Most-read authors & other randomness

Hello out there! I apologize for the lack of blogging lately, and the missed Titanic Tuesdays this week. It’s been a crazy week at the day job, so I haven’t had as much free time as I’d like lately. I also spent the whole weekend working on my next book, which meant I didn’t get a TT post ready as I usually do. Hopefully I’ll be back next week with it.

Anyone a member of GoodReads? Well, they have a new feature (or at least, new to me, as I didn’t notice it until I saw it mentioned on another blog today) that shows you who your most-read authors are. It’s kind of neat. I was going to link to it, but the link is personalized to your account, so the best way to get to it is to go to any of your shelves, and in the left-hand column, there’s a section called “tools.” The link is in that group.

My most-read is interesting. I have 833 book on my “read” shelf, so that’s a lot of authors to organize. (I’m going by my personal account, which I’ve had much longer than my writer account, and therefore has more books recorded.) According to GoodReads, my #1 most-read author is Nora Roberts and #2 is J.D. Robb . Since Nora and J.D are the same person, that means I’ve read 91 of her books. Damn! That woman is impressively prolific, because that’s not nearly all the books she’s written. Here’s the rest of my top ten, just for giggles.

1. Nora Roberts (49 read)
2. J.D. Robb (42 books—man, has the In Death series really got that many???)
3. Janet Evanovich (31 read)
4. Stephen King (29 read, though that will be 30 soon, as I’m getting ready to start 11/22/63 this weekend!)
5. A tie between Charlaine Harris (25 read) and V.C. Andrews, who I haven’t read in ages, but used to love when I was younger.
6. Laurell K. Hamilton (22 read) She was once my favorite author – her Anita Blake series was pretty much my main inspiration to write vampire fiction, but lately the books have gotten away from what I loved most about them. Still, I’m loyal, so I continue to read, hoping one day they’ll get back to the good stuff.
7. Sherrilyn Kenyon (21 read)
8. Anne Rice (17 read) My original favorite vampire series, until it, too, got too weird. I haven’t read her more recent stuff, but I did like her Mayfair witches series.
9. Lynn Kurland (15 read) I love her time travel romances.
10. Another tie at 14 books each. This time between Victoria Laurie (she has two great series: Abby Cooper, Psychic Eye and her Ghost Hunter series) and Lynsay Sands, who writes the fantastic Argeneau Vampires series. It’s an original twist on the vampire myth that I love, and is lighter than most vamp romances.

Okay, so technically that went into #11 on the GoodReads list due to the ties, and was really 12 authors. Close enough.

Since it’s Veteran’s Day and therefore the banks and post office are closed, I was able to duck out of work early. This is good, because maybe today I will actually get that final revision started on my next book. Once I’ve done that, I can send it off to be read by someone that isn’t as close to it, who can hopefully help me work out the kinks and maybe slim it down a little more. (While I’ve done a good job hacking it down for it’s original 200,000+ word count to only 134,000, I’d still like to shave another 20k off if possible.) But before I do that, I need to rework the opening, tweak one of the characters some and remove an element from the ending I don’t like. If I can get that all done this weekend, I will be very happy.

While I’m doing this last read-through, I also need to keep my eyes out for possible titles, as it looks like I’m going to have to re-name it. *sigh* I’ve always been terrible at titles, but this was the ONE book that practically named itself. I was so happy that I wouldn’t have to struggle with naming it … until a few weeks ago when I discovered two other Urban Fantasy novels that came out recently with the same title (Bloodstone). Grr. So either I need to find a way to add to the title to make it more unique, or come up with a new one altogether. I have a similar issue right now with my current book, as Destined is not only the latest in P.C. Cast’s fabulous House of Night series, but another paranormal romance book is being released this month with that title. It doesn’t help that Destined is a common word, and therefore not easy to search without adding my name. So I want my next book to have a more unique title.

Since it’s also the first in a series, I want something I can use as a naming convention for later books. With Bloodstone, each subsequent novel was going to have a gemstone in the title. Maybe I can come up with something that refers to the setting (Miami) instead. I need something different: too many other UF series with vampires use “blood” or “death” in the titles, so I’m making an effort to avoid that. Another reason to toss out Bloodstone, I suppose. One option could be to change the bloodstone in the book to a different stone and use that, but I haven’t found one that would work yet. It doesn’t have to be a bloodstone, just a stone that isn’t commonly used in jewelry (so not a birthstone). I liked that the name was a wink to the vampire element in the book, and that it was kind of ugly, making it stand out. (It’s part of a murder case, so it needs to be recognizable.) I’m sure there’s another stone out there I could substitute if I can’t come up with another title idea. Either way, I’ll keep thinking. Eventually something is bound to come to me!

See what I mean? It’s not exactly pretty (some are more green than black), and it’s very distinguishable. If anyone has any suggestions for a good alternate, I’m open to them!

