Fun stuff from my Jane Eyre tumblr campaign. And because pictures are fun!
Kindle Scout link: http://amzn.to/2i8DZlb <- Get the book free if you nominate during October!
Word Art: The Rise and Fall of Jane
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Category Archives: Books
Kindle Scout campaign details
I’m ten days into my Kindle scout campaign, and several other writers have asked how much information I get as I go along. This may not be every reader’s cup-of-tea, but I thought I’d throw some thoughts up here.
First, if you have a moment, don’t forget to nominate my Jane Eyre romance! 😘 I really appreciate it.
Okay, deets. When you have a campaign going, you get a dashboard that looks like this:
The “Hours in Hot & Trending” seems to b a key metric, though I’ve heard anecdotally that it’s only one factor the Amazon team looks at. There have certainly been titles who trended a ton and didn’t get selected and vice versa. This dashboard updates once a day, in the morning.
Anyway, I had a big push at the beginning (mainly from friends and family and readers (thanks!) and from the visibility of being new. My page reads have been pretty steady since then, but we’ll see how it goes. So that’s my sneak peek. Good luck to my fellow writers who are planning on giving it a whirl!
Don’t forget to nominate The Rise and Fall of Jane! And let me know in the comments if you’re considering your own campaign!
Thanks
Corrie Garrett
The Rise and Fall of Jane
Hurray! Almost three years after starting a contemporary retelling of Jane Eyre, it is polished and almost published! During the month of October, it will be up on Kindle Scout for readers to sample and nominate.
About the book: Jane Agosto wants to leave her lonely, dysfunctional past behind when she gets a job as a nanny at Miles Hayes’s mansion. It only takes a few encounters with Miles for her to feel drawn to him, but Jane refuses to be THAT nanny, the one who falls for her boss. She’s no Cinderella, and she won’t break her heart on a wealthy player, or raise the hopes of the little girl she cares for. But when attempted murder shakes up the family, Jane’s heart falters. Should she trust Miles, or hit the road?
You can read the first three chapters and nominate here!
What are the difficulties of writing a Jane Eyre re-telling or spin-off?
Well, first of all, it’s been done. It’s been done well. It’s been done with literary and poetic excellence. I’m thinking Wide Sargasso Sea and things of that magnitude. Yikes, right? I’ve also enjoyed several modern re-tellings, plus the innovative YouTube show The Autobiography of Jane Eyre that I loved!
So, I tried to decide what I hadn’t seen in the re-tellings that I wanted:
I wanted more faith. It is an integral part of the original story, but most modern re-tellings gloss right over it. I particularly wanted a Jane who wasn’t sleeping with her boss by the time the big twist comes. For me, without the moral and spiritual conflict, most of Jane’s reaction is lost.
A twist with the “Bertha” character that is not drugs. I get that drug addiction or related mental problems make sense in this retelling, but I wanted to do something else.
A Gothic sense of dread and supernatural. In the original, particularly the end when Jane hears Rochester’s voice over thousands of miles, there is a sense of natural (and divine) wonder. Almost a magical realism, in that Jane just accepts it and the story doesn’t pause to figure out what happened and how.
How did I include those? Well, it was tricky. I don’t want to give away the twists that I did use, but I can say that I fell a little further into the paranormal spectrum than I meant to, and that some mythology is used. There aren’t any shifters or vampires, but there are definitely some mysteries to be uncovered.
Most of all, I wanted it to be a compelling and un-put-downable love story!
Hope you enjoy. Thank you for following along.
Click here to get a sneak peek, and nominate for Amazon’s publication team!
Corrie
How Not to Write a Novel
From personal experience. (Sobs quietly over her smoothie.)
1. Re-start it once a year for three years.
2. Decide to switch main characters more than once.
3. Write it all on your phone and lose a significant chunk when your toddler gets the app open.
4. Get distracted by new shiny ide- squirrel!
5. Have a baby. (Actually this one I recommend. It just delays the writing a TINY bit.)
6. Tell your sister or your best friend the whole idea and lose all motivation.
7. Swing wildly between manic confidence and utter revulsion in what you’ve written.
8. Take three years to write it.
9. Get feedback on early chapters and lose all motivation.
And 10. Blog about writing instead of actually WRITING! 🙂
Protected: Mailing List Confirmation
The Officer – coming June 28
Summer is here! Do you have a good book to read?
