How to Get Published

by Victory Crayne

If you have difficulty selling your novel, I suggest you ask someone in your critique group, your editor, or someone who can analyze your writing if your manuscript is shy on any of these three key ingredients.

Study what the bestselling novelists are doing. You will find that all bestselling novels are different from each other, but they have three things in common that are often missing in other novels.

1.  Well developed characters

Well developed means showing or telling aspects of their personal lives or personalities. Yes, this is a place where telling can be useful. Does your tale reveal your protagonist as a “real” person with a “real” life, going beyond the “bare bones” needed to move the story along? This takes extra time in designing the main characters. Most beginning writers are reluctant to spend that time. Instead they want to rush into the fun part–writing scenes.

For those authors who have characters recurring in different novels, this is critical. When you see a new book out by a favorite author and the protagonist is one you’ve read about before, are (more…)

Victory Crayne

A good story is not just what happens to the characters. As a matter of fact, the most important element of a good story is what happens to the reader. The reader is like an invisible participant in the story. The best stories are designed not just to “tell a story” that resides in the imagination of the writer, but are designed to touch the insides of the reader, her emotions, her insights into human nature, her understanding of herself. (more…)