I have long wanted to create a “brand” for my four books to unify them. Make them look like they belong together. My books are not a series, but they share enough similarities that they do indeed belong together. But the covers do not demonstrate that.
Here are the front covers as they exist now — in the order published.
They do not look like they belong together, though the first and the fourth are close, and my intention was to redesign the other two to match.
When I Killed My Father was easy, though I have not uploaded the new cover to the two sites where I publish my books — Amazon/KDP and IngramSpark. (One of the benefits of self-publishing is that authors can upload new covers and corrected manuscripts at any time for no cost. It can be time-consuming, but it doesn’t have to be.)
Wasted has not been easy. Over the last number of years, I designed more than ten different versions of the cover and was not happy with any of them. Now I’ve got three that I think are better. I welcome your feedback.
When I designed the Wasted cover in 2015, I was pleased with it. I’d been a graphic designer for decades, but I did not realize until later that there are “rules” about book covers that I did know, one of the most important of which is that the cover telegraphs to the reader its genre. Here’s what designer Joel Friedlander, former president of Bay Area Independent Publishers Association (BAIPA), said about the Wasted cover:
Obviously the designer is skillful, but the big fail is that the book looks like nonfiction or a corporate publication, and has no trace of what must be the excitement and drama in the story.
Guilty as charged
I’ve been messing with all sorts of cover ideas for a while, and when I sought feedback on them a two years ago, more people liked the one I considered ugly than any of the others. But I didn’t like it.
This is the ugly one.
I recently created another version of the cover that I like better. Then I took the existing cover, the one that looks like a nonfiction primer on recycling and adapted it to fit the brand. Rules are made to be broken, right?
Below are these two new versions. What do you think?
So here are new front covers that all share the same branding.
And then I had another idea, to make the branding more explicit by including the tagline: “Page-turner with a Conscience.” I have used that line many times in marketing the book, during book talks, in this author letter, on my website, and on sites where I sell my book. So I took another pass at each of my novels and added that to the top.
What do you think? I value your feedback. I’m too close to my books to be as objective as I need to be. Please share your feedback in the comment area below or contact me via email at johnbyrnebarry@gmail.com.
One way or the other, I am committed to branding my books.
Now that I look at them at the small size most people will see them, the “page-turner with a conscience” is barely visible, so I probably need to scrap that idea or make it bigger.
Enjoy the rest of your summer.
P.S. You may wonder whether devoting all this time to redesigning my book covers might not have been better spent writing my current novel. The answer is surely yes, but designing taps into a different part of the brain than writing and it’s “fun.” That’s my excuse anyway.
I would love to hear from you, even if you don’t have an opinion on the covers.
In May, I presented “When Plots Collide — Create Suspenseful Page-Turners by Weaving Multiple Storylines” to the San Joaquin Writers, for the first time since my first time, back in 2017, and it went swimmingly enough I thought I’d write about it for the Bulletin.
Writing formulas are tricky — I find many of them useful, but if you stick to them too rigorously, you end up sounding, well, formulaic.
That said, almost all good stories have formulas and the trick is to write them so they seem fresh, even if the plots are ones we’ve seen before.
You’ve all seen colliding plots in action — it’s a formula used extensively on crime shows, like “Law and Order.” The book or the TV show starts with a couple of unrelated stories, but you know they’re going to bump into each other. Other shows that come to mind: “House of Cards,” “Downton Abbey,” “Breaking Bad.”
The trick is to use the formula so each story impacts the others and amps up the suspense. I’ll be mapping out the plot of Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s brilliant 1987 novel about New York City, to demonstrate.
(You don’t have to have read the book, but I highly recommend it.)
The protagonist of Bonfire is Sherman McCoy, a white, late-thirties bond trader who makes a million dollars a year, but is hemorrhaging money — on his Park Avenue coop, his wife’s extravagant decorating, his daughter’s private school, his Mercedes. The story kicks into high gear when he drives his Mercedes to JFK to pick up his mistress and on the way home they get lost in the Bronx. When he gets out of his car to move a tire in the road, he sees two young black kids approaching. They seem menacing. One asks, “Yo, need some help?” Assuming they’re predators, he throws the tire at them, jumps in the car — his mistress has taken the wheel — and as she fishtails away, Sherman hears a thunk. They escape.
