nana-in-the-moon

[nana-in-the-moon]

how to properly structure a query letter!*

Dear [Agent], 

[An optional brief introduction, no longer than 2 - 3 sentences, perhaps where you elaborate on the #ownvoices of your manuscript, or pointing out certain things in your manuscript that the agent asks for. I reiterate that this paragraph is optional. Unless you have a very specific reason to be querying this agent—for instance, if they tweeted an MSWL for a heist novel and you’re querying a heist novel—there is no relevance, so don’t include this paragraph.]

[The first paragraph of your summary introduces the world, the main character, and their Normal. For instance, Cynthia lives in the times of a pandemic and works to continue living in their new normal. Every day, Cynthia choose to get up and keep living and making the most of their situation while trying to find something to do to be useful.] 

[The second paragraph of your summary introduces the plot. To continue with the above idea, Cynthia has been tasked with trying to find a cure to coronavirus, but all they have to work with in their home is duct tape, tangerines, Tylenol, and a never-give-up attitude.] 

[The third paragraph introduces stakes, aka what will happen if Cynthia doesn’t discover a cure with the resources they have at home. Luckily for them, however, a woman named Jane they had a one night stand with needs a place to crash after she was evicted. Cynthia agrees to let her stay as their roommate, especially because Jane brings with her the missing ingredient to the cure for coronavirus, a magic bean she stole from a giant–but there’s only one magic bean. If Cynthia and Jane can’t find a way to make more beans, they might be sent to the realm of giants forever.] 

[The closing paragraph goes like this: Complete at 89,000 words, THE MAGIC BEAN is an Adult contemporary fantasy with potential for a companion novel. I believe it will appeal to fans of Erin Morgenstern and Naomi Novik. Briefly explain who you are and share what you’re comfortable with about yourself—I say I’m 26, headed to grad school for archiving, and that the book is #ownvoices for genderqueer representation. Also mention if you have any connection to the publishing industry. I mention who I was previously represented by, why we amicably parted ways, and that I’ve mentored in many writing contests.] 

[Final closure: Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to hearing from you again!] 

[Best,]

[My name]

[My phone number and, though optional, my twitter handle] 

*i’ve been in the publishing industry for nine years now, have mentored many authors who went on to be published by the Big 5, and worked in writing contests to help writers, not only with their manuscript, but with their pitch and query letter and comps etc. i know what i’m about 😉

[nana-in-the-moon]

how do i gain an audience? i've been using wattpad, tumblr, youtube, instagram, and twitter to promote my writing, but i still am not getting much attention on any of those. how can i market better on social media?

Per my Rules and Considerations, marketing questions are considered to be “on shaky ground” because I don’t do my own in any aspect of life. I’m very close with someone who does it for a living so I have some info, but I don’t have personal experience with it, and your question is touching on the details that may require it. 

This is the general advice I give for anyone who asks about marketing, tweaked a little since you’re currently trying it:

You need a strong summary, hook, and/or title. Pictures help a lot! Every site has a few different formats of how posts look, but a summary and title are usually the most common elements and are typically what a potential new readers sees first. You have to make them want to click on your work.

Each type of social media has its own special way to get views. You can’t use the same tactics on every one because they attract different people who respond to different types of marketing. Often, it’s even better to go for quality over quality. Focus on a few sites rather than spamming a bunch, especially when sites require consumer effort to interact with. YouTube is  high-consumer-effort since videos are already a big “time commitment” compared to text, there isn’t a preview to grab interest, and the way the site is set up where you have to actively search and click as opposed to just getting a feed.

Look at the market for what you’re writing. For example, Fanfiction has a natural market. There’s a set community in a fandom and the members actively search for what they want to read with tags. Fanfiction readers tend to be more forgiving of writing mistakes because they are already invested in the story because of the fandom. Original fiction has a much pickier consumer base because the consumer has no connection to your story at the start. It’s marketed by genre or subject matter.

Find a more specific community. Even breaking down into genres isn’t really enough to get readers, you have to actively search and market for the people who actually want to read the kind of thing you write. Compare your story to popular stories to find fans who are more likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

Promote your work with competitions or promotion blogs. It’s tough to do it yourself when you don’t have much of a writing presence in the first place, so build one by interacting with platforms that do the marketing for you

Marketing isn’t about throwing a product to the world with a pretty bow– it’s about getting the right information to the right people who are predisposed to go for that product. 

And then the bit of advice from both myself and my friend (that can be hard to hear sometimes): marketing does not guarantee attention if the product can’t stand up to quality check. Sometimes, the issue is grammar, sometimes it’s subject matter, marketing not matching the product, poor presentation– there are so many things that can prevent stories from getting attention and you have to make sure that yours can stand up to the quality check that most readers will naturally do.

