My Interview with Author Cheryl Rainfield on Book Promotion
My first novel is coming out in three months and I’ve gone tharn. I’m a Watership Down bunny, wide-eyed and paralyzed, unable to move as the oncoming truck of my release date barrels toward me. On the one hand, I love that I’m publishing at a time when a book’s promotion isn’t completely out of an author’s hands. I have Twitter, Facebook, blogs, websites, give-aways, book trailers, Goodreads, tumblr, StumbleUpon, message boards, and a thousand other tools to help me get the word out. But does joining Twitter and Facebook actually translate into book sales? Do I really want to start...
Read MoreNewsy Bits
I was delighted to open my mail on Friday and find a copy of Reality Imagined: Stories of Identity and Change, published by McGraw-Hill Ryerson. My short story “Mouse” is included along with stories by a some great Canadian authors like Jean Little, Linda Holdman, Sheree Fitch, Kathy Stinson and Ted Staunton. I was really thrilled to be included. “Mouse” is a story about a mother’s mental illness as seen though the eyes of a child who doesn’t understand it. It won second prize in the Toronto Star’s short story contest some years back, and...
Read MoreWriter’s Block, Writing Partners, and “the Dread”
Back before I started my first novel, I asked my full-time writer friends how they did it, how they sat down at their desks every day without that feeling of dread, that feeling that their desk was repelling them like a magnet. None were very helpful, I must say. I got some blank stares, maybe a few, “Y…es, I remember that it was like that once…” but no definite answers as to how to combat that particular form of writer’s block that sometimes affects new writers: the inability to get started and keep the momentum going. When I was a young student just beginning to tell people (in a...
Read MoreMichael Hauge—A Different Way of Thinking about Character Development
Last month a number of other children’s authors and I attended the Screenwriters’ Summit in Toronto. I’ve already written about what I learned from speakers Linda Seger and John Truby, and now I’ve finally found a moment to write about my favourite speaker of the conference, Michael Hauge. Because all the speakers have books that they’d love you to buy, I haven’t summarized their entire talks; instead Ive chosen the one nugget of wisdom in each that struck me the most. Michael Hauge is well known for his Six Stage Plot Structure, and he writes very powerfully about how to create...
Read MoreCool Cover Tweak
Before and After: Have a look at the changes to changes to Witchlanders’ cover! Emails flew back and forth last week between my editor, my agent and myself about this small but important addition to my cover. Did I like it? At first I wasn’t sure. I was used to the gorgeous original, but agreed wholeheartedly that the cover without the sword was more suggestive of a paranormal, maybe even a paranormal romance, than the sword-swinging high fantasy that it is. Because we have a girl on the cover and my protagonists are boys, the fear that, beautiful as the cover was, we...
Read MoreAbout Me
Hi! I'm Lena, a young adult fantasy author from Toronto.