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This is number 125 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“WHAT IF YOUR WHOLE LIFE was condensed into a single year and everything important in it happened that year? For fifty years, Lowell has lived in the memories of his life in 1979. As the song goes, ‘I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a king.’ And Lowell was all those things in just one year! These are his memories of that one incredible year.”
The most important thing an author writes to promote his or her work is the blurb. The earlier you start working on it, the more useful it will be. It should fully encapsulate exactly what the story is while piquing the interest of the reader to open the book. It should also inspire you to write the work! When you read your blurb, you should clap your hands together and say, “I can’t wait to write this!”
If it doesn’t inspire you to write it, it’s not likely to inspire a reader to read it.
In 2015, when I decided to write a story in the ‘Damsels in Distress’ universe, I first read all the stories I could find that were set in that universe. The heroes were overwhelmingly former military men, trained and experienced in combat and survival. They’d been through war and were upright men with honorable character. Much like most of the retired servicemen I have known.
But I am not ex-military. Writing about characters in the military and their experiences is not in my ‘wheelhouse,’ as my dental hygienist put it this week. I had to consider what other things went into the making of a hero and when I came up with a theatre student who saves the lives of his niece and sister-in-law, but is crippled by the act, I knew I had a hero. I went to work on describing him in the blurb for Sleight of Hand.
Crippled while saving his niece and sister-in-law from a drunk driver, Lincoln has struggled five years to 'never give up' at their encouragement. When his friend and magic tutor Seth is suddenly killed on Chaos, though, Lincoln is forced to consider that the stories his mentor told him were more than a LARP. But what kind of hero could a guy in a wheelchair become?
And, indeed, when I came up with this blurb, I couldn’t wait to start writing the story. It’s short as compared to most of my novels. Just eight chapters. But in it, Lincoln gets to Crossroads where his paralysis is healed and he learns to become a different kind of hero, using his magic tricks and theatrics to rescue the damsels in distress.
Sleight of Hand and the entire Hero Lincoln Trilogy are available in eBook from ZBookStore, and as a single volume paperback at online retailers.
There are some key things to remember when writing your blurb. First is to identify who your story’s protagonist is and what type of person he or she is. Then put the protagonist in the key conflict of the story—what does he have to do or overcome? And finally, how did the protagonist get in this predicament?
Many blurbs also include how the protagonist completes his goal, but that is not as necessary as the other three ingredients. Later, however, that will become critical.
Brian was the geekiest shrimp in his class—frequent target of neighborhood and school bullies. But his next-door neighbor, “Heaven,” was watching over him, keeping him safe and protected—until the day Brian became the protector. Brian Frost, would-be chemist and aspiring cook, loyal enough to his friends that they become fiercely loyal to him. All because Heaven told them a fairy tale.
First, who is the protagonist—the person the story is about? Brian, a little geek who is often picked on. What does Brian have to overcome? He has to change from a weak person who is being protected to a person strong enough to protect others. How did it all happen? Heaven, a protector, told a story to Brian’s friends that brought them closer to Brian.
This blurb is 388 characters long. Most of the places you will use a blurb have a character limit. It may vary, but the most prevalent is 400 characters. Use as many of them as you can, but only include essential information. Don’t try to tell the whole story in the blurb. Get those details out that will inspire you to write the story and will sell people on reading what you’ve written.
Go to the story links page at Stories Online. Read the blurbs for the stories posted today. Some are extremely short. Some come close to the full 400-character limit. But which are the ones that make you think you’d like to read them (or write them)? Look at what turns you off of other books.
Of course, your personal interests will affect your interest in the story as well. The author can’t do anything about that. In fact, I want the blurb to warn you away from my story as well as attract you to it.
Part of the motivation for this series of posts was an email I received from ‘Johnny’ who pointed out the number of blurbs that contained poor writing. That included poor English, punctuation, spelling, and word-choice. He said, and I agree, that readers are often turned off from reading a story because the blurb is poorly written. I have to agree, but I’m not going to post any of the ‘bad examples’ he forwarded to me.
The blurb should be an example of the best of your writing. I believe the problems with most of the bad examples were the result of being treated as an afterthought. The person posting the story—and this is just as true of people publishing an eBook or paperback through one of the major vendors—seems often to forget they will need a blurb until they are in the process of posting. So, they hurriedly jot something in the text box and move on.
The blurb should not be an afterthought!
It should be planned, written, and edited in advance. Don’t start posting a story until you have given thought to the blurb. (I believe you shouldn’t start writing the story until you have given thought to the blurb.)
Write your blurb with the care of a Madison Avenue advertising exec intending to sell a million copies. Those sales will all be based on this 400-character blurb.
Of course, the blurb is not the only tool you have to sell your story. Most distribution sites for your eBook or paperback also include the opportunity to give a longer description. We’ll talk about the description and synopsis next week.
This is number 124 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“IT’S AN INTELLECTUAL THRILLER with high stakes and fast action, but a low body count.”
