Abusing the TBR Pile: Readers' Advisory For Writers - The Vampire Edition!

It's the inaugural Abusing the TBR Pile series post! Woot! I suspect I'm probably the only person really excited about it. Which is why I'm giving away a copy of one of these books to one lucky TM reader who comments before 11:59 p.m. central time today! I'll announce the winner, who will then squee, and directly afterward e-mail his or her choice to me. If you choose an e-book, your prize will be in the form of Fictionwise micropay credits/publisher gift certificate for the amount of the book. Violating e-book copyrights is bad, m'kay?

So, what's up with the AtTBRP book lists? Back in February I posted an entry called "Books that Suck and the Readers Who Love Them." We discussed how performing peer critiques and analyzing some of the published work we read can help us improve our own writing.

I decided to use my Librarian Readers' Advisory Superpowers to make balanced lists of books for writers who are analyzing genre markets.

We'll abuse our TBR piles every month with a different genre and giveaway, as close to the 15th as we can get.

Two caveats:

These lists are by no means comprehensive. Omission or inclusion of a title makes no statement about the its quality. I will, more than likely, repeat genres as older titles go out of print and new ones get published.

AtTBRP book lists aren't just for writers! Bibliophiles of all flavors can use them to discover new authors and expand their reading.

Ready? Since we Title Magicians all write paranormal (among other things, of course!), I figured it would be appropriate to start with a paranormal subgenre. This month? It's all about vampires.





Blood Ties: The Turning by Jennifer Armintrout
Nocturne by Elizabeth Donald
Evermore by Lynn Viehl
Kiss Me Forever/Love Me Forever by Rosemary Laurey
Lord of the Night by Robin T. Popp
Tall, Dark, and Dead by Tate Halloway
Sweeter than Wine by Bianca D'Arc (E-book)
Night Rising by Chris Marie Green
Wicked Game by Jeri Smith-Ready
Lover Unbound by J.R. Ward



So, tell me. What genres are you most interested in?

*Today's list was compiled with the help of Gale Group's "What do I Read Next" database , AquaBrowser's Fiction Connection, LibraryThing, Vampire Romance Books and the book Genreflecting: a guide to popular reading interests by Diana Tixier Herald

**Edited for clarity. Never let me post pre-caffeine again.

Nonfiction: its not just for research anymore

Shelving books in a library can be dangerous. I don't get to do it much anymore because we have the most fantastic page who keeps the carts clean. I swear she's got a clone tucked away somewhere! But when I do shelve, I have to restrain myself from bringing back as much as I put away. I have found interesting things in almost every dewey decimal area, and most of it has influenced my writing in one way or the other.

The me from ten years ago would never have believed the me of today would be a non-fiction reader. She was strictly a novel girl unless forced to write an article or paper that required research. Today, I see non-fiction as treasure. You never know what you're going to stumble across that will spark your imagination.

Inspiration is random and very subjective. And sometimes the more you force it, the less inspired you'll be. But you can guide it a little bit. Most of us expose ourselves to television news, documentaries, newspapers, new experiences, and new people just to give inspiration a chance to hit us over the head with something brilliant. I get just as many inspiration-related head injuries in the non-fiction sections of libraries and bookstores as I do with those other things.

For example, the book Done and Been: steel rail chronicles of American hobos by Gypsy Moon inspired my current WIP about a stranded woman struggling to get home to her daughter who is assisted by the hobo community, most of whom are more magical than they seem. King of the Gypsies by Peter Maas prompted a really bad early epic fantasy that I'm trying to disown. The Miami Indians of Indiana by Stewart Rafert gave the spark for Voice of the Bard. Blowing My Cover: my life as a CIA spy by Lyndsay Moran was responsible for a short story I'm editing, and The Feline Mystique: on the mysterious connection between women and cats by Clea Simon inspired a YA fantasy still in the planning stages. None of these works would exist without the non-fiction books acting as idea catalysts.

I don't have a formula for picking non-fiction for inspiration, but I can tell you what I do. I grab things that catch my eye. Sometimes I seek out books that I don't know much about, and sometimes I look for things on subjects in which I'm interested or familiar.

Do you read non-fiction for pleasure? Which titles have inspired you?

Reading For Writers

Books that Suck and the Readers Who Love Them

The Care and Feeding of Your Local Librarian

Nonfiction: it's not just for research anymore

Starting May 15th - Abusing the TBR Pile
Every month, I'll post a genre-specific book list for genre fiction writers and readers. The best part? Title Magic readers'll have a chance to win their choice of book from that month's list, just for commenting. Free stuff, for the win!

The Care and Feeding of Your Local Librarian

"The Linebaugh Public Library System's purpose is to provide you the freedom to discover and the resources to explore a lifelong love of reading and learning."

I love my library's mission statement. It really gets to the heart of why most of us enter the profession, either as a librarian or a paraprofessional. A lifelong love of reading and learning is something library folks treasure and we want to share that with our communities.

