Charlene Teglia

There’s a lot of hype about social media, often promoted by people who don’t really understand social media, i.e., that people who are using it do not want to be marketed to. New authors are common victims of the “go start building an audience” directive without any guidance.

If you want to know how to use social media effectively, start by understanding that other people do not want your spam. They don’t want to be bombarded with promotional messages. They don’t want to be your fan on Facebook; if they did, they’d go find your fan page and join it. They don’t want to follow a blog that consists of nothing but “buy my book”.

Social media is not about direct sales, it’s about relationships. What social media does for you is it allows you to make connections and become part of a conversation.

Becoming part of the conversation online is exactly like joining a conversation in the real world. You don’t interrupt. You don’t hog or hijack the conversation. You’re polite. You listen as well as talk. You understand that listening to others doesn't obligate them to return the favor.

Blogging is a wonderful platform for sharing your ideas and finding likeminded people. Twitter lets you share news, links and images on the fly. Facebook lets you keep in touch with mini posts or longer ones and play games and share pictures. Yesterday I used Twitter and Facebook to collect book recs for my kids.

My general rule of thumb for posting is that I try to make it worth somebody’s while to read what I have to say. I try to entertain or inform or be thought-provoking or do all three. I can’t be entertaining or interesting to everybody, but by focusing on what I find entertaining or interesting, I’m appealing to people who are interested in the things I’m interested in.

Well, then, how does it help sell books? Bump factor, for starters. Bump factor is the sales term for that thing that happens when somebody comes across your name multiple times. Eventually they notice your name, and remember it, and when they’re standing in a store and they see your book, they think, “Hey, I’ve heard of that writer.” And that might be the thing that prompts them to pick your book up.

I put links to my website on my Facebook and Twitter pages. A pretty high percentage of my website visitors come from Twitter, and they stay for several minutes. Long enough to check out my backlist, my current books for sale, who I am and what I have to offer. My main page has “buy” links to current titles so I make it easy for somebody who wants to buy a book to do that. But I don’t bombard visitors with “buy” messages; I provide them with information so they can shop if they want to. If they don’t want to, they’re still free to follow me on my blog, on Facebook, on
Twitter, to look at my Flickr images and read about what I’m reading on Goodreads for as long as they find me interesting or entertaining.

What about those authors who aren’t active online? There are people who buy my books who never visit my website or find me via social media. Social media is not the be-all and end-all of a writer’s existence. My advice to the author who has been told to blog/tweet/get on Facebook is to go ahead if they want to and have the time and energy for it, understanding that it’s not a handful of magic beans. But it is pretty cool to be part of the conversation, and you never know when somebody you follow on Twitter might need a book to fill a publishing slot or a story to round out an anthology. If you're listening, you can catch those opportunities.

I have been sandbagged by exciting ideas over the last couple of days. Sadly, the market for alien warriors and futuristic supersoldiers in romance is limited. My brain has gone so SF lately. Nuns and Huns was only the beginning. I even broke down and joined SFWA because I could see the handwriting on the wall. When all you want to write about are aliens and monsters and people with superpowers, you maybe belong in speculative fiction.

Honestly, I think I've gotten by in romance as long as I have only because I wasn't writing traditional romance; I wrote in the erotic niche market where futuristic supersoldiers and alien warriors and yes, even Nuns and Huns, fit right in. The real problem is that I've yet to find NY publisher who wants alien warriors and futuristic supersoldiers. Monsters are an easier sell. I haven't exactly exhausted the possibilities, though. If my brain wants to write this stuff, I have to go with it and find a way to make it work.

Why? Why can't I just do something smarter, more marketable? Um, because I can't. I've tried the "write this, it's what will sell" route, and I discovered something about myself in the process. I didn't fully understand it until I watched
Temple Gradin's TED talk, though.

I write the movies I see in my head.

Apparently this is not normal. Apparently most people do not think in pictures. (Lest you think this makes writing a book easy, sometimes I can see the scene perfectly and yet I cannot get the language right. So I rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and cry and rewrite some more and beat my head against the wall and rewrite it again. Writing a book is hard work, no matter what your process is.)

