JC Hutchins’ book 7th Son: Descent is out.

This makes me happy.

Not just because it’s good (it’s superb), not just because he’s got a damn snazzy website (although it is pretty damn snazzy), but because any new author trying to make it in the business should take a look at JC Hutchins’ way of doing things.

Hutchin’s has taken the “give it away free first” model and run with it. On his website you can literally try the novel before you buy it, listen to a prequel written just for 7th Son (which is awesome in its own right) and fill yourself up on all the juicy details your infovorous* minds can handle.

You can do all of that at his site jchutchins.net.

This means you (and by you I mean “me too”) can whip yourself up into a state of frenzy for the story before the book even reaches the shelves. 7th Son: Descent is so good that I think it would have done well even without all of the online attention that JC Hutchins’ media savvy/general awesomeness has generated, but combining its quality** with a genuinely inspired approach to new media and internet marketing will push this book through the roof. It’s not a novel for the faint of heart, but Hutchins’ writing grabs hold of your eyeballs from the very first sentence.

You can try this novel without spending any money. You can avail yourself of delicious details on JC Hutchins’s website, and you can check out Hutchins’ other (spooky) novel Personal Effects: Dark Art while you’re at it.

What are you still doing here?***

* I have Tycho Brahe of Penny Arcade Comics to thank for the word infovore, which I’ve twisted into infovorous. Making up words is fun, even if you’re not the first to think of it…

** Yes, no matter how great your marketing/website/interview style is your book still has to be good. JC Hutchins is a very very good writer and he’s platformed the rest of his stuff from that. Bear that in mind.

*** I would consider it a personal favor if you purchased 7th Son: Descent because novels like this should be encouraged and nothing encourages writers more than being paid for their good work.

Serial Agent Pimp Nathan Bransford (I love coming up with titles for people, it’s going to get me in trouble sooner or later) has finished the mammoth task of reading 2,500 plus entries and come up with a short list of ten finalists.

I’m not one of them.

I’m not bitter about this at all, for starters the ten finalists have some up with some excellent first paragraphs, I want to know what happens next in their stories. The other reason I’m not bitter is that if I couldn’t handle losing out in an online blog contest, I’d have no business at all being a writer.

Rejection and failure are all part of this writing business. You will be rejected, your masterpiece will go unappreciated and often unread, you will lose contests, you will be hunted down by pitchfork wielding peasants.

Actually that last one’s just me.

My propensity for attracting lynch mobs aside, every writer goes through both internal and external rejection. Luck plays a huge role in any creative endeavour, especially publishing. Even if you get an agent or a publishing deal, there is no guarantee your book will sell.

There are a few things that can get you through the down times:

Persistence:

Don’t quit. If you stop writing your chance of being published instantly drops to zero. The more you write, the better your writing will get and the better chance you will have of being the person who’s in the right place at the right time. We all know that J K Rowling got rejections before Harry Potter made her one of the richest women in the world.

Flexibility:

You might have to make some changes. None of us really like changing our stuff, after all we’ve written it, edited it (you did edit it didn’t you?*) and loved it, surely it’s golden?

No. Not even a maybe.

It could well be that your book just hasn’t found the right agent yet, but if you’ve hit up every agent that handles your genre and there are still no bites, there could be something that needs changing. You need to be open to the idea that you can change your book, even if it means a re write or even starting a whole new story. be stubborn about keeping writing, not about making changes.

That leads us to…

Objectivity:

Take a week off from your story, take two. The go back and read it like you just paid twenty dollars for it at Borders. You’ll see mistakes there that you never thought you could make. The key at this point is not to ignore those mistakes. You read books, lots of books**, so you know how a good book should feel. If your story doesn’t feel that way, you will need to be honest about that with yourself and make the changes.

Equally valuable is bringing in some outside objectivity. Recently Julie Butcher*** of Wordathon fame took some time out of her ridiculously busy schedule to give me some feedback on my writing. I took the notes she gave me and decided that my second chapter needed a complete re write. If Julie hadn’t been kind enough to give me that feedback I probably wouldn’t have changed it.

Enjoy Yourself Damn It

It’s really easy to get caught up in how hard writing is. It’s really hard, some days are a horrible mockery of a happy existence. It doesn’t matter. I love writing, I’m happiest when I’m tinkering with my stories, and like cold pizza and sex, even when it’s pretty bad, it’s still pretty good.

If writing does nothing but fill you with pain, why are you still doing it? There is no guarantee that you will get published, and even then no guarantee that you will sell enough books to make a decent living, or even a living at all. Obviously we all want to be published and have so much money that Dan brown turns green with envy, but we have to be able to enjoy the process of getting there as much as we dream of fame and fortune.

Fame and fortune may never arrive. I honestly believe that with enough work and a little talent, anyone can get published if they keep at it, but real success is often down to luck. If that fame and fortune never arrives I want you to be able to look back on every minute you spent writing and say “It was worth it anyway.”

