An Overview, or, It might not be quite as obvious as you think

Now, most people understand what marketing is—or at least we think we do. But sometimes even marketing professionals can’t see the forest for the trees when it comes to the practice of marketing.

We all know that TV commercials and banner ads are a form of marketing, but they’re both different types of advertising, which is just one marketing tactic. The first things we think of when we think of marketing—search engine optimization, affiliate marketing, email, blog tours, giveaways—are also tactics.

Then what’s marketing? In my mind, marketing is getting your product into the minds of your audience, the people who are looking for your solution. Marketing can also help to persuade people to look for your solution, but a large part of marketing is connecting to a pre-existing audience, people who are either already interested in the type of product you’re selling or who have the problem your product solves.

Sometimes it seems like fiction authors are at a disadvantage here. Nonfiction authors frequently do have products designed to solve problems and benefit readers. Where do fiction authors fit in?

Just like with my characters’ goals in fiction, I was overthinking this one a lot. (It’s like a hobby.) I was so focused on trying to figure out what problem we solve for our customers. But really, we have it pretty easy! Your audience is built in: it’s your genre.

After all, you’re probably not going to want to put your product in front of people who won’t like it. (Sorry, there’s no such thing as “universal appeal.”)

And the problem that we solve? It varies a little bit by genre, but underlying all of them is that we give them an experience they want: excitement, fun, connection, contemplation, novelty.

Once you figure out those things, all you have to do is get your product (book) in front of that audience through tactics like those we mentioned before—but for the best effectiveness (not to mention your personal sanity), it’s best to pursue a unified strategy in your marketing tactics.

What’s your audience/genre? What experiences are your readers looking for?

Coming up: Features vs. benefits — and — Tactics vs. strategy — and — When should I start marketing?

Image, battle of Waterloo, by Ipankonin

Yes, I know, I’m ready for the new year, too. But I was curious: which writing series got the most visits here on my blog last year?

A quick dig through my analytics gave me the answer, and I wanted to share what I found with you! (Did you know I had more than ten series here? Yep, despite the fact that I haven’t made them into PDFs in forever and the Writing Guides page doesn’t have most of them.)

11. Dialogue
An overview of the mechanics and technique of writing good fictional dialogue.

10. Clues in non-mysteries
A new series in 2011, here we looked at how to balance foreshadowing—making sure it’s enough but not too much.

9. Character arcs
By request, we looked at character arcs in fiction, showing growth and change in our characters. I’ve actually used this series while I was preparing for Nano, and I have some new thoughts to bring to this series this year.

8. Bad advice
I have had (and currently have) some great critique partners—but I’ve also received my share of off-the-wall awful advice. Here’s how to tell the difference and take the bad in stride (more or less ).

7. Aspiring Author Websites
Setting up a website as an aspiring author: is it worth it? I think so! This series talks about how to do it, and what to put on your site. We’ll be seeing more of this with our new Marketing Mondays.

6. Emotion: it’s tough
Even when reading escapist fluff (which is okay!), people read to make emotional connections with characters. Fiction without emotion is flat—but emotion can be hard to write. Here are some ideas and tips in one of two series on this list from 2011. (They might be the only two series I wrote last year…)

5. Backstory
Another one I think about a lot still, and have some more posts in store this year. Backstory is vital, but it’s most interesting and useful to the author. In this series, I discuss why that is—and how to slip the backstory into the real story at the right place and in the right way.

4. Creating Sympathetic Characters
One of our first series, we looked at how to get readers to identify with your characters—even when they’re unlikeable.

3. Deep POV (x3)
Deep POV is the most popular narration mode today. Here’s how to get into your characters’ heads and write through their eyes.

To find ten unique series listed in here, I had to sift through more than ten lines of data. Deep POV was so popular that it had three pages in the top 20 or so series pages!

2. Tension, Suspense and Surprise (x3!)
Tension is vital in fiction. I’ve learned this the hard way and now I look for ways to get it in every scene, in every page. Here are some of the best ways I’ve found to do this.

1. Plot Thickens (x5!!)
A look at several methods of creating and structuring plots—the top series on this site for three years in a row!

I think this year I’ll try to work to get more of these top series compiled into PDFs.

What’s your favorite series? What subjects would you like covered, or re-covered this year?

And I don’t mean getting published

This time of year is ideal for thinking of our resolutions. But we’re not the only ones who should be working (or autopiloting) toward a goal: in fiction, characters should have a goal, too. Characters’ goals affect their stories from beginning to end, on multiple levels.