What I've learned is that while I can create the right atmosphere to ask for a specific type of story and get the movie rolling when it doesn't happen spontaneously, it has to be an idea that is innately "my" kind of idea to begin with. If my initial reaction to a "you should write this" is "but I am not excited about that" or "who would want to read about that?" or "my God that's revolting", it's not my kind of idea. My kind of idea makes me go "ooooo. YEAH!" And the movie machine is off and running.

It takes excitement to get a story off the ground*, and if I don't find it exciting, interesting, a story I would want to read, writing it is going to be an enormous struggle. And since writing a book is hard to begin with, why set myself up for an impossible mission I won't even enjoy?

These are the things you learn through experience; what your process is and how it works, what you can and can't change about it, what kind of story is "your" kind of story and what kind you shouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, no matter how much money somebody might be willing to pay you to write it. And why you are going to find yourself gearing up to write about futuristic supersoldiers even though Everybody Knows they don't sell.

Maybe to write the ideas I love, I will have to go write another genre, like YA. Or even straight SF/F. This is not the end of the world. What would be the end of the world, or at least the end of my creative world, would be turning off the movie machine instead of being entranced by the amazing, wonderful fact that I have one and using it. 

Also, I am now gripped with the idea that somebody should be getting graphic novels and comic books into schools for autism-spectrum kids above the picture-book age. Because a kid who thinks in pictures will have an easier time reading if they can "see" the story too.

Meanwhile, I need to gently direct the movie making mechanism back to the current works so I can clear my schedule for things like spring break and summer break. Now that it knows I will write the SF stuff later, it'll cooperate.

*The flip side to this is that things can happen to kill the excitement when the story is in a vulnerable unfinished stage. I'm actually contemplating going back to writing everything on spec and selling afterward to keep this from happening.

I've been revisiting a very good book,
Seven Steps on the Writer's Path, this week. If you haven't read it before, it goes through the stages of the creative process with tricks to get moving again if you get hung up on any of them. In my experience every project does go through those stages, and very often if I get stuck, it's on step 5, letting go.

There are various things that I've found help me let go. One is my book playlist. The right music helps put me in the right mindset for the story. Studies have shown music can alter brain waves. Music helps bypass the thinking, critical brain, the side that gets in the way when the emotional, intuitive, symbolic side that does all the real heavy-lifting when it comes to creativity needs to get on with the job.

Thinking about what I want is another way to let go. Why do I want to tell this story? What do I want it to be? What do I want next in my writing life? When you want something enough, it's easier to let go of where you are or what you're hanging onto and reach for it.

My current playlist:

• Billy Idol, White Wedding
• Social Distortion, When She Begins
• Naruto, Rising Dragon
• Naruto, Hero's Comeback
• Social Distortion, Ball and Chain
• Foo Fighters, Learn to Fly
• Powerman 5000, Action
• Social Distortion, When the Angels Sing
• Mazzy Star, Fade Into You
• The Clash, Rock the Casbah

Good sources for music online: Rhapsody, low-cast monthly membership for unlimited listening, or Lala, listen to any song once free, buy it for .89 cents.

Everything in the yard is budding. I don't care how much snow is still on the ground, it's spring. I will get my seedlings going as soon as I have all the starter seed. I'm eating spring honey from our local beekeeper. (If you have allergies, this is a way to build up immunity to your local pollen. Find a beekeeper near you and ask for spring honey!)

We're planning the garden. Went over hoop house plans last night. The cat is spending more time outside; the winter days of "NO thank you, my nose just froze" are past. (Seriously. On cold days we'd open the door for him, he'd sniff, back up, and go lay down someplace warm.) Birds are flocking around the trees; we need to get the bird house up so somebody can build a nest in it.

Also on my spring to do list; get done with books. Because once summer is here, I don't know how much I'll be working. Kids will be home all day, and we'll have activities going on, and I'm not sure I want to add deadlines to that. More books can get written in the fall.

Are you full of spring fever and itching to do everything on your list?

