I’ve long felt that much of being an adult, and a professional whatever-it-is-you-hold-yourself-out-as, is knowing what you’re good at, and what you’re not.

You do the things you’re good at. The things you’re not good at, you either learn how to do competently, or you find people who are competent at them to take of them. (n.b.: A brief aside here: Competence is the point at which other people are willing to pay you for your services, not the point at which you feel like you know what you’re doing. There is far too little competence in this world. I don’t care what your IQ is; I care whether you’re competent at whatever it is you want me to pay you money for.)

I am a competent writer. I have been supporting myself and my family in this profession since the late 1990s. I am not, however, a competent graphic designer, as much as I would like to be.

Good graphic design is both an art and a science. The art should be obvious; the science, however, is less so.

To someone without formal training in the field, it can be difficult to appreciate what separates the good from the bad. You may be able to feel that one example is better than another, but the why of it can be elusive. I hasten to add here that “formal training” can consist of self-study; there are many awesome graphic designers out there who are entirely self-taught. These folks, however, have taken the effort to study what works and what doesn’t, to compare things that look good with thing that look like crap and understand what separates them, to learn the specific mechanics of creating good design, and to spend an awful lot of time practicing all of this stuff.

There is in fact some established science behind why the human eye prefers certain color combinations, how certain designs direct the eye rather than confuse it, and why a whole array of design conventions are more effective than others. It isn’t just a matter of creating things that “look nice.”

This brings us to self-published book covers. And here there is really little point in belaboring the fact that the world judges your book by its cover. Simply put, an amateurish cover tells your prospective readers they’re getting an amateurish book.

All of the covers I’ve revealed here were created by professional graphic designers. I could certainly have saved myself the $350 or so I’ve spent so far on covers and done them myself, since I’m not completely unacquainted with Photoshop and Illustrator. They would, however, have looked quite a bit less interesting than the ones I’ve gotten.

Part  of the reason is that a graphic designer, being disconnected from the book you’ve just written, is able to think about it in a way that you, as the author, cannot, and is able to think about how best to present it to the world in a far more objective fashion.

This matters.

Pretty much every cover I’ve commissioned has come back looking very different from what I had originally envisioned, and every single one of them has looked better than the cover I would have created on my own. I don’t regret a single cent I’ve spent so far.

If you want to convince the world your writing doesn’t suck, you need to get that world to read it. And getting it to read your writing requires an intriguing cover.

Don’t sell yourself short.

(P.S.: I’m supposed to get the draft cover for The Needle and the Dungeon tomorrow. Between you, me, and the fence post, I can’t wait to see it.)

Update: The cover is in, and you should see it in the post below. This is precisely why I don’t do my own covers.

Yesterday I decided to vent a bit about bad erotica, and that vent created a bit of a stir for a three-day-old blog. Having established why so much erotica sucks, I promised to offer my thoughts on how not to suck.

Therein though lies a problem, because tastes in erotica vary so widely. It’s impossible for me to offer much one-size-fits-all advice. All I can really do is explain how to write erotica that I think doesn’t suck. There aren’t a lot of objective standards here, for obvious reasons.

This is also much too big a subject for one blog post, so tonight I’m going to focus on one problem in particular.

Let’s imagine for a moment that you had at your disposal two (or more) fully animatronic, anatomically correct robots. You can make them fit whatever your personal preferences may be, and dress them (or not) according to your personal fetishes.

Now, let’s imagine them having sex, or doing whatever it is turns your crank at the moment. Would you find this arousing?

My guess is that, unless you have a Real Doll fetish (and apologies to those of you who do—I’m not passing judgement here), the answer would be no.

They’re just robots. They’re fake. You’re watching a mindless conglomeration of metal and silicone, not flesh.

Why does that matter? It’s because sexual arousal caused by things we see is directly connected to our ability to empathize with what’s going on, to imagine ourselves as part of the experience or to recall similar experiences of our own. Without that connection, we’re left cold.

This is one of the biggest problems I see with poorly written erotica. The characters are no better than robots. They’re shallow, soulless stereotypes. Some people can deal with this, or just don’t care, but for me, I have a very difficult time getting into a story unless I can envision the characters as real people. No matter how extreme they may be, a good writer can give them enough touches of reality to let me connect with them.

Effective characterization is a skill that good writers have to master, and it starts with being a good observer of people. And here I mean real people, not, for example, people you’ve only read about in other erotica. That’s one of the rationales behind my warning in the first post about how being an avid reader is not enough to make you a good writer. Because if you get too far into the genre, you can start seeing those frequent stereotypes as living, realistic people when they’re anything but.

The ironic thing is, though, that creating believable characters is really not that difficult. Mostly it’s envisioning the sort of person you need for the narrative, and then giving them some details you’ve observed in other people. Take the way your college roommate liked to talk, and add in a background element from one of your neighbors, plus a cool hairstyle you saw on some girl in the mall. Is there someone you once met who had a personality quirk that’s stuck in your head ever since? Try adding it in here and see what you get.

Doesn’t quite seem to work? Replace one element, or tweak it a bit. Keep playing with it until you’ve got someone you can envision as a three-dimensional person, someone you’d recognize if you ran into them at the grocery store.

Obviously, the process isn’t quite this easy or straightforward—often you want to just let your characters create themselves as you write—but you should get the basic idea. Not building your characters like this and just inventing everything from whole cloth (because it’s easier or you have a stubborn fantasy that wants out) usually means you end up with a story filled with synthetic people.

“But,” you protest, “I just want my characters to fuck.” Fine, let them fuck. But you can make them real with as little as a few sentences (or, if you’re really good, only a few words). The key to this is not forcing things as if they were robots. Don’t envision the action and make them dance; envision the characters and let them do and say what seems natural. Don’t rush it. Just let it happen. Think of them as people, not sex-bots. What would they do?

Now, having said all this, I want to stress one important point. The problem with weak erotica is less the absence of characterization than it is incompetent characterization. It’s actually quite possible to write an effective piece of erotica with no characterization whatsoever. The unidentified characters are there, and immediately begin fucking. While making this work takes some care, it can be done, and done very well.

Where so many authors go wrong is trotting out the same tired characters they’ve read 100 times before because it’s what they’re used to, or slapping together something that bears no resemblance to live human being because they’re too impatient to get to the sex.

That’s what sucks, and I want it to stop.