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What you Thought

7/28/2014

In last week's blog I posted the images of five different covers from Elizabeth Wein's YA novel Code Name Verity and asked you what you thought. Your answers were interesting, so here's a report:

Less than a third of you had read this book. If you are interested in World War Two books, this one's a goodie. It features two very different strong female voices, and reading each one's account of events, sometimes the same event from two very different points of view, is really interesting. One thing I found fascinating is that one of the characters is writing under extreme duress and knows that her words are going to be read by the enemy. So how much of her writing is true and how much is written to throw the enemy off? Sometimes the reader gets a clue, but sometimes the reader doesn't. It makes for layer upon layer of reading analysis, which is a fun game.

When I asked which cover grabbed your attention, people voted all over the board. However, the middle cover got the most votes. The middle cover is the one that I first saw, and I liked it well enough to use it as a good example when I submitted cover that I liked to the man who designed the cover for my World War II novel Code: Elephants on the Moon. It was a special favorite of those who'd already read the book but, interestingly enough, it was not the cover that those who'd read the book thought did the best job of portraying the book.

Almost all of you thought that the cover on the far right best depicted what Code Name Verity was about. This was true both for those who'd read the book and for those of you who based your opinion simply on my synopsis.

And one more bit of interesting data: no one voted for the cover on the far left. Not as the one that grabbed your attention nor as the one that best depicted the story. Interestingly, the cover on the far left is the one that you get when you go onto Amazon. I think that means that some publicist or advertising exec somewhere thinks that's the cover that will reel in the readers, but we disagree.

So, what do you think? I'd love for you to comment about how you voted and why, and I'd especially like to hear from those of you who've read Code Name Verity as to what you thought.

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Code Name: Cover

7/21/2014

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Everyone knows the saying "Don't judge a book by its cover." Everyone also knows that everyone does exactly that. Mark Coker, the guy behind Smashwords, one of the premier sites for self-pubed ebooks, says "your cover image is the first impression you make on a prospective reader. A great cover image makes a promise to the reader. It tells the reader, “I’m the book you’re looking for.”

So how do you decide what images will make readers decide that your book is the one they're looking for? Tricky question.

Just how tricky this question is to answer becomes obvious when you look at the five different covers that have graced Elizabeth Wein's new YA historical fiction Code Name Verity. Wein's novel is about what happens to two women whose plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France in 1943, and it's told in first person through the writings of the two women. The cover on the left pictures a plane trailing blood-red smoke as it goes down, a dark silhouette of a woman, and a rose, and I can say without giving too much away that all three images are appropriate, although I am not enough of an airplane enthusiast to tell you if the plane on the cover is the right kind or not. The next cover shows two women's arms bound together, and while it does show how the two characters are emotionally bound to one another, I first wondered if this novel was about lesbian lovers or bondage rituals. The middle cover shows two old bicycles against a stone wall, with bombers in the background and is, like the first cover, appropriate although not as mysterious or dark as the first cover. The remaining two covers have women's faces and the suggestion of imprisonment: one with high strung barbed wire and the other with the shadow of fencing. One features a red gash across the woman's face; the other, the bombers again. Two of the women seem to have dark hair and eyes. The third looks like a blue-eyed blonde, which is what the woman whose code name was Verity was.

I've added a little more about this book to my web page on Code: Elephants on the Moon, in the for further reading section.

I first came across this novel when I was looking specifically for cover ideas for Code: Elephants on the Moon, and at that point the only cover I saw was the center one. I liked the bombers and, since bombers also feature in my novel, I decided to include them in my cover design.

So what do you think? If you had to judge Code Name Verity by its cover, which would you choose?

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Boarding the Boat: A Fable for our time

7/20/2014

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There was once a very determined young girl who decided to go on a very long trip. to a far, distant land. She packed her carpet bag and walked down the hill to the harbor. There she looked at a great number of vessels lying at anchor.

