Independent Authors Guild

This and That May 24th Update

2009-05-24T11:05:00.000-07:00

New member Mark MGinty has started a new review site, focusing on POD books - think of it as PODBRAM's little brother. It's called The Boogle, and it's here. Drop a line and let him know if you are game. Don't forget that PODBRAM is also available to review books, and so is the perennial favorite, Blogger News Network.

New member John Manuel, the Honorary Greek is looking for a mutual exchange of links with other writers' websites. Drop him a line at his website, or through the discussion group. (Which reminds me, I still have to read and review Moussaka To My Ears...)

And I am updating the IAG website to include first chapters of everyone's books... and a roll of those members' books most particularly honored with the awarding of rather nifty literary prizes... more to come.

Mid-May Update

2009-05-16T09:30:00.000-07:00

Terrific, fantastic, wonderful news - our own founding member Jack Shackley's "Confederate War Bonnet" has been awarded the gold medal for historical/military fiction in the 2009 Independent Publisher Book Awards! That's the IPPY Awards, for those of us who speak cluent Acronymish. Yay, Jack! Yay, for Independent Publishing! And yay us ... for over the last couple of years, many of the IAG member writers seems to be picking up a lot of those solid and meaningful awards!

Apropos of that, fellow member Lloyd Lofthouse sent a particularly cogent essay about writing and publishing through the email discussion group that deserves wider circulation: here it is, in full -

Self-published books start out untested, which means the book hasn't run any gauntlet like agents and editors that traditionally published books have to suffer to get into print. Yet, traditional publishing is a flawed system and good books don't get picked up all the time but what human system (corporate or government) is perfect?

Also, do not forget that traditionally published books go out to bookstores with a guaranteed buy-back if they don't sell. Why should a bookstore or a library take a risk on a self-published book that hasn't been vetted by agents, editors and reviewers before it is even available just because the author believes the book is good? There is only so much self space and most of it is already taken.

That's why the shelf space that is available goes to traditionally published books. The bookstore would rather take their chance on the book that comes with a guarantee from the publisher than one that has none.

So, there is no way to prove that a self-published book that just came out is worth shelf space in a library or bookstore unless that self-published book somehow proves that it is worthy of further attention. That's where the real battle begins.

It is up to the self-published author to prove that the book he or she wrote is worthy of further attention by gaining reviews, etc that can be used during the promotion. In other words, get noticed as often as possible until people start paying attention.

Sitting back and waiting for lightning to strike is not going to bring the vast majority of self-published books to the attention of the buyers when there are several hundred thousand new titles each year.

Who has time to read them all? Book store owners and librarians have more to do than read endless books from self-published authors, most of which may be of a questionable quality making it more difficult for those that are up to traditional standards to get noticed--like a rusty needle in a hay stack the size of a ten story building.

It may be easier to win a state lottery than getting a self published book noticed if the author sits around waiting to be discovered.

The best places to get started are close to home by becoming a salesman and taking a copy of your book into the local brick and mortar bookstores while also mailing out copies to the best reviewers you can find that will give the book a chance. One example is PODRAM. There are others.

If a writer doesn't have the confidence in what he or she wrote to send it to those reviewers that will give it a chance, why are they writing in the first place. Stick your neck out. Take a chance. Grow a thick skin. You might be surprised. You may also need to return to the drawing board or change directions to some other dream while holding down a crappy day or night job that doesn't pay much or one you would rather not be doing.

In the end, writing should be a passion. The passion may keep you going even when it seems dark and forbidding out there. If writing is your passion, at least on that day you draw your last breath, you can say you gave it your best shot.

Word of Mouth

2009-04-12T11:45:00.000-07:00

Over and over, solo and chorus, I have been assured that word of mouth advertising is the very best, the ultimate platinum-standard when it comes to getting a product or a service out there; I even heard this, years before I even considered writing books. The CPA who does my taxes was referred to me by another client of his who coincidentally was a friend of mine. The technical services company that sees to the maintenance of my home AC unit came to me in a similar fashion- and you would not believe how essential that service over Texas summers. (Famously, 19th century General Phil Sheridan is reported to have once remarked, that if he owned Hell and Texas, he would live in hell and rent out Texas). So, no argument that the very best referrals come from satisfied clients and customers, who are ecstatically happy to tell other people about their experience.