* Didn’t you?!

** Your writing will be better for doing more reading.

*** Julie is the busiest person in the world and still cranks out excellent writing, helps with charity events, organises wordathons, raises six kids and plots daring cupcake escapades. If she can find the time to write so can you.

Does your story need violence to make it interesting?

Maybe.

I wish the answer was no, I’ve experienced enough real violence to tell you for sure that it isn’t fun in the least*, but when it comes to stories one of the things readers really respond to is violence.

It doesn’t need to be physical violence though, crippling harm can be dished out verbally by a character who knows how to manipulate someone’s emotions, or ruin their reputations. An emotionally violent character can quickly and easily make their victims wish they’d been punched.

With all that said, the term violence doesn’t really cover what your story needs, perhaps a better question would be “does my story need conflict to be interesting?”

If that’s the question then the answer is definitely yes.

I used to make a distinction between literary and genre fiction, loathing the introspective go nowhere aspect of a lot of literary stories. To be fair this isn’t fair to a lot of literary writers, who have written some really fantastic books, however the books that very nearly put me off literary writing forever were the ones without conflict.

I definitely prefer my fiction with a splash of physical violence, but I’ll read anything that has an intriguing conflict in it. A good example of this type of conflict = interest equation is in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files books. The protagonist, professional wizard Harry Dresden** is constantly in the middle of multiple conflicts. Not only is he beset on all sides by any number of ghost, goblins, demons and vampires, Harry is also drawn into conflict within his own organisation (The White council of Wizards), and while occasionally violence is threatened, the conflict there is mostly political.

You’d think that’s be enough, but Jim Butcher writes in even more woe for Harry. Dresden is constantly experiencing conflicted feelings for his sometime partner Officer Karin Murphy**. On top of that he’s also dealing with the side effects of being raised by the Dresden File’s equivalent of Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars, emotional attachments to various supernaturally maligned women and a half brother who’s also a life draining succubus.

Dang that’s a lot of conflict, and that’s just one character.

However with all of this multi-level conflict, I have never even once been bored reading one of Jim Butcher’s books. I always want to know what happens next and I’m always hanging out for the next one to be released. Part of that is down to the excellent writing, but a serious part of my interest in the books is down to the total lack of navel gazing.

Bottom Line: You don’t necessarily need violence, you definitely don’t have to have graphic violence, but you must have conflict in your story. No conflict means, for me at least, no sale.

* Violence in the context of sports is fun. I do MMA and it’s a blast. I’m talking about honest to goodness no prior agreement to be gentlemen fight for your life violence.

** To be fair, from Butcher’s description Karin Murphy is smoking hot, and a total badass to boot. I’d be conflicted too.

I have a new reivew up of Larry Brook’s book 101 Slightly Unpredictable Tips for Novelists and Screenwriters.

First 10/10 review on this site, so I think you should go and check it out.

I caught one of ninja agent Nathan Bransford’s blog saying that the thing we, the reading public, could best support our favorite authors by buying one of their books.

This is true. Without a doubt the best thing we can do is buy a book. Every sale counts.

Still, it’s hard times for most of us, and buying the books of all the authors you love is a costly business*. So what do we do? One option is to log onto your local library’s website and request that they buy said book. Obviously if they’ve already got a copy this isn’t going to work, but for many new authors their books won’t necessarily be on the buy list. I asked my librarian girlfriend and apparently libraries are keen for their customers to ask for books. Most libraries have a book buying budget, and the more direction they can get from their customers the better.

What else? Write a review, then post it all over the place. Facebook, Amazon, Goodreads.com and any of dozens of book sites all want your reviews. Every good review you give your author adds to the chances that they’ll get a sale. If you’ve posted a review on your site make sure you publicise it, again send those authors some traffic.

This is a short post so you now have plenty of time to go and write some reviews.

I just reviewed Dan Well’s new novel I Am Not A Serial Killer. IIt’s good reading, and I’m looking forward tot he the next in the John Wayne Cleaver series.

You can get the review right here.

I’d bette get back to writing my novel now, still sometimes you need to read.

Normally I only link directly to posts on other blogs in Twitter, but I Should Be Writing’s Mur Lafferty makes an excellent point about writing and your real life. Click here to get the goodness.

Hi everyone, I’ve just reviewed Scott Sigler’s spectacular horror novel Infected. If you click on this here link it’ll take you right to it.

Scott Sigler, one of my favorite authors, has announced his tailgate tour. You can check it out right here. The tour is to promote his book The Rookie. What’s The Rookie? It’s American Football with aliens, humans and what can only be described as a very loose set of safety regulations.

Sticking to his tradition of general awesomeness, Sigler has posted a free podcast of The Rookie in its entirety on his site.

* With apologies to Jay Z