Lousy Book Covers ReBlogged

By:  Kimberly Hitchens is the founder and owner of Booknook.biz, an ebook production company that has produced over 2,000 ebooks for over 750 authors and imprints.

I genuinely do know that I'm a dreadful nag.  In my first post here at CFC, I posted the second part of my discussion on book covers (Cover Design Calypso, Part II), which appeared here in November of 2011, and then reposted the first portion, which originally appeared on my own website, Cover Design Calypso, Part I, here on CFC during the Christmas holiday, I did indeed nag our gentle readers about the import of good cover art.  In thinking about it (and in my happy treks around the Internet), I discovered a source that has become a daily stop for me, before I open my emails--it's called "Lousy Book Covers" (on tumblr) and it's the CakeWrecks of book covers.  If you haven't discovered CakeWrecks, ("Where Professional Cakes Go Horribly, Hilariously Wrong") you don't know how to live, but suffice it to say:  LousyBookCovers is worth a daily visit. 

And it occurred to me, in my enjoyment of LBC, that I'd learned an old but valuable lesson:  a picture is worth a thousand words.  And thus, this week's nag is an urge for you to visit LousyBookCovers, and think to yourself:  Would I ever pick up this book and flip through the pages?

Since Blogger won't allow you to reblog from Tumblr, and my understanding of the associated rights isn't quite thorough (Mr. Shumate pulls the images through his Amazon associates link, and I don't know how he manages to obtain only the cover images, sans Amazon text--I think it's a Tumblr thing, which is, after all, an images weblog site), here are some links to his Tumblr blog that I know reinforced my theories on "what NOT TO DO" when creating a cover:

Erotic Refugees:  (captioned, "We don't want your kind here!")

Talon of the Raptor Clan (captioned:  "I don't want to startle you, but you have an eagle where your hair should be."

Goat Suckin' --- Hotter Than It Sounds (captioned:  "It would have to be, wouldn't it?")

Elfthade (captioned:  "Words fail me.")

And,

If You Miss the Train Im [sic] On (captioned:  "On the plus side, the unreadable font almost hides the fact that the apostrophe is missing")

Now, trust me when I tell you:  there are plenty more.  These aren't even the worst; they're just five examples of why you not only need Beta readers for your book (not to mention editors and critique groups!!), but for your cover design as well.  Remember two things:  if you enjoy LBC from now on, you have me to thank.  (Okay, really, you have Nate Shumate to thank, the evil genius behind LousyBookCovers, but, hey, I am the one who toldja!).  Secondly:  when you look at your cover, close your eyes and just imagine:  "can my cover end up on Lousy Book Covers?"  If the answer is yes, or maybe:  get working on that redesign!  (if you're on a budget, don't forget our Super-Secret Budget Saving Tip from Cover Calypso 2:  Check out Goonwrite.com, for high-quality pre-made covers.) 

If you have a good amount of memory on your computer, click through and view Nate's "ARCHIVE," which will leave you gasping for air, because you'll either be crying or laughing so hard, you won't be able to breathe.  If these don't make you laugh, you're clearly a cyborg designed by Cyberdyne systems, and they left out your humor module. 

You've been warned!  The posts are all in good fun--but an object lesson is to be had, as well. 

Next time:  actually, I have absolutely no idea. 

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When we last left Gayle, she was forgetting something...

I had an entire essay to post for my turn last Thursday, then forgot to actually post the darn thing, so LJ told me to just post it on Saturday. I thought I would rework it slightly to cover why I got so befuddled Wednesday evening. As they say, when life hands you lemons, squeeze the crap out of them. Then stick the peels down the garbage disposal to remove odors, and trade the juice for chocolate.

My brain flew out the window on Wednesday because my new book finally hit Amazon and I needed to let everyone know. It's not a mystery book, it's another humor book. I now have two humor books and two mysteries.

By quantity, I write more humor than mystery, simply because, since 2005, I've provided the Placentia News-Times with 600 words every week, telling some story about my family in the most exaggerated, and hopefully funniest, way possible. And yet, when people ask me what I write, I tell them I write murder mysteries.

I try to say that with a demure smile.

I'm guessing there are probably 100 mystery writers to every 1 humor writer. Just go into any bookstore and look around. "Mystery" gets its own section "Humor" gets one shelf. So why do I want to align myself with an ocean of writers, instead of trying to be the big fish in the smaller pond?

The problem with being a humor writer is that comedy is so subjective. Everyone recognizes that Hamlet is a tragedy, even if they are not moved to tears. However, if I walked across the room, tripped spectacularly and fell in a heap, some people would gasp and rush to my side, and some people would help me eventually, after they stopped laughing.