It’s true that there’s a buyer for every product (a reader for every story) but creating any lasting presence involves making sure your writing is as good as it can be. That doesn’t mean you have to be a master, but it does mean presenting the work nearly, using proper grammar, anything that speaks to the quality of a story and the level of effort should be in top shape. It’s true that not all readers are going to put quality as a priority for what they will and will not read, but it’s not smart to alienate the ones that do if you’re trying to have a presence. 

Good luck with your marketing!

Thinking of asking a question? Please read my Rules and Considerations to make sure I’m the right resource, and check the Tag List to see if your question has already been asked.

[nana-in-the-moon]

Did I meme right?

[nana-in-the-moon]

Top Tips for Clues, Red Herrings, and Breadcrumbs

One of the most important parts of writing MYSTERY is figuring out what to do with clues and red herrings - and how to use them effectively. Here’s some advice that’s never steered me wrong: 

Hide the real clue before the false ones! Most people, so by extent your readers and your sleuth, tend to focus on the last piece of information presented to them. A good strategy is to mention/show your real clue and then quickly shift focus. 

Do a clue cluster! Squeeze your real clue in among a whole pile of red herrings or other clues, effectively hiding it in plain sight. This works especially well with multiple suspect mysteries. 

Struggling to think of what a clue could be? Try this list: 

Physical objects: Letters, notes, tickets, emails, keepsakes, text messages, diaries, etc. 

Dialogue: voicemail recordings, overheard conversations, hearsay, gossip, rumours. All of these can hold grains of truth! 

Red herrings distract and confound your protagonist and your reader, so you should be careful not to overuse them. Well balanced, red herrings should lead your characters down false paths to create confusion, tension, and suspense.

Contradictions! Have characters claim they did so-and-so at such-and-such a time, but other characters have evidence that contradicts this.

Balance! Avoid a clue that’s so obvious it’s like a neon sign saying “Look at me, I’m a clue!” but don’t make it so obscure it’ll be missed entirely. A good clue should leave a reader saying “Damn, I should have noticed that” 

[nana-in-the-moon]

i commissioned @mohtz to draw lillith & shaye from my w.i.p novel that’s essentially if every YA fae novel and howls moving candle had a lesbian baby. i love them so much they look so good!!! thank u stephanie ❤️❤️❤️

[nana-in-the-moon]

Virtue requires a delicate balance. 

[nana-in-the-moon]

You know what fantasy writing needs? Working class wizards.

A crew of enchanters maintaining the perpetual flames that run the turbines that generate electricity, covered in ash and grime and stinking of hot chilies and rare mushrooms used for the enchantments

A wizard specializing in construction, casting feather fall on every worker, and enchanting every hammer to drive nails in straight, animating the living clay that makes up the core of the crane

An elderly wizard and her apprentice who transmute fragile broken objects. From furniture, to rotten wood beams, to delicate jewelry

A battle magician, trained with only a few rudimentary spells to solve a shortage of trained wizards on the front who uses his healing spells to help folks around town

Wizarding shops where cheery little mages enchant wooden blocks to be hammered into the sides of homes. Hammer this into the attic and it will scare off termites, toss this in the fire and clean your chimney, throw this in the air and all dust in the room gets sucked up

Wizard loggers who transmute cut trees into solid, square beams, reducing waste, and casting spells to speed up regrowth. The forest, they know, will not be too harsh on them if the lost tree’s children may grow in its place

Wizard farmers who grow their crops in arcane sigils to increase yield, or produce healthier fruit

Factory wizards who control a dozen little constructs that keep machines cleaned and operational, who cast armor to protect the hands of workers, and who, when the factory strikes for better wages, freeze the machines in place to ensure their bosses can’t bring anyone new in.

Anyway, think about it.

[nana-in-the-moon]

excuse me what the fuck

trigger warning for nazi shit and a dead body

This is an advertisement I found a few minutes ago. I have no idea how this got onto the site or who the hell created it.

#i just found this ad on tumblr #what the fuck #tw #tw hanging #tw nazi #nazi #hanging #body #dead body

[nana-in-the-moon]

“coming of age” books and movies are so stupid like being a teenager isn’t about having sex and going to parties it’s about staring out your car window after hanging out with your old best friends who you haven’t seen in months and realizing that you aren’t actually friends anymore and that your childhood has been well and truly dead since you were thirteen

[nana-in-the-moon]

cowgirl lesbians? 🤠

100% yes.

