Cheryl Cowtan on Writing

I've participated in PitMad and NestPitch on Twitter, and both have provided the opportunity to pitch my manuscript to potential agents. I have also benefited from the wonderful opportunities to share my hopes, my dreams and my work with like-minded writers (who are also moms, dads, teachers, and members of communities all over the world). Currently I'm participating in PitchSlam, and I have found this pitching competition offers a new benefit--critique by professionals. The process works like this. Pitch 35 words Receive feedback for improvement Submit first 250 words Receive feedback for improvement Submit revised 35 word pitch and revised 250 words What I found is the reviewers caught some pretty obvious mistakes in my work that I did not catch after multiple reads. And once I followed the suggestions, the improvement of my pitch and first 250 is encouraging. Compare the results yourself. My first 35 word pitch: Name: Cheryl R Cowtan Genre: Adult / Dark F...

   Many blogs, articles and podcasts address the reader's error in not following submission guidelines as the reason for rejection.  However, there are many reasons for rejection and one of those can be the writer's style.     A writer's style is affected by the writer's "voice" and how the writer puts sentences together. Style is specific to each writer, it's unique. But that doesn't mean it cannot be changed.     Writers change their style to target their imagined reader, and to mould their writing to the genre and the format.    According to The Writing Centre, you can improve your style by cleaning up wordiness, by reading out loud to catch awkward phrasing, and by focusing on meaning and tone.     One suggestion is to remove repetitive redundant words that mean the same thing. I could remove either one of the "r" words in the previous sentence without affecting the overall meaning.    If you are ...

I've been watching YouTube videos of authors, and I have to say, some videos made me feel closer to the author, some impressed me, and some made me wish I had never watched it. Presenting yourself in video can be a great way to connect to an audience. The question is, "who" do you present? Do you show them your funky, home personality, or dress up and be professional, or get quirky and align yourself with your genre? I think these questions have to be answered by the person filming themselves. Usually, I go for professional, but today I killed two hours (and cracked myself up) creating an instructional film called Don't be a You-Boob on YouTube   I believe this film might be the beginning of my author-platform evolution from words to video. Watch the film to learn and laugh about the many things (namely 10 ... or 11) that you can do to improve your YouTube production.

The Synopsis Often publishers and agents ask for a synopsis of your novel manuscript. The synopsis functions to provide the barebones information about your plot, character and the stakes of your story. It is usually no longer than one page, which is what makes writing it difficult. The synopsis includes what happens, so it's like a mini-arc of your story. We start here, this happens, we go here and then that happens and we end up there. The SynopSnip Creating a SynopSnip is much more fun, more visually stimulating and is for a different audience--the reader. Consider the SynopSnip to be a very succinct snapshop of your synopsis. It is also in a format that makes it easy to distribute on social media, such as Facebook, Twitter etc. Take a look at the one below to see what I mean. The Example: The Fergus She Novel: The Fergus She Characters: Rachel (protagonist) Scarlet (antagonist) Grafen (antagonist) Angus (love interest) Plot: Rachel is the victim of an ancien...

Wordle is a tool that converts a section of your text into a graphic. The graphic will feature words that are used many times in your text in large font, and words that are less often used in smaller fonts. Believe it or not, Wordle will take up to 90,000 words (and possibly more), which means, you could paste in your entire novel manuscript. Once you see your Wordle graphic, you can determine what words you might be overusing in your manuscript. For example: Is the word "back" in the same size font as your protagonist's name? Doing a quick "Edit>replace" using MS word will allow you to take out redundant words, and then recopy the text back into Wordle. However, make sure you do this on a copy of your MS and not your original. Later, you can figure out how to edit your manuscript to reduce the number of times you use those common words. With Wordle, what you're hoping to create is a mini, visual synopsis of your novel. So character names should...

The format for the #pitchmadness pitch included starting with a 35 word logline. Trying to summarize my 90,000 high fantasy, novel manuscript into a two-page synopsis was challenging enough, but 35 words? I was a little unsure if I could do it well. According to tweets posted by the slush readers, the logline also had to fulfill the following: Make grammatical sense Make sense in terms of the plot Have the same tone as the manuscript Sound intriguing enough to encourage the reader to continue So I started. And then I revisited it over a few days. And then I put in the final logline revisions right before submission. And ended up submitting this: Laywren’s destiny is to make war and fill the goddess’ Hall with souls. But when betrayers block the return of those souls, Laywren becomes an instrument of extinction, and children become the most precious quest. The next step in submission was to pitch the first 250 words of the manuscript. Lucky for me, my manuscrip...

