Lori Devoti, paranormal romance and urban fantasy author

There was a time when I would have argued titles don’t sell books.

I would have been wrong.

Now there is good reason behind my previous thinking. More often than not I don’t remember the actual title to the last book I read. I remember characters or plot or author, but the title, especially with romances, tend to fade. And in a bookstore I don’t grab up a book for the title…cover yeah, but title? No way.

But the fact is titles can sell a book. They can sell it to an editor or an agent. They can sell it to readers. They can even sell it to Hollywood.  Here are a few examples of titles that I believe helped sell the book:

The Naked Duke

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Eat, Sleep, Poop

Carpe Demon: Adventures of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom

Do any of these titles get your attention? They do mine and I guarantee they have helped the success of these books. Why? Because they are high concept. They in seven words or less grab your attention and tell you this book is going to be different while also playing on some concept you already know and love.

The known and popular, but fresh. It’s a killer combo and if you can relay it in a book title you have a very marketable gift.

Another thing about these titles is they all show contrast. They put the unexpected together. Think Duke. You think aristocratic, noble, if you are a romance reader, maybe alpha. You do not think naked. Pride and Prejudice? Well, before this book, your brain certainly didn’t go to zombies. Eat, sleep….fill in the blank. Love? No POOP. (Dreamworks by the way just picked up the rights to make this into a movie. A how to book being made into a comedy! I have to think the title helped that deal come to be.) And finally, soccer mom does not equal demon hunter.

None of these things go together and that is exactly what makes all of us go “Oh, I need to read that.” And that, people, is what makes them high concept.

Wisconsin Women Magazine interviewed me, Ann Voss Peterson, Kathy Steffen, and Meagan Hatfield–all friends–for their February issue. :)

Read the article here.

Book View Cafe Welcomes Sherwood Smith

On Thursday, January 28, Sherwood Smith will be joining the Book View Café team. Smith began her publishing career in 1986, writing mostly for young adults and children. To date she’s published over thirty books. The latest was Treason’s Shore, last of the four-book Inda series, with Banner of the Damned coming out next year. She also writes for young adults, her most popular book being Crown Duel, from Firebirds. She’s also written short fiction, published in various venues. Sherwood Smith has collaborated with several authors, including the Grand Master Andre Norton. One of her books was an Anne Lindbergh Honor Book; she’s twice been a finalist for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award and once a Nebula finalist. Some of her stories have been reprinted in “best of” anthologies, and her work has been translated into numerous languages.

For her debut on the 28th, Smith will be offering her science fiction novelette, BEING REAL.

A friend of mine, Intrigue author Ann Voss Peterson, has a mantra concerning books and the main characters’ goals and motivations. It needs to be personal and it needs to be important, very important at least to the character—to the world is even better. (but that doesn’t work for every type of book)

Now, I KNOW this, Ann has told me enough times I should, but somehow knowing and doing don’t always go together.

Right now, I’m revising a paranormal young adult novel that my agent had sent to seven houses. Two of these houses in particular had a lot of feedback and said they would be interested in seeing the project again if I chose to revise it.

So, I’m revising. First seven houses is not the world and if two professionals have given me some feedback I’m at least going to give it careful consideration before sending it out to anyone else.

Neither of them said—Hey, dummy, remember the protagonist’s goal should be personal and important. But then I’ve found when people have an issue with a book they seldom pin it to the board quite that neatly. They say things like “I’m not believing this character.” or “I didn’t quite care as much about (fill in blank) as I wanted to.”

So, ignorant to the fact that I had made a basic error that I know darn well better than to make, I started reading.

And there it was—or wasn’t. My protagonist’s goal was personal and it was important…kind of. But it wasn’t important enough. And as I read further past the first plot twist when things start to go south, that personal connection faded. She still had the personal thing going for the initial goal, but now the “get us out of trouble right now” goal…that was weak. It felt like she could have walked away and left the job to someone else.

She personally didn’t have anything at stake. It wasn’t her brother that was in trouble. It wasn’t her life that was going to blow up. Yes, the antagonist winning wouldn’t have been good, but my protagonist could have disconnected and gone on. That wouldn’t have made her a very nice person, but so what? That isn’t the strong emotional tie a book needs to make readers care.

Ugh. Stupid, stupid, me.  Slap, slap, get up and revise the thing!