The girl saw big ships and little ships, wooden ships and metal ships, ships with sails and ships with smokestacks that belched rolling clouds of black, sooty smoke. She walked up and down the shore for a very long time before she found the one that seemed just right for her: a great cruise ship with tall, golden sides. A nearby marquee promised that all who boarded it would have a lovely adventure. But no sooner had she stepped onto the gangplank than a man in a uniform blocked her way.
     "Do you have a ticket?" the man asked in a stern voice. The girl confessed that she didn't, and he turned her away. She walked back up the hill to her cottage feeling very downhearted.
     The girl worked for years before she earned enough money to buy a ticket for a golden cruise ship. Finally ticket in one hand and carpetbag in the other, she walked back down the hill to the harbor.
     But this time, she could find no golden cruise ships at anchor. There were still big ships and little ships, wooden ships and metal ships, ships with sails and ships with smokestacks belching black, sooty smoke, but none looked like the one she had bought the ticket for.
     "Times have changed. Nothing is as posh as it used to be," the man in the uniform explained when she asked him. He assured her that there were still plenty of berths on the other ships for a determined young girl who wanted to go on a very long trip to a distant land.
     For many days the girl returned to the shore each morning. She walked up and down, trying to decide which ship to embark on. Some looked too big, and she feared she would get lost on their vast decks. Other ships were decked with sparkling garlands and had fine bands playing aboard them. When she approached of of these, the steward sniffed and said that it wasn't built for the likes of her. She sniffed right back, then marched away, her head held high.
     Once she saw a ship that seemed to be listing to one sided and taking on water. She watched as the crew manned the pumps, determined to keep it afloat. She walked away very quickly.
     As she walked along, one of the boats cast off its lines and left the harbor. She waved her handkerchief at the excited passengers and wished that she could be among them. Feeling sad and discouraged, the girl sat down on an overturned bucket and put her head in her hands.
     The girl was on the verge of tears when she heard a little bird twitter. She looked up and saw that it was perched on the edge of a little rowboat. The rowboat seemed to be dancing as the gentle waves lifted it up and set it back down. Its oars lay across the seat, waiting for someone to set them in the oarlocks and dip them into the water.
     The girl decided that she was that someone. She set her carpetbag into the boat, settled onto the seat, and began rowing. Before she knew it, she was leaving the harbor.
     The girl is rowing still. Sometimes she sees others standing on the shore, waiving their handkerchiefs at her, and she waves back. Sometimes a large ship passes by and she must row hard to keep its wake from swamping her. But she is on her way, and although she does not know for sure just how long her very long trip will be, she knows she is closer to that distant land than she had been the day before.

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Killing the Gatekeepers

7/7/2014

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When I first began submitting manuscripts to editors nearly twenty years ago, the editors were the gatekeepers. They were the people who stood between a would-be author and publication, making sure that the books that were published were worthy of publication. The only way around these gatekeepers was using a vanity press, which was both expensive and, as the name suggests, a way for the vain but not erudite, to get published.

Back then, home computers were still rare and the internet was in its infancy. The submission process involved printing out one's manuscript and a cover letter on a dot matrix printer, using a long, accordion-folded paper that had to be ripped apart along perforations to produce pages. These were stuffed, along with a SASE, or stamped, self-addressed envelope, into a large manila envelope. Then the waiting began. My recollection was that the wait averaged anywhere from two weeks to three months. The fastest I ever got a manuscript back was one day, when I managed to fold up the envelope TO the editor and stick it IN the SASE with the other materials. The longest I ever waited was a year and a half, at the end of which I received a letter from a widow apologizing that her husband the editor had died and it had taken her some time to deal with the pile of papers he left behind. But in those early years I always did get some kind of response. One was a scrawled "No Thnx" on the bottom of my query. Some were standard form rejections, photocopied until they were pale and listless. But many were personal, encouraging and helpful.

But then the industry started to change. As home computers became more common, so did the number of people who thought they had produced the great American novel. Overwhelmed editors began putting up barricades to stem the barrage: gatekeepers for the gatekeepers. First houses that had welcomed manuscripts now wanted only queries, then only queries from writers who had membership in a professional organization such as SCBWI. Then I began seeing stipulations that houses were only accepting manuscripts from authors with agents, followed by agents who only wanted manuscripts from people they had met at conferences. The gatekeepers seemed to be proliferating; the distance between manuscript and publication more daunting. And perhaps even worse, many houses and agents changed their policy so that they only time they contacted you was if they were interested. Instead of waiting a month or six months for a rejection, one now waited forever for a rejection that would never come at all. It's now been years since I received a personal, encouraging or helpful rejection. That's a long time to stand at a door and wait.

Some of the gatekeepers out there are not really gatekeepers at all, but hucksters trying to take money from desperate writers. They stand at the gate and pronounce that they have the key, and they will share it with you for only $199, or $250, or $1,000. They tell you that if you let them send out your queries or write your business plan, or edit your manuscripts: if you attend their conferences or webinars, join their clubs, follow them on Twitter, you will be successful. And maybe you will. But maybe you will just be poorer.

Yet, at the same time that getting through the ever-lengthening line of gatekeepers seemed more and more like running a dispiriting and expensive gauntlet, other doors were opening. Print on demand and e publication joined vanity presses as a way to put one's writing out to the public. Years ago a friend and I talked about this. She encouraged me to give it a try. I didn't. I wasn't ready to rattle the knobs on any of those other doors.

The reason I wasn't ready is because I was still waiting for a gatekeeper to allow me to pass. I wanted someone - an agent or editor - to tell me that I was good enough - that my manuscript was good enough. I wanted a gatekeeper to assure me that I wasn't being vain in believing that I had a story to tell. I wanted validation. It didn't seem to matter what friends and critique buddies had said.

Then suddenly this spring, something happened. I don't know what it was, really. I just suddenly knew that I didn't need to wait for the validation of a gatekeeper to get published. I could open a door myself, without their approval.
Because really, it wasn't an editor or an agent who was keeping me from being published. They weren't the true gatekeeper. Fear was. And I wasn't going to let my fear stop me anymore.

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What you Thought

Code Name: Cover

Judging Code Name Verity's cover

Boarding the Boat: A Fable for our time

Killing the Gatekeepers

ABout Jennifer Bohnhoff

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