Now THAT was a year!

We in the Intrigue Publishing family have a lot to be proud of as we look back on 2014. We started the year with the release of our first sensual romance short story, Chocolate, Cheese and Choices, by Juli Monroe. 

Intrigue Publishing made a fine showing at the Love is Murder Con in Chicago, where CA Verstraete gathered a Lovey Award for best paranormal/sci-fi/horror novel with Girl Z: My Life as a Teenage Zombie.

We followed that up with a collection of Hannibal Jones mysteries in each of the next three months. Publishing short stories for the Kindle gives readers a chance to try our authors for just 99 cents.

In July we published The Girl They Sold to the Moon by ChrisStevenson in paperback and ebook versions. This Young Adult dystopian science fiction novel has gathered some great reviews, which is no surprise since he is a past Finalist in the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest and took 1rst place in the Entranced novel writing competition.

August brought our first urban drama, Let Me Just Say This by B. SwanginWebster. The author is in great demand at book clubs, in part due to her popular online radio show We  Be Swanginon  on Listen Vision Live.  Webster also featured several of our authors on her show through the year.

We released Beyond Blue in September, introducing my new detective series. I’m told it is a fitting companion to my Hannibal Jones series.

 

 The second annual Creatures,Crimes & Creativity Con in October proved to be the party of the year. We enjoyed three days of panels, presentations and book signings, and people are still talking about John Gilstrap’s stirring keynote speech.

In November we offered two new Hannibal Jones short story e-books including a Christmas-themed collection. We also faced a new, unexpected challenge. We discovered that an unrelated individual was publishing self-help and medical advice pamphlets under the name Intrigue Publishing. After some legal research and a cease-and-desist letter we put that threat to our brand behind us.

We ended the year with a bang! We celebrated Annie Rose Alexander’s Retribution at a fine dinner book release event which gave the Intrigue team a chance to meet and greet Annie’s wonderful family and friends. That was quickly followed by the ebook crime short story Death of a Sandman by Ed Teja. And the Intrigue team traveled to New York to attend the release party for Jeff Markowitz’s Death and White Diamonds at the Mysterious Bookshop. Jeff’s novel quickly hit the list of Amazon Hot New Releases.

And all of that is just hitting the highlights of 2014. We want to thank all of you for your help and support, and thank our authors for their talent AND hard work. We promise them, and you, even bigger things in 2015! Intrigue Publishing is on the move.

Thanksgiving Aftermath

This is a difficult time of year for those of us who are both family oriented and small business owners. The real holiday, Thanksgiving, tempts us to focus entirely on the beloved visitors. We had 16 at the table this year, family up from Florida and down from New York State, plus a few from closer to home. Nothing beats a house full of love and a vast variety of yummy food.

We've all had some losses and challenges in the last year, but we were all focused on how thankful we are for our many many blessings. And I was thankful for my family who were able to join together this year.

However, the artificial holiday, Black Friday, tempts us to focus on business. Advertisement rises almost to the level of white noise because all businesses know that a lot of money will be spent on this official start of the 30 day gift-buying binge. As a publisher, I owe it to our authors to try to capture some of those dollars. So even though my parents are here with us for a few more days, and Christmas decorating starts the day after Thanksgiving, I had to turn my mind to business.

Luckily, Intrigue Publishing Marketing Director Sandra Bowman put out a call a few days ago for video promotions from each of our authors. We received some great ads and Sandra took a break from building the best tabletop Christmas village ever to post the first video online, starting with Annie Rose Alexander’s ad for her upcoming thriller, Retribution.  This video is the leading edge of Intrigue Publishing’s holiday sales push.

As an author, I want to get readers’ attention to my own work too. So I released a compilation of three longish short stories that are all set at Christmas time. These Hannibal Jones Mystery: Christmas Short Stories are available on Kindle for just 99 cents.

So the day AFTER Thanksgiving, I am thankful for a lot of people I haven’t met. Not just my fans (although I am of course very thankful for them) but also for all avid readers and everyone who loves a good story enough to keep trying new authors.

And, in case it isn't obvious, I’m also thankful for all the writers who keep at it, and risk harsh rejection by sending their manuscripts to publishers, small and large.

So thank you, readers, for supporting us. And thank you, writers, for feeding our thirst for new stories.

The Human Element

In this blog I’ve discussed several facets of the publishing business – submissions, editing, marketing and more.  But one part of our business that I haven’t gotten into is more ephemeral and harder to define. For want of a better term, I’m calling this side of the business the human element.

It is true that writing is both a skill and an art, while publishing is a business. But a publisher is more than a venture capitalist, investing in the potential value of a product.  That is because a publisher doesn’t simply invest in a book.  He also invests in the author, and dealing with the artistic temperament of a creative fiction writer is often much more challenging than dealing with that writer’s work.

For example, editing is the process through which good manuscripts become great manuscripts. At Intrigue Publishing, like most small presses, that process is collaborative.  Professional editors know how to improve pace, strengthen characters, and fill plot holes. But only the author knows how to present his theme, establish the chosen atmosphere and preserve her own voice. We want to end up with the best book possible, but we never want to take the book away from the writer.  Better to let the book and the writer go than to have an unhappy or bitter author in our stable.

