Yesterday, I paid a friend to shoot me. Fortunately, he used a camera.

Okay, so my photographer isn’t just a random friend. He happens to be Jaren Wilkey, the 2011 Photographer of the Year for the University Photographers’ Association of America. (Just in the 2011 UPAA print competition, six of his photos also won prizes/honorable mentions including two 1st place finishes.) I’ve seen him take lots of pictures before—and had him take some great pictures of my family—but after working with him yesterday, let me tell you, the man knows his stuff. I mean, just check me out (and these are just straight from the camera):

(okay, I photoshopped fixed my hair a little in this ^ one)

These are three of the just under 500 photos we shot in 90 minutes. I am now armed with reaction shots for any possible blog topic. For example, murderous rage:

I will say this a thousand times: if you have the money or the contacts, get a professional to shoot your author photos. (And the same thing goes a million times for your wedding photos. Still grumbling about mine.) There is no substitute for someone who understands how to really work a camera and use lighting and backgrounds and poses to make you look your best.

In case you’re wondering, taking your author photos is pretty cool and can be a lot of fun, but no, it doesn’t make you feel like the real deal (yet).

Any faves here? How do you want to do your author photos?

In case you missed it, photos by Jaren Wilkey

Over the month of January, I collected the stories I found on Twitter and in my feeds that were just too good to miss and put them together for you! Welcome to “Thinky Links“!

Author Janice Hardy offers some good advice on how to cut a scene without hurting your story

Kristen Lamb gives a really good example of how to start in medias res.

The Editors’ Blog looks at the use of coincidence in fiction, why it’s bad—and how to fix it.

I’ve been working hard on revising my Nano novel, so I’m really far behind on my feeds, but I did happen to see two good posts on EditTorrent recently, the kind that make me want to run around telling people “I’ve been vindicated” in an imaginary battle I was having with no one. The first covers showing versus telling in an interesting way (i.e. not writing 101), including that was is not always bad and is not the same thing as passive voice, and the role of telling in exposition.

The second is how to avoid that obnoxious “As you know, Bob” (or Alphonse) dialogue by slipping in backstory, characterization and other information through subtle cues. I LOVE working on this, and Alicia gives great examples!

Although I’m now with a traditional, regional publisher, I still find self-publishing very interesting. So for two different perspectives on that this month, Daniel J. Friedman takes a hard look at the numbers behind self publishing: what they make, what they’re worth, and what they’re selling. On the other hand, Joanna Penn interviewed Adam Croft on How To Sell 130,000 Books Without A Publisher. And for some perspective on both sides, Future Book looks at Why Amanda Hocking Switched, with some interesting notes on how her publishers are working for her.

And to close, here are a few of my favorite posts on this blog from Januaries past:

• A perennial favorite of mine, how to spot and avoid the most common (empty) gestures in writing
• Another one I still use extensively, creating and editing with a scene chart
• And a few from the series on tension, suspense and surprise:
  • Choosing whether plot elements should be set up strongly to create suspense, or should remain a surprise
  • One I should probably study a little more: creating suspense in Act I
  • What creates tension and suspense?

What’s the best writing/marketing/publishing advice you‘ve read lately?

Photo by Karola Riegler

AKA Strategy Before Tactics

Believe me, most authors feel the same way the first time they have to market a book. Maybe you have a few ideas about contests you could do or blogs you could visit, but on the whole, your marketing “plan” feels like a disorganized mess. Good news: using strategies helps you to organize your efforts and focus on the tactics that work for you.

Huh? (The difference between strategy and tactics)
We mentioned this in passing the first week of this series, but as a reminder:

The first things we think of when we think of marketing—search engine optimization, affiliate marketing, email, blog tours, giveaways—are also tactics.

Tactics are the individual things we can do to promote our book, all those online tactics listed above as well as offline tactics like in-store marketing, radio/TV/billboards, etc. Strategies are composed of our goals and plans for using those tactics.

So many people make the mistake of jumping into tactics without considering strategy—but not us!

So, This Strategy Stuff . . . ?
I’ll admit: I focused mostly on the tactics myself when I thought about my (far-off) marketing, up until last year at the LDStorymakers Conference when I attended a fantastic class by Robison Wells on marketing strategy. (Strategery? No.) Rob was so kind as to put his writers’ marketing strategy presentation online (motion sickness warning. I’m not kidding).