I have been following the #Pitchmadness posts on Twitter and noticed that the slush readers have made a few comments about some of the #Pitchers not properly identifying their genres. So I've put together a flow chart writers or readers can use to identify the genre of their novel. In this post, I'm specifically going to be addressing genre for fiction novels. Genre is a category that novels can be placed in based on the content, the theme, the characters and other conventions in the story. Conventions are those consistent elements that we read about over and over. For example: a convention or common element in fantasy is magic. Easy right? Not really. Especially when a novel can belong to a sub-genre. Then it gets tricky. A way to avoid confusion is to think about the purpose or reason the author wrote the novel, and to think about how the reader would react to the novel. So let's put your novel to the test. When you write a novel you use a number of tricks (beyond t...

Get ready to post your manuscript pitches to eager agents March 10th. See details and rules at www.brenda-drake.com.

Oh sorrow! Oh my! Oh me! I just discovered PitchMAS ten days too late. And I'm going to post about it, so you and I never miss it again. PitchMAS seems to be a query-fest that occurs between December 15th and 16th during which authors can submit a 35-word pitch through email to the twitter pitch geniuses. On December 19th, the top 75 pitches will be posted on this blog   http://pitchmas.blogspot.ca/  and agents and publishers will weed through and make comments or request manuscript pages. On December 20th, everyone and anyone can tweet their 140 character pitches with the hashtag #PitchMAS. The line-up of  ready and willing publishers and agents just waiting to find that perfect twitter pitch is pretty impressive, not to mention all of the authors and other industry folk following for fun. (Check out the list here  http://pitchmas.blogspot.ca/2013/11/epic-announcement-pitchmas-2013.html ). So, it's over. How can it help us now? Easy. Read through the list...

I wasn't going to go with an agent for my novel and here are the reasons why: Agents generally take 15%  Publishers list their submission guidelines on their web pages, and I can follow those Query letter example s abound, and I can apply those Lawyers share free publishing contracts with do and don't list s, and I can read those Kindle offers online publishing , and I can learn from their format suggestions DuoTrope and Submission Grinder offer access to calls for submissions, and I can track mine I have three family members who are active in the book industry, and I can ask them And I did all that. And I submitted my novel, "The Precious Quest" to three of the biggest fantasy publishers who accept submissions from authors.  A year and a half later, and three rejections later, I have run out of big publishers who accept high fantasy and who accept from unagented authors. Still confident, I felt I could get my 90,000 word, high fantasy that took ...

As a new Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) author, I have learned a few formatting points that I would like to pass onto you. KDP requests that your manuscript be formatted in MS Word or HTML. If you are writing or revising your content in Word, like I did, you need to know the following: INDENTS: Don't use spaces or tabs. Use the "Paragraph" feature and "Indent" "First Line" by 0.5" or 1.27cm. Paragraph returns may not hold. Instead go into "Paragraph" again and set "After" "Spacing" to 10. Insert "Page Breaks" between chapters or text may run together on Kindle. Insert "Pictures". Don't cut and paste. Don't use Headers and Footers, or page numbers in either. Do use "Header" font formatting for your chapter titles as Kindle will turn this into easy-to-use navigation. Do insert a "Book Mark" at your Table of Contents and nam...

I self-published The "OpenYar Mouth" Health Care Lottery picture book in 2006. Today, I'm going to republish it as a Kindle book. I will blog as I go, and provide all the steps below. I’ve never done this before, so let's see how long it takes. 3:00 p.m.   Start! Go to Amazon.com or .ca and sign in Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the menu link ""independently publish with us" This takes you to the "Take Control of Independent Publishing" page which features three publishing options: Kindle, print and audio. For this adventure, I'm choosing Kindle. Read and (if you want) accept the terms. Update your contact information including your phone number (3:15 p.m.) Provide bank account information for the deposit of royalties (excited yet?) Once you save your bank account info, your publisher code will be showing at the left. Capture that and keep it somewhere.  Here is...