Stiff Competition and Being Savvy About Choosing Genres

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

We haven’t had a sunrise pic in a while. Sign of the season, I suppose, when my regular wake-up time now precedes the sun’s. Alas for that.

I’ve been crazy busy lately wrapping up The Rebecca Contest. This is my local chapter LERA’s contest for unpublished manuscripts. (Our finalists are listed here.) For some reason, in an era of declining contest participation, our numbers went up this last year. This is the second year I volunteered as the Contest Coordinator, so it’s given me an interesting perspective on the industry.

I shouldn’t fling that “for some reason” out there, because I do have a pretty good idea what made this contest attractive to aspiring writers. One is that we made a serious effort to have final judges who are solid industry professionals who are both actively acquiring new authors and who are not easy to access for most writers. That’s what I wanted for my work when I was entering contests, and that’s what we try to get for our contestants.

Second is that it’s noteworthy that it’s a contest for unpublished manuscripts – not unpublished authors. This means that authors who’ve already published can participate as long as the manuscript in question is not under contract when they enter the contest.

This aspect brings up an important point about our industry that I think can get overlooked. It used to be that getting published was the sinecure, the lifetime career that ended with the literary equivalent of a gold watch and a generous pension. Now, just as those days of the lifetime career with one company have given way to an average of 5-6 careers in an American’s life, getting a contract for that first book, or even that 2- to 3-book series is no longer a guarantee of anything. The market is tough, the stakes high and publishers are frequently kicking authors to the curb whose books/series don’t perform to high expectations. And it’s a sad irony that the writer is now not that enticing creature, the “debut author,” who seems to be as avidly sought as the proverbial beautiful, young virgin.

How does an author circumvent the scarlet letter of less than bestselling numbers on a previous effort? The anonymity of a contest works pretty damn well.

Of course, this means that our contest had incredibly stiff competition. In two categories, in particular, the finalists were fractions of a point apart. This is the most interesting part to me. Can anyone guess which were the two most competitive categories? The five were:

Historical Romance
Category Romance
Paranormal Romance/Science Fiction Romance/Urban Fantasy
Young Adult Romance
Contemporary Romance

Did you all make your guesses?

YA and Paranormal. Both had the most entries (though Contemporary only had three fewer entries than YA) and both had the closest finalists scores. In Paranormal, the three finalists all had perfect average scores. (Each entry is judged by three people, at least one a published author, the lowest score of the three is dropped and the two highest scores averaged.)

I think this reflects the marketplace, too. YA and the speculative fiction takes on romance continue to sell well. The competition out there is fierce.

What lesson do we extract from this? I’m curious to know what you all think. Does the savvy writer focus on those less-competitive sub-genres, hoping to stand out as a shiny fish in a smaller pond? Or does she set her sights on upping her game and hope the high tide floating all those ships in the popular sub-genres will sweep her along, too?

Of course, that’s pre-supposing that any writer really chooses what they write…

Author Intrusion – and How to Avoid It

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

Wow – welcome to September everyone!

(And how the hell did THAT happen, anyway??)

I have to give a little shout-out to friend and CP Carolyn Crane, whose book Head Rush is out in paperback today. This is kind of significant because the ebook version came out in 2011, but this particular publisher (Samhain) takes a long time to get their print versions out. In this case, it was too bad for hard-copy readers, because Head Rush is book 3 in the Disillusionists trilogy and book 2, Double Cross, ends on this heart-wrenching cliffhanger. It’s a totally earned cliffhanger (which I rarely think is true), as the title suggests. (If you haven’t read this trilogy, start with book 1, Mind Games – you’ll be glad you did.) At any rate, I feel for those hard copy readers, because I finished book 2 on my Kindle and IMMEDIATELY downloaded book 3. (I may have been chanting something to myself like “no, no, no – it can’t be true.”)

(Apparently I’m feeling parenthetical and all-cappy today – sorry!)

