My first interview–I’m so excited! Last week I reviewed the book The Art and Craft of Writing Christian Fiction and this week we will meet the author, Jeff Gerke.
Jeff has published six novels under the name Jefferson Scott–he also has two non-fiction titles to his credit. Be Intolerant, co-authored with Ryan Dobson, made him a best-selling author. Jeff gives back to the writing community by speaking at conferences, functioning as book doctor and teaching the craft through his book The Art and Craft of Writing
Christian Fiction. He has a slew of editing experience under his belt. And Jeff is also the founder and publisher of Marcher Lord Press. You can find his amazing resume here.
Thank you for joining us today and being my first guest! Let’s get down to the questions . . .
Heidi : In mega-mastery cluster 1 (Character) you discuss how a novelist needs to create characters that don’t sound the same. Great point. There are two tools that you discuss in this chapter, could you give us more detail on them?
Jeff : The tools you mention are How To Find Your Story and Character Creation for the Plot-First Novelist. These are interactive e-book systems that help novelists find their stories and create their characters. I sell them separately or bundled together in a package called The Writer’s Foundation.
Character Creation for the Plot-First Novelist is the result of my own efforts to come up with a method for me, a card-carrying plot-first novelist (meaning my characters are naturally weak but my plots are strong), to create memorable, realistic, three-dimensional characters. It starts with a core personality and then adds layers on top of that. Even the most plot-centric novelist will be able to create amazing characters if he works the system.
How To Find Your Story is the corollary to the character creation system. Indeed, the working title was Plot Creation for the Character-First Novelist. I realized that there are character-first novelists–whose story people are brilliantly rendered but whose stories can be meandering and dull–who could benefit from the same kind of system, but for building story structure.
The two systems work together and form the basis of what I teach at Christian writers’ conferences–and for my upcoming Writer’s Digest book tentatively titled Plot vs. Character: the divided novelist’s guide to writing balanced fiction.
Heidi : Thanks for the information on those tools Jeff. I purchased the bundled package over the summer and it kickstarted my second novel–particularly the Character Creation tool. It forces the writer to look deeper into the characters through an easy to use on-line tool. And I thank you for that!
Heidi : Lets have some fun….Say you were stranded on a desert island with only the clothes on your back. And you find Barbie floaties, a brush and a pair of bongo drums. You look up and see a magical creature (one created in a book or one you can create on your own). How will this magical creature get you off the island using each of the items you found?
I’m afraid this isn’t going to go the way you intended. [grin] I see before me Keeth, the talking dragon from Mitchell Bonds’ Hero, Second Class, who can hear if you pronounced his name with a double e or with an ei. I call him by name–using the double e, of course–and he is so grateful I’ve said it correctly that he takes me on his back and whisks me to the landmass of my choice. He eats the floaties, brush, and drums.
Heidi : Nope, not how I thought the story would go!
Heidi : What advice can you give to someone wanting to walk this publication path?
Jeff : Count the cost. Anyone can say she’s going to write that novel one day, but very few actually do the hard, lonely work of creating a long manuscript. And very few of those are ever published. So don’t even start down this path if you’re not convinced it’s what you must be devoting your life to doing. I read this advice regarding budding actors, but it applies to novelists: if you can possibly see yourself doing something else with your life, do it!
Most novelists labor in silence and without publishing credits. They strike out with agents and editors and publications. They see others get published while they remain in anonymity. Others with less craft or having paid fewer “dues” get ahead while these writers don’t. Or they get published but then the book bombs. If you know you can’t handle something like that for the next 18 years of your life, look for another creative outlet.
What advice do you have for a novelist who has completed at least one novel and feels the novel is ready to be published?
I tell novelists there are four main milestones on the road to publication. Some get published without going to the fourth one, but not many. Usually it goes like this:
- Write the novel (no one will take you seriously until you’ve done this)
- Learn what you can about your craft from books, seminars, conferences, and other people’s books (then apply those lessons to a revision of your ms.)