I had planned on covering all of the useful things libraries can do for working writers. But as I wrote about our thoughtfully constructed collections and our database subscriptions and the knowledgeable staff who provides premium research and readers' services, I had an epiphany: writers and librarians are kindred spirits, dedicated to words and information. Most of you already utilize and celebrate library resources in the creation of your work. If you're published, you've probably made some appearances at branches in your area. But did you realize that there are library-based promotion opportunities beyond the book signing?

Your secret weapon for local promotion is the desk clerk.

Okay, I have to admit, I'm a little biased. I work the front lines every day, and perhaps sometimes I feel that what I do is more important than it really is. But let's think strategically for a minute. We come in contact with almost every patron who walks in the door, even if only offer a greeting. Branches in my system can service anywhere from 300-1,500 people (sometimes more during the summer) every day. That's a lot of people.

Let's take this a little bit further. Even though some of these people come in for internet access, faxing, general research, etc, a goodly number of them are fiction readers and most of them like to book talk. These patrons want to know what we're reading and what we think about what they're reading. They request books, they recommend books, and solicit recommendations from us. Library staff handsells as much as booksellers do. For example, one of my favorite fantasy writers is Kristen Britain. I handsell Green Rider to my fantasy patrons when they come to me for recommendations or during a conversation, and the circulation numbers, when compared to similar titles released around the same time, reflect our effectiveness.

Green Rider by Kristen Britain- 76
Blood of the Fold by Terry Goodkind - 42
Firebird by Mercedes Lackey - 25
Acorna: the unicorn girl by Anne McCaffrey - 34

During readers' advisory sessions and book talk conversations, we introduce our patrons to writers they might not have picked up on their own and, frequently, that turns into later sales. A good number of my regulars try before they buy. They'll only borrow what they're not sure about and buy the authors they know they're going to like. Once they find you, they'll buy you if they deem you worthy for their shelves at home.

The bottom line is, if we know you and we like your books, we're going to tell people about them. It's our job. We'll recommend anything to a patron if we think they'll like it, but we can't shut up about the authors we know and like. And with the advent of Web 2.0 - blogs, podcasts, wikis, LibraryThing, social networking sites and all that fun stuff - we have the opportunity to reach so many more people both in our communities and outside of them. Just google Nancy Pearl or Wendy Crutcher to see the potential for web-wide readers' advisory.

So, how do you get our attention? How do you get on our recommendation lists? How do you get us to handsell you? To talk about you? To book you for panels and signings? Well, you have to seduce us.

• Get to know us better. I have a core group of regulars that I see at least once a week. I know who likes to cook, whose taste in historicals runs to regency, and which woman prefers law enforcement heroes in her romantic suspense as opposed to military men. I also know my writers, published and non. The ones I see regularly, the ones I have positive encounters with every week are in the forefront of my mind and are frequently the first ones I think of when a patron is looking for something in the genre in which they write.
• Spend some quality time with us. A couple of volunteer hours a week is frequently worth more to a library than money. Library staff is doing more with less these days, and having someone reliable to help the pages shelfread, notify patrons about available holds, and doing other odd jobs really helps. When you regularly volunteer, you form relationships with the staff - you become a part of the library family. And it's difficult to find a more loyal, enthusiastic group of people than library people.
• Make us feel special. Libraries are always in need of supplies. Sponsoring an activity or providing programming will get you a huge public thank you and some warm squishy feelings from the staff (who will, more than likely be more than willing to talk about how nifty you are!). And not only will your kindness be noticed by the staff, it will draw attention from the storytime moms whose children benefit from the crafts you provided or the patrons who check out the books you donated to the collection.

Don't forget to see other people once in a while, though. It's difficult to forge relationships with staff in every library. But we all travel. Planning a book tour? Include some library stops. Going on vacation or to a convention? Pop in and say hi. Sign copies of your books. Maybe leave some bookmarks with the desk staff (because the patrons go through bookmarks like crazy!) A ten-minute visit can go a long way.

Now it's your turn. I'd love to know about your favorite library. Are you a regular patron, or do you just visit once in a while while you're in town? What makes it special?

Reading for Writers series:

• Books that Suck and the Readers Who Love them
• The Care and Feeding of Your Local Librarian
• April 14 - Non-fiction: Not Just For Research Anymore

Series Coming Soon: Abusing the TBR Pile

Reading for Writers: Books That Suck and the Readers Who Love Them

As the facilitator for my local indie writers' group, there's one question I hear from new writers and non-writers more than any other: why is peer critique important?

Why, indeed? Well, there are the obvious benefits for the recipient of the critique. The feedback you get from peers lets you know what works and what doesn't from a readers' viewpoint. Also, exposing your work to people on a regular basis can give you confidence for the submission process and potential post-publication criticism. What's not as obvious is that peer critiques help the critiquer just as much.