So, it’s belaboring the obvious, pointing out that this applies to books as well. Every reader who reads one of our books, and sings its praises to their book-loving friends, who also love it and… well, it’s like that old fable/tale/mathematical demonstration about grains and rice and a chess-board, where you start out with a single grain and finish up (through the miracle of geometric progression, or something like that) with thousands and thousands of grains of rice. The exact technical name for this escapes me at the moment, since I was an English major.

Anyway, I got a lovely email from another long-time San Antonio blogger who - although he blogs about drinking, music, tractors and gambling – has also been a fan of mine since way back. He wrote that he was at an event a couple of weeks ago – some sort of IT or business event in Los Vegas, I believe – and for some reason, he was involved in a video production, for which the producers had hired voice talent. In the breaks between shooting the video, he was chatting to the voice talent, a very pleasant and down-to-earth woman, whose husband also was from Texas. It developed that her husband was very fond of the Hill Country and had also lived in Germany, so my friend began telling her all about the Adelsverein Trilogy – which he had ordered and read, months ago when it was first released. She was terrifically excited to hear about the Trilogy, and said that her husband would be absolutely thrilled, because he loved, loved, loved history. She took down the information about ordering it, the author and titles and everything – and at the very end of it my friend found out the name of her husband; Peter Weller. Yep, “Buckaroo Banzai” and “Building an Empire” Peter Weller.

He was just tickled – and so was I; I didn’t even know that Peter Weller had any connection to Texas, or to Germany, even. I am waiting breathlessly for the Amazon ranking to hiccup slightly, and move upwards, meaning that someone – dare I hope? - has bought another set.

Sunday Afternoon at the Old German Free School

2009-03-21T13:02:00.000-07:00

So, ages ago, Karen M. who manages the speaker’s schedule for the German Texan Heritage Society emailed me to ask if I would like to come and do a talk about the history of the Adelsverein in Texas, and how I went about writing three historical novels based on those events – which are dramatic to the nth degree and which hardly anyone outside of Texas has ever heard of. Of course I said yes, how could I resist any organization which contains a large number of people who are, or might be interested in my books, and whose’ tag-line on their website is “Guten Tag, Y’all?” Besides, they offered refreshments for afters; I will work for cookies and punch. Perhaps someday I will be able to throw all sorts of hissies and demand Perrier on tap, a fruit tray and a private dressing room before engagements, but that day is not yet – really, my sense of entitlement is all but stillborn. Either that or I haven’t become jaded – darn it, I still enjoy these things, once I get over the initial panic of standing up and looking at all those strangers or almost-strangers in front of me, waiting for me to say something deathlessly witty. This is where having been a broadcaster comes in handy. I know that I have spoken, through a microphone or a TV to larger numbers of people, but those audiences were not ‘there’, not in the same room. On those occasions, I could fake myself out, pretend that I was only speaking to a handful of people, be casual and friendly, informative and remember to stand up straight, not pick my nose and not cuss in front of them … but having them all look back at you – that is another kettle of fish. Fortunately, I am getting accustomed to a live audience…

Blondie programmed the GPS unit, and I did a google-map search for the venue, which was described as being “The Old German Free School” in beautiful downtown Austin, Texas… which is, I feel only fair to point out, really quite beautiful, as it is spread over a number of scenically lumpy and rather nicely-wooded hills on either side of a lovely deep-green river. A lot of the streets were strategically and alternately one-way, but – thank god – there was no particular festival going on, which might have clogged traffic unbearably – but we did have to go to one exit and then zig-zag through another couple of streets which afforded us some nice views of assorted college students enjoying their last day of spring break, and one particularly large complex which seemed to be ‘street-people central.’

The old German Free-School turned out to a lovely antique two-storey building, constructed of stone, and stone and plaster, and stone and plaster over rammed-earth, a long structure just one room deep and turned sideways to the street, with balconies and terraces overlooking a series of pocket-gardens connected by stairs. Most of the rooms opened onto balconies or the terraces, with long windows on either side, which reminded me irresistibly of 18th and 19th century townhouses in Charleston or Savannah or Beaufort, built up on relatively deep town-lots with the narrow end of the house on the street. All of the rooms had tall windows on both sides – to ensure a good draft through the room, essential in those far-distant summer days before the invention of air conditioning. It had just gotten over being unbearably chilly and rainy, so the rooms were quite pleasant.