The same applies to cover design.  Our job is to create a book cover that will get a reader’s attention, express the book’s genre and tone, and prompt the reader to pick that book up. But authors feel, often very strongly, that what matters is that their cover represents their story accurately.  So for many writers it can’t be a great cover if it depicts a scene that doesn’t actually occur in the book, if characters are facing each other who don’t meet in their story, or if the heroine is wearing a gown she would never wear.  This type of thing may not matter much to the big six publishers (or are there only five now?) but we don’t want to have one of our authors out there promoting their book but hating the cover.

Every press is bound to make decision an author doesn’t favor (we’ve debated the font, page layout and even chapter heads with writers) but we consider every choice carefully and always stand ready to explain why a writer’s preference isn’t followed.  We must never forget that it takes a special person to create a novel others will want to read, and that the publishing industry really rests on that human element.

When You Say Edit…

As Editorial Director of Intrigue Publishing it’s my responsibility to make sure every manuscript we publish is as good as it can be.  Of course, I don’t do all the editing myself, but I don’t think most writers understand the challenges involved in just hiring an editor.  To acquire the right services, I have to be able to describe just what I want an editor to do.  I have to be able to explain what I mean when I say “edit” and I thought you might like to know too.   

Let’s start with the easy stuff.  Proofreading is not editing, although I expect our proofreader to do more than simply correct grammar and spelling errors.  She watches for capitalization, punctuation and proper word use (fowl language is what chickens speak.  The writer meant FOUL language.)

Copy editing is a step beyond proofreading. Copy editing actually addresses the mechanics of style, looking for inconsistencies. A good copy editor will notice dialog from a dropout that sounds like a college graduate, or vice versa.  Stylistic editing is more about clarifying the writing. This would include eliminating or explaining jargon and smoothing the language. It’s similar to copy editing – in nonfiction work it’s often called line editing.

Once we love a book enough to want to publish it I generally handle copy and stylistic editing myself.  Then I return the manuscripts to the author to rewrite based on my input.  The heavy lifting, the work I bring in higher-level experts for, involves structural and developmental editing. The manuscript has to already be in a good, readable form before I can ask a pro for these services.

Substantive structural editing involves further clarifying the storyline, often reorganizing the manuscript’s structure. This is where you get the pacing right, smooth the flow, refine the dialogue, and maybe punch up character development. At this stage, suggested changes bring me to negotiating with the author.  We don’t want to destroy a writer’s style or voice, but the writer needs to really understand their story so they can make me understand why our recommendations are not for the best.

Again the author makes the actual changes and after some back and forth we have a manuscript we can all agree on.  However, after the rewriting, the book gets a final thorough proofreading. 

So now you know what I mean when I say a book is in the editing process.  This is not necessarily the way it works at any other publishing house, but it’s the series of hoops a book has to jump through to wear the Intrigue Publishing logo.

Your Award Winning Novel

My company, Intrigue Publishing, was well represented at the Love is Murder Mystery Conference last weekend.  We took pitches from authors.  I sat on one panel and moderated another. We sponsored the newcomer’s breakfast and I moderated that too.  We worked the con the way I hope other small presses work our  Creatures, Crimes & Creativity con.  And our big win was that one of the books we published, “Girl Z: My Life as a Teenage Zombie” won the Lovey Award for best horror/sci-fi/fantasy novel of the year.  The Lovey, voted on by Love is Murder attendees, is given in several categories.

 

In today’s crowded marketplace winning an award is one way to distinguish a book and make it stand out.  Awards that are voted on by readers can carry a lot of weight with a specific audience. Like Love is Murder’s Lovey, the Agatha award is granted by the fans at the Malice Domestic conference. For authors and publishers who attend writers conferences, this can be a great extra benefit.

 

There are also plenty of awards available to authors and publishers who don’t love Cons, although there is usually a price.  For example, the annual International Beverly Hills Book Awards is open for submissions through Feb. 15.  They consider cover and interior design, promotional text, aesthetic components and other factors that demonstrate outstanding presentation, in addition to the writing. They accept fiction and non-fiction books in a wide range of topics and categories including mystery, romance, business, self-help, memoirs and inspiration.

USA Regional Excellence Book Awards recognizes books that take readers into the heart of a “place.” If your book delivers the distinctive character  of a locale, say the glitz of Hollywood or the hustle and bustle of New York City, it is a perfect candidate for a USA REBA award.  Again, Sept. 15 is this year’s deadline.

And while the International Thriller Writers and Mystery Writers of America restrict their awards to well-established publishers, that doesn’t mean all others are shut  out.  The National Indie Excellence® Awards (NIEA) was created to help establish self-publishing as a legitimate side of the publishing industry. You’ve got until March 31 to submit to them.

 

You could question the promotional value of book awards, but  there’s no denying the joy of such bragging rights.  So go see if your book can become an award winning.