Sherman is distressed. Did they hit one of the boys? Is he hurt? He searches the news reports, wonders if he should go to the police. He screws up one of his bond deals because he’s so distracted.
While Sherman stews, the book switches focus to other characters, starting with Reverend Reginald Bacon, a black minister who received $350,000 from a church to build a daycare center, but the money’s gone, nothing’s been built, and he’s in trouble.
Enter Annie Lamb, mother of the boy hit by Sherman’s Mercedes in the Bronx. Her son Henry is in intensive care, in a coma. Annie goes to Reverend Bacon for help, and he sees an opportunity to challenge the justice system for always putting people of color behind bars. How about this Mercedes driver who was white? The boy got a partial read on the license plate.
Then we jump to the district attorney’s office, where Abe Weiss, white and Jewish, is facing re-election in a primarily black and Latino borough, and there’s nothing that would help him more than what he calls “the great white hope” — a high-profile case with a white defendant. We follow Larry Kramer, a mid-level DA, who starts tracking down the Mercedes involved in the hit-and-run. He’s got a crush on a woman on one of his juries, a woman with brown lipstick, and he wants to make a name for himself.
But there’s more — a drunk, broke has-been British reporter, Peter Fallows, whose main goal is to figure out who he can cadge drinks and dinner from at his favorite watering holes. He interviews Annie Lamb, mother of the hit-and-run victim, for a front-page story in City Light.
When Sherman reads that story, he learns there are 500 Mercedes in the New York City area with license plates that start with RF and that the DA is going to investigate them all.
Finally the police visit Sherman, ask to see his car, and he falls apart. The police “know” it’s him. When the DA finds a witness to the hit-and-run to ID Sherman, he’s arrested.
What I love about these colliding plots is how an action in one story causes an action in another. We see Peter Fallows find his journalistic footing and redeem himself with solid reporting and writing. That’s his story. At the same time, his actions tighten the vice around Sherman.
Peter Fallows, Reverend Bacon, and Larry Kramer have their own hungers and hurdles — they don’t care about Sherman per se, they don’t even know who he is — but the more success they achieve chasing their goals, the more trouble they cause for Sherman. So even though Sherman is not a likable character, I found myself sympathizing with his plight.
There’s an old storytelling adage that you should chase your protagonist up a tree and then throw rocks at him. Keep the trouble coming, and your readers will keep turning the pages. The crux of this plot-colliding formula is that you’re throwing rocks at the protagonist even when he or she is not on the page. It’s as if your protagonist has a musical theme, and during those times when you’re following the other characters’ stories, you’d hear a faint refrain of that riff.
Last month, I participated in apanel discussion on “Finding Your Voice” for the California Writers Club Marin Branch. I’m writing my fourth novel, another “page-turner with a conscience,” and I know that I have an author voice that is me, the writer, and it’s distinct from my characters’ voices. But it wasn’t until I was asked to take part in this panel that I deconstructed that author voice, and identified how it differs from my characters’ voices. (Spoiler alert: sometimes it doesn’t, when it should.)
(Here’s a video of my presentation if you prefer to watch instead of read. Only nine minutes.)
I’ve been in a wonderful writers’ group for five-plus years now, and one of the most useful, and common, critiques I’ve received, in regards to my dialogue, is: “That doesn’t sound like your character, that sounds like you.”
(I hate it when people are right like that.)
To deconstruct my author voice, I looked through my three novels, and compiled dozens of excerpts, but because I had a time limit, could only include a few in my talk.
Robert Rose lay on his back, his hands crossing his chest. Peaceful. Deep in sleep. Lamar used to be able to sleep like that — “You could probably nod off on a fire engine with sirens blaring,” Janis once said, not hiding her resentment. He couldn’t sleep like that now.
(This is a conversation between Lamar and his daughter, Sierra, who has just returned home to Albuquerque to work on a political campaign just as her parents are separating.)
“Tell me what’s new,” he said.
“You mean, other than the fact that my parents are splitting up and I’m coming home to land in the middle of it?”
As they neared downtown, the windows of the Plaza Tower and the Hyatt reflected the afternoon sun. “You’re upset and you’re not sure how you’re going to manage,” he said.
“There you go, doing that therapy thing on me.”