The German Free School was the first institution of public education in Austin, according to one of the members of the society who came for my talk. In the mid-1850s, there were sufficient numbers of German-speaking settlers who were totally exasperated with the lack of educational resources; the only option for educating their children was to hire a private tutor, or send them to the Anglo-American ‘Sunday Schools’. According to my informant, one of the founders was totally fed-up, (possibly with listening to all his fellows kvetching about the subject) so he threw down a thousand dollars in gold and growled, “So, build a school!” and there you go – apparently the Free School predated the Austin Independent School District by at least a decade.

There were about fifteen or twenty attendees – and the room was fairly small, so I went ahead and used the podium, with my notes and my pictures of certain relics and locations, 81/2 by 11 pictures mounted on foam-core board, with little hinged supports to hold them up – all of essential items or evocative locations in Fredericksburg. It really went well, this time – I have quite a sort-of-planned talk-with-notes that I use for these occasions, a list of notes, names and things that I simply must cover, and in the proper order; not a set script, for that is the absolute death of this kind of event, just a memory-jogger of the high points. This is the best and most-spontaneous seeming kind of talk, I am not bound by an every-single-word script and can play up or play down things, and respond immediately to what the audience seems to be most interested or engaged in. I wing it, every time – but a wing-it with some sturdy yet invisible supports! Finished with a reading – a couple of pages from “The Gathering” – about the feast and bonfire the first settlers held among the trees of what would become Fredericksburg, and took questions until everyone repaired for punch, home-made coconut cake and a plate of little baked pastry and sausage nibbles.

The members of the audience were all enthusiasts – the very best kind of audience an author can ask for, for they had interesting questions and a lot of knowledge behind them – even if only one person among them had actually the Trilogy. Doris L. purchased the Trilogy and read it all – her husband is from one of the old Gillespie County families and by one of those interesting coincidences of history and the internet and all – it was her husband’s several-times great grandfather who owned the sheep-flock that a boy named Adolph Korn had been watching over, when he was taken by raiding Comanche Indians. Adolph Korn’s g-g-I don’t-know-how-many-times grand-nephew Scott Zesch wrote bout his life and the ordeal of a number of children taken by Indians from the Hill Country in his book “The Captured” – which was one of my references in writing Book Three “The Harvesting” – about the multi-leveled tragedy of young children taken captive by the Comanche or Apache and later returned to their white families. Some of the other questions asked of me were about Prince Solms – who I do still think was rather an idiot, in spite of what one of his particular partisans could say. Sorry, buying into the Fischer-Miller Grant was not an act bringing any particular credit upon Prince Solm’s financial or political acumen. Also, the train of personal servants and his insistence on his title of nobility – not a good move, all around, no matter what his qualifications as a serving military officer might have been in other fields. Although there was an excellent point made, about how perceptions about Germany and German settlers went to the bottom of the tank after about mid WW I or so.

Until that era, and in most places in these United States – being from the German settlements and of German ancestry were seen as pretty favorable things. It was OK to be one of ‘the folk’, to remember Germany as it was… until history turned a corner and Germany changed. The place that these hard-working and cultured immigrants came from, the place that they remembered with fondness and reminiscent affection morphed into something ugly. That Germany – or those duchies and principalities that they came from – changed during their absence, even as they changed themselves, becoming a place that they would not have recognized, these innocent and ambitious immigrants, taking ship from Bremen, carrying their memories and those wooden trunks with them. By the mid-20th century, their new country would have fought fight two wars against the old – against what the old country had become, even as they were busy building lives and towns, bringing up their children as free citizens in America. Funny, how history happens, when you are just trying do your business and get by.

All in all, a most gratifying Sunday afternoon spent, in the company of book and history enthusiasts. And Blondie did make sort-of friends with the garden cat.

Spring has Sprung...

2009-03-21T12:39:00.000-07:00

And its all been very quiet out there for the last couple of weeks.... however, the following are noted:

New Member John Manuel, who is a semi-retired graphics designer is offering to help members with page layouts. A sample of his work is available here. He may be contacted through the email address posted in the group files.

