Nagisa K. Writes

Hype people up for your original writing project (no fanfiction please- it's a wonderful medium but not the focus of this blog post) or work in progress by giving us some juicy details!

WELCOME TO MARKETING MONTH

Hi everyone, it's time to crack this case.... together. Please feel free to do submissions of questions for this event! Seriously! It's gonna be an entire month of us answering marketing questions and trying to figure out what to do about this conundrum.

TODAY'S QUESTION:

Because I feel this. Deeply.

Getting a little real here. I perceive myself as totally uninteresting unless someone's willing to engage with me on things I like (like writing craft or philosophizing or One Piece or Fate/ or Okinawa). Plus, my default social setting is "mistrust everyone but be as civil as possible" so it's also difficult and exhausting for me to maintain conversation with strangers for long.

So I too am not a marketable character or personality, unless "blunt honesty" or "sensitive perspective" become trendy.

The conclusion I've arrived at for now is, I won't market myself.

I mean. If I don't see myself as a viable product, I don't see how merchandising myself will serve me much purpose. For me, that's a disingenuous sales pitch at best, so I keep the focus on the product I do think worth selling: my book/writing and the characters in them.

Boy do I love love love those "products!" So I will tell you as much as I can about them!

Tag taken from @milosometimeswrites

I was tagged by @purple-on-black :) Time to pick something good.

Rules: share a line from your story with zero context.

Since I have a couple of projects going on, I hope it's alright if I share a couple of out of context lines <3

From Adamantine (cheating a bit, because it's a couple lines):

Your first kill came weeks later. Mother told you to survive, but not to be good. You were so hungry then. So very, very hungry.

This is from an earlier draft of my current project, The Goblin Bride:

“Love, Clarriss. Love is stronger than any magic there is. You can render a potion inert, you can create a dead zone, and you can block a spell. But love? Nothing stops it. Not fists, not fear, and not blood.”

This is from a Twine interactive fiction/game that I finished the first draft/outline of this week:

Tomorrow, maybe you’ll forget that the hole inside you is there until you trip over a rock, walking behind your armoured rescuers, and gain a dent in your head that won’t heal. It won’t ever heal.

And then finally, this one is from a project currently in the editing stage:

When Kogen’s voice failed to drop, like he’d expected it to, he’d panicked because he was sure that if he continued to sound like a “miserable warbling songbird” that Aldox would alter him, just like he did Mercuria. It wasn’t until later that he’d realized that there was a reason it wasn’t dropping.

"Jay... When's the last time you were happy?"

He stops. The foreign word holds this... power to it.

OC Development Side Series:

"Star's shine brighter during the night, light is more visible in the dark. But... I would've liked to know what the sun was like before I became nocturnal."

I don't have multiple projects. Just the one canon timeline 🤷‍♂️ Picked random lines here xD

"So close to death, yet pulled from its brink."

Tagging:

From A Sight of Aur, as usual~

Hello my lovelies! Readers and writers alike, join our morality Monday!

Fans of the series recall, with heavy hearts, the war at Marineford (dunno the English translations sorry sorry). I still can't watch or read any scenes with Ace without feeling my soul split itself in two.

And though Ace's final words hit my waterworks every time, Doflamingo's musings have equally haunted me, that "Only victors have the right to write history." We've heard the sentiment before.

I bring up "history" because I think it goes hand-in-hand with "legend." I feel that, at a certain point for a certain function, history is deified into legend. Accuracy goes out the window in favor of heightening drama and theatrics, because a memorable story sticks. We distill history down to "heroics" or "villainy" because the brain's very comfortable with categories and compartmentalization. And if we hold the "history's only written by the winners" as a fact, that means in the moment history becomes legend, the legends too are written by the victorious.

Hype people up for your original writing project (no fanfiction please- it's a wonderful medium but not the focus of this blog post) or work in progress by giving us some juicy details!

WELCOME TO MARKETING MONTH

Hi everyone, it's time to crack this case.... together. Please feel free to do submissions of questions for this event! Seriously! It's gonna be an entire month of us answering marketing questions and trying to figure out what to do about this conundrum.

TODAY'S QUESTION:

See, I used to work as a bookseller. Can't say I was any good, but the one skill I tried to hone was identifying comp titles.

Oh the dreaded comp titles, right? You might not think you have to research comp titles until you're querying agents, but an agent is also a reader, right?

And comp titles are not "well I have the banter from [X] and the spice from [Y] so my pitch is [X] + [Y]."

From here it's a matter of my personal opinion, but I'd say comp the piece with that niche stage play anyway! Because there IS a community of theater enthusiasts who know that niche, and there's bound to be a few readers in there too.

If I were to build a table based on that niche play, I'd try to consider what mainstream pieces would lead a reader to it. Would, for instance, Hadestown lead a reader to your piece? What about Hamilton? Rocky Horror? Arcadia? The idea is to start with something familiar and funnel potential readers to your piece. :)

I'm thinking about @meiyohakobune when I say this, but go boldly outside of your genres! meiyo says Proxy Agents is a "YA urban fantasy," but given its motifs and inspirations, I'd absolutely announce manga and graphic novels like Puella Magi Madoka Magica or Magical Boy as comp titles!

Actually, thinking about it now, graphic novels (YA, adult, AND Young Readers) in general do a lot of genre-blending, so that might be another place to check too!

Oh oh! Example! A recent fantasy release titled The Rainshadow Orphans comp'd itself with the likes of Akira, Pokemon, and Spirited Away. So a manga, a video game, and an animated movie.

Hype people up for your original writing project (no fanfiction please- it's a wonderful medium but not the focus of this blog post) or work in progress by giving us some juicy details!

WELCOME TO MARKETING MONTH

Hi everyone, it's time to crack this case.... together. Please feel free to do submissions of questions for this event! Seriously! It's gonna be an entire month of us answering marketing questions and trying to figure out what to do about this conundrum.

TODAY'S QUESTION:

See, I used to work as a bookseller. Can't say I was any good, but the one skill I tried to hone was identifying comp titles.

Oh the dreaded comp titles, right? You might not think you have to research comp titles until you're querying agents, but an agent is also a reader, right?

And comp titles are not "well I have the banter from [X] and the spice from [Y] so my pitch is [X] + [Y]."

My father is everything I'm not, see. Outdoorsy, extroverted. The hyperactive end of ADHD (I'm not diagnosed with anything, but my sister and I have an increasingly sneaking suspicion I might be somewhere on the spectrum). Writing is such a foreign concept to him, he once asked me for advice on how to journal.

He probably saw the walls of text I'd brainstormed, plus how I'd locked in on typing, so he asked me about the process. "So... what all goes into this?" (gestures at my writing tablet)

I kept my explanation brief. Brainstorming, just to get the ideas out. Plot structure, for a generic map. Character development, to track goals. And that I'll choose to throw out a lot of these ideas between drafts.

Would I express that love to them? Probably not. I'm not interested in shouldering the obligations that come with a confession. The expectation of sharing the ups and downs of that person's story, their journey in fulfilling that destiny. I see myself as more of an observer in that regard. Loving from afar.

After all, loving someone doesn't have to lead to a relationship. I don't find any fulfillment in having my feelings validated or acknowledged.

I think that's why I enjoy writing as much as I do. The characters can play out the intricacies of "love" on my behalf. I know their destinies. So I can simulate situations where the love dies, or it continues.