Hold on just a minute. I know, I know, we’re talking about marketing and we’re into it, but let me just tell you who this Robison Wells guy is first. 1.) Pertinent to this conversation: he’s an MBA. 2.) Also quite pertinent: he’s a writer. He made his national debut last fall with a YA dystopian novel, Variant (aff). This book. Is. Excellent. And you don’t have to take my word for it—Publishers’ Weekly named it one of the Best Books of 2011.

And back to marketing.

“Without strategy,” Rob says, “those tactics are just a shot in the dark.” Our strategy helps us to determine which tactics to use to suit our books, our audiences, our personalities, and our lives. A strategy also helps us to make sure the messages we send to our consumers, from our books to our blogs to our websites to our tweets, is the one we want to send.

Who Are You
(Why, yes, I do like The Who.)

To figure out this strategy, we first need to understand ourselves, our books, and where we fit in the market. We do need to understand where we fit in a genre and what that audience expects, of course, but we also need to know how our book stands out from and adds to other works in the genre.

Rob offers an example positioning statement to help us find our book’s Unique Selling Proposition, the thing that sets our book apart from others in the market—AKA the reason people will want to read it:

For the reader who wants _______, my book is (genre) that offers _______. Unlike other books in my genre, my book provides ______________.

Be specific and push yourself hard when filling in those blanks! Don’t just go for the first generic thing that pops into your head, and don’t use backhanded compliments or digs at the present state of the market as a way to set yourself apart because you’re “better” than them.

Also, don’t worry about how long this ends up: you’re not giving it as an elevator pitch. You’re using this to help remind yourself the things that are important when you’re creating your strategy and using those tactics to communicate with your audience.

Who’s Your Audience?
To state the obvious, your audience is the people who might be interested in your book. We’re going to ignore the people who are ignoring you, okay? It’s just a recipe for pain otherwise.

We’ve said before that the goal of marketing is to get your product in front of people who would be interested in buying it, i.e. your audience. These are people who read in your genre, read about the types of characters you’re writing, read your style of writing.

It’s vital to understand your own Unique Selling Proposition because it helps you narrow down your audience. I’m sorry, but your audience isn’t “everyone who is young at heart,” or “people aged 6 to 1,836.” In fact, your audience probably isn’t all mystery or romance or sci-fi readers. If you’re writing a cozy mystery, people who read exclusively hardboiled detective novels aren’t your audience.

So let’s say you are writing a cozy mystery. You know you need to target people who read cozy mysteries, right? Now you need to tell them why they should read your book instead of all the other cozy mysteries out there. How is it different from other cozies they’ve read, and how does that appeal to them? What shiny, new, novel novel concept (hehe) are you bringing to the table?

Yeah, this is where all that “market research” comes in. (Oh, come on, you’re reading this stuff for fun, right? If not, maybe you’re in the wrong genre.) You know how your detective is different from Jessica Fletcher, Miss Marple and Jim Qwilleran. You know which quirks and settings and storylines are “taken.” You know how your writing style stands out. Most of all, you know what types of things cozy readers like, and you’re giving them something new that is exactly what they want to see. These are the things that belong in a USP—and your strategy.

So, Where Do I Fit In?
Yes, about you. You play a huge role in your strategy, aside from knowing your book and what’s unique about it better than anyone else. Your role in your own strategy is the key player, the mover and shaker—and yes, the marketer.

What does that mean for your strategy? It means that you’re going to have to stick to things you know how to do or are willing to learn. It means that you need to focus on tactics and campaigns you enjoy, do well, can reach your audience through, and, yes, have the time for.

I really wish I could tell you how to figure that out, but I do know that you can look at your past Internet habits as a clue to what kind of Internet marketing tactics might work well for you. If you you think Facebook is the root of all evil, perhaps set up a page there (so someone else doesn’t!) and don’t do much more. If the thought of blogging gives you thrills & chills—or night sweats—you know what to do.

A lot of people out there will tell you that you should should should do X, Y, and Q7. But worrying about what someone who doesn’t know you or your audience thinks you “should” do—and forcing yourself to use tactics that crush your soul—is seldom a recipe for long term success.

What do you think? What else belongs in a marketing strategy? How do you figure out what tactics are right for you?

