Quote:
Originally Posted by Gregg Bell
Thanks Hitch. And I've got credits at Canstock. (They're good in that you don't have to use the credits within a year.) The photo is way cool but almost in silhouette. I'd have to think about that one. Thanks for the Murphy link. I'm going to study that baby and come back with a killer cover. I agree there is a lot of murk in the cover I've got. Maybe it would look decent in an aquarium though. But yeah, it's not like people are going to be looking at it in SeaWorld. And I've grown to like American Ballerina as the title. Nothing wrong with American Ballerina in London. Just American Ballerina is meatier somehow. Like Chicago: the title of broad shoulders.
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The Murphy link is, bar none, the best thing I've ever read on commercially-viable cover design. I have a lot of clients, as you know, and a lot of them are utterly daft when it comes to cover design.
There are two kinds, really; those who say, "I need a man and a scepter and a dragon and a sabertooth tiger and a crown and a cave and a bat and, oh, yeah, did I mention he needs a magical staff?" Those are what I call
the IMAX clients. They think of a book cover as the size of an IMAX screen, and they "see" the entire story scrolling across it. Wrong, wrong, and did I say, wrong?
The second type are the "it doesn't matter" type. Now, I tend to struggle with that bunch (in my head, I mean) because they simply don't "get" that as much as they want to believe it, the writing isn't the "ONLY" thing that matters. That's what I believed, too, when I first got into this racket--that the covers didn't matter, only the story or the book mattered. And I was absolutely, positively, 180-degrees DEAD WRONG. I was horrified when I realized that bad covers could kill fabulous books, and great covers could sell mediocre books. But it's true. People ARE like crows, and they pick up bright shiny pretty things. So...don't do MURKY covers, unless there's a compelling reason...nope, I take that back. Don't do murky covers, period. If the bloody story is set in a swamp, find something colorful about it to put on the cover.
Covers are absolutely critical. Particularly for an author still finding his or her audience, and astronomically so for a new author. Wanna be found? Need great cover, period.
Now, the other discussion: details, readers, beta-reader hostility, etc.
I'm one of "those." I'm one of those that will a) ignore small mistakes, like putting a given cafe on the wrong street, if the rest of the book is good enough to carry me along. But, I hate continuity errors, and if I feel that the author has taken his reader for granted, in not doing adequate research to support the tale, then I too will become outright hostile (particularly if I've paid bloody money, or worse, if it's a beta, not alpha, read, and my TIME has been taken for granted.)
True story: before Booknook.biz really came to be, when I was still sorta working here, there (with the real estate crash having killed my "real" career) and the next place, one of my to-be conversion clients asked me to EDIT, not proofread, his mystery. He's a wealthy fellow, who hired a ghostwriter/co-author, to help him write a 7-book series of mysteries.
The first book wasn't bad, in terms of plot. I felt that the characters, however, were positively DREADFUL. They could not have been more cardboard. I spoke to the client, and he told me some things that knocked me on my ass. 1. He doesn't READ. at all, for entertainment. (

). 2. He and his "co-author" had come up with the characters' personalities and traits by throwing darts at a newspaper horoscope column, and using the various traits THERE, for their characters.
I was fairly speechless about all of it. I told him the truth--the plot for the first book was a good one, but the characters were flat and cartoonish, and the female characters were outright offensively crafted. (He had a female character that was thrown out of the "Bolshoi" because her BREASTS WERE TOO BIG. I only recalled this because of your book, but...needless to say, that was one of the nails in his coffin, as far as my editing work for him went. I was like,
"really?") He blithely ignored me, and off we went into the next books, which progressively became worse and worse. This guy spent a FORTUNE on the co-author, video trailers, his website, publicity... but he refused to listen to a word I said (or anyone else, mind you) about how poorly written the books were. These "mysteries" didn't have any (mysteries); they were more like thrillers. There was no "detective;" no clues. No detecting. I finally quit working for the guy, because I couldn't take it any longer.
What did me in was this gem: he'd "poisoned" one of the characters, during a trip up a mountain. Several things were wrong. First, he Litvinenko'ed the guy. All well and good. But the victim died in MINUTES, not days/weeks. Secondly, although it took the characters hours to get UP the mountain, coming DOWN was accomplished in practically minutes, even though they were now CARRYING the dying/dead man.
When I explained to the author that Polonium-210 takes days/weeks to kill someone, he said "oh, okay, well XXX has fixed it." (XXX being the co-author). And he did--he made it "magical." Basically, they wrote one line saying that one of the badguys "made it 100x more powerful." It was ridiculous, and pathetic. (n.b.: he also had another book in the series, about how terrorists took a gold mine hostage, holding the "world to ransom over the gold standard." When I said, "uh, we haven't been on the gold standard in decades," he blew me off, saying "it's only a story.")
THAT is what will kill off a reader. I was positively insulted by all of it. He didn't know what a mystery WAS, even though he was claiming to have written and published 7 of them, in this series; he had no concern whatsoever for the intelligence of the reader; he thought magically making something "more" poisonous was an adequate solution to the problem of the Polonium; he blatantly disregarded time issues; the list goes on.
This is a long-winded way of saying, if the Royal Ballet is crucial to the storyline, as is the UK locale, make SURE that you've researched both enough to not insult the reader. I, too, worry a bit when you say that your beta reader was "hostile" to the story. If that hostility is about either your locale, the ballet, or how a person in the UK speaks, then I would strongly recommend that you take a step back. Maybe you should shelve it for 3-6 months, and come back at it fresh. That, or ask people in ballet, and in the UK, to read the damn thing, before you publish it.
When your reader makes a comment about the rhythm of a Londoner's speech, perhaps he means, in a roundabout way, that the dialogue isn't working for him/her. And it's true that someone in the UK doesn't sound like someone in London, CT, USA. There are different speech patterns, different slang, etc.
I'm not hazarding a guess as to whether or not the book is good or bad or..? I'm just giving you examples of what can really make a reader lose interest, or get angry. Fantasy is one thing; but a thriller or mystery needs to have some roots in factual aspects, to be believable, even if it's about some whackjob who is going to blow up the entire world. The supporting "stuff" has to be there. One Polonium mistake, or one timeline error, can yank a reader completely out of the story.
<snipped because I used it earlier, duh.>
FWIW.
Hitch