Author Dean Wesley Smith Lynn Viehl recently shared her royalty numbers for Twilight Falls, the sixth novel in her Darkyn series, which debuted at number 19 on the NYT Bestseller list.

Here is the first royalty statement for Twilight Fall, on which I’ve only blanked out Penguin Group’s address. Everything else is exactly as I’ve listed it. To give you a condensed version of what all those figures mean, for the sale period of July through November 30, 2008. my publisher reports sales of 64,925 books, for which my royalties were $40,484.00. I didn’t get credit for all those sales, as 21,140 book credits were held back as a reserve against possible future returns, for which they subtracted $13,512.69 (these are not lost sales; I’m simply not given credit for them until the publisher decides to release them, which takes anywhere from one to three years.)

My net earnings on this statement was $27,721.31, which was deducted from my advance. My actual earnings from this statement was $0.

Damn. That’s not a whole lot of cash for a bestselling novel. Kind of puts that dream of living as a full-time writer a little more out of reach… Oh well, we can always pin our hopes of selling lucrative foreign rights

EDIT: With apologies, the post above belongs to author Lynn Viehl. I followed a link to it and relied on the linker’s description, instead of perusing the site more thoroughly to double check who wrote that post.

Tags: Dean Wesley Smith

Okay, so my previous post on first person POV raised some hackles. I must explain.

As Andy LeBlanc theorized, that post came from a deep place of personal hurt. As Managing Editor of Every Day Fiction, I’m exposed to an unending stream of terrible, terrible fiction in the form of a deep slush pile. The “rules” that I mentioned in my previous article were, like any rule, meant to apply to beginning authors only. Masters* are free to break them (at their own peril).

For your convenience, here are a few rules about first person POV for you to break:

1) Your narrator cannot die in the end. Otherwise, who is he telling the story to?
2) There should be no scene breaks in first person POV. What do these mean exactly? Your narrator is taking a cigarette break?
3) No meta-narrative. Imagine you`re standing around a barbecue. Your friend is telling a story. How in heck does he relate the meta-narrative?

Anyone want to fire off a few more?

*Special note to Creative Writing Majors. This is not you. Masters have been published in one of the pros.

Hey guys,

Andrew LeBlanc just passed along this link which contains a transcript of the story meeting held between George Lucas, Steven Speilberg, and Lawrence Kasdan (the writer). It’s a wonderful glimpse into how one of history’s most popular film characters was created, and what thought processes were employed in his creation by some of cinema’s most creative talent.

Mystery Man gets it right when he says that one of the most important insights here is that they started not by plotting out Raiders of the Lost Ark, but by developing Indiana’s character.

Tags: Indiana Jones, Lucas, Spielberg

Got the call today that I’ve been accepted to Clarion West for the class of 2009. I’m incredibly pleased by this. I’d actually applied to both Clarion and Clarion West, but CW was a clear favourite because it’s got awesome instructors, a vibrant writing community in Seattle, and is a short three hour drive across the border. I’m going to arrange for a PACE pass so that I can skip the line-ups there and back.

I’ll be posting my Clarion West Application Essay, so you guys can see what got me in (of course, the fact that the story I submitted with my entry placed 1st in Writers of the Future couldn’t have hurt    ).

Tags: Clarion West

So, I’m writing this article so that later, I’ll have proof that I coined this term.

The Red Baron is something that is better explained through example.

Say you are writing a WWI story. Your protagonist is fighting the Germans, but the Germans are a faceless bunch and therefore not particularly exciting. To add tension, you invent a Red Baron-type character. You take ONE German, humanize him, give him a history, give him panache… and then make him really skilled and awful (no idea if the original Red Baron was evil, this is just an example). To your readers, the Red Baron becomes a stand-in for “the Germans”, and if the Red Baron is evil, all Germans become evil. By contrast, your protagonist becomes “good”, which helps to generate sympathy.

The Red Baron makes your story go from a hero fighting a nameless, faceless enemy, to a pitched battle between well-developed, gripping characters.

Now, there’s probably a literary term for what I’m describing. If there is, please leave the name in the comments. Otherwise, it shall be forever known as “The Red Baron”!

EDIT: Okay, forever is pretty damn short. Andrew LeBlanc shortened it to A Red Baron in this article, which is well worth reading. Now what are the rest of you waiting for? Let’s popularize this thing!

Tags: A Red Baron, The Red Baron Ploy