Photo credits: War Games screencap via Dan Brickley; strategy graphic by Sean MacEntee; bookshelf by Josh; social media strategy by Matthieu Dejardins

We’ve all met people with funny names. I have a friend whose mother-in-law’s name is Lynn Lynne. I played a prank on a friend once, claiming I was going to marry someone with the last name Gordon (and my first name is Jordan, remember?). And of course, my father shares a name with a very famous early US statesman.

In real life, these humorous names often happen by accident (especially if you’re a woman). My dad’s mother, for example, had already picked out Dad’s name before she met my grandfather and thus learned what last name her children would have. (It was the name of her favorite mule…)

In fictional worlds, we get to pick all our characters’ names—so hopefully, we get to avoid these embarrassing “nom” pas . . . but only if we’re really thinking.

Sometimes we choose funny or odd names on purpose. I chose the last name of Saint for one of my characters because it set up a number of jokes. I named another character Molly Malone for the same reason. (Poor characters…) Of course, for Molly, I had to explain how she came to have that unfortunate name. Same went for the tongue-twistery Cora Warren.

And sometimes . . . well, we’re just not smart enough to realize what we’ve done at first. For example, I once had a character with the first name Kent. I needed a nice strong surname for the guy, so in the next scene, he became Mr. Clark. It was a little while before I put the names together.

Kent . . . Clark.


Uh. Yeah. (His last name became Thornton soon thereafter. Borrowed from someone I knew IRL.)

And my most recent character naming accidents came in my Nano novel. Just before another book was accepted, by coincidence I wrote one of my villains sharing a surname with my editor. (It was not a coincidence that another villain shared the same editor’s first name. I changed that.) But the biggie was the hero—and you know how hard it is to change the hero’s name!

Most of the time, it wasn’t a problem. He went by Jack, a nickname from his last name, Jackson. (Which set up some jokes, too, of course. This trend is becoming disturbing.) It was a great name for him.

And I thought his first name was perfect, too. Kerr. (It was a drug store and a lake where I grew up, and my dad had a friend named Kerr when he was a kid. Not that I ever knew him, but I knew it could be a given name.)

If you haven’t seen the problem yet, let me tell you: when his real first name came up, this character often had specify either the spelling or the pronunciation. Let me treat you to a now-defunct conversation from the novel: in this scene, their car has been reported stolen and is about to be towed.

They hurried across the street, Jack trying to compose his thoughts so he could pull this off. The stunned disbelief and confusion wouldn’t be too tough, but the innocence would be a stretch. [They have something stolen in the trunk. Which, sadly, will also end up on the cutting room floor.]

“Whoa whoa whoa,” he said, jogging up to the officer. “Is there a problem here?”

“Is this your vehicle, sir?”

“Yeah. Did I park illegally? The sign says no parking Monday to Friday.” Jack pointed to the sign. [It's Sunday.]

“No, sir. This car has been reported as stolen.”

“No, no—no. This is my car. It has been for seven years.” Unless his brother had changed the registration into his name when Jack left home—but still, it should all check out.

The cop raised an eyebrow and read something off the clipboard in front of him. “License plate 267 VAP?”

He nodded. “All me.”

“Registered to Kerr Halsey Jackson.”

“It’s pronounced ‘car.’ As in, ‘This is my car.’”

The cop folded his arms. “I’m going to need to see some ID.”

So what’s the problem?

His name is Kerr Jackson. Pronounced Car Jackson. Let me try that again: pronounced CAR JACKson.

I realized this two days before I finished the novel. He got a new first name—but I’m definitely going to reuse Kerr. Maybe with the last name . . . Hop?

All right, top my stories: what are the craziest, funniest or silliest things you’ve named characters, on purpose or by accident? Did you change them?

Photo credits: Superman by Greenog; car jack by Cameron Flanders

An earlier version of this post ran in September 2009.

What’s in a name? Well, as it turns out, it can be quite a bit. I recently read a couple contemporary works where the heroine, aged 20-30, was named Madison. Madison is an adorable name—in fact, a little too adorable. It was the 538th most popular first name for girls in the 1980s. It climbed to the top 100 in the 1990s and has since soared to #8 for girls in 2010, the most recent data available now.

