Cheryl Cowtan on Writing

Category: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Mystery > International Mystery and Crime I am going to use the book cover comparison feature of Pronoun’s book publishing application to help understand which design elements are trending in the International Mystery and Crime category. I used Pronoun to prepare my Dark Fantasy novel, Girl Desecrated, for publication, and many features such as category comparison, placement, keyword achievability and popularity, all helped me place my novel in the best position of discoverability for my target reader. I n this research, I’m looking for trends and consistencies in the book covers of the International Mystery and Crime category to determine how to best design a book cover for this genre. I have taken screen shots of Pronoun’s view of top ranking book covers of both traditional and indie published novels. I should note that many top-ranked traditionally published books in this genre are by the same author, David Baldacci, which c...

"If you want me out of your life, you'll have to paint me 100 more waifs--100 more Keanes". How does it happen? How can someone take over your art, your heart's-work, and pass it off as their own and you just let it happen? If you've ever wondered how people get themselves stuck in situations that don't serve them, and often harm them, you need to watch the movie "Big Eyes" on Netflix. The film is based on the true story of Margaret Keane, artist of the "big eyes" waif portraits. For 10 years, her husband claimed he was the artist who created her work, and though he couldn't paint, he was a genius salesman and was able to make quite a bit of money and gain a lot of fame through his sales skills. Walter never painted a thing. His wife produced all the paintings for him to sell, often working herself to sleep in a small studio in their house. Even Margaret's daughter was lied to. The film succeeds, for me, in the way it s...

So, Girl Desecrated, my first book in The Fergus She series, has been out for six months. At first, sales were quite good. After the first month or so, sales dropped and I started advertising to increase visibility. Book reviews started to increase, and they were coming in strong (4-5 stars). Based on reviews, I knew readers were enjoying the book. Kim Duquette rated it  I t was amazing From time to time you discover a book that you just can't put down. Girl Desecrated is that book. A modern woman with an ancient burden. Let the world fall down around me...I'll be reading! But still, many click thrus to the book were not resulting in sales. So, what was wrong? I did some research on back cover copy . Now that my novel was out, I could pinpoint my target reader a little better using data. Knowing who was reading, helped me understand how to sell - which words to choose, rhythms to use, etc. Rhythm was really important. I did a search o...

I have been setting Goodreads to the side as I build my author platform, and even just writing this statement strikes me right in the oxymorons. Why? Because, people join Goodreads to talk about books, share books, review books, put books on their shelves, and promote books. Now that my first adult horror novel, "Girl Desecrated",  is launched, I realize I should have been focused on this group of potential readers instead of trying to sift through Facebook and Twitter. You see, some people on Facebook like to read. Some people on Twitter like to read. But the 55 million Goodread members are an author's goldmine because everyone on the site likes to read. So, there's gold in them thar hills! How do we get it out? Obvious step #1: Create an author page and load up a book. Here is what else you can do: The Goodreads' initiative that created the most buzz for my book was a giveaway . The giveaways are for print books only, at this time. You pick your book,...

The process from novel drafting to book promotion can be a long, confusing journey of pitfalls that costs us money, causes us to doubt ourselves, and can dampen the spark that gave us the courage to start in the first place. Until a self-publishing degree is offered at our local universities, we authors have to educate ourselves on the complexities of self-publishing. There are thousands of self-taught experts writing blogs, selling books, broadcasting, and offering lessons via video to help authors navigate this learning curve. We could spend years  exploring and mining the extensive market of self-publishing information, and I have. The trouble is, when we are surrounded by a plethora of information and a multitude of people pointing us in different directions, we get bogged down with information overload and become mired in indecision. In my upcoming book, How to Solve the Top 5 Indie Author Problems, I examine the five challenges many indie authors fac...

On Saturday Feb 4th, I attended GenreCon2017 in Guelph Ontario, where, for the first time ever, I tried selling my novel at a Con. I was armed with some realistic expectations from Brandon Sanderson (Writing Excuses), Joanna Penn (The Creative Penn), and other authors I network with, so I'm actually quite pleased with how things went. I set realistic goals and as a result, succeeded at all of them, and I learned a few things about selling at conferences. #1 I can sell at a Con and keep my pride too :) I took " Girl Desecrated ", first-in-series of The Fergus She , which I published on Halloween 2016. I had a little marketing scheme going, which included pre-preparing a 3 second blurb, a 30 second blurb, and offering free tree-of-life bracelets with each sale. I also dropped my novel's price $4 from the Amazon.ca cost, and signed each copy with a quote from the novel. “Bad-girls, highlanders and vampires, in Guelph!” Now, I know I could have been more ...

We already know readers judge books by their covers. If you are still fighting this social truth, then close your eyes, take a deep breath and release your rebellion to the universe. Repeat after me, "Readers judge books by their covers". If the above is true (and it is), can we say books in specific categories or genre s have similar and distinct styles, fonts and images used in book cover design? A quick scan of Goodreads can provide a visual for us to examine, but we could never go through as many books in as short a time, or with as much brain power as a computer could. Brian Kenji Iwana and Seiichi Uchida conducted a study at the Kyushu University in Japan to determine if book genre could be guessed by cover design. What's interesting is they used a "Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to predict the genre of a book based on the visual clues". In case you care... Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), in particular, are multilayer n...