Because some people laugh at slapstick. Others laugh at erudite, New Yorker stories. There are people who love bawdy humor, who love puns, who love knock-knock jokes, etc. If you write something which appeals to one of these groups, they will pronounce you funny. The rest of the folks, however, will not say, "Yes, I recognize it as humor, but it's really not my style."

They will say, "I didn't laugh, therefore, it wasn't funny."

Therefore, you are not funny. You big loser.

Even if you feel confident in being humorous within your group, and you are a good writer, humor is very difficult to write. When I'm writing my mysteries, my character can trip over a table or the table without too much trouble. Action is more forgiving. In humor, though, one word can make or break the joke. One example:

Erma Bombeck released a book of her columns called, I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression. Funny title, yes? What if the word "the" was replaced by "my"? Suddenly, I Lost Everything in My Post-Natal Depression isn't so funny. It's now a sad, yet ultimately redeeming memoir (that we've all seen before).

So now I'm consumed with my new book, checking to see if it's on Amazon yet, and now is it on Barnes & Noble? I'm doing a Goodreads giveaway, and I put a Media Release on my website. I'll be talking about it briefly on my own little two-cents-worth blog. If you're a writer, you know the drill, and how everything else falls away while you're taking care of the bird in your hand.

So how do you market humor? Ideally, you're looking for that subset of people who laugh at the things you find funny, and trying to avoid the people who don't get you. The straight approach of "Read this book, it'll make you laugh," doesn't always work. Maybe some people will think it's funny, but others will take it as a dare. I love to laugh, but when I see ads for books or movies that tell me they're "uproarious", "hilarious", "gut-bustingly funny", etc, I want to run the other way. Mention "zany" or "wacky" and I'm in the next county.

Here are some of my rules for marketing.

1. If you're writing humor within a genre, market the genre. My mysteries have a lot of humor, but I'm afraid if I brag about how hilarious they are, I am just begging for a snarky beatdown. Instead, I describe my mysteries as fun romps. I allude to the humor, as in, "it's got a little humor in it." That way, either readers like the story and don't get the humor, or think it's funny and I'm being too modest, or don't like the story anyway, making it a moot point.

2. If you're writing straight humor, compare it to someone else's style. This doesn't mean you're copying them. It means you write in the tradition of Robert Benchley, or David Sedaris, or Tina Fey, etc. Or perhaps, like me, you write Erma Bombeck-style, slice-of-life humor. It's like saying the password, opening the door, and finding your people.

3. Market your sense of humor. This means writing your ad copy, your press releases, and all other marketing materials in your "funny" voice. If you write a blog, you should include your humor there. If you have a website, same thing applies. This goes back to the first rule of writing: show, don't tell. Don't tell your reader they'll laugh if they read your book. Show them the funny!

4. Last, your marketing kit should include plenty of steel wool. Scrub yourself with it on a daily basis. You're gonna need thick skin for this business.

Hope you enjoyed my little rant, and if you don't get my kind of humor, it's okay. If you can't say something kind, say something snarky, right?

Finding Humor in a Dark Future

By L.J. Sellers, author of the bestselling Detective Jackson mysteries. This essay was originally posted at Alex J. Cavanaugh's blog, but it's worth a repeat.

In my new novel, the future is bleak, my characters are flawed, and their quests are intensely personal. Writing this novel could have been depressing, but I set much of the story in an endurance contest called the Gauntlet, which provided some unusual and amusing research moments.

In one competition scene, the protagonist is required to crawl through tunnels. I wanted her experience to seem real, so I left my keyboard and got down on my hands and knees. I crawled around the family room for a few minutes, trying to decide how big the tunnel needed to be and what part of my body would start to hurt first.

Of course, my husband walked in as I was crawling and said, “When does the barking start?”

It was the first laugh “til your belly hurts” moment I’d had in a long time.

In another phase of the contest, Lara enters a locked-room scenario, in which she must use the items on hand to find a MacGyver-type solution to get out. I admit, I sought help from my husband, who designs and builds things for a living. We came up with a plausible three-step solution, then decided to test the parts of it that we could. Not wanting to give away this scene in the story, let’s just say we headed down to the garage with a box of matches and some potentially combustible material. (It’s Oregon, and it was raining, so we had to stay inside.)

As we struck the matches and cheered for a flame, we remembered catching our three boys doing something similar when they were young. We imagined our kids walking in on us while we attempted to start a fire in the garage, and saying “What the hell?” We laughed until the tears rolled.

It’s good to experience little moments like that when you write gritty thrillers. Otherwise, it’s too easy to get sucked into a dark mode and forget that people and characters can find joy and humor even under stressful circumstances. I also managed to sneak a light moment into the story near the end. And even though The Arranger is set in a bleak world thirteen years from now, the overall theme is an affirmation of the human desire to improve oneself and make a difference in the world around us.

Do you need humor in every novel? What weird/funny things have you done for research?