Yes, this is another 5 Things post.

1. March contest at All Romance Ebooks this month! See the nifty graphic on the sidebar. The grand prize is an iPod Touch filled with 31 books and a $100 gift certificate. To play, click the graphic, go to ARE, and do the daily treasure hunt. Daily prize; free download (by the day's featured author) and a $10.00 OmniBucks certificate.

2. Also this month at ARE, Samhain books are 25% off. If you are missing any of my Samhain backlist, shop and save!

3. We have stealth deer. I never see them, even though they traipse up and down the driveway and I can see the hoof prints they leave behind. This morning one of them knocked over the bird bath. (Delinquent deer tracks are visible leading up to and away from the scene of the crime.) But do I ever see these deer, despite having an office window facing the site of all these deer tracks? No. They are stealth deer.

4. More organic seed is on the way to round out our garden planning. If you're curious, we're doing a vegetable garden, an herb garden, and a butterfly/hummingbird garden. Will probably construct a hoop house over the veggies to keep stealth deer from turning it into their personal buffet. If you are looking for non-genetically tampered seeds, shop carefully. I just discovered that Burpee's was recently bought by Monsanto, so I'm really glad I got organic seeds. Next year I'll buy from another source.

5. This morning has been a total Monday so far. I plan to take it out on my fictional characters, mwahahaha.

Peat pots, starter mix and seeds, organic and heirloom. Soon it'll be gardening season. Are you ready for spring?

"I'll sit down and write a novel," you say. You have plot ideas, you have characters, maybe even a setting with elaborate maps and history. But sitting there with all the pieces of what will become a novel someday strewn around you leads to a sinking realization; somehow you have to figure out how to put it all together. You need a structure.

Structure doesn't have to be terrifying. You don't even need a hard hat, but you might get a lot of headaches along the way so stocking up on ibuprofen won't hurt.

The first point of structure: your story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Otherwise known as three acts. In act one, you introduce your cast of characters and set up your main conflict. In act two, you build on everything you introduced in act one, building towards the big crisis when everything goes boom. In act three, the story goes boom, resolution, the end. You can get more complicated than that, but you're going to need a lot of ibuprofen before it's over and your liver can only take so much of that, so I'd recommend keeping it simple. Three acts. Divide your major story events into things that happen in the beginning, the middle, and the end.

Next, the golden triangle of fiction. Your golden triangle is made up of a protagonist, an antagonist and an ally. If any of your sides are missing, you have a structural problem you must solve. "But I'm writing a story about a guy stranded on an island," you cry. "How can I have an antagonist and an ally?"

Go rent the movie Cast Away. Tom Hanks had an antagonist (isolation). He had an ally. (Wilson) The antagonist can even be different in different scenes. You can be creative with your structure, but you need those roles fulfilled to write compelling scenes. If your scene structure keeps falling down, check your triangle for missing sides.

"Wait," you groan, clutching your head. "What is this scene you speak of?"

I'm so glad you asked. After the three act structure, after the golden triangle, you get scene and sequel.

"I thought you said novels were made of threes," you say, getting suspicious. "That's two things."

Right. Scenes and Sequels are made up of Motivation Reaction Units. And each of those three things has three parts, too.

In a scene your character has a goal and a conflict that ends in disaster. In a sequel your character has a reaction and faces a dilemma that ends in a decision. Goal, conflict, disaster; reaction, dilemma, decision. Threes.

"I don't see why I need a scene AND a sequel," you mutter. Building a novel is starting to seem like a lot of work.

Think of a scene as dropping a bomb and a sequel as showing the impact crater. You can't just write a book full of explosions that don't matter to anybody. The explosion has to matter, and the sequel is where you give it space to matter and to have impact and to drive the story onward to the next scene. Shortcuts in story structures will lead to the whole thing collapsing and having to start all over.

And now we come to the final set of threes, the motivation reaction units. You'll need your ibuprofen for these, I always do.

