Made-up Mayhem and Adapting Your Novel for Film

The print and e-release of my first non-fiction books is fast approaching! I was going to post the covers, but Blogger is just totally whacked today. I'll have to try again when its not so hinky, not to mention ANNOYING.

In the run up to the release of the books, actually booklets would be a more accurate description, I plan on doing a couple of short blogs on subjects from the booklets. Basically both books are my "quick and dirty" techniques on how to write a suspense novel and adapt your novel for film. 

Let's look at Adapting Your Novel for Film first. There are a lot of excellent books on how to write screenplays and on adapting work for film. But they are BOOKS. They are meant to be long and authoritative. My booklet just covers the basics of how you dissect your work and then recreate your story as a script. There is some advice on basic screenwriting in there, too. It's not meant to be definitive or even authoritative. It's just my experiences and how I did it. If you want to now more on the subject, then there is a nice, long bibliography, but for the person who just wants to know the nuts and bolts, then this is, IMHO, a good resource.

Made-up Mayhem also cuts away a lot of the chaff. It assumes you know the basics of writing and want to know how to write a suspense based novel. It takes the reader through information that I had to collect by reading a lot of other books. At the back, there is a list of some of the most useful of those books, if you want to know more.

I was thrilled to get two new reviews for The Key. The book will be out for a whole year, so I appreciate both sites doing the reviews anyway. :-)

Mostly Fiction Reviews

Manic Readers Reviews

I guess the message here is: never surrender, never say die. **g**

Perilously yours,

Pauline

Book Teasers

Okay, this is totally my opinion. I've viewed a lot of book teasers (can't call them trailers, because it has been trademarked). I've seen many I liked a lot, some I didn't. But liking a teaser and having it impel me to go buy the book, well...

Again, MY opinion, but I don't think a teaser should be:

*Long. It's a teaser, not a novella or even a summary of your book. We live in a short attention span society and your teaser is competing with all kinds of crazy stuff on you tube, etc. You can't hope to condense a novel into something comfortable to view anyway. What your goal should be, IMHO, is a hook that makes the viewer want to find out MORE. If you think about movie teasers, most are also short. They are designed for maximum impact and to create questions the viewer needs answered by either seeing the movie or looking it up if it isn't out yet.

*Cast with actors. Again, this is just my opinion, but if I see actors portraying roles in a book, well, it messes with MY casting those parts in my head. And if I'm not wowed by the people playing the parts then it turns me off the book, not on it. The other reason I personally, have issues with book teasers containing acted out sequences if that the teaser is about a BOOK. If people won't read a brief teaser, watching it acted out isn't going to make them buy the book. Teasers should be targeted at READERS.

*No music with words in the background. I find myself listening to the words of the music (or trying to figure it out) and miss the words I'm supposed to be focused on.

I don't have a problem with teasers that have pictures. It should certainly include your cover art. And it can have some nice visuals and good sound is nice, but again, IMHO (I have no data to back this up, just my gut feeling) spend most of your time focusing on the WORDS. Your goal is to tease visits to your website for more information--or better yet, get them to go looking for it in a bookstore.

I did my first teaser and I have no clue if it is a good one or not. Obviously I don't have the necessary distance from it to judge it dispassionately. I may never know if it is successful or not. It's hard to find linkage between any promotion you do and income. (It's on my website on The Key info page, if you're curious or want to mock me.)

So why do a teaser if you don't know if it works or not?

Its just one more tool in your promotion kit, one more way to get your name and book title in front of people. I rarely go looking for book teasers about a book I want to read, because well, I READ books, I don't view them. But I will go look at a link for a friend or if someone forwards me a link with a "this is cool" comment.

So, my last suggestion would be, make it cool. Make it fun so people want to forward i. Be creative. Or completely ignore everything I've written. Because it just MHO.
Perilously yours,
Pauline

Pauline Baird Jones
www.paulinebjones.com
2007 Dream Realm Awards Finalist
The Key; Men in Jeans: Death in Texas Anthology

Rick wished he had a tie to tug on. Not that he liked wearing ties, but the moment seemed to call for a good tie tug. “We need to talk to you about your books, ma’am.”
"Is this some kind of weird joke?” She looked past them, as if she expected a camera crew to pop out of the under brush. “A new reality show?”
“We’re not allowed to joke, ma’am.” It took some work, but his lips didn’t twitch.
(From Men in Jeans, DEATH IN TEXAS Anthology)

Talking Sig Lines...

Sig lines (signatures at the end of your email posts) can be a wonderful promotion tool or drive some people into a foaming frenzy. The frenzy comes from expectations--mostly the unmet kind. Everyone has opinions on what is the perfect sig line.

Here's mine:

Some sig lines are block-long parades and others barely cast a shadow.

What a sig lines should do for the author is tell people a little about you without you having to come out and say it. Look at this way, you don't go into a party wearing a sandwich board or carrying a blow horn. You should approach your internet contacts with the same courtesy and restraint.

A good sig line will contain:

1. Your name (believe it or not, a lot of people forget this basic necessity. If you're name isn't there, then your name recognition isn't being built.)

2. Your website URL: This tells people where to find our more about you if they want to.

3. Email contact: While most email programs let you find an email address, you want to make it easy for people to contact you. (And no, if someone creepy uses this info, you don't have to answer them. Use the delete key.)

4. Your book title. It can contain book titles, but probably no more than two. Too much information and your sig line because a novel, not a sig line.

5. In SOME situations, you can add review or book snippets to your sig line, but be sparing and respect the list rules. Put this information at the bottom, so you can delete it easily where necessary.

Note the word snippet in the above line. That means SHORT. To the point. Yes, there will be a longing to shoe horn all the wonderful things a reviewer said about your book, but you want to pick ONE sentence. Later you can use the other wonderful things, because a sig line should also evolve.

And while you're waiting for review quotes or once you've used all you have, consider the benefit of adding short snippets from your book. Linnea Sinclair creates a special file of these snippets while she's writing her book, then sprinkles them through her email correspondence. It does a wonderful job of creating buzz and anticipation for novels. I tried this and actually had a reader email me for more information.

The good thing about sig lines, because they are a work in process, you have time to hone and refine yours. :-)
Perilously yours,
Pauline