And then it was SUCH a good book. You know how some trilogies peter out by book 3, like there’s just not that much to say anymore? But in others, book 3 is the capstone, the final arch that brings the pillars of books 1 and 2 together into a magnificent edifice. (The other one that springs to mind is Kushiel’s Avatar by Jacqueline Carey, which brilliantly tied up the heroine’s entire journey.) I love how Carolyn handled Head Rush, exploring the nature of memory and reality. Deft and wonderful.

Now, you might be sitting there thinking, oh yeah, of course she says these things because Carolyn is her friend and crit partner. She’s totally biased. She HAS to say these things. While it’s certainly true that writers support their friends, the thing is – Carolyn became my friend AFTER I read these books. I read them on Sullivan McPig’s recommendation. (She does a terrific review blog here.) And then I was so impressed by these books that I twitter-stalked her and made her be my friend.  Mostly so we could talk about her hero Sterling and how much I liked him. And so I could complain that I felt CHEATED of certain moments with him.

Carolyn, being who she is, let me bitch and we ended up having a great conversation and the rest is, proverbially, history.

This is an important point, because I *do* have one here. I reached out to this author to talk about her hero and the story and she responded to me. This is something readers do a lot – they take possession, particularly of the hero (some of the bloggers call them “book boyfriends”) and want to communicate with his handler (as the bloggers also say).

Carolyn recently suggested I read another series because she thought I’d enjoy the hero – and she was absolutely spot on. I read the books, tweeted about them, and another gal I tweet with quite a bit responded that she loved this hero, too. We riffed about him and she looped in the author, who I hadn’t met before. The author replied (good) and then started telling us about the hero in her NEXT book and he’s EVEN MORE ALPHA.

And well, hmpf.

Totally defizzled my fizz, if you know what I mean.

Now, I can see why she did what she did. Here are fangirls of her books and she wants us to be fans of not just these books that we already bought, but of her upcoming books. I totally understand this kind of marketing impulse. She’s likely thinking, please don’t be fans of just that one hero.

But I think it was a mistake. She diverted us from talking about something we were really enjoying, killing our buzz. Also, by telling us the next hero would be even more something, she subtly made us think less of the one we’d liked so much. (Who, btw, I hadn’t thought of as particularly alpha, so that sort of impinged on my fun, too.) I think the other reader felt this way, too, because this ended the conversation. We had nothing left to say.

I’m not sure what caution I’m offering here. It’s easy to obsess about social media, to be afraid of missteps. That one little mistake will be a fatal one. But I think the message is to be always wary of letting that marketing urge overtake the social one. Readers and writers love to talk about books and that love leads to sales, which is a good and organic thing. Careful though, if the “leading to sales” bit gets stronger than the “loving to talk about it” bit.

And, on that note, you should totally go buy Carolyn Crane’s Disillusionsts Trilogy. 😀

(Okay, I really just laughed and laughed at myself.)

Hunting the Siren Release Day!

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

Today is the day HUNTING THE SIREN hits the world!

So far you can only buy it on the Ellora’s Cave site here, but they have it in .docx, .zip, .epub, .pdf and .prc, if that’s any consolation. Or you can be patient (I know, I know – not our forte) and wait for it to pop up on the third party retailer sites like Amazon, B&N and ARe.

This story is a follow-up to Feeding the Vampire, which many of you know started with a dream. I was in something like a church basement, badly lit with flickering green fluorescent lights, and I know I’m there because the world is in chaos and there’s nowhere else for me to go. I sat in a circle of folding chairs with a bunch of other people I didn’t know, like a self-help group, and a vampire was sitting across from me. Someone says as how he needs to be fed and I volunteer.

I had to figure out the rest from there. Why the world had ended, why there were suddenly vampires. And so forth.