Sometimes, we hear “goals” harped on so much that it gives us a complex. I had one: I used to think my characters didn’t have good enough goals. Beyond the scope of the plot, I couldn’t think of what their goals might be.

Plot-level goals
I used to think that characters had to have goals in their lives aside from the ones that get thrust upon them at the beginning of the story. While that’s true, I doubt the hero’s goal of retiring in Hawaii or the heroine’s dream of owning a bed and breakfast in twenty years plays heavily into their story. (It can help to make the characters richer, of course, but that’s just not what Goal-Motivation-Character is all about.)

Finally, I realized because of the types of stories I write, the plot did contain the characters’ goals, and that was okay. In romance, the characters’ goals often are to find someone. In mysteries, the characters’ goals are to find the killer/perpetrator and bring him/her to justice. There’s something wrong in the world (the character is alone; someone has been killed, etc.), and it’s their job to right it. And that’s OKAY.

The character’s plot-level goal is controlled by the story question. In a romance, it’s “Will they get together?” In a mystery, it’s “Will they catch the bad guy?” In other genres of fiction, of course, the variety of questions might be wider, but it might be “Will Jenny find healing?” or “Will Harry triumph over his awful, lonely roots?”

The answer to all of those story questions is yes. (You could phrase them other ways to get a no, like “Will the murderer get away with it?” or “Will Jenny’s past ultimately defeat her?”) The characters’ external, plot level goals relate directly to these questions. In a romance, with “Will they get together?”, the characters’ goals are to not be alone, to be with someone who understands them, to find someone who will love them in spite or even because of their peculiarities. (These might double as internal goals, too.) In a mystery, the characters’ goals are to serve justice.

Plot level goals are SIMPLE. I worked myself up overthinking this level of goals, worrying that my characters had to have a grand life plan in place and they were on step 27-B section ii-c when suddenly STORY CRISIS comes along. Not necessarily. What does your character get in the end? Is the story about the character’s journey to get that? There’s your goal. (And if your story isn’t about your character’s goal, take another look at your story.)

Internal goals
It was much harder for me to identify characters’ internal goals: until I looked closer at their internal conflicts. Just like the external plot conflict, I found the characters had goals inherent in their conflicts already. I just hadn’t fully expressed those goals to myself. And when I did, I was able to tweak their character arcs ever so slightly to make the characters even stronger.

For example, let’s say your character struggles with being disrespected. (Kind of external, but we’ll go with it.) The story follows their internal journey, from disrespected to respected, or maybe from disrespected/low self-esteem to high self-esteem. Their internal goal is right there, inherent in that starting point: gain respect.

To find internal goals, look at the character’s arc. Where does she start from, emotionally? What does she gain or how does he change in the course of the story? Voila.

Internal conflict adds a necessary dimension to characters. Making sure that internal conflict is clear and expressed in a character arc adds a necessary dimension to good fiction.

Scene-level goals
Characters have even smaller goals, of course, than living happily ever after or ridding the world of the threat. Characters should have goals in (almost) every scene. In fact, in Scene & Structure, Jack Bickham says that our POV characters should state their goals for that scene fairly early on.

The prototypical scene begins with the most important character—invariably the viewpoint character—walking into a simulation with a definite, clear-cut, specific goal which appears to be immediately attainable. This goal represents an important step in the character’s game plan—something to be obtained or achieved which will move him one big step closer to the attainment of his major story goal. . . . (24)

The scene begins with a stated, clear-cut goal. (25)

Scene goals are fantastic for structuring fiction at this level because they tell us, the writers, what needs to happen. Our character arrives at the car dealership with the mission to buy a car/talk to his ex-girlfriend/flirt with the new salesguy. (It sets up the “scene question,” if you will: will s/he get this goal?) The character works toward that goal, until the disaster, as Bickham calls it. We answer the scene question with, most likely, a “no” or a “yes, but [complication].” (Just plain yesses should be reserved for false victories, lulling characters into a sense of security, and, of course, the finale.)

But scene goals aren’t just for the beginning and end of scenes. You can use them to keep the tension high in a scene. By reminding the readers what the character is after—and showing the growing disparity between her goal and reality—we can draw the reader along through the scene. As always, we don’t want to harp on anything too much or be repetitive.

Scene-level goals drive the story forward through each scene. Keeping those goals clear helps to keep our characters—and our readers—oriented in the story.

Occasionally, we’ll have something unexpected befall a character in a scene. The POV character may not always have a goal at the beginning of a scene like this—but try to use this technique sparingly, or your characters might seem directionless and as though they’re not taking charge in their life.