Nan Hawthorne is channeling Maid Marian, with "Secrets of a Good Marriage" at her blog. And she has a fan-fiction story about one of her "Involuntary King" characters, too!

S.A. Rule has got a lovely review for her latest "Cloak of Magic" at Fantasy Book Review, here.

And Steve Knutson recommends this site, for locating radio stations for the use of authors looking to get radio coverage.

And finally - but not least,Kim McDougal's "Rainbow Sheep" won an EPPIE for best children's e-book of the year!

March Round-Up

2009-03-06T14:17:00.000-08:00

All right then - so that's my excuse and I am sticking to it.

The most wonderful news for the IAG crew came from our fearless leader, Dianne Salerni, who uncorked the wonderful news that her novel "High Spirits" - and her follow-up-book have been purchased by publisher Sourcebooks,Inc ... and the film rights to High Spirits is also being negotiated for by an independent (only fitting, considering!) film producter. Bravo, Bravo! (Cheers, whistling, footstomping!)

Fairly recent new member Chester Campbell has some advice on his blog entry, entitled "Selling Outside the Box" He also had a great review of one of his books here.

Marva Dasaf recommends Flamingnet Book Review, saying "I also received an email from FlamingNet Reviews. This is a site where teens review the books. You can get info on how to put your book out for review on the site. However, the email was asking for
adults to preview the teens' reviews and mentor them to some degree, giving suggestions etc. on how to. It's unpaid, of course, but it might be something the teacher-types would like to do. More here.

Member Linda Austin recommended this article, about how to keep up your spirits when it seems that no one on earth is interested in reading your books. There was also a post about the Perils of POD publishing, which is a very good overview for those of us who haven't already discovered much of what lies therein...

Dianne Ascroft also got a lovely review for her book "Hitler and Mars Bars" here - Dianne has been touring and marketing to beat the band lately!

And Kim McDougall also has a review - the first - for her latest book project, here.

Trudy Schuett has a gig at a local newspaper! She writes that she is now working for "The Rural Arizona Headlines Examiner." On Sundays, she is hoping to feature authors in who either live in Arizona or have books set there, or are about Arizona, fiction or or non. If anyone or their books qualify, let her know by emailing "thezonieATdishmailDOTnet" with "AZ Books" in the subject line.

Name On the Marquee in Lights!

2009-03-05T08:46:00.000-08:00

Perhaps not in lights, but it was definitely my name on the marquee in front of the Butt-Holdsworth Memorial Library in Kerrville last Saturday. Blondie took a picture, so we have the evidence. It seems that they like to do author talks on Saturday afternoons, and it would appear that Phillippa Gregory or Diana Galbadon already had busy schedules – so the librarian in charge of author-wrangling emailed me to ask if I would come and talk about the Trilogy. Of course I said agreed; I’d much rather drive an hour and talk with a group of people about my books, or local history, or the vagaries of 19th century frontier Texas then sit at a small table in the front of a big-box bookstore and watch shoppers carefully avoiding me for an hour or so. There’s just no contest there – and frankly, doing a talk and answering questions is much the better way to build my local fan base anyway.

This talk turned out to be for an audience of about a dozen or fifteen, in the basement meeting room of the library, which – since it is built on a steep hillside overlooking the river, looked out on a stone-paved terrace and a line of trees at the edge. I’d feel such an idiot, standing at the podium and talking to such a small group, so we circled the chairs and sat down. As it also turned out, most of the audience hadn’t been able to read any of the Trilogy yet, not even the librarian. Although the library does have a single copy of all three books – they have hardly spent any time at the library and the reserve list for them is lengthy. Gratifyingly, as soon as they return, out they fly again! Excellent news for me, and perhaps they might even consider buying another set, if Adelsverein is going to be that popular.

For my talk, I did a brief overview of the entrepreneur scheme, the grand plans and bungling that doomed the Mainzer Adelsverein, outlined how I came to be interested in such a relatively obscure historical event, and what I did for research, and how I really had to make up very little regarding the various historical events that I touched on. Amazingly, most of the people present – just about all of them from Kerrville or close by - had not heard much about either the Adelsverein, or the travails in the Hill Country during the Civil War, so much of I had planned to talk about was a) new and b) interesting. All in all, a pleasant afternoon, well spent – although we did have to hustle back to San Antonio in time for me to get to work – in my ‘author’ tailored suit and well-chosen accessories, which proved something of an astonishment for the Saturday evening co-workers, who are used to seeing me slop around in something considerably less professional-appearing.

