Advice for book writing.

[Benny The Miraj]

If you want to communicate a mature story, I think the best way to do that is to forego images entirely and leave things up to the imagination of the reader. Once you show your readers the main characters, it can ruin the tone of the story for them. This happens to me a lot when I read books (even very well-written and well-drawn ones) and I usually regret looking up images of the characters. There's very little to gain from adding images and a lot to lose.

Instead, you should focus on the main problem: Your writing is not keeping the attention of your readers. Whether that's due to poor pacing, a predictable plot or uninteresting characters, I don't know. But I do know that if your story is well-written enough, it can easily stand on its own without images. Ask your readers why they're losing interest. If they don't give any reasons, find harsher critics. Close friends and family members are generally poor choices since they're afraid to offend you or put you down. And if you have trouble finding strangers to read your work, just give them little snippets of your story and get criticism on those.

To be honest, that's my thoughts exactly. It's my boss that wants me to add pictures/make a graphic novel, but I can't help but agree that pictures would downgrade the maturity. I keep trying to tell her that, but she still wants pictures. I think it's my fault, I originally designed Benny to be this super cute kids character, but I kind of grew out of that idea and wanted to make a mature story, but my boss doesn't want to forget the original cute version.

Well, one BETA reader said they didn't like how the story started, with "There was a planet called Earth. I was destroyed recklessly by its inhabitants. A new planet came to fruition, filled with mythical monsters. Fortunately, yet unfortunately, these creatures are much the same as humans, blah blah blah." I think that person had a point, though, and I might nix that from the story. Another problem is that I feel the story gets darker and darker as it progresses, but then a light-hearted chapter breaks it up before going back to being dark. The light-hearted chapter, however, feels a bit childish, and I might have to rewrite it.