Well, I’ve got one for you! The Officer is almost here. Eleven science fiction stories examining the duties, challenges, and downright chaos of authority in strange places. It’s available for pre-order now, and drops on June 28.
From the back cover:
“Being an officer means balancing many conflicting demands. Making the wrong decision can have serious consequences. It takes a special kind of person to cope with the responsibility.
The stories are:
Duty by Alasdair Shaw
Patchworker 2.0 by M Pax
Totaled by Benjamin Douglas
Lucky Star by A R Knight
There Comes a Time by J J Green
Red Fortitude by Eddie R Hicks
Pithos by Mark Gardner
A Step on the Path by Tom Germann
Rituals by Rick Partlow
First Generation by Adrien Walker
The Grape Thieves by Corrie Garrett ** That’s me! 🙂
Instafreebie promotion!
There’s a great little site called Instafreebie where you can try out new authors for free. It’s similar to finding free ebooks on Amazon, but it’s more helpful to the author, besides offering Nook, Kobo, etc. I’m part of a big science fiction and fantasy promotion where you can pick just one book or all of them! I submitted a new Christmas fantasy romance called That Christmas You Remember. Enjoy!
Mash Story short list!
I dabbled in flash fiction last month and submitted a piece to Mash Stories (mashstories.com). Much to my surprise, I was recently contacted by the editor to let me know my story made it to their short list and is in the competition for their quarterly prize! Fun! Here’s the link and if you feel like voting for it, that’d be awesome too! (Everything has votes now, right?)
Also, as a teaser, it began as a chapter in my modern re-telling of Jane Eyre which should be coming out this fall!
Top 5: Ensemble Science Fiction
I got to do a guest post a while back about ensemble fiction (books with at least 5 – 8 main characters), and these are my suggestions!
From Lord of the Rings to Ocean’s Eleven to Crash, I almost always enjoy ensemble movies. But my particular favorites are sci-fi ensembles like Independence Day or Inception. So, in their honor, I’ve put together a Top Five reading list for other science fiction (and ensemble) lovers.
(For my purposes I’ve left out classic authors like Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov and focused on newer authors and books you may not have read yet.)
1. Robopocalypse (Daniel H. Wilson)
This book is an explosive collision of I, Robot and The Day After Tomorrow – big, crazy violence and big, crazy heroes. You’ve got conflicted, noble robots and super-scary evil ones, heroes you love and heroes you kind of hate (in a good way). The story starts when the main human character finds a “hero archive” compiled by the arch enemy computer – who, despite the fact that he’s been decimating humanity, is fascinated by the heroes who fight him. I’m bugging my husband to read it so I can talk to him about it!
2. The Ghost Brigades (John Scalzi)
This is the second book in the Old Man’s War series (which is generally fantastic) but this novel was the standout in my opinion, and could be read alone (though I bet you read the others, too!). In a cutthroat universe, the human military has developed a way to take the DNA of dead people (who’d volunteered for military duty but died before they could begin) and turned them into perfect clone soldiers. Following a group of these cold ghost soldiers as they come to life is a surprisingly emotional and satisfying read.
3. Bruiser (Neal Shusterman)
You might have read this in school in the last few years, but if you haven’t, put it in your to-read list! Yes, right now, I’ll wait…. Okay.
Told from four perspectives, this is the story of Brew, a young man who absorbs the pains and injuries of those he cares about, and almost destroys them in the process…Because without pain, you can’t learn and you can’t really live. And you can’t put down this book, either.
4. Agent of Change (Sharon Lee and Steve Miller)
This is the first novel of the Liaden Universe, and although the authors began it in the 1980’s, it’s been kept alive by a small but fanatical fan base and now contains upwards of sixteen books! The books are a mix of regency romance and space opera – lots of dancing, piloting, and matchmaking. (I understand they had some copyright problems, but I see that they’ve just released a new kindle version of this book for free! The cover is a little less awesome here- copyright issues, probably. But it’s free! Go get it!)
5. Revenge of the Sith (Matthew Stover)
It’s hard enough to write a good novelization of a sci-fi movie, but throw in a really lackluster script and angry fans, and you’ve got your work cut out for you. Incredibly, (some might say miraculously) this is an EXCELLENT book. I’ve never been a huge Star Wars gal, but this book converted me. Mace Windu and Yoda and all these people I’m vaguely familiar with suddenly came to life…and took my breath away.
I know this is woefully short, so tell me – what sci-fi ensembles do you love?
Happy reading,
Corrie Garrett 