Friday 6 January 2012

Promoting Your Characters...

Now we all know that promoting your latest book is very important for sales (and future books perhaps), but have you considered promoting your character as a way of getting interest in your book?

Writer Rosalie Warren has started promoting her new fictional character from a ghostly tale- MarieT's story is about her upbringing by sisters/nuns, who may be ghosts...

She has her own Twitter handle @MarieTGhost and a blog Brought Up By Ghosts

Now perhaps this is something that is much more effective for children's/YA fiction. But do you think it would work for other genres?

We all know that writers need to use social media to promote their work, and I think this is quite a fun and different way to do it, engaging potential readers.

So what do you think of this? Would you try it, or do you think it might not work as well as usual social media methods?

Personally, it's an interesting idea...







Thursday 5 January 2012

Novel or Short Story...

At the moment my brain is in novel, rather than short story mode. Though I find that when I'm working on longer pieces my new ideas seem to be short story related, and vice-versa.

As I mentioned previously I've been getting on with combining all the information on my characters for my novel (before I rewrite Chapter 1) and it's been helped along by using the odd twenty minutes or an hour (as available) working on the information, between other tasks.

(I'm still waiting for the competition comments- but I hope to get them from the prose secretary via the post, soon.)

While I can't write the novel without quiet, I've discovered that combining the scattered information doesn't need the same depth of concentration as actually writing the story does; so I'm making a little more progress than I expected. And the list of questions I'm answering has given me some insights into my characters that I wasn't previously aware of.

So meanwhile, my short story attempts are on hold, but I'll certainly be making a note of this useful blog post by Sally Quilford, 'The Key Elements of a Short Story', so I can check I'm not missing something when I get back to them...