Unlocking the Passion

by Author S. Dionne Moore

Almost twenty-one years ago, my daughter was born. The light of my life. As every first-time mother will tell you, she was perfect. A gift. Except, she was born too early. At one pound and fifteen ounces, her condition was fragile at best. We spent seventy-five days in NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) as she struggled to breathe, much less suck and swallow, a reflex natural to full-term babies. 

Good days were always tinged with sorrow, and bad days sometimes became the stuff of nightmares. Those times when you entered NICU and saw an empty bed where an infant had been the night before, your emotions rolled between grief for the parents, relief that it wasn't your child, then guilt over your relief. 

When the day came that we brought our baby home, it was glorious. We were filled with joy. We willingly dragged along the heart rate monitor just to have her out of NICU, and a chance for normalcy. Granted, our days were filled with more worry than most new parents, more concerns about our child's growth and development, but the question of life and death had at least been settled.
In the midst of all this I came to the slow realization that I needed an outlet for the coiled knot of hope and fear that had become my constant companion. A hobby that I enjoyed. I turned to writing. A hobby I had not dabbled in since my teenage years. 

I started small. The Preemie Experience was my heartfelt tribute to mothers of premature infants, and the culmination of experiences of other young mothers with whom I swapped stories during our stay in NICU. In that day, Geocities was the way to publish a blog on the Web, and that's what I did with my tribute. To my surprise, I was contacted by an editor who was compiling stories from other parents. She asked if she could use my article as the prologue for her book, Living Miracles: Stories of Hope from Parents of Premature Babies. It was a thrilling moment, and one that made me reconsider old story ideas I had developed in my teens, with a mind to writing a book. 

Brides of Wyoming

My new journey to write fiction began with a lot of learning. Mastering the rules of writing, the best ways to help your publisher market your book, and all about developing story, conflict and characters. After a few years of conferences and meeting with editors and agents, I received feedback from a professional encouraging me to use my sassy, mature, secondary character as a heroine. LaTisha Barnhart was born. Within a year I had finaled in a writing contest with the opening chapter of a cozy mystery in which LaTisha held the starring role. It was for this book, Murder on the Bunions, that I received my first contract.

My journey in writing continues in the form of my newest release, Brides of Wyoming (11/1/2016), an anthology of three romances featuring heroines who must overcome physical and emotional dangers to learn to live and love to the fullest. And as my daughter turns twenty-one and studies for a degree to become a Paralegal, I have to stop and smile. It's amazing how terrible circumstances can unlock an unrealized passion that brings such joy and dimension to our hearts and minds. And my daughter? She has become a beautiful young woman with a sharp mind a quick smile. She is my heart. My joy. My gift.

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I needed an outlet for the hope and fear that had become my constant companion.~ S. Dionne Moore (Click to Tweet)

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S. Dionne Moore

S. Dionne Moore resides in the historically rich Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, where she indulges her pleasure for history and vacillates between the need to write and the desire to play. Brides of Wyoming is her newest release from Barbour Publishing. 

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Losing Control

Deborah Raney dreamed of writing a book since the summer she read Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books and discovered that a Kansas farm girl could, indeed, grow up to be a writer. After a happy twenty-year detour as a stay-at-home mom, Deb penned her first novel, A Vow to Cherish, which won a Silver Angel Award and inspired the acclaimed World Wide Pictures film of the same title. Since then, her books have won the RITA Award, HOLT Medallion, ACFW Carol Award, National Readers' Choice Award, as well as twice being finalists for the Christy Award.  She and her husband, Ken, have four children and four precious grandchildren who all live much too far away. Visit Deb at www.deborahraney.com. 

On a writers' loop I'm on, the discussion of authors' rights came up––how much of our story we retain control over, and how much we must give up. This was my response:

There are SO many places along the road to being traditionally published, and/or having your novel optioned for film, that you DO lose control over your property. It was one of the biggest surprises to me after I sold my first novel. (This is long and full of parenthetical asides––sorry!––but if you don't read the whole thing, please at least read the last few paragraphs to see why I'm NOT complaining!)

I signed my first contract in 1994 and I agented myself for the first 9 years. That was back in the day when the secular market had closed to unagented authors, but the CBA was still allowing writers to submit over the transom.