- Get feedback on your book—from crit partners, writers’ groups, online readers’ groups, etc.
- Seek professional help [grin] (pay for the professional opinion of one or more fiction authorities whose teaching and/or writing you admire)
Many people want to just write the book and get it published right then. Failing that, they might read some books or attend a writer’s conference to learn what they can. Some are more agreeable to the long study approach than others, but all groups usually realize they don’t actually know everything naturally that will get them published. So they learn what they can from books and lecturers. What they learn does improve their writing.
But you can learn only so much that way. It’s one thing to know what show vs. tell is, but it’s something else entirely to be able to see it in your own writing. Most would love to have a professional mentor, but simply can’t afford to do so—or don’t yet see the need to find a way to afford it. So they find crit groups and so forth and try to get help that way. It does help to have someone commenting on your book, not just speaking in general. But crit groups can also be really awful, injurious places. Tread carefully.
Usually, most writers stop at this point of development and try to get published. Sometimes it happens. Often it does not. Many of the individuals I work with (as opposed to when I freelance for publishing companies) are coming to me only after they’ve struck out on their own. They finally realize that their crit group can’t take them far enough. They’re serious enough about this to get a professional opinion. I love helping those folks.
Long answer to your question, but here’s my summary: go through all the steps. You don’t have to do all of them, of course, but keep in mind that a good professional editorial review is worth its weight in gold.
Novelists are to market themselves these days. Can you give the top three pieces of advice you have for a debut author?
First, if any publisher tells you that any new novelist must have a “platform,” realize that they are blowing smoke and looking for excuses to say no to your book. A platform is a built-in audience. It’s guaranteed sales. If you have a weekly radio show with 2 million listeners, you have a platform. It’s true that nonfiction authors need one (usually), but fiction is different.
Publishers are always looking for ways to lower their risk, and an author with guaranteed sales of 50,000 is a zero risk proposition for them. But how many novelists have a media empire or megachurch? Not many. Readers are just fine reading books by people they’ve never heard of, unlike with nonfiction.
So Thing One is to not panic when someone says you need a platform to get your novel published.
You also don’t need to brand yourself. Wow, people get so wrapped up in finding their slogan or branding or whatever. I don’t know of anyone in publishing who thinks that’s really important—except people who teach seminars on branding. Yes, marketing types like to create a brand, but unpublished novelists don’t need to worry about it, imo. Just write fiction.
No one knows what makes some novels do well and others—often much better than the ones that become bestsellers—tank. Marketing is a mystery, despite marketing consultants’ claims to the contrary. Probably a book succeeds when it gains momentum through the accretion of dozens or hundreds of little things you do: placing well in a contest, getting a small paper to review it, doing 100 blog interviews, speaking at the elementary school, sending a review copy to the mayor…whatever. And of course God is behind the rise or failure to rise of every book.
So my advice is to do all you can not despising the day of small beginnings, not neglecting the little “plus” you can do to nudge your book a bit today, and trust in God.
You started Marcher Lord Press in 2007. How is your speculative fiction line coming?
Marcher Lord Press publishes only Christian speculative fiction: SF, fantasy, time travel, etc. It’s going very well; thank you. It’s micropublishing, really. Very small numbers. But my model is such that I break even on a small number of units sold.
I’m trying to take my own advice: doing a thousand little things to try to generate an ever-enlarging snowball. We’re doing a lot of contests this year. A MLP title (A Star Curiously Signing) has just been named the official ACFW Book Club book of the month for March. We’ve got two novels named as finalists in the Epic Awards. We’ve got four books entering the Christy Awards this year. People keep hearing about us. It helps, of course, that when people do try out MLP books, they find them to be wonderful.
If we keep putting out quality work and more and more people keep hearing about us, I have to believe good things will happen. And even if they don’t, I’m breaking even at the level things are now, so, God willing, I can keep doing this indefinitely.
You are a wealth of information and I enjoyed talking with you. Thanks for being with us today Jeff!