[nana-in-the-moon]

it’s been a while, they’ve been hanging out a lot, and they’re ready to hit the town  😎

part 1

[nana-in-the-moon]

go through a nighttime routine and ill tell u what kind of villain u are

[nana-in-the-moon]

PRH buying S&S is Not Good for anyone (except maybe the top executives?) and a total monopoly. They’re claiming S&S will work independently but how long until there will be layoffs? How are books going to be sold when a third of the market is owned by one company? This sucks!

[nana-in-the-moon]

Now that the movie theater in my hometown is closing forever, I can finally tell you all about the absolutely batshit job I had my freshman year of college. 

I am 19 years old and apply to work at the local movie theater, which is owned/founded by a wannabe business tycoon baby boomer who was like a cross between Donald Trump, Danny DeVito, and Jay Gastby (the Gatsby parallel will make sense in a minute, I promise. But it’s very important to me that you know that this man looked like a Danny DeVito clone with Trump’s toupee.) 

They are paying me minimum wage, which back then was about $6.50 an hour, to sweep popcorn off of the carpet with a tiny broom and occasionally hand out mints at the door at the end of movies. Our uniforms were unisex and consisted of a dark green tuxedo jacket and shirt with black bow-ties. There was also a stupid little hat but nobody actually wore them. This isn’t very important, except the uniform actually went with the interior ~design~ of the theater, which I think was supposed to look “fancy” but actually looked like the person who designs Cheesecake Factories dropped acid and got set loose in a Home Depot with an unlimited budget and no directions. 

I do my job, sweeping popcorn off of the rugs, wandering the hallways, and occasionally handing out mints. We get free popcorn on break (with no butter) which at 19 I thought was the most amazing thing I ever experienced. Because I was poor, my diet probably consisted of about 80% movie theater popcorn by volume. We could also stand in the back of the theater and watch like 5 minutes of a movie if there was no popcorn left to sweep up with our little brooms. 

For some reason Donald DeVito-Gatsby took a liking to me. Not in a creepy way–he just thought I was the shit for some reason. He called me “Tammy” once, which is not even close to my real name–doesn’t even have any of the actual letters of my name in it, which I think he eventually figured out was wrong, but still didn’t care enough to find out my actual name, so he just started calling me “sport” every time he saw me (which was almost daily). 

He’d saunter up on his tiny legs while I was sweeping popcorn and say something like, “Doing great today, sport! Keep it up!” and clap me on my little epaulet-clad shoulder and leave. I could never figure out why I appeared to be his favorite popcorn-sweeper. It was baffling. 

I have no idea what he actually did to run the theater except wander the halls, occasionally yell at the managers for letting the concession stand use too much butter, and talk about how much his tailored suits cost. Probably nothing.

He would also occasionally hire dance troops to perform Vegas-style routines at the front of the theater before big premiers. This was 1) very weird, and 2) somehow perfectly in-character with everything about this man’s personality and aesthetic. 

He once had his high school reunion there, and made a mixtape of songs from the 1960s to play on a loop during the big event. They were all terrible songs, and the CD just played on a loop for years and years and years afterward because he liked it and no one could be bothered to turn it off, I guess. I think it was probably still playing on loop when the theater shut down. It is because of this that I now have a classically-trained rage response to the song “Aquarius” by the 5th Dimension. 

Anyway, sometime while I was working there, he decided that what the theater really needed to keep up with the times was to knock out the end of one of the hallways and build an enormous IMAX theater with like 500 seats and it’s own dedicated concession stand that served more expensive food. We didn’t have anything like that in our town, so it was kind of a big deal. 

The wall gets knocked out, and the concrete gets poured, and there is a crew working to put in all of the wiring needed for the giant speakers, etc. Donald DeVito-Gatsby is very distressed about this because he was super racist and literally scared of Mexicans, who made up most of the construction crew on-site.

Donald DeVito-Gatsby decides that I am the perfect person to “keep an eye on them” and “make sure they’re not planning anything” because somehow he thinks I speak Spanish. I do not speak Spanish. I attempted to correct him. He doesn’t believe me. 

So he sets me up in the unfinished theater with my own little pink hardhat, and now my job is to sit there on an unattached memory foam IMAX seat all day and “watch them”. For what? I don’t know. I don’t think he knew, either. 

The helmet is pink because, I don’t know, maybe he thought a girl would be offended by a normal hardhat? I’m not sure. Anyway, the best part of this was that he got some shiny stickers and put “IN CHARGE” on the hardhat when he sent me off into the construction zone. I was not, in fact, in charge of anything. I don’t know why he did this.

