in August of 2012, Jennifer L. Armentrout's book of the same title had come out in May. My editors at Carina said that wasn't the reason for the title change. Instead I sunk my own ship by first publishing the Facets of Passion books with them. Those were erotic BDSM contemporaries, also with one-word jewel titles: SAPPHIRE, PLATINUM, and RUBY. (Ironically, book 4, FIVE GOLDEN RINGS, was supposed to be called ORO, the Spanish word for gold, but Carina thought readers wouldn't get it. I'm still sorry about that retitling, too.)

It was a newbie author mistake. Had I realized that one-word jewel titles wouldn't work for two different series, in two different genres, from the same author at the same publisher, I would have cheerfully changed the Facets of Passion titles instead. Alas!

I'd love to get this trilogy back from Carina someday - largely because I've never liked these covers, either. Would I change the title back? I don't know... I wouldn't want readers to think I'm trying to trick them into reading something new that's actually old. 

What would you say?

    

Retelling the Fairy Tale

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is which fairy tale would you pick to rewrite and why?

It's kind of a funny question for me, because it's starting to be more accurate to ask me which fairy tale I *haven't* rewritten yet.

So far I've done retellings of Beauty & the Beast (PETALS AND THORNS) and The Goose Girl (HEART'S BLOOD).

Then there are all the books that incorporate fairy tale themes without being direct retellings. For example, the original Twelve Kingdoms trilogy began with the idea of the three princesses, daughters of the High King, each more beautiful than the last. All of the books in that trilogy and the Uncharted Realms and Chronicles of Dasnaria spinoff series play with various fairy tale themes. My first fantasy romance series, A Covenant of Thorns, also plays on fairy tale themes, that time about a person being transported to Faerie.

 As for the ones I still want to do... two have been on my list for a long time: Rapunzel and Cinderella. I have ideas for Rapunzel, but nothing yet that really gets to the feel I want. Cinderella poses its own challenges, but... I think I may have it now. :D

No Thank-You

I've been thinking about our customs around saying "thank-you" to people. Since our topic at the SFF Seven this week is whatever is on our minds, I'm going for this!

Way back in January 2013 I did a post on why I hate thank-you notes, and I tell you - I *still* get people finding my blog by Googling that topic, and sending me messages. So, this is something I've been mulling for a long time.

I've gotten a new perspective on the topic lately as I've been reading Seanan McGuire's October Daye urban fantasy series. The stories are set in a contemporary world where Faerie exists and interfaces with the human one. It's interesting to me that one of her world rules is that the fae are exceedingly careful about saying "thank you" as it implies a contract and obligation.

It makes me feel pretty fancy because in my first fantasy romance series, A Covenant of Thorns, which is about a modern day scientist who ends up in Faerie, uses this same element. I wasn't nearly as deliberate about it as McGuire is, but I had that in the back of my mind. I hadn't thought of it the way she uses it, that a thank-you seals a magical pact, but it explains a lot of my intuitive dislike of the expression.

AND, it explains why I really dislike the use of "thank-you in advance." How much more of an obligation does THAT create?

All very interesting. Plus a fun excuse to revisit this trilogy that doesn't get that much attention from me anymore. :-)

Pros and Cons of Genre Boundaries

I spotted an interesting comment in a review of THE PAGES OF THE MIND. The book came out last Tuesday and it's been doing amazingly well. The best of any of my books so far, in fact. Something I credit to my amazing readers who've really turned out to support this release week.

You all are amazing with posting reviews and talking up this book and series - thank you!

It's even more super cool that the companion novella in FOR CROWN AND KINGDOM, with darling friend Grace Draven, has cracked the Top 1000 on Amazon in the paid Kindle store. Love seeing those fabulous rankings! So does my mortgage company, so there's that, too. :-)

At any rate, a review of THE PAGES OF THE MIND posted just today said:

My goodness its been so long since I read a legit Fantasy Romance. The genre is so small, and its hard to find gems like this one. When I say Fantasy Romance I mean non Paranormal. Since the Twilight craze there are just too many Vampire/Werewolf type romances happening. This book is in a completely different world than our own with its own politics, religions, and lands.Top it all off add in some magic and romance and you've got me hooked.

I saw that just this morning as I was mulling this week's topic: How does working within or outside the genre spectrum benefit or limit? As faithful readers know - my books rarely fall within genre lines. In fact, when I wrote ROGUE'S PAWN, the first of my Covenant of Thorns trilogy, I had no idea it was Fantasy Romance. So, it's kind of amusing to me to have a reviewer call my book "legit Fantasy Romance."

This comes on the heels of a friend who asked me if I had any new Contemporary Fantasy Romance releases later this year for an interview. Which... I don't. My Fantasy Romances are all either "historical," as in they occur in less technological ages than ours, or they're alternate world. Really they're all alternate world, but I'll accept historical. Only that original Covenant of Thorns trilogy counts as Contemporary Fantasy Romance, because part (very small parts) of the storylines in books one and three take place in our contemporary world.

So, those are perfect illustrations right there of how working within a genre can both benefit and limit at the same time. Having my books fit exactly within the Fantasy Romance genre is fantastic and very helpful for conveying what these books are. However, genre boundaries can be so limiting - as much as I'd love to participate in my friend's article, that small addition of "contemporary" leaves my current books out of the running.

But, in the end, does it really matter? For me it's all about the story. I suspect that's true of most of you, too.