Author Archives: crymsynhart

by Crymsyn Hart

You place your fingers on the keys, focus on the screen, and then let the world fall away. You get lost inside of your own mind and are transported to another reality that you are in control of. Or at least you think you’re in control of. That is what the characters inside of your head want you to believe. They want you to think that you are the one controlling their lives when in trust they are the ones who are controlling your hand and hacking into your thoughts to dictate which way they want their lives to go. It’s all their plan to make you forget that you are the instrument. Sometimes it makes me wonder who is really writing the books. Then again it almost feels like playing a video game going around killing people off and hooking them up.

At the moment, I have three books going on right now, each characters warring in their own landscapes. Each of them are squared away in their own boxes. But the walls between them are growing thin and each want a chance to take over my hands and start playing. But of course, I shouldn’t be writing but getting ready to go to the convention I’m heading to this week. Maybe it’s really the characters telling me to go and I’m just the puppet. Or there is someone else pulling my strings.

Cons seem to be the thing to do in the summertime. When all I want to do is write, other things are pulling me away from that. But that is a good thing because us authors have to get out from behind the computer and meet with people. I’m not exactly the social type, but anything that can get me out of the house is a good thing. This is the first con, I’m heading to by myself and the furthest so far. Heading to Fandom Fest in Louisville, KY. Then in August I’m heading to Philadelphia to another convention.
Hope to see you all there. Should be exciting.

by Crymsyn Hart

One of the most important things for marketing a book is the cover. I particularly love what’s between the book jacket, but the first thing a reader sees is the picture on the front cover. Hopefully that cover can give you some idea of what you might be getting yourself into.  Then again, a person might read a book, look at the cover and wonder what in the world had they read. I’ve done that a few times. I’ve grabbed a book that looked like something I had wanted to read and the blurb was pretty good, but after reading the book it had nothing to do with the cover. I’m sure that everyone’s done that.

One thing about working mostly with small e-publishers, I am lucky I can browse the various stock art sites and choose who or what I would like to be on the cover. I recently had a conversation with one of my cover artists. She did a wonderful cover for me, but I needed the model added to the cover to show it was an Interracial Romance. She countered that it would be shown as an IR from the blurb and the page it was one. However, my response was that I look at covers first before I read the blurbs especially when shopping online. I’m sure there are others who do the same thing. But it’s nice to have an input. I spend hours looking over different models who I think are a good representation of what my characters look like. Then that goes to the cover artist and they perform miracles with the stock art.

Many people don’t realize that e-books do have covers. But they do, and like their print counterparts, they turn people on or off.

What do you think about covers? Do you judge a book by it?

by Crymsyn Hart

This past weekend I took the day and drove up to
ConCarolinas here in Charlotte to say hello to my fellow bloggers, Tina,
Jeremy, and Gail. It was great to see them. I was also there to hang out with fellow author and film maker, Stephen Zimmer. I’ll also be hanging with him in July at FandomFest in Louisville, KY.

Hanging out with the other authors is also great and makes
me feel right at home, but it was something that Stephen said that got me to
thinking. As an author, I write because it’s my passion, just like all authors
write because they love to do it. You want to reach the fans and hope they like
your books. But when I came home and looked over what I have available, it got
me to realize that I write. A lot. I’m currently hanging around fifty books published. Some are large and some are small. But over the past decade that is a lot of word count. The first book I published was based on my senior project I had written for college. Then I took it and rearranged it, added a few more characters based on friends, and over time it became the work that got me started.

Even after writing seriously for the past decade, I wasn’t picked up for publication until five years ago with a small, now defunct, e-publisher that accepted four of the books I had at the time.  From there, I also worked with three other presses that have now disbanded. For each, I would write something new and I’ve met a wonderful group of people that from five years ago has grown into authors now owning their own small presses. I’ve found a home among them and feel more comfortable there then with the big e-publishers.

Taking into account everything, that still doesn’t make me get to a
point where I just want to throw in the towel and quit writing all together.
There have been many times over the years, frustration has set in and damn my
characters or not, I’m going to stop listening to them and take up another
hobby.

The longest I’ve stopped writing for is three months, by far the worst
period I had. But then something clicks and I get back on the horse. So
far, I’ve had one episode this year that I wanted nothing to do with any of it.
It’s a different feeling than writer’s block, being frustrated with characters,
or the world in general. For that short period of time, something inside of me
dies and I’m ready to bury it. However, something reminds me that I’m not
writing for money, or to keep pumping out stuff because there is a demand for
it. Heck, there are thousands of books coming out every year. That something is the Writer’s Soul in me that wants to be revived and spin new stories. It’s friends and others who give me encouragement. Loved ones who read stuff that they can’t stand, but do it anyway because they support me.

So no matter how much you might want to bury the writer in
you, just remember it will come back from the dead. I’ve learned that from experience. I guess