So what, you ask? Well, those statistics mean that the average girl named Madison is less than five years old right now. When I read these, I couldn’t help but thinking of the curly-haired toddler down the street. Although a strong, androgynous girls’ name is awesome and Madison hits all the right notes with parents and authors alike today, that’s exactly what makes it all wrong when naming a character who’s supposed to be an adult today.

Personally, I love naming characters. I’ve spent considerable time searching for just the right name for each character, making sure their names fit their ages, backgrounds, and characteristics. Here are a few of my favorite resources for finding the perfect name. (Note: some of these resources are US-centric, but I’m sure that you can find similar data for other countries.)

Character Naming Books

The links to books are affiliate links

The Baby Name Wizard by Laura Wattenberg. I picked this up while pregnant with my oldest, even though my husband and I had the names of our first four children already picked out (three down, one to go).

Why I like this: It give little profiles outlining why and when each name was popular, as well as assigning names to groups according to style and popularity, and lists similar names. (That’s especially good when you have a name you really like but it happens to be your brother-in-law’s name.)

The New Baby Name Survey Book by Bruce Lansky and Barry Sinrod. The authors of this book surveyed >100,000 parents about 1400 popular names to see what perceptions and connotations the names carried. I picked this up (again, while pregnant) at a thrift store for $2, and I was a little hesitant at first to spend that much (no, seriously), but it’s definitely paid off. In fact, it’s paid off so much that several years later when I found the above-listed new edition, I sprang for it.

Why I like this: Seriously, where else will you find someone to tell you that a female Jerry calls to mind “a friendly, fun-loving brunette who enjoys being the life of the party” while some see the male Jerry as “likely to wear flashy gold chains and may come on a bit too strong.” Those are from the previous edition, which brings me to the drawback: The 1992 Baby Name Personality Survey, with Barry Sinrod, is a little out of date (I mean, seriously, were you naming your character Jerry?). And it’s a penny for the 1992 OR the 2007 version (used on Amazon)—so why not?

Character Naming Websites

BabyNames.com. I use this to look up name origins and meanings. Why I like this: I like to be able to search by meaning and/or culture of origin. Um, duh.

US baby name popularity from 1880 from Social Security records. You can look at the popularity of a name over time, or popular name lists by birth year. Why I like this: This is the best way to find age-appropriate (American) names for characters.

Nymbler from The Baby Name Wizard website. Like the book, this helps to find similar names. Why I like this: It makes it easy to find names by “style,” including origins, popular time period and the more subjective “feel.” I do still prefer the book version, but the website is also fun to play with.

The Baby Name Wizard’s Name Voyager, which generates graphs of name popularity over time. The data is based on the SSA. Why I like this: It’s a visual representation of popular names over time, which is a little more accessible than just the lists from the SSA. (The blog also talks about naming trends.)

The US Census Surname Distribution to find last names, and to check if the sometimes crazy last names I want to use are really last names. (Real names include Police, Outlaw, Saint, Notice, Justice and Riddle. Only one of which I’ve actually used.) Why I like this: when I’m stumped on a last name, reading through the list or using a random number generator can help me finish my character’s name.

Real life, of course!

I seldom name characters after people I know—it’s kinda weird for me—but the people around us every day are a great source for character names. In fact, one of my writing friends actually keeps a name data bank—whenever she meets someone with an interesting name, she makes a note of it and puts it in her data banks on her computer. She also collects names from newspaper articles, especially foreign names—and she stores those by nationality (and surname/given name). When this friend uses names from her list, she marks them with different colors for passing mentions, minor characters (both recyclable) and major characters (one-time use).

And of course, there’s the old standby: the phone book! (Whatever will we do when they stop printing them?)

And always double check

I always Google a character’s name before I settle on using it, just to make sure there isn’t a famous person I’ve forgotten/have no reason to know about with the same last name. On the other hand, if there are a lot of (moderately) famous people with that name, I figure it’s fine to use it again, right?

Of course, Google isn’t a foolproof measure against choosing a bad name. If you’ve ever given your characters a supremely bad name—and despite all the resources I have, let me assure you you’re not alone—be sure to come back Friday! (And save yours for then, too, so we can all have our catharsis at once )

How do you find your characters’ names? What are your favorite or least favorite character names? Would you comment on a character’s name in critique?

Photo credits: Name tag—Henk L; Jim—Deon Staffelbach