Friendly Advice for Vampire Authors

Here at Vampires.com we have a lot of first time authors contact us to either review or feature their book (something we are always happy to do), and with them I have learned a few dos and don’ts – which brings you today’s post. Here are a few pointers that may help you guys out with your publishing dreams.

1. E-Books: E-books are incredibly popular nowadays, especially with self-publishing authors. I understand that printing books is expensive, but, not everyone owns an e-book reader and few people enjoy reading an entire book off of their computer. Only having a PDF file is going to make it VERY hard to find someone to review your book. Personally, I refuse to read them. Yes, I want to review your book, but there’s no way I’m going to sit at my computer for hours to do so. So keep this in mind when you’re getting ready to publish your novel.

2. Simple e-mails: This may seem silly of me, but it can be a problem. When you are contacting a company to review your book, keep the e-mail short and sweet. All you need to do is tell us the basics – you’re an author, you have a book you’d like reviewed, the plot of the book, your contact info and so on. You can also add in an attachment of the book cover, that’s great too. Keeping is simple like this is perfect! It becomes an issue when you not only send a 30 page report on your life and book, but then add in a couple dozen attachments to the whole thing. That turns it into a big unorganized mess and it’s frustrating trying to sort through all of that information. If a reviewer needs more info, they will ask for it.

3. Website: Your website represents you! One of the first things people do is check out your site. I’ve taken web design classes, graphic design classes and marketing classes and I can not begin to stress the importance of a good website. Make it visually appealing (but not over the top), professional, make sure viewers know it’s an author’s site, keep it organized… etc. You want a quality website, but don’t worry, this doesn’t require an expensive designer, just do your research.

4. Price: Many self-publishers pick the price of their book, that’s fine, just be reasonable guys. I’ve seen new authors charge $25 for their book… yea, sorry, but I won’t pay $25 for a book by my favorite author let alone an unknown author.

5. Adjectives: One big problem with first time authors is their overuse of adjectives. I may sound insane right now, but if I haven’t seen it so many times I wouldn’t have to mention it. Being descriptive is fantastic! Readers want to know what the scene and characters look like, but something like this gets very tedious very fast.

“Amanda ran her pale boney fingers through her dark red long wavy hair, while her cold grey blue eyes glared very menacingly at the tall tan man with the glowing red orange eyes.”

I love descriptions, but I hate long choppy sentences. It’s very difficult to read a book when every sentence is like the example above. There has been countless times where I just wanted to give up and stop reading. You want your book to read smoothly, you want the adjectives to blend into the story.

6. Being unique: Writing a unique vampire story when there are a million vamp books out there is hard. I can understand wanting to write a creative story, but don’t try too hard. Listen to your muse, let the words come to you, don’t purposely try to be different, it usually sounds forced and fake.

I am by no means an expert in the publishing field, I’m just a book junkie that reviews a lot of books and loves helping you out with your dreams of making it big. Hopefully you can put the info to good use. For some expert advice I HIGHLY suggest reading THIS.

– Moonlight

By Moonlight

Moonlight (aka Amanda) loves to write about, read about and learn about everything pertaining to vampires. You will most likely find her huddled over a book of vampire folklore with coffee in hand. Touch her coffee and she may bite you (and not in the fun way).

7 comments

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  3. Nice advice :3. I’m one of those people that is working on a vampire novel, at the moment I’m trying to get past the “OMG vampires are overdone”/”OMG vampires are stupid/Twilight sucks” comments that everyone brings up the second you tell them what you’re writing about.

    I can’t believe the fact that I’ve actually seen people tell fellow writers not to write about vampires on some writing sites.

    1. Yea, I think it’s ridiculous when people tell others not to write about vampires. There’s a million stories left to be told. :)

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