Two New Online Workshops Announced

(Starts in August)

WRITING MYSTERIES

There is often a fine line to writing to market, which can often hurt a writer, to writing so that a reader’s expectations can be filled. To have a reader be satisfied that the promises you  made to them in your cover, your blurb, your opening is critical to a reader buying the next book in your series or the next book you write.

So how do you know what a reader is expecting in all the different genres and subgenres?

That’s what this workshop is about. That’s what this workshop will teach you to understand so you can do it automatically.

“Writing on the Rails” is a term to describe when a writer starts a story off in a certain direction with promises of a certain ending and those promises are fulfilled. But there is a problem. If that sort of writing is obvious, characters cardboard, and readers are way ahead of your story, the readers will stop.

So “On the Rails” means reader expectations are met and you have done your job with the characters and pacing and such.

In every genre there are a bunch of reader expectations that if you follow, you sell more copies and get readers telling others about your book. Doesn’t mean the book isn’t original, not at all. It means that in your original story you gave readers what they wanted.

Reader expectations for me are so ingrained now, I don’t even much think about them and never as I write.

Readers need to care about your story and your characters while at the same time allowing the reader to feel secure that you will fill your promise you made to them for a certain type of book.

For example: You promise a cozy mystery, then have a gunfight in the middle of the book with blood and lots of dead bodies. Cozy readers will put the book down because you promised them a cozy and didn’t deliver.

Or you put a spaceship on the cover of your most recent sf book and there is no spaceship.

Readers hate having promises broken and won’t buy more of your books.

So this workshop is all about all those expectations a reader has coming into all the varied genres and subgenres. Once you know about the expectations, understand deeply that you are writing for someone else on the other side of the typing, you can then just go ahead and write for yourself.

In other words, a lot of this workshop will be awareness. A massive amount of awareness that has never been covered in any way in any other workshop we have done. We did one workshop that is now a classic called Genre Structure, but that workshop didn’t cover any of this. In fact, it would be a nice fit with this one.

After you get through this workshop, you will have faith that you are fulfilling reader expectations. And that faith will help your sales and your writing.

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