“No, that’s called listening, a highly underrated part of conversation. It’s where you say something, and I pay attention. You may want to try it sometime.”
“Dad, I am a good listener. That’s why I can hear you manipulating me.”
So when I looked at these and many more excerpts, I asked myself “what characterizes my author voice?” and I came up with these adjectives and attributes.
Smart
Sharp
Snappy
Witty
Staccato
Tight
Irreverent
Dramatic, sometimes melodramatic
Over-the-top
Metaphorical
Visual
One-word sentences and sentence fragments
It was a valuable exercise for me, and I encourage other writers to try it. We all have a voice, but often, we are not conscious of it. Think of it like accents. Many of us don’t think of ourselves as having accents, but we do.
How to Distinguish Between Author Voice and Character Voice(s)
There’s a difference between author voice and character voice, but they can blur together. Many successful writers sometimes have many of their characters sound alike — one example is Aaron Sorkin, writer of the West Wing.
But ideally, they don’t. If you see a line of dialogue, or an internal monologue, it’s bestg if you can tell who is speaking without identification.
Think of the difference in how Barack Obama and Donald Trump speak. Obama is thoughtful and deliberate, sometimes painfully so, like he is formulating his entire sentence in his head before he says it. Trump is impulsive and improvisational. He has riffs he repeats, but you get the sense that he just opens his mouth and blurts, almost without thinking. He speaks in short guttural phrases, doesn’t finish his sentences.
What I aim to do with my characters is identify speech patterns like that.
Here’s a simple one. I’ve got a character in the novel I’m writing now named Mickey Macgillicuddy, who talks like this.
“Hey man, like I went to college. Well, Grateful Dead University. Hey, how can you tell when Deadheads have been staying at your pad? They’re still there, man.”
In this case, I run the risk of sounding like a cliche, but it may be worth it for the joke.
Here are a few ways to make your characters’ voices distinct.
Ask rhetorical questions or answer questions with questions. Are you accusing me of…? What do you mean by…?
Speak in long, grammatically correct complete sentences.
Speak in fragments, interrupting yourselves. Don’t finish sentences.
Use contractions, or do not use contractions.
Use words like “brilliant” or “groovy” or “awesome.”
Use verbal tics —
“you know”
“look”
“what I mean is”
“at the end of the day”
“actually”
Interrupt others. Finish their sentences.
Try to be funny, sarcastic, or self-deprecating.
Use big words, or never use big words.
Use certain sentence construction, like more-this-than-that. “Other friends didn’t disappear so much as recede.”
Tell stories or jokes. (In my presentation, I started with a joke, which comes from When I Killed My Father, where my protagonist Lamar, a therapist, tells stories and jokes and that’s as part of who he is. It’s part of his voice.
One critical way to make characters’ voices unique is what they notice, what they are concerned about, who they care about, and so on. Their inner thoughts and feelings. Their goals. Their regrets. Their yearnings. By showing their character, you also show their voice. You don’t want all your characters to sound alike, but if their journeys and their conflicts and what’s meaningful to them are unique, their voice will reflect that. Let’s look at Lamar’s voice. (This is him talking to his daughter, in the same scene as the excerpt above, about listening.)
“OK. My Story, by Lamar Rose. Chapter 1. I still care for your mother. I do. I take marriage seriously. I take my responsibility as a husband seriously. I believe in keeping my promises. But love is a verb, not something static. It’s how you act. In our case, it’s become acting—on my part. Your mother doesn’t even bother with the acting.
“There’s a difference between the unconditional love I have for you and what I feel for your mother, which is conditional love. I’m going to love you no matter what. I want you to love me too, but if you don’t, well, I’m never going to stop loving you or being your father. It’s not a choice I have to make.
“But I can’t make a marriage work by myself and I’m no longer willing to give up my own life because I made a promise. I can’t live a healthy life married to your mother. I can’t heal her—I’m not sure she wants to be healed—I can only heal myself. So I am. I apologize for not consulting you, not giving you a warning. This has nothing to do with you.”
“But why did you move?” she asked. “You love the house, the garden. Mom doesn’t care about any of that.”
“I brought that up, said we should figure out who lives where, to which she said something like, ‘after all you’ve done to me, I’ll be damned if you kick me out of my house too.’ Those were the exact words—they’re seared in my mind.”
