Jade Varden Official Blog

It's very dramatic to kill a character suddenly, or allow raeaders to walk in on a cheating husband. Many authors write moments like this in order to provoke an emotional reacion. But your readers aren't going to buy it unless you're easing into it. Abrupt plot turns need to have some backstory. Otherwise, readers just aren't going to care.  Slowing Down You're writing a story about Beatrice and her friend Ursula. But if you kill Beatrice in the first four pages of text,  what do I care? I barely had time to meet her before she was suddenly gone. If the remainder of the story is all about Beatrice's loss, I'm not really going to identify because I'm not feeling the pain of that loss. In other words, I won't like that story.  There is merit in slowing down and setting the stage, something that many great writers do before they introduce too much action and plot. Show me some scenes with Beatrice before you take her away. Show her ...

Ever given someone a not-so-glowing review? Ever had that come back to you in equal, or even greater, measure? The indie author community is a close-knit bunch of folks that do a lot of interacting with each other...but artists do tend to be a little touchy. You too could be a victim of indie author retaliation.  Spite I'm a big advocate for the indie author community as a whole. Self-published authors need each other, and honestly if you're doing it right you're going to interact with them anyway. You'll bump into them in forum groups, on Twitter, and you'll find them commenting on your blog.  And you're not going to become BFF with every last one of them, because this is not summer camp. Even worse, if you start reading books by other indie authors (and chances are, you will) you're going to discover that some of them just don't suit your particular reading tastes. You're not going to enjoy every single self-published book you read...

What's the craziest marketing idea you ever had? A few years back, I launched a one-woman email campaign under an assumed name in an attempt to get a certain right-wing, conservative talk radio host to publicly denounce a book I wrote (under a different pen name, in a former life). I happen to believe that bad publicity is better than no publicity at all, and there's an entire school of thought that controversy sells books...but I digress. The point is, I'm not above at least attempting a publicity stunt (because my campaign didn't work, FYI)...and you shouldn't be, either.  Hanging Upside-Down from a Building I saw this movie about Houdini once. It was based on his life (they call that a biopic) and it really wasn't very good (it had everything to do with the actor that played Houdini, whom I won't name). But I do remember this one thing about it quite distinctly: he was a master of the publicity stunt. Houdini resorted to all sorts of stuff i...

Break it down to the basics, and writing is simply this: painting a picture with words. You have to use 26 letters, repeated in millions of different patterns, to make someone else picture exactly what you want them to see. That makes you a little bit insane, really. You've set yourself to an extremely ambitious and difficult task. But if you break it down to basics, there are a few tricks you can master to make painting with that word brush a little bit easier.  Do You See What I See? Picture me standing next to a tree. You're going to come up with an image of me, and an image of a tree, based upon your own experiences. If you're from the Pacific Northwest, you might be seeing a towering redwood in your mind's eye. Someone from the southern US may conjure up an image of a drooping weeping willow, or a fragrant magnolia.  So maybe I ought to tell you to picture me standing next to an elm tree. If you've never seen an elm, you aren't going to be a...

When you're an indie author, you have to be your own publisher, literary agent and biggest fan. In other words, stop being humble. You are an amazing writer and anyone who isn't reading your book is totally missing out. Remember that. Write it down if needed. Keep it close by...and when all else fails, just pretend. Because if you're going to promote yourself, you have to be capable of selling yourself .  Buy Me You don't have to convince readers to buy your books, whatever they're about. You have to convince readers to buy you as an author. That's the real secret to selling books. So first things first: convince yourself that you are awesome. If you can't do that, you certainly can't convince anybody else.  Fooling yourself is an important part of being an indie author. But there's no reason to be ridiculous about it. Read and re-read your book. Check it, double check it, triple check it for errors. Make sure there are no plot holes ...

I'm not too sure how it happened, but I started reading one of my really old books the other day. Predictably, I was quite appalled by what I saw. One of the many things I've learned is this: every single thing does not need to be described. Adding Adjectives What does that mean? Aren't writers supposed to be descriptive, paint pictures, put their readers in the middle of the action? Yes, to all of it. But there is such as thing as too many descriptive words. Let me give you an example of the type of stuff I've been reading in the past week:  "It looks like rain," she said quickly, glancing to her left at Lola.  Lola hurriedly rushed to the window, peeling back one side of the drapes to press her nose close to the glass. "It does!" She cried excitedly, turning to look over her shoulder at Dev. "It really does!" She added with a big smile.  Bad, right? Felt like it was sort of dragging you along, didn't it? Let...

They say that being successful as an indie author requires spending a lot more time on promotion than on actual writing. But if you're just throwing stuff out there at random, you're not doing a whole lot of good. First, you've got to figure out where your target audience is. Then, you've got to actually target them.  Ready, Aim, Fire It's a lot like playing basketball. If you close your eyes and start chucking balls in the general direction of the basket, sure a few of them will go in. But if you open your eyes and actually aim at the center of the target, it's likely that you'll land even more of them. Targeted marketing just makes sense, and it will save you time that you can spend on actual writing. Define your age group. The first step in targeted marketing is defining the age group that would be most interested in your books. This is really easy for some genres, like children's and YA. You already know who you're writing for . Whe...

The Internet has totally blurred, if not altogether obliterated, the lines of good punctuation. Now, people are using punctuation to make little faces at the end of the sentences. This is not the use for which punctuation was originally intended, and it's darn confusing. Maybe that's why it's so difficult to know when to use brackets in fiction writing. It's almost never okay for authors to do so...even when you're writing about what happens on the Internet.  Thou Shalt Not Use Brackets Brackets are not a parenthesis...they're the more twisted cousin. While parentheses have gently curving lines, brackets have hard edges. That's to remind you that they're used only in the most extreme of circumstances. In fiction, they're used almost ever. In other types of writing, brackets can be used for a handful of different reasons.  Math: In some complicated mathematical problems, brackets are used to show specific number groups or funct...