My acquisitions editor told me they loved my book and wanted to publish it. I assumed that meant somebody would fix my typos, punctuation and grammar, the book would go to press a couple weeks later, and I'd be holding my (NYT bestselling, Pulitzer prize-winning HA!) published novel in my hands a week or two after that. Ha! The first thing I received after signing the contract was a 12-page editorial letter––the substantive edit––with dozens of suggestions for changing the plot, deepening the characters, and CUTTING some of my favorite passages in the novel. I've now written for Bethany House, WaterBrook Press/Random House, Barbour, Steeple Hill/Harlequin, Howard/Simon & Schuster, Abingdon Press (non-fiction) and have contributed to anthologies, thus worked on a smaller scale with Tyndale House, Multnomah, David C. Cook (then RiverOak), and others, and I can tell you that 12-page letter was one of the shorter ones. ; }

One of the main plot changes the publisher wanted me to make completely derailed the theme of my book! I argued hard for that one, and won. Because I was brand new and didn't want to rock the boat, I deferred to my editors on most other issues. (Eighteen years later, I'd say I still take 85-90 percent of my editors' suggestions because I TRUST them! They know their stuff!! But I'm also much braver to argue hard for a point I disagree on.)

Anyway, after extensive rewriting (mostly to fix all my head-hopping POV issues and to change many, many telling passages to SHOWING) my book went back to my editor for line edit (more changes), back again for copy edit (during which we found at least one HUGE timeline/continuity issue that we'd ALL missed in the early edits!) then back to me in galley form for one final read. And FINALLY, 15 months after I sold the book, it started showing up in bookstores.

Somewhere in the midst of all those edits, I learned that my publisher rarely uses the author's title. They promised me they wouldn't use a title I hated, but they didn't plan to use the one I'd submitted. We settled on something I didn't hate, but didn't love it either––A Time to Cherish. A few weeks later my niece informed me that Robin Jones Gunn had a YA book out with that same title. I didn't want people going into bookstores asking for my title and being sold the far-more-popular-far-more-well-known (and very lovely and delightful, but I didn't know that yet!) Robin Jones Gunn's book! So we changed the title to A Vow to Cherish, which I still didn't hate, but loved a lot less than the first one.

My publisher chose a cover that wasn't what I'd imagined at all, but that I liked just fine. Mostly. And at least my name was on the cover.

A few months later, I learned that my novel had been optioned for film. And shortly after that, I got the contract, which signed over ALL control of my story to World Wide Pictures. But it was Billy Graham's film company, so I trusted that even if they changed everything, I would at least be happy with the message of the film. I was sent the script to read when it was finished but it wasn't for approval, it was just a courtesy. And believe me, they changed almost everything they could change about my novel. (And it had changed even more dramatically by the time my husband and I got to watch the premiere in Hollywood the following July.)

Still, I don't believe there's one thing about the above scenario that I would change if given the chance to do it all over again. I had SO much to learn about writing and about the publishing industry. Working with my editors who changed so much of my story was like getting a degree in fiction writing. And I have no doubt that my first book would have been my last, had I not been coachable and taken that direction from my wonderful editors. (That's still true today, with 20+ novels under my belt!) 

I'm apparently getting better at titles because I've gotten to use my own on my last 10 or 12 books. I've gotten some great covers and some not so great ones, and I get varying degrees of input depending on the publisher, but again, I'm learning to trust publishers who've been in the business for far, far longer than I have.

About that movie? If I'd put my foot down and said, "I won't sign unless you give me story approval, etc." I have no doubt the contract would have gone to someone else. And that movie launched my career.

My first contract with that traditional publisher (for 2 books) paid an advance that fully covered 4 years of room/board/tuition for our oldest son's college. (The REASON I started writing in the first place! And the reason, with 4 kids, that I'm still writing. 30 semesters down, 2 to go!)

Yes, my name is on the covers of my books (and the credits of the movie) and the copyright is in my name in the Library of Congress info. But I've given up a lot of creative control to partner with traditional publishers. And because of the ever changing definitions of "out-of-print," in some cases I've given up the option to get the rights back to my books. But despite the frustrations of not always getting my way with MY books, I wouldn't have it any other way!