Your character is faced with a motivation. There will then follow an emotional response, a reflex, and then a rational action or speech. MRUs give you the greatest opportunity to cut or expand a scene that needs to be longer or shorter. If you find the whole MRU is unnecessary, you can cut the whole thing, from the motivation to the last rational action/speech. If you need it but need to tighten, you can reduce the characters' emotional reactions and and reflexive responses and rational actions/dialog to one each. You can use clever writing to imply the first two and skip to the end with the action or dialog in one or two sentences. Or you can use it as an opportunity to expand the scene, adding more emotional reaction, reflex, rational response.

Leading us to the final point, as long as your structure is sound, you can expand or contract at need. Tighten up scenes/sequels. Tighten up MRUs within scenes and sequels. Cut whole scenes/sequels/MRUs that you don't really need. Or do the reverse. If your climax doesn't hit hard enough, beef up the scenes/sequels that lead to it, giving it more drama. Give more space to the resolution afterward, tying up all the loose ends and coming to a truly satisfying conclusion that doesn't feel skimpy.

To sum up: Stories are built in threes. Get your structure right and your story will stand strong. Don't run out of ibuprofen before you're done hammering at the MRUs. And there's your quick and dirty guide to story structure. Go forth and build.

Yesterday while I was pretty much incapable of anything but reading, thanks to the child who shared her flu, I read Flirt. I've been tracking all my reading for the year at Goodreads, and I like having some place to track what I'm reading and what I think about it. But for this book, I really didn't know what to think when I finished. I wasn't capable of too much thought (see "flu"), but I kept chewing it over in my brain.

Here's the thing; Laurell K Hamilton excels at creating a world so real it's easy to believe in, and characters you become invested in. I don't know how you rate a thing like that, but she's currently rating it by her income and number of times on the NYT list. I'd say those are pretty good indicators that she's pleasing her audience.

The ability to emotionally involve and move a reader isn't something everybody has. I read a lot of books that are technically competent but have no spark. I can read as much as a quarter of the book before I toss it aside because I just don't care who lives or dies or becomes a Jehovah's Witness.

There are books that have what many people call flaws or even bad writing. Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer, and Laurell K Hamilton are frequently accused of this. But when you entertain that many people, get that many readers invested in your story, your world and your characters, it's hard to say "bad writing" with a straight face. Harlequin Presents novels fall in this category, too. They consistently hit store bestseller lists. They are not what a writing teacher would point to as stellar examples of how to write. Even in RWA's Rita contest, they usually don't score well. But they involve and move people emotionally.

That's difficult to do. If you think it's easy, really look at how many authors can do it. Then look at how many can do it consistently.

Books today compete with a lot of other media for time, attention and dollars. If I want my books to be the ones readers will pick up instead of playing a game, watching a movie, or looking at LOLcats, I'd better study what Harlequin Presents, Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer and Laurell K Hamilton are doing. Because those authors are doing what's nearly an impossible feat; getting a reader emotionally involved and invested in nothing more than printed characters on a page.

Guest blogging all over! Today I'm at the Australian Romance Readers Association where Claimed by the Wolf is a 2009 Finalist for Favorite Erotic Romance. I'm talking about readers as collaborators.

And at I don't want to wait, I want the book now, you can still win a copy of Adventure Lover!

1. Turns out if you take a month off lifting weights but continue to do things like shovel snow, you don't lose your muscle strength.

2. I have decided to start doubling up when I make dinners and freeze the extra meal. This way I can build up a "don't feel like cooking" buffer that also keeps me from ordering a pizza.

3. Despite the two feet of snow in my yard, I really think it's almost spring. I predict we've had our last winter storm.

4. You never know what you'll see when your desk faces a window. Yesterday I saw a neighbor's dog get loose and start running around the newly-shoveled driveway with the spirit of an aviator who just found a clear airstrip. Another dog was led astray by this example, and the two of them raced down the drive, then the shoveled path to the deck, up the stairs, across the deck...smack into the giant snow bank at the bottom. The fact that they didn't see that coming didn't keep them down. Dogs are full of joy in the moment.

5. Shoveling snow is good for thinking and plotting time. I haz plots to hatch and books to finish.