When you do a peer critique for someone, you don't just hand the manuscript back and say, "I liked it!" (And if you do, your writer friend will be grumbling at you behind your back.) You tell her, "I liked it! Except for..." And then you give reasons. You tell her why you fell in love with the hero. Why you felt the mother/daughter relationship wasn't very believable. You tell her how tired you got of the gazes flying and the fingers wandering by themselves. And after the critique is over, you remember these things. And when it comes time to edit your own work, you might think twice about letting your heroine's eyes follow someone across a room. Because, really, who wants carpet lint on their eyeballs? Yick! (Can you tell this is a particular peeve of mine?)

A few years ago I read a post on Holly Lisle's blog about how she was analyzing the structure of books from the genre she was aiming to break into at the time and that's when I heard that wonderful clicking noise in my head: Just like peer critique, it's not enough to just read published books and determine whether you liked them or not. Not when you want your work to be among them on the bookstore shelves. You have to scrutinize them, too.

There are a few things you should keep in mind before you start picking apart all the books on your keeper shelf:

• It's not very realistic to spend the same amount of time on a single published work as you would a peer critique. If you're like me, your To Be Read pile is already out of control and slowing down isn't an option! Besides, these books have already been edited by professionals and they don't need us to go spelunking for typos.
• It's also not very realistic to try to analyze everything you read for pleasure or you'll burn out. Reading will start to feel like a chore instead of a hobby. So be choosy.
• You won't learn as much by just reading the good stuff. (Besides, picking apart the sucky stuff is a lot more fun! MST3K fans can attest to that.) Select a short list of recent releases that are of varying quality and popularity. I'll be posting recommended lists in a variety of genres on a regular basis after completing this series.
• Creating a venue for your criticism can do wonders for your motivation! You may or may not want to do this, but I decided that if I was going to do all of this work, I might as well share it with somebody. So I started reviewing for The Long and Short of It, and I do some contest judging. Be careful, though. You don't want to say something to alienate someone you'll meet at a conference, social function, or in the blogosphere later. Anonymity or extreme diplomacy is important when you're a writer critiquing in public.

When you settle down to read, make sure you have a notebook and a pen handy.

The very first thing I do is make a note of the structure. Holly's right. Books in the same genre/subgenre are similar this way. A James Patterson thriller is going to have lots of little chapters heavy on the action whereas a Robert Jordan epic fantasy is going to have longer chapters with more blocks of description. So I write down how many pages the book has, how many chapters, and how many pages are in each chapter. You could even go as far as breaking it down by scenes within chapters if you think you'll find that helpful.

While you read, make notes. You're not necessarily looking for typos or grammatical errors, although if they bug you or there's an excess of them, you can certainly mark them down. What you are looking for are the things that yank you out of the story. The things that give you pause. An oddly worded phrase. Clumsy dialogue. Illogical plot points. Character inconsistencies. Even factual errors. Confusing head-hopping. Anything that makes you think, "Eh?"

Don't forget the stuff that makes you go, "Wow!" Write down what you liked or the things you think the writer did exceptionally well. Using the omniscient point of view without giving the reader a headache, for instance. Witty dialogue. Did the book elicit strong emotion? Did it make you laugh?

All of these things are the "whats," and for every what you need a "why" and a "how." For example, understanding why that dialogue is clumsy (unnatural speech or overused regional dialects) and how it might be improved. Why that scene made you cry (reader manipulation by word connotation, good set up of the pay off) and how you might use these things in your own work.

When you're done, you'll have a ton of data. How you manage all that stuff depends on your writing process and your organizational style. I tend to be more organic than organized. I take the bare minimum of notes, and make a journal entry about the whole thing when I'm done. I internalize things better when I babble to myself in a notebook or in a Word document. I'll occasionally go back and read my thoughts just to refresh my memory, or to see if there's something I have forgotten.

Folks with a more organized mind might find an index card file handy for this. A section for characterization, a section for plot, a section for little things that drive you crazy like my fuzzy eyeball thing, etc. Each card should contain the what, why, and how for each issue. This could also translate to a database or a spreadsheet for writers with techy leanings. Ultimately, there are as many methods of dealing with the results as there are writers who devise them.

There are many ways to improve your writing, but I believe that this is one practice that can give you an edge that most unpublished writers won't have. At the very least, you'll better know your market. At most, you'll have a good things/bad things epiphany that will change the way you look at literature forever. Most of us will fall somewhere in the middle by finding helpful new techniques as well as annoying elements to avoid every single time you analyze a book.

Reading for Writers Series
Books That Suck and the Readers Who Love Them
March 13: The Care and Feeding of Your Local Librarian
April 14: Nonfiction - Not Just For Research Anymore

Series Coming Soon: Abusing the TBR Pile - Readers' Advisory For Writers