The publishing world is definitely going through some serious growing pains (I could NOT traverse these current waters without my wonderful agent of 9 years, Steve Laube!!) and things are changing to where it's becoming much more possible to self-publish successfully, but for where I started and what I wanted out of the writers' life, I would give up that portion of creative control all over again. Yes, it's meant I don't always have a say about certain aspects of my own books! But I'm proud to have partnered with some wonderful publishers who've made it possible for me to work full-time at the career I've dreamed of since I was a little girl.

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A Cover Story with Creative Director, Ashley Schrock

Ashley Schrock serves as creative director for Barbour Publishing, Inc. Outside of work she enjoys playing tennis, coloring (you're never too old to color!) and walking her newly acquired puppy, Sawyer. She currently resides in the fabulously small town of Sugarcreek, Ohio.

My job as creative director covers a lot of ground—I oversee covers that are sent out to freelance designers, manage cover schedules so they get out to the printer on time, facilitate the communication of cover processes with our editorial team, and more recently coordinate photo shoots for our full length fiction. Basically if it has to do with our covers, I have something to do with it. But the majority of my time is spent designing covers and that's what I'm going to share with you.

And let me preface this by saying how thankful I am not to only have a job during this time of hardship for so many but a job that I love! Sometimes I can't believe that I get paid to do something I enjoy so much (don't tell my boss I said that). :) So here it is, in TLC title fashion

When we're working with new books everything starts with the publication list. We work from 2 lists a year—a spring and a fall. This is screen shot (below) of a pub list from a few years back. You probably can't make out the info but the highlighted yellow column contains the title info and that's where I start—finding the titles, author, and what category it belongs too. Most of what we do is in the fiction, gift, reference, kids, or devotional categories but we have several titles per list that are wild cards. The number of titles on these lists ranges from about 75-90 titles and included in every fall list are about 20-30 Christmas titles so once this list is final I can start what is about to be a crazy couple of months...

Once we have our pub list final I have meetings. Holla if you love meetings! (crickets? that's what I thought). But no, these meetings are great because it's with our editorial team. We go over upcoming titles and the direction we want to take them in. In our meetings review the strategy of who we want the book to target (read: market analysis), say a 20's something group and that gives me an idea of why kind of style we'll looking at. We decide if we want to art of some kind or photography and maybe we want it a little edgier than some of our other titles. Or if it's woman's devotional we look at who we're targeting and go with a whole different approach. We talk about budgets and what we can do as far as the cover treatments go, spot uv, foil, emboss, etc. Now it's go time...

And this is how the magic happens...

This is my handsome 24" iMac I named Zeke. In the morning I come into my office and say, "Zeke, it's go time." :) If ever there is a Mac vs. PC match going on you'll find me in Mac's corner holding the spit bucket. And those Mac commercials... love em! (Big surprise, a designer likes Macs. I know.)Anyway, getting off point. Now it's time to start. I always start a new design by sketching out ideas first. And to be honest, I'm a terrible drawer so I usually want to skip this part, but I've found that you can't be afraid to sketch out 10 awful covers because the 11th might be great. So I get over my insecurity and stick to drawing mostly straight lines. :) I very rarely let people see my sketchbook but here's a shot from a page that I was sketching out ideas for The Names of God.

Then I go to work on Zeke. I begin with a blank page in Photoshop and a few minutes later I take a step back and find a cover. Poof! It's just that easy! Okay not really. This final cover was the result of many hours and several bad comps, gradually turning into better comps, and eventually landing on a final. A comp is what we call a cover that is designed but not approved yet. Like when I'm done with designing a front cover and send it out for feedback I say "Here are the first round of comps (compositions)." And we refer to them as such until we choose a final

I have to say I was happy with this one (below) at the end of it all. Some days I'll start working on a cover and it feels like no matter what I do it just keeps getting worse. Then I'll come in the next morning, open it up, and think, "Oh I need to do this!" And then everything just falls into place. I think that happens to a lot of people. Author's can you back me up on this?

And just because I call it final doesn't mean it actually is. It has to pass through several people before it gets the stamp of approval. I refer to this process as "the gauntlet of cruelty". :) But in this case The Names of God cover shown is the approved, final cover. Yeah!!! The worst part now is waiting until I can have a printed copy in my hands. Depending on how late in the year it's scheduled to come in it can up to a year. I'm currently working on designs for our Spring 2010 pub list. I know who to blame when I write 2010 on my checks.

So that's a pretty quick run-through of my design process. Hope you enjoyed it!

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