Sierra flinched.
“Sorry,” he said. “I should have kept that to myself.”
“What did you do to her?”
That’s when I ended my presentation. My nine minutes were up. You can learn more about my author voice and character voice in my books.
I’ve been listening to podcasts almost everyday since the beginning of the pandemic, and now I’m a guest on a podcast. What a thrill!
Thank you to hospice doctor and End of Life University founder Karen Wyatt for hosting this engaging conversation about addressing end-of-life challenges through fiction. She read my novel, When I Killed My Father: An Assisted Suicide Family Thriller,enjoyed and appreciated it, and asked me questions no one asked before, like why my protagonist did what he did when he didn’t want to. As well as some of the more common questions, like do I support assisted suicide/euthanasia? (You’ll have to watch to learn the answer to that.)
If you enjoy this conversation half as much as I did, that’s still a lot of enjoyment. I shared this with friends and through Twitter and Facebook, and one friend remarked on what a warm and terrific interviewer Karen Wyatt is. I couldn’t agree more.
We talked for a long time and could have kept on going. If your time is short, and you want to take a peek, jump to 3:23 or 35:07.
For the billions of you who have not read the book, here it is in a paragraph: What if your ailing father asks you to kill him? And what if, at your father’s memorial, from the pulpit at the front of the church, your sister accuses you of murder? When I Killed My Father: An Assisted Suicide Family Thriller is a “page-turner with a conscience” about a man caught between what is compassionate and what is legal.
Thank you again to Karen Wyatt for her generosity and curiosity as well as the courage to tackle what is still a taboo subject for many. If you appreciate this kind of conversation, check out Karen’s other interviews on the End of Life University podcast. She posts a new one every Monday and she’s on episode 365 now — that’s the equivalent of a full year of interviews. This week’s “interview” is a solo episode about How to Live a Death-Aware Life.
On January 1, the first day of the year, I wrote the words “the end” to Sausalypso, the novel I’ve been working on during the pandemic. That doesn’t mean I’m finished, but I made it to the end of the first draft and now I go back and rewrite, reorganize, and make it better.
I just recently reworked my prologue. Which is a short and sweet introduction and history of Sausalypso.
Prologue: A Short History of Sausalypso
My name is Tin Alley and if you’ve heard of me, keep in mind that I don’t consider myself a hero and I didn’t solve the murder by myself.
I was not in Sausalypso when the houseboat story started, during World War II, when Bechtel Corporation built a massive shipyard called Marinship on the shores of Rich Bay. At its peak, Marinship employed 20,000 workers, who built 93 cargo ships and oil tankers for the war in three years.
I lived in the City then, as a newly orphaned sixteen-year-old, laundering sheets and scrubbing toilets for Sally Cal, who ran a brothel on Nob Hill.
I am forever grateful to Sally for taking me in when I ran away from my foster home at fifteen, and putting me to work changing sheets and washing dishes and cleaning toilets and never once pressuring me to become a working girl. She knew better than I did that wasn’t something I would be good at. And when she instructed me, once I had graduated to greater responsibilities, to pass out envelopes of cash, I followed orders.
This was long before I became police chief in Sausalypso, the first woman police chief in California. You can look it up. Long before the houseboat wars, the murder at City Hall, and my brief brush with fame.
Workers came from all over to work at Marinship, and there wasn’t enough housing for them. The county housing authority and the feds teamed up to establish Marin City on what had been a dairy farm, and build housing for 6,000 workers. Still wasn’t enough. Many workers lived on old boats or built them from whatever materials they could scrounge.
When the war ended, Bechtel abandoned the shipyard, and a boatbuilder named Donlon Arquez bought 20-plus acres of waterfront, full of shipbuilding debris. The land was considered worthless at the time. But that changed.
Arquez dragged old boats, like decommissioned ferries, onto the mudflats and rented them to free-spirited artists and soldiers returning from the war. People built their homes on barges and rafts. Out of packing crates, railroad cars, motor homes. These floating homes — most were not true houseboats as they were not navigable — connected to land with ramshackle wooden walkways or floating docks made from plywood sitting on styrofoam.