Now, despite my above personal smack down, I don’t blame myself too much. In fact I just read a book by an author I really enjoy where the same thing happened. At first, like these editors, I couldn’t quite pin down what the issue was. Then I saw it.

The protagonist had an ugly past. All the building blocks to giving her some very personal reason to hunt down the killer in question, but the author didn’t use it. The author let the killer not be tied in anyway to the ugly things that had happened to our protagonist in her past (not even the same type of crime being committed). Then later when there was another opportunity to make this particular killer personal by having him kill off a secondary character we the readers might have liked the author wimped out again.

It was there in her grasp, the possibility of making a well written book that was just fair into a really great gripping book, and she missed it.

It was very, very sad.

So, if you are writing a book. Is it personal? Why does your protagonist have to be the person to do what he or she does? If he or she doesn’t do it, what will happen? Will his or her life implode? Will she or he lose everything they hold dear?

If not, you might want to look at it again.

This may seem like a strange question, but it is one I encounter a lot. Maybe not in the actual question form, but from people who think they know the answer and oh so obviously don’t. In fact, even writers who say they write romance don’t always know what makes a romance, at least when looking at the term in the genre romance sense.

I, like many published romance authors who are members of Romance Writers of America (RWA), judge RWA’s big contest, the Rita. I haven’t started my entries this year, but in the past I have received books entered as romances that just weren’t. In fact I have received books that had zero romance in them. Yes, there was a boy and there was a girl….uh and that is where it stopped. (An aside…the Ritas have a box for judges to check that says either “not a romance” or “wrong category”. If a certain number of judges check the box for one book, it will be disqualified from that category.)

So, what makes a book a romance novel?

Romance.

Not a clear enough answer? Okay, I’ll go a little deeper, but first let’s clarify a bit. My definition is for today’s genre romance. It is not for classic romances written two hundred years ago, or even literary books that might be romantic. This is for genre romances.

Okay, so there is romance. Someone (in mainstream fiction this still means two people) falls in love. But and this is huge, not only do these people fall in love, but the story of their romance is KEY to the novel. How key will vary by sub-genre (in romantic suspense the romance plot may take up less than half of the book), but if you yanked the romance plot out of the book, the story would fall apart. You would not have a book that stood on its own. Period. No way around it.

This does not mean any of the cliches you hear about romance is true. The hero and heroine do not have to meet on page one–although since the romance is one of the, if not the, key plot line you can see how this might be a good idea. The hero doesn’t have to be rich or dashing. The heroine does not have to be a virgin or feisty. You just have to have a romance!! And that romance has to be important to the book! Very important!

Oh, and if the book is a GENRE romance there had better be a HEA (happily ever after). In murder mysteries the reader wants the killer caught. In romances we want the love to last. Just the way it is.

And that, people, is about it.

One last word of warning. You can not tell a romance by its cover or what is written on the spine. You may in fact pick up a book that says “romance” on the spine. This does not sadly guarantee that what you are reading is in fact a romance. What it does guarantee is that the publisher and their marketing team think the book will SELL better as a romance. Yep, that’s right at times books are labeled or packaged just to sell the book. But you now will know if you are reading a romance, right? And how? Because there will be romance important to the overall success of the book in it!

Fun video of a cover shoot!

So, I’m behind, but I finally got my vampire romance short story, Lost, formated and uploaded here on my site. And now you can download it for free.

I hope you enjoy it!

It’s that time of year where I try and get things set for the next year. Today in my pursuit of a better life in writing, I’m heading to SWAP. It’s a great place with lots of dinged up tacky looking old office furniture. Maybe it’s because of the leftovers my dad would occasionally bring home from the factory he worked at when I was a kid, or maybe it’s from my 12+ years working at newspapers where such decor was standard, but I actually prefer these goods to the flashier but a lot less sturdy choices of today. My black metal desk I got from SWAP a couple of years ago is my favorite such find, and today I’m hoping to get some equally fabulous bookshelves.

I’m also moving a cocktail sized table out of my office and an old marble topped table in. The marble table is a rectangle which I think will be great to lay out projects and stuff on. I also in this plan will get rid of the boxes and boxes of author copies of all of my books I still have. I’ll keep the books, but get rid of the boxes.

All in all I have high hopes for all of this. It won’t be fancy, but I’m not fancy and I think it will work for me.

How about all of you? What’s your style and do you like setting aside time to reorganize a room?

I hope to do more of these, but my first free short is online at BookView Cafe today! I hope you enjoy it!
Lori