On Tuesday evening, with my computer returned to me and functioning more or less normally (fried mother-board and CPU, but all docs retrieved and saved – whew!) I followed up the library talk with a book-club meeting, on-line and through an organization called Accessible World, which provides books to the vision-impaired. Nan Hawthorne, another author and IAG member, had finagled me into putting the Trilogy into the Accessible World library, and Book One was the book to read for Accessible World’s historical novel book club. So that made another very gratifying hour, linked into their internet ‘conference room’, with about fifteen people who had read “The Gathering” and loved it, loved the characters, and had lots of detailed questions about what was real, what were the character’s motivations, and why had I written things in the way I had. Now, that was an hour that went past very quickly. It’s caviar to the writer’s soul, hearing from people who have read your books and are passionately interested. It makes up in a small way for the months and days, spent alone but for the world that you have created in your head, when you hear from people beginning to share that world and to become as engaged and interested in that world as you are.

And as of this morning, and possibly thanks to a wonderful write-up from David Foster at Chicagoboyz – the Amazon ranking for all three books of the Trilogy was at and around 150,000, which is possibly the highest it has been at since all three were released for sale in early December. So it appears that I am a few steps closer to being a famous ‘arthur’!

Wild West Monday

2009-02-09T08:52:00.000-08:00

So a number of fans of Westerns are trying to raise interest in that particular genre, by mobilizing other fans, around the world to go into their local library or bookstore and ask for Westerns - any western, new, traditional or somewhere in between. More here, thanks to Gary Dobbs of "The Tainted Archive".

Gary says, in part:

"At the moment we are in a situation where bookshops control the market (a select amount of buyers chose the titles they think we want to read ) and they seem to think all we want to read are massive tomes with more padding that substance.

The days of cheap paperbacks that existed to entertain, excite and delight are long gone. Strange when those are the reasons we started reading in the first place.

But it doesn't have to be so - so come on get involved, hit the bookshops, hit the libraries. All of us on MARCH 2nd.

Come on get involved."

Weekly Update - 21 Jan

2009-01-21T15:34:00.000-08:00

OK, so it's the middle of the week, and I didn't do an update last week... I had one of the most awful colds/allergic reactions/flu imaginable, and my heart was seriously into nothing more energetic than crawling out of bed for a fresh cup of herb tea and some ibuprofin now and again. But I am feeling better now, so without farther ado -

IAG member Patricia Gott (So You Wanna be a Cowgirl?) was interviewed on the Western blog - The Tainted Archive! (Yay us - everywhere that western writers want to be!)

Jack Shakley had a review posted in the latest Internet Review of Books: it doesn't seem to me like he liked the book at all. (and thanks for the warning, Jack - since I have a low gross-out threshold anyway!)

L.S. Cauldwell is over the moon, with a good review for "The Golden Treasure" at "The Midwest Book Review"! So sayeth head reviewer Diane C. Donovan:

"The Anna Mae Mysteris: The Golden Treasure is a multi-cultural
mystery novel for young adults. Twelve year old Anna Mae Botts, her
eight year old brother Malcolm, and Anna Mae's bet friend Raul Garcia
encounter a ghostly black fist on their fist day of school. It drops
paper clues about Jeffeson Davis' lost Civil War treausre, and later
a school fire occurs. Paranormal events multiply, and the young
people are led along the same trail the Jefferson Davis once took
with his gold-laden wagon train. A fascinating story of uncovering
history's secrets as well as hidden welath, The Anna Mae Mysteries-
The golen Treasure is sure to captivate the imagination and is a
welcom addition to young adult library collections. "

And there is a new e-book publisher out there called "Smashwords" (link to side here)
with something of the same mission as the IAG. Check it out, if interested.

And the January Spotlight On...is up at Dianne's plase. Well, it has been up for a bit. Her monthly spotlight is now also on the IAG home-page in the "links of significance".