So, when the lovely and persistent Editor Grace bugged me about a sequel, I had to really think about the what next. I had no convenient dream to draw from this time. I did know about another story, about a woman dealing with this same post-apocalyptic world, but I wasn’t ready to write it yet. Instead, I scanned this world in my mind, which is kind of like being a superhero and flying over the broken and drowning earth, looking for life. I thought maybe people would have survived on the Russian Steppes, since it’s a relatively stable earthquake zone. And there I found my Vampire Queen and her band of Night Riders. I also spotted Kasar, an engineer in Moscow whose noble bloodline serves him well in surviving the fall of the city – and his hike to find his sister. Then my CP, Laura Bickle, got all revved up about furry boots and yurt sex and the story rolled along from there.

This series, officially dubbed the Blood Currency series, because blood is now the major commodity for trade between the unevenly matched and struggling populations of vampires and humans, is a different one for me in that the heroines are not much like me at all. Misty, in Feeding the Vampire, wasn’t terribly well-educated, had no real skills and no confidence in herself. Imogen, my Vampire Queen, is ancient, ruthless and rule with an iron will. Both of them were really fun to write – for totally different reasons.

Will they all meet up someday?

Seems inevitable…

 

Why I’m Not Ashamed to Travel Heavy

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

Colorado comes up with some pretty great skies, too. Credit where it’s due!

I’m back from the long Birthday Weekend – our annual family celebration in which we all gather someplace fun and whoop it up in honor of three birthdays: mine, my aunt’s and my stepdad’s. Because this year was Stepdad Dave’s Big Birthday (75), he got to choose the location and he picked his favorite spot, Lake Dillon. Stepsister Hope made an appearance from Tucson, too, which made it all that much more fun. 

We arrived at the condo Friday evening, had some great meals, drank a lot of wine, hiked a bit, boated some, shopped the outlet mall, hung out a lot. On Monday morning we headed down to Denver and took in a Rockies game that night. Baseball is seriously the only sport I like watching – mostly because I get to sit outside in nice weather and drink beer, I think. The stats and strategy appeal to math-brain me, too.

On Tuesday morning, David and I drove home to Santa Fe and settled back in.

One thing this kind of multi-stage trip meant, is that we loaded and unloaded the car several times. And, because we took my two-seater jag to make the road-trip even more pleasant, the loading part involved Tetris-like skills to fit everything in. Though we divested ourselves of birthday gifts, I ended up receiving some, too, so that was a zero-sum game. I  may also have acquired a few things during our shopping excursion. Also, the chilly late-summer nights in the mountains required layers and the range of activities from boating to fancy dinner out demanded multiple outfit types.

At least for me.

David, of course, brought a smaller suitcase, but I brought my bigger one. No dash-bag for this kind of trip.

This is one of my things – I travel heavy. And yeah, those of you who read me regularly know I travel quite a lot, for fun, the day job and the writing career. Seems like I always encounter the common wisdom that you should learn to travel light. The advice is always how to maximize carry-on space, mix and match outfits, turning things inside-out for additional wearings. The mantra is presented as a personal virtue – as if there’s something good and right and holy about traveling light.

I say balderdash to that.

I travel heavy and I’m not ashamed. If I’m working for five days? I bring at least six outfits. Maybe I’ll have a wardrobe error with one. Maybe I’ll drink too much beer at the baseball game and the tight waist on that one skirt won’t fit right. Maybe I just plain won’t feel like wearing something. Because I travel a lot, I want the comforts of home with me. I have no desire to do without. I bring my furry house slippers and my favorite hair-dryer.

Wearing clothes I feel good about, when I want to, that I feel like look good, is a big part of my confidence, my public face to the world.

Yes, my suitcase is heavy. I figure, as long as I’m willing to lift it myself, I have that privilege. It can be funny, because I’m a fairly small woman, but I’m stronger than I look. More than once I’ve handed my suitcase to a cabbie who then sagged under the weight, looking surprised. I do try to warn them, but that doesn’t mean they listen.

David, though – he always carries my suitcase for me. Every time. Always I tell him I can carry it – because I do feel a little self-conscious that it weighs three times what his does – and always he gives me his slow smile and says he’ll get it. I hear the words he doesn’t say. He loves me. He accepts me for who I am, heavy suitcase and all.

Gifts beyond price.