Looking for those precious story nuggets.
[As a special feature for the time I’m on vacation, Bare Knuckle Writer is bringing you Guest Posts by random mental patients friends of mine. Be nice to them.]
Our illustrious leader is on vacation this week, so in addition to booby trapping her house and putting her cats on Kijiji,* I’m staging a hostile takeover of her blog. I need to preach at you conveniently assembled penmonkeys for a second.
You see, I’m not just a writer and a reviewer. I’m also a voracious book-eating tiger. I need a dozen a month just to survive. Dreck gives me acid reflux, so whenever I prowl the Goodreads giveaways I reject about a hundred books by new authors who made the same dumb mistakes as the last hundred. In the interests of improving my digestion and your bottom line, here is a list of things to do if you want me to eat read your book.
1. Name it something interesting.
Your title is your one chance to grab my attention. Don’t blow it by naming your book Nonspecific 2: The Broadening. Your title should also tell me about the tone and content of the story. Game of Thrones says ‘pseudomedieval political infighting’ while The Graveyard Book says ‘like The Jungle Book, but with dead things.’ Avoid all puns unless your book is funny.**
2. Don’t photoshop your own cover.***
I know ‘they’ say you should never judge a book by its cover, but ‘they’ are whiners who don’t want to put time and money into fixing crappy book covers. If you don’t care enough about your book to pay an artist with actual talent to design your cover, why should I believe you care enough to write it well?
3. Blurbs are where you tell me what happens.
Don’t ask questions. Don’t quote Amazon reviews. Boil the essentials down to a couple of sentences**** and TELL ME WHAT HAPPENS. If you can’t organize your thoughts well enough to write a coherent paragraph, I’m going to assume your scatty brain can’t possibly handle a whole book.
4. Proofread your Goodreads page.
Spellcheck does a lot of the legwork when it comes to fixing typos, but it won’t catch clumsy wording and it definitely won’t recode your HTML if you missed a bracket. So double-check that your finished page isn’t loaded with ampersands before you rely on it to make all your hopes and dreams come true.
5. Avoid pay-to-play publishers like the plague they are.
You want to self-publish? Great. Start your own publishing company. Give it a name. Hire an editor. Create a website. Register for an ISBN. Don’t just hand over your life savings to a vanity publisher, because in my world ‘Createspace’ means ‘no typos were harmed during the publishing of this novel.’
Katrina Nicholson is a writer, reviewer, and bareknuckle catsitter. She lives across the street at www.refrigeratorbox.org.
*For sale: one tangled furbeast, one Irish dunderhead, and a honey badger.
**Yes, even the really clever ones.
***Or draw it with pencil crayons, or hire your twelve-year-old nephew who’s ‘really good with computers’ to do it.
****Not a meandering 3,000 word essay. My attention span is not that lon–SQUIRREL!
Bare Knuckle Writer 
Funny how I knew this was written by Kat by the end of the first paragraph. 😉
Just as a side note, CreateSpace is actually a good choice for a book *printer.* However, I’ve seen some of their work with other aspects of the process and yeah, no.