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Happy Memorial Day

It's a holiday weekend, which means I have an extra day off and therefore should be getting all sorts of work done on my book, right?  Well... sort of. I did get some things done, mostly yesterday. I finished up some last-minute research (found a new book at the library I hadn't read yet, as well as a few on Google Books) and changed around a scene in the novel to better fit the timeline, am about 95% settled on a title (finally!), am about 75% settled on a cover design (found an awesome font yesterday that got the design geek in me all excited), and started creating my web site. I have everything done in the Kindle version except the copyright and "About the Author" sections (I never know what to say about myself), so I'll soon be able to do a final read-through of that for formatting quirks.

All in all, it hasn't been a complete waste of a weekend.  On the other hand, I've also spent way more time than I should playing Yahtzee on my iPad. (EA Games had a sale this weekend. It was only $0.99! How could I resist?)  I still have a day left, and my plan is to get the web site closer to finished, and maybe finally get that author section done so I can start that final Kindle pass. If neither of those are inspiring enough to get my butt in gear, I may skip them and start the print formatting in InDesign instead. I know that's going to take some time, so the sooner I get started, the better.

I wish I was 100% on more of these decisions, though. I'd feel much better if I was sure of the title and cover art, but I keep going back and forth on both. Where the cover is concerned, I have 2 versions: a light and a dark. The light version uses a photo of the Titanic as it sailed away from Ireland, and while it's pretty, I worry that it looks too much like a literary fiction cover and not a paranormal/time travel/romance cover.  And while the dark cover (featuring a dark sea and iceberg) probably fits the theme of the book better, it's very dark, and I worry it won't show up well in ereaders or in thumbnail form on sites like Amazon. *sigh* I'm torn. I'm tempted to scrap them both and start over, but... ugh. I don't want to start over! So, the debate continues.

Another dilemma I'm running into involves the web site. I have a design that I think I like, but the hardest part is going to be content. What do you put on an author website when you only have one book out? (Or one book that has yet to come out?) I already have a separate blog, which I'll obviously be linking into the site when the time comes, but then what? I need content for the home page as well as the "books" page that will one day list all of my novels. For now, with just the one book, it's going to look pretty sparse.  I know I'll have a synopsis and possibly a short excerpt, as well as links to all the places it can be purchased (my goal is to have it available for all the various ereaders, iBooks, and a print version from either CreateSpace or Lulu). If I'm feeling brave, I may even tease whichever novel I decide to release next, if I decide by the time the website goes live. Outside of that, what else is there to say? It's frustrating. Maybe I'll spend some time googling around and looking at sites of other new authors, see what they have. When all else fails, research!

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Title Trouble

I'm terrible at titles. When I used to write more casually, I would use song titles because they were all I could ever come up with. Now, since I'm aiming to publish my book soon, a song title would be a bad idea. Not original, for one, but most likely copyright infringement as well. As I used to work in music copyright, I have a healthy respect for it and don't want to take any chances. Besides, I want my book's title to stand out, not get confused with a song.

Up until recently, the working title for my novel was Ship of Dreams. The bulk of the plot takes place on the Titanic, so it was a fitting name—until I did an Amazon search yesterday and found more than just a couple of books with the same name. So... back to the drawing board.

I'm not entirely upset by this. I knew all along that my title wasn't very good. It was bland and unoriginal, but it fit my book, so I thought that would be all right. In a way, I guess this is a blessing in disguise: the impetus for me to get off my lazy butt and come up with something better. I'm about 75% of the way through my latest edit (mainly for Kindle formatting errors, but also a general edit as I never seem to be happy with my work and am always making changes), so maybe some turn of phrase in that last 25% will jump out at me as a good title. One can only hope, because if it doesn't, I need to start brainstorming, and as mentioned at the start of this post, I'm awful at coming up with titles. I'm almost as bad at naming characters, but at least there are baby name books and sites out there to help with that task.

At least I learned something out of this. Before you get too set on a title, do an Amazon search. See if there are other books out there with it.  If there are, are there a lot? Are there any in the same genre as yours? It's not necessarily bad for more than one book to have the same title, especially if the title is simple, but only if the books are vastly different. Otherwise you risk confusion. The same principle works with pen names. If you find that there are other writers out there that share your name (or the name you want to use), it might not be a bad idea to find another one. I made sure to search around with Allison Kraft before I chose it. Not just on Amazon, but Google in general, as well as godaddy.com (had to make sure the domain name wasn't already taken). I was toying with another surname, but found the .com was already taken. So, decision made: Kraft it was.

For anyone wondering where I got Kraft in the first place, it's a family name. I've become very interested in genealogy in the last couple of years, and thought it would be a nice way to honor my roots. If I'm not going to use my real last name (it's hard to pronounce and spell for some), it seemed like I should at least stick with something in the family, rather than picking a random name out nowhere. My grandmother was a Kraft (sadly, no relation to the cheese), and the name is close in length and alphabet to my real name, so it felt right.

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