Goals and character sympathy
Another role that goals can play in fiction is to help develop character sympathy. How? When readers support a character’s goal, they want the character to succeed. They care.

What does it take to get our readers on board? According to James N. Frey, it takes a noble goal. They can be a really detestable person (Frey’s example is of a convict who wants to break out of prison), but giving them a goal that we can all believe in helps us to believe in the character, too (Frey’s example, IIRC, is that the convict wants to get out of prison to help a family member). And this really works: I felt it happen to me while watching a game show.

What’s noble? Something that’s self-sacrificing, something that benefits another person more than it does the main character, something that helps the general populace (but that can be too vague: helping one concrete person, such as the character’s child, can actually be more effective as a character goal than trying to better the whole world).

Goals and characterization
Our characters sometimes do have life goals other than the plot-level story goals—goals that may or not play into our story, and goals that may or may not be fulfilled in the course of the story. The bed-and-breakfast, a job at the FBI, the private island in the Bahamas.

While these might not really influence the plot, they can still have a great effect on the story: adding layers to your characters. Like real people, our characters can have life goals and dreams. These goals help demonstrate the character’s depth, to round them out.

These goals can manifest in little ways: the FBI job is one of my character’s ultimate goals that doesn’t play into the plot of the story. That goal manifests in her hobbies: spy movies and spy novels. They can also come in handy when they play into the character’s motivations. (I’ll spare you the convoluted explanation of how this happens in my story.)

The biggest caution here: make sure this goal doesn’t upstage the main plot. We’ll see how this works out in edits, but I’ve had a little mixed feedback about my character’s dream. Some readers think it’s so important it needs to be mentioned in the very first chapter. And even though that chapter won the contest, at least one judge complained that the very same character didn’t have any dreams or aspirations. (Why, exactly, they thought she needed to think about those dreams and aspirations when dealing with the murder of her priest, I’m not sure.)

However, adding that to the first chapter might make readers think it’s an important part of the plot. It’s not part of the story question for this book. Our first chapter offers a promise of things to come, not a synopsis of the characters’ lives. If we make a promise of this character’s dream, and especially if it’s not fulfilled in this book, we’re setting our readers up for disappointment.

Instead, use goals and dreams to add depth to the characters and the story—from the hobby on up.

How can you better use goals in your writing?

Photo credits: climbing the mountain—Ben Rohrs;
my life in 10 years—lululemon athletica; grab the brass ring—Foxytocin

I’ve mentioned it before, but in case you missed it, until about 18 months ago, I worked in marketing. To be honest, I fell into the career: there was an Internet marketing company hiring writers locally, and I applied. I did it well, but I always thought it was something I did mostly for the paycheck.

At my first writer’s conference, I had one book almost ready to submit. Nothing with a publisher, no queries out—no “real” professional interest in selling books yet. And yet the classes that interested me the most? Marketing.

This was when I realized I actually like marketing.

And, like I said, I wasn’t bad at it. In fact, I was considered an expert (admittedly low-level). I spoke at a conference. I even got recognized once.

What’s the point? I hope that I learned something in all those years and efforts. And those things? They seem basic to me, but really, the general author population doesn’t know this stuff. And I’m very happy to share!

So, this year, I’m devoting Mondays to Marketing! I have a lot of ideas: we’ll start off with Marketing 101, then look at various online marketing tactics for authors including Facebook, SEO and blogging. We’ll also look at offline marketing a bit. We’ll do some of the ever-popular website reviews. I have lots of ideas and I’m very excited to share.

And (I hope) it won’t be just me: I have some really great friends who know a lot about marketing because they’ve been in the trenches for their books. They’ve tried a lot of different things and we’ll have them there to tell us what worked for them.

What marketing topics do you want to see on Marketing Mondays?

Photo courtesy of Top Rank Online Marketing Blog

Okay, yes, (hooray!) I have a book coming out (in a while). But I just like to make covers.

So this is NOT OFFICIAL, NOT MY REAL BOOK COVER, JUST SOMETHING I DID FOR FUN, but I made a book cover. Because I can.

Just what I need for that little extra burst of motivation and inspiration for the next round of edits!

This is the book that was accepted, coming out next year. It is not an official cover. It’s not even the official title. (If you want, you can read more about the LDS FBI agent undercover as a Catholic priest in the excerpt from the first chapter.)

The actors here are physical models I (loosely) used for my characters, although they’re still a few years older than my characters are. Not too bad, since they started out ten to fifteen years older. But Photoshop (well, Paint.net) can only do so much.

Altar photo (behind the title) by H. W. Morse