If you look at this and have your interest piqued, it’s a successful logline. It means you are one step closer to reading the story. If you just keep scrolling, it was not successful. The purpose of the logline in today’s world—it changes over time—is to stop the reader from scrolling. If we are being unkind, we can also call it click-bait.
A lot of the time, it is all a reader will see as they are scrolling through titles. You have literally an eyeblink to capture their attention.
Consider what happens when you look through an onscreen directory of movies to find something that matches your mood at the moment. Here is all you see:
A CIA decoder hunts for his wife’s killers, his intelligence serving as his ultimate weapon.
Did it make you stop scrolling long enough to watch a preview or read a longer description?
A pretty, popular teenager can’t go out on a date until her ill-tempered older sister does.
Hmm. I think that’s a modern adaptation of a Shakespeare play. I’d check it out.
Amid cosmic clashes and interplanetary politics, an heir must harness mystical powers and lead a rebellion against an oppressive regime.
I think I’ve seen at least half of those movies, so I’ll probably look to see if I’m interested in this one, too. If you are upset that I’m not telling you what movie any of these loglines are for, then they were obviously effective. They made you stop and want to check out the movie a little more.
This is number 123 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
LAST WEEK, I got an interesting email from SOL reader Johnny: “Oh, I pass this to you as I think you would do a much better job of presenting it than I could. The topic is creating a title and description that attracts readers. Forgive me if you’ve already written on this. I’ll claim Alzheimer’s.”
Don’t imagine that I never listen to my readers! This email hit me at the perfect time. Just as I was trying to get the perfect blurb for Forever Yours! I don’t know if I nailed it, but it’s better than what I originally thought up.
Back in the old days when my business partners and I started the boutique publishing house LongTale Press, we started receiving manuscript samples and blurbs from a lot of aspiring authors. Most of them were really crappy, so we were invited to several different venues to talk about and coach people on creating a title and perfect pitch for their novels.
There are five levels that I want to talk about.
1. The Title
2. The Logline
3. The Blurb
4. The Description
5. The Synopsis
Each of them deserves a lot of consideration on the part of you, the author. Let’s start with the title and we’ll see if this is a one-week post or two weeks, or more. It’s really a big topic!
Sometimes we get the perfect title when we first think of the story. That is what happened to me when I was struck by the title Living Next Door to Heaven as I was parked on a beach in Alabama in March of 2014. It was perfect and I could immediately imagine the complete story line that would cover some ten or fifteen years. Well, it turned out to be a great series name, but covering that much time and detail, it ended up being nine different books and I needed to come up with an actual title for each of the books. Bummer.
More often, the perfect title comes long after the first—and sometimes the second or third—draft is finished. That was the case with Nathan Everett’s (Wayzgoose) first published novel. We released it as part of an anthology of NaNoWriMo books in 2006 with the title Security and Exchange. Since the anthology was released as a fund-raiser for libraries during Microsoft’s Giving Campaign, a lot of people asked me if it was about protecting email servers. ????
Four years later, when it was released as part of the launch of LongTale Press, it had been extensively edited, rewritten, and retitled: For Blood or Money. That title reflects the contemporary noir mystery that the book actually contains. Much better, and a good seller.
Today marks the commercial release of my newest novel, Forever Yours, in both eBook and Signature Edition paperback. So, why not use it as an example? This book started out with a working title of “Sisyphus, a Modern Myth.” Thrilling title, isn’t it? It was more a reminder to me of how I perceived this contemporary story. I would retell the ancient Sisyphus myth—the guy condemned to roll a stone up a mountain that would roll back down each day for eternity—with my own twists on the story.
After that first draft was completed, which followed my outline exactly, I realized that not only was the title boring, the story was less than interesting. I went out to a nice brunch with my friend and alpha reader Les and his wife, and we talked about what I wanted to do with the story and how the whole thing was really about artificial intelligence and the prospect of creating a singularity in which man and machine were somehow united.
But I was struggling with a title for the new work.
Les had read the entire first draft and a particular phrase stuck out to him: Forever Yours. It was the name of the AI program that became the protagonist’s singularity. The title immediately struck me, not only as a good summary, but also as a guiding light as I re-wrote the novel.
Forever Yours is available as an eBook at ZBookStore. The Signature Edition paperback is available at my own Ingram Spark bookstore.
My newest work, Forever Yours, is now in pre-release on ZBookStore and will be released on Sunday! I know it's been a wait, but I wanted to make sure all edits had been reviewed before I pulled the trigger.
Artificial Intelligence programming prodigy Henry Pascal pulls three other friends with him to create a new company with $billion prospects. Getting through jealousies, college, loves, virtual and physical attacks, takeover challenges, and family life, Henry succeeds in creating a singularity AI--one that can contain all the data from one's life. But how will it be used?
Is this science fiction? Certainly, it is speculative, but the reality of artificial intelligence and the impending singularity are so near, that part may not be fiction much longer. It is not a case of if we get there, but how and how soon?
Is this erotica? If your only definition of erotica is whether the book has sex scenes, then yes. If that's why you choose to read it, you will be disappointed.
Ray Kurzweil's book "The Singularity Is Near" was influential in conceiving of this work.
