serials

The making of Dunham

Moriah

And so begins a post (or series of them) (you know how wishy-washy I am) on Dunham, the privateer-heroine and pirate-hero Revolutionary War swashbuckler, which, for those of you not following the serial, will be available for sale JULY 4, 2013.

To kick it off, here’s the final cover for the official book:

Dunham full-flat wraparound cover.

I struggled with the question of whether to go with a slightly modified version of the serial’s cover to deal with familiarity to those who’ve followed the story all year (yes, almost a year!). But in the end, I decided not to. Why? Several reasons.

  1. At and during the RT Booklovers convention two weeks ago in Kansas City, I had a few marketing epiphanies courtesy of Tracey Reid (but most of which I can’t articulate yet, which is why I haven’t written about it).
  2. My attempt at articulating this epiphany to my friend Melissa Blue brought forth an issue I hadn’t thought about: my books’ covers. ALL OF THEM. The fact that they needed a serious makeover. And that it must be done before Dunham was released to take advantage of the marketing wave.
  3. So I did that. The Proviso, Stay, Magdalene, and Twenty-Dollar Rag have new covers. In a different post, I’ll talk about the evolution of those, as I did before, long ago when I was just starting out.

Collage of cover revamps for THE PROVISO, STAY, MAGDALENE, TWENTY-DOLLAR RAG

  1. After I had done that, I realized that the variation of the serial cover I had made could not conform to the format I’d made for the previous titles, so I scrapped it and redid it from scratch.

I also decided to remove the series tag from Dunham and, subsequently, book 5, which is a post-apocalypse polyandry tale (as yet not officially titled). That, too, was for a reason: people see a series number and assume that the series has an overall arc and that book X is NEXT in the chronology. It makes them less inclined to pick it up because who wants to start something in the middle of a series? Even so, the four contemporary ones above, while perfectly able to be read alone, are, in fact, chronological, and so the series tag is appropriate.

Yet I needed the cover of Dunham to conform with the first four while still being separate. You will also notice that the featured couple is on the back instead of the front. Why was this? Because Dunham is as much epic adventure as it is romance, I want to capture male readers. There are ships involved and thus, naval battles.1

And so we have a cover that reflects the pattern of the four contemporary covers, but is also separate.

People DO judge a book by its cover because marketing has evolved so much that people can tell exactly what’s in it. Well. Maybe not exactly. But close enough to the target market to do the job.

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1. I have done as well as I could regarding ship details and battles involving tall ships, which, I will have you know, is very difficult to come by for this very narrow window of time. It was a time of shipbuilding upheaval and drastic changes in naval warfare that began somewhere around 1760 and ended right around 1798, from which evolved the zenith of tall ship building and warfare, on display at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. In short, a LOT of significant things happened in shipbuilding technology and naval warfare between 1780 and 1805.

“A book a year is slacking.”

Moriah

This sentiment got some traction in writerland a couple of weeks ago, but since the beginning of this digital publishing surge, it’s been a (sometimes unspoken) maxim. No, actually, it’s been around a long time. Way back in the day when I was a member of RWA and went to all the chapter meetings (MARA), there were two prolific category writers in my chapter. They worked for both Harlequin and Silhouette and put out three titles a year minimum. Then you have the James Patterson-type book mills wherein a team of ghostwriters is assigned to an idea and a title and off they go. I now know of many writers, especially erotic romance and erotica writers who espouse this view.

It begs some questions, of course, the main one being, “How many pages/words do these books have, anyway?” Come to find out many of them are short stories. Many are novellas. Some are category-length (the size of a Harlequin Presents, or about 50,000–60,000 words). Never mind the fact that I do, actually, write that many GOOD words every year. (Good words meaning ones I want to keep. I throw out as many words as I keep.) As far as I can tell, nobody’s writing longer works at the pace of one title per year. (“George RR Martin is not your bitch.”)

I sure as hell am not. What’s an epic writer who is NOT, in fact, George RR Martin, to do with this business when she’s lucky to be able to put out one title per year? This, combined with some other book news that I will not belabor because it’s been belabored quite enough, has got me thinking about what I write and how I write it. How can I capitalize on the fact that I do write the equivalent of three category-length titles per year?

There was only one answer to that. It’s not a new idea. It’s not even an idea I necessarily like because it involves a way of reading I don’t care for. But other people do like it. A LOT. If it works, it’ll keep my name out there for the next year until Dunham is released (July 4, 2013—save the date!) and, hopefully, build excitement. If it doesn’t, no harm done. (I don’t think.)

Cover of the serialization of the first third of my novel DUNHAM, a sailing tallship in a storm.Beginning July 4, 2012, I will be posting one unedited chapter of Dunham per week, every Wednesday at 6:00 a.m. US Central time, for one year. I’ll offer them as free downloads here, at Smashwords, and at All Romance eBooks, and send email reminders to those who request one. It will be the serial equivalent of an Advance Review Copy (ARC).

Fifty-two chapters! you say. That’s a lot! Yeah. It is. In fact, it’s approximately 140,000 words, which (for my fans) is half the length of The Proviso, longer than Stay, and nearly as long as Magdalene. It’s also somewhere around 70% of the finished book. Oh, hey, it’s a swashbuckler with lots and lots of angst, set during the Revolutionary War. They have ships! They go places! They blow things up! So of course it’ll prop a door open! (Eh, but that’s the beauty of digital, innit?)

Hopefully, by the time July 4, 2013, rolls around, you and a gazillion other people will want to know how it ends and buy the book to find out.

I’ll be frank: This is a marketing ploy. I hate marketing. I suck at marketing. So do the most of the rest of us. I also can’t put out two or three titles a year to do my marketing for me. I’m not asking for any money via tip jar or a Kickstarter campaign. I’m offering a free hit and hoping you will get hooked and, in turn, you will hook your friends. Please hook your friends!

Some details:

  1. The cover is for the serial. It will not be the cover for the finished book. I thought it would be utterly gauche to go without a cover.
  2. Remember, this will be unedited. The finished novel will be professionally edited and available in print as well as digital.
  3. Though the serial is offered only here, Smashwords, and All Romance eBooks (of necessity because neither Barnes & Noble nor Amazon will allow me to offer it for free) (fuckers), the complete book will be offered at all the normal retail outlets.
  4. Even if you opt in for the email reminders of a new installment, I won’t keep track of your email and I won’t spam you. I just don’t work that way (which is why I suck at marketing!).
  5. Each installment will be available for download in DRM-free EPUB, PRC/MOBI/Kindle, and PDF. I’ll even post the text itself online at theproviso.com/dunham (not live yet).
  6. Hopefully by the time the serial begins, I’ll have come up with back-cover copy that reflects the story accurately and does not suck. Until then …

It’s 1780. He’s an earl acquitted of treason and out for revenge. She’s a pirate planning a suicide mission. Their first kiss sparks a tavern brawl—and then things get interesting.