Arques charged little or no rent, and his landlord style could be generously described as “benign neglect.” Others called it anarchy. The waterfront became home to junk collectors, artists and craftsmen, boat builders and carpenters. Then, after the Summer of Love turned dark across the bay in Haight-Ashbury, hippies and squatters arrived, seeking free love and free living. Many homes had electricity, the wires strung along posts on the piers, but not sewage hookups.
This waterfront property, known as the “Gates,” became the epicenter of Sausalypso’s development battles of the 1970s. Local officials tried to clean up the houseboat scene, and Arques was forced to sell as complaints mounted. Then the evictions started.
You might remember news anchors like Dennis Richmond or Johnny Dash reporting from the Sausalypso waterfront about the eviction raid standoff, when the houseboaters in their dinghies pushed away our police boats with long oars. Or you read about the murder at City Hall in the newspaper.
But you can’t believe everything you see on your television screen or read in your paper. I was there.
Last fall, after a fellow author interviewed for a podcast, she said to me that she found it interesting that someone as articulate and accomplished as I was chose such a poor book title.
It was just one person’s opinion, I told myself. Still, I had to wonder if a different title could make a difference in terms of visibility and sales.
Titles are hard. I wrote an 80,000 word novel, with 54 chapters and an epilogue, and I had to distill that into a few words.
The premise of my novel is simple enough — what if your ailing father asks you to kill him?
Here’s my elevator pitch: Psychologist Lamar Rose’s father is suffering from cancer and dementia, and wants his son to help him end his life. Lamar refuses, but his father keeps demanding, and he relents. Then, from the pulpit of the church at his father’s memorial, his sister accuses Lamar of murder.
I like to callWhen I Killed My Father a “page-turner with a conscience,” about a man caught between what is compassionate and what is legal.
Response from readers has been heartening, but I have not had as many readers as I’d hoped. Not everyone wants to read a book about death and dying and end-of-life decisions, of course, even though, as more than one reviewer noted, the novel is also fun and funny. My disappointing sales may have more to do with my subject matter than the title.
There are authors who have done republished with new titles, and managed to keep their reviews — See Helena Halme on How to Change a Book Title Without Losing Reviews. But there’s no guarantee that her strategy will work for others.
The web is full of advice for writers, and no shortage of articles about how to promote yourself on social media, how to use the right keywords in your book description, how to find the right editor. But I have found hardly any useful advice on book titles, other than obvious things like, the title is uber important and you should devote your best energy to it.
The advice that is out there is more on how to avoid a bad title. As Tucker Max, co-founder of Scribe, says, “A good title won’t make your book do well, but a bad title will prevent it from doing well.”
Informative (Gives an Idea of What The Book is About)
Easy To Say
Not Embarrassing or Problematic For Someone To Say It
The right length
Well, I think I’ve got three or four out of six.
When I was first writing When I Killed My Father, its working title was Edgewater, which was the name of the senior residence Lamar’s father lived in, on the lakefront on Chicago’s North Side.
There was a lot I liked about that title — the noirish sound of it most of all — but it’s such a common place name and it doesn’t signal the subject or genre of the book in any way.
I brainstormed many title ideas, such as:
Cheeks as Smooth as Ice
Die Now, Pay Later
What I Did for My Dad
My Father Begged Me
What I Promised My Father
At First I Said No
The Measure of My Love
I Can’t Stand to Live Like This
Some Secrets Should Stay Secret
The Duties of a Son
Fulfilling My Father’s Wishes
And many more.
My brother Pat, who read an early draft, suggested Let Me Go, which I liked a lot, and that’s what I used when I published my advance reader copy.
But one day, when I was sharing title ideas with fellow writers, one said Let Me Go was too subtle. I said, “Well, I don’t want to be too over the top and call it ‘Why I Killed My Father.’” She blurted out, “Oh, that’s so much better.”
I took heed and that became my first choice, but because it sounded like a how-to book, not a novel, I changed the first word from “why” to “when.”
I’d love to hear what you think, whether you’ve read the book or not. (If you haven’t, you can read the first three chapters here.) Should I change the title? What title do you like best?
If you’ve published a book, do you have second thoughts about your title?
But one day, when I was sharing title ideas with fellow writers, one said Let Me Go was too subtle. I said, “Well, I don’t want to be too over the top and call it ‘Why I Killed My Father.’” She blurted out, “Oh, that’s so much better.”
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