Imagination and Will

2009-01-13T15:10:00.000-08:00

Sometime around the middle of the time my daughter and I lived in Athens, the Greek television network broadcast the whole series of Jewel in the Crown, and like public broadcasting in many places— strictly rationing their available funds— they did as they usually did with many worthy imported programs. Which is to say, not dubbed into Greek— which was expensive and time-consuming— but with Greek subtitles merely supered over the scenes. My English neighbor, Kyria Penny and I very much wanted to watch this miniseries, which had been played up in the English and American entertainment media, and so she gave me a standing invitation to come over to hers and Georgios's apartment every Tuesday evening, so we could all watch it, and extract the maximum enjoyment thereby. We could perhaps also make headway with our explanation to Kyrie Georgios on why Sergeant Perron was a gentleman, although an enlisted man, but Colonel Merrick emphatically was not.

On occasion, the Greek broadcasting network screwed up, and the next episode of Jewel didn't air. Penny and I would talk for a while, and Georgios would encourage my daughter to all sorts of rough-housing; pillow fights, mostly. (Blessed with two sons, the Greek ideal, Georgios rather regretted that he and Penny didn't have a daughter as well.) On those Tuesday nights when Jewel in the Crown didn't air, the Greek network most often substituted something appropriately high-toned, classical and in English. Brought out from their library and dusted off, most likely— the Royal Shakespeare Company, in all their thespian glory. And Penny and Georgios and all I noticed on one of those warm spring evenings, that Blondie was sitting on a cushion on the floor, totally absorbed, wrapped up in one of the Bard's duller history plays. She was then about four years old— but she was enchanted, bound by a spell of brocaded velvet words, swirling cloaks and slashing swords, glued to the television while we sat talking about other things, drawn in by a spell grown even more lightening-potent over the last 400 years. And it happened, the next time that Jewel was preempted - it was the RSC again, and Blondie was glued to the television, her concentration adamantine, and almost chillingly adult. I was quite sure she had never seen anything of the sort before, I wasn't one of those frenetically over-achieving mothers, stuffing culture down the kidlets' throat. I barely had time and energy enough to be an achieving mother: we hardly watched TV at home, VCRs were barely on the market and her favored bedtime reading was Asterix and Obelix, although we had branched out as far as The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. No, it was not anything I had done - it must have been something innate in Shakespeare, a spell that has been cast, and drawn them in since Shakespeare himself was a working actor and playwright.

A couple of years ago I got "Will in the World" as a book club bennie. It's a good book, a speculative book by necessity, since we know so very, very little for certain of the real William Shakespeare. The author is dependent on speculation and imagination, much given to assuming that if such and such were happening in the neighborhood of Stratford-upon-Avon in the lifetime of the glove-maker's son, then he possibly would have known about it, and might have reason to weave it into one of his spell-plays. Did he have a good education, or not? Might he have been a school-teacher? A soldier? A clerk? Might he have been a Catholic sympathizer? Might his marriage been unhappy, his father a drinker - we have no way to know for sure, in ways that would satisfy the strict accountants of history. In fact, many have been the symposia, the experts, the finely honed intellectual authorities who have insisted over the years that the Shakespeare who was the actor, the manager and entrepreneur, the son of a provincial petty-bourgeois, simply could not have written the works attributed to him. Such expert knowledge of statecraft, of law, of international polity, of soldiering and the doings of kings and nobles - no, the tenured experts cry - this could not be the work of any less than an intellectual, highly placed and noble, gifted with the best education, and extensive mileage racked up in the corridors of power! Any number of candidates, better suited in the eyes of these experts to have written the works attributed to Wm. Shakespeare of Stratford are advanced, with any number of imaginative stratagems to account for it all, but every one of them I have read, leaves out the power of imagination itself.

Imagination, which takes us out of ourselves, and into someone else— the common thing all these great experts disregard, as if it were something already cast into disrepute, something useless, of no regard, but it is the major part of the actors - craft and entirely the part of the writers - that part that is not given up to intelligent research. All those great experts seemed to be saying, when they credit other than Shakespeare, the actor and bourgeois householder of Stratford and London - is that imagination is worthless, null, of no account or aid. It is impossible for a writer to imagine himself, or herself into anything other than what he or she is. One cannot imagine oneself convincingly into another time or place, gender or role in life. Imagination is dead and you are stuck with writing about what you are. How sterile, and how horrible. How pointless and boring—
but that is what the highly-educated would have of us. We must not, under pain of what the academicians judge, imagine what it would be like that it is to be whatever we were born to be.