The foreman spoke English, but most of his crew didn’t, and we eventually figured out that Mr. DeVito-Gatsby had probably heard me speak Sicilian on the phone with my family and thought it was Spanish, but I still understood almost none of what was being said between the crew at the site. Over the course of about three months we developed this kind of pidgin language when he wasn’t there to translate. After figuring out that I had nothing to eat but popcorn during my shift, one of the guys started bringing me lunch, which was probably the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me at 19.

I have no idea what Mr. DeVito-Gatsby thought these guys were going to do. He made some noise about how they were probably going to “steal something”, which would have been impossible because most of the audio equipment weighed hundreds of pounds. It apparently never occurred to him that the person most likely to steal anything would probably be the person who made the least money–which was me, making $6.50 an hour. 

I didn’t actually steal anything, though. Occasionally I’d make off with an extra cup of popcorn on my break, and one time one of the concessions people felt bad for us and brought us the hotdogs they were going to throw out. Mr. DeVito-Gatsby yelled at them for it.

I literally did nothing for months. I just…sat there and took naps and played Pokemon on my Gameboy. There was literally no point in me being there at all, and I was probably in the way sometimes, but I was being paid $6.50 an hour with the owner’s approval to sit there and literally do nothing at all because he was racist. 

Eventually, DeVito-Gatsby started adding stickers to my hardhat for some reason. He didn’t tell me why–I would just show up and there’d be more stickers. I would later find out that apparently he went into the equipment room and would just add a sticker whenever he felt I had done an “especially good job”, and I have no idea what that even means considering I was doing literally nothing. One day I came in and he had added “SPORT!!!” to the font in sharpie, so now my hardhat said “SPORT!!! IN CHARGE” with a bunch of random stickers. I was not, in fact, in charge of anything at all, and I don’t know what the exclamation points were for.

Months went by and the IMAX was basically finished, but neither Donald DeVito-Gatsby nor any of the managers ever showed up to reassign me, and I wasn’t going to ask about it because I Really Liked this gig where I was basically being paid to sit there and sleep and play video games all day. 

One morning, I came in and the crew was finally packed up and gone, the theater was finished, and I had…nothing to do. At all. It was just… empty. When I went to find a manager to ask if I needed to go do something else, he waved me off and told me that my job was now to “babysit” the IMAX theater until they started selling tickets for the first show. Owner’s orders. OK, I said, and went to sit in the now finished IMAX theater by myself.

This went on for several weeks before my desire to see other humans finally outweighed my desire to be paid to do nothing. I asked again to be reassigned again, but nope, that was my job now. When the theater wasn’t going to be showing movies, my job was going to be to just…sit in the theater. For no reason, and just…I don’t know, stare at the blank screen. 

I hung up my pink hardhat, put away my little green tuxedo jacket and went home, and never went back. No one ever called me about missing a shift. I’m not sure anyone even noticed I had left. 

[nana-in-the-moon]

“Most writers could identify as authors only by finding and working with a publisher. Publishers became constitutive of authorial identity. How, then, is this identity jarred, reconfigured, and shaped when writers have the opportunity to amass an audience in the absence of publishers?”

Timothy Laquinto,  Mass Authorship and the Rise of Self-Publishing

The idea that authors might be involved in something as mundane and distasteful as marketing their work rather than spending time on their craft upsets the romantic paradigm of the author. People ascribe meaning to the act of getting published that the act simply does not carry.

By self-publishing, you have simply decided not to participate in the traditional publishing industry. This is not a death sentence. This is not a reflection of the quality of your work.

#publishing #selfpublishing #self publishing #self publication #writing #writerblr #writers #writers on tumblr #fiction #novels #novel

[nana-in-the-moon]

why do 90% of all medicines sound like cool wizard names

[nana-in-the-moon]

Excerpt from The Cosmos in Her Eyes

Chapter 2

It had been a long time since Rashmi had felt so lost— adrift at sea. She felt stupid and confused again. War was as foreign a concept to her as Angond had once been. A language she hadn’t learned. She didn’t want to learn it. 

Once upon a time, she had fallen into this world, opened a door that took her into a different world instead of a different room. They— these new people— had tried to feed her meat before she knew the language. She knew that it was meat and that she couldn’t eat it, but she hadn’t yet learned the word ‘no.’ They soon understood what she meant with her repeated English and gestures, but what place was there for a British girl in this foreign fantasy world?

#full chapters will start posting weekly soon #tcihe #the cosmos in her eyes #lesbian fiction #lesbian fantasy #lesbian #lesbian fic #novel excerpt #gay #lgbt #lgbt fiction #lgbt fic #writing #writers #my writing #writers on tumblr #fiction #fantasy novel #sff #gay fiction