Enjoy!
This is number 122 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“WE’RE SORRY. Because of extremely high call volume and cuts to the park service, wait times at The Void may exceed three hours. Try our website at TheAbyss.con which still has a few openings. If this is an emergency, please hang up and scream into your pillow.”
My writing group down in Las Vegas stays together by using a Discord server. We have group write-ins online as well as in person, with an online sprint manager that times the word sprints and tracks word count. There are social events and tips and tricks. And a channel simply called The-Void.
“If you would like to vent, rant, whine, moan, or complain, you may throw your negative feelings into the-void and the-void will accept them as sacrifices. They may be witnessed, but never discussed. If you would like advice, feedback, or comfort, please use the pillow-fort instead.”
I recall numerous times when I worked in high tech that I closed my office door and silently screamed at stupid decisions made by the management or actions by my co-workers. I found out by accident that I often sent my co-workers to their own version of The Void to scream.
It doesn’t seem to make a difference what our situation is, there are times when we just want to scream. But what I’m seeing more of, that might be more concerning, is people getting lost in their thoughts. A grocery store stock person stopped beside me the other day and asked if she could help me find something. I discovered I’d been staring at a shelf of cereal for several minutes.
“Oh. I was looking for batteries,” I said.
And it’s not just old people. Kids in school are known for staring vacantly into space while the teacher lectures. I’ve even seen the cameras scan the fans at sporting events and land on someone who, amidst the yelling and cheers around them, is staring off into The Abyss.
The Abyss is calling us.
Friedrich Nietzche in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) famously said, “If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.” Some of my books are simply The Abyss staring back.
What got me thinking about this?
Oh, yes. I’m preparing another book for my Signature Collection that I plan to release around the first of November. I’ve combined all three volumes of Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon into a single massive book. (8.5x11 inches and nearly 700 pages! Published in hard cover.) In addition to having a digitally signed photograph of the author (me) in each book, there is an exclusive interview. Airline thriller author Karlene Petitt agreed to interview me for this edition and set about reading all three volumes.
After reading the third volume, she sent me a message that said, “I just finished your series. Quite fun but disturbing read. I was dreaming of sex trafficking last night!!”
Yes, that third volume definitely looks into the dark. And the dark looks back.
I completely rewrote the third volume and will re-release it as an eBook in October, but the message is the same. There are things in this world that need to be cleaned up. If there was a demon running around, we wouldn’t be happy with the way he started the cleanup.
All three volumes of Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon are available as eBooks on ZBookStore. The hardcover trilogy will be released in November. The second edition Volume 3 eBook is coming in October.
By the way, in case you're confused, you are supposed to scream into the Void and stare into the Abyss. People often reverse them, to no one’s harm.
But what’s the point?
Why should a writer of erotica be concerned about sex trafficking, depression, PTSD, and autism?
When Bob attacks a vast trafficking network and destroys it, why isn’t that the end of sex trafficking? When Tony (Model Student series) gets four wives and a successful career with high praise as an artist, why isn’t his depression cured? Why does Henry (Forever Yours) continue to suffer from PTSD years after the attack? Why isn’t Art (Strange Art series) cured of his autism when the dark goes away?
Because that’s not the way life works!
In a recent interview, I was asked “What is one piece of advice you’d give to aspiring erotica writers?” To me, the answer is simple: “Before you focus on sex, story, or world-building, create believable characters that people can engage with.” Believable characters have to act in believable ways. The simple truth is that there is no cure for depression, PTSD, or autism. People won’t stop trafficking in humans as long as there is profit to be made. Governments will always be corrupt. People will continue to exploit others.
Yes, I sometimes write stories in which there is some kind of deus ex machina. The gods ride in to save the day. I consider them light and unreal—and so do my readers. In reality, the gods don’t step in to save the lives of Denise and Lexi and Fletcher and Harper because there are crappy people who interfere even with God’s plans.
And that’s where the stories lie. In elementary writing, we are taught that a story needs a conflict, an obstacle, a reason to exist. Or as I have said on occasion, “There is no happily ever after if it is happily ever before.” No one cares.
And so, when I write a story like Drawing on the Dark Side of the Brain, Jett is still dealing with the problem of being a GenZ teen, or a digital native, in a world where hopes and dreams seem to be forever out of reach. There will never be enough money that he can just devote his life to his art. His polycule will have people leave as they find their own path. They’ll have to live through the pandemic without killing each other. They may never have jobs that support their lives, let alone prepare them for retirement.
No matter how escapist the story is, it isn’t interesting if it isn’t relatable in real life.
I have readers who complain that they read erotica to escape from reality, but I shove reality down their throats. Sorry about that. In my daily interactions with people in the real world, I find they are doing just fine at denying reality.
And so, like an ancient Greek playwright, I look at my characters and determine their fatal flaw. Then I exploit it by looking into the dark.
I get some great ideas sent to me by readers. This week I received one from a devoted reader and it struck a chord with me. The topic is creating a title and description that attracts readers. Now that’s something worth considering next week!
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