When I was about 17, or so, I wrote a story for a high school English creative writing class, incorporating an account of a historic event which I couldn't possibly have witnessed— because I had been born fifteen years after the events I described. But I had done research, and even at 17 I was pretty good at writing description and I had the gift of imagination. It creeped the hell out of the creative writing teacher. He knew of the events that I had written about, and I had gotten it pretty well right. So, imagining again; what would have prevented a young actor from sloping up to a friend of his, in a tavern someplace, a friend who was a soldier, or a law clerk, a priest or servant in the house of a noble, and saying " Say, I've got this thing I'm working on - what d'you say about it? What do you think, how would it work, really?"

Which was the creepy, magical part, the part that academicians and writing teachers cannot fathom - how far the intelligent and well-researched imagination can take us. To insist that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare, is to deny the power and authority - even the authenticity of imagination.

Which may explain the relative shittiness of novels written by all but the most deviant of academics. Education— all very nice, but nothing will take a writer farther than imagination and some good contacts in other fields. Imagination - it' s what we have that separates us from the beasts. Never underestimate it, use it what you must. Especially when it's necessary to get out of what you are, and see through the eyes of someone else.

Oh, Pioneer Museum!

2009-01-04T06:33:00.000-08:00

That was a treat – yesterday at Fredericksburg’s Pioneer Museum. I had a talk and a discussion for an hour, with a group of interested historians and readers, and then sat behind a small table the visitor center, between a shelf of scented candles, cowboy postcards and other souvenirs, and a large rack of maps and information about Fredericksburg and the Hill Country and signed copies of the Adelsverein Trilogy for two hours. All in all, exhausted, happy and talked hoarse. Richard Bristol, the event manager was a little disappointed that it was not standing room only – but alas, it seemed that an elderly retired admiral, who was very much a big wheel in local historical circles had died this week, and his memorial service was scheduled for Saturday afternoon. And Kenn Knopp, who is also very big in the local historical society, was ill and in the hospital … so not as many of the local enthusiasts were in attendance, but those who were, were very keen. One of them had seen the write-up in the Fredericksburg paper, had driven 200 miles.

They had set up a podium and folding chairs, in the old parish hall, which is now part of the museum complex, but I would have felt so stupid, standing up and talking to barely a dozen people, so I just said, heck with it; we pulled some chairs around in a circle, and I rattled on for a bit about how I came to write the books, what was so fascinating about the 19th century, and how I did research, then I read a bit from Book One (the part where the first party of settlers had a bonfire and celebrated among the trees on the first night after arriving at the site of Fredericksburg.) After that – question time!

Not terribly difficult ones; most about Fredericksburg, and the Civil War, and the Mainzer Adelsverein. All those present were interested and knowledgeable, and I have been so steeped in the original sources over the last two years that I could hold my own. Brief discussion of how many murders there actually had been on Main Street (only two, of the Itz brothers during the Civil War – J.P. Waldrip was killed a little way off Main, Louis Scheutze was taken from his house on Main and killed elsewhere), of the ways in which Prince Karl of Solms-Braunfels was an idiot (a practically endless list), the origin of the Easter bonfires on the hilltops around Fredericksburg (transplanted regional folk-way, nothing much to do with Indians) and the fact that long-trail cattle drives from Texas to Kansas only went on for barely ten years.

And the most gratifying part was that almost everyone at the discussion had either already bought a set of the Trilogy, or went and bought one directly afterwards, and brought it back for me to sign. As I had hoped, many of them have some connection or special interest: the lady who came 200 miles now owns the house which was built by the Itz family. Richard has ancestors on either side who are mentioned; Lt. Wilke, who went with John Meusebach on his peace mission to the Comanche, and the Stielers of Comfort who were strong Unionists – and still have a large ranch property on the road between IH-10 and Fredericksburg.

After that – two hours, as noted in the new museum reception center. Well, not exactly new, it’s an old historic stone house which became a restaurant at the other end of town, then painstakingly disassembled and put together again on the museum grounds. According to Richard, it took so long that the numbers on some of the stones had weathered away, and it was the very dickens to put it all back together again. It’s much lighter and more open than the house in which it first was – that house was very dim and cramped. Good for working up a mental picture of what the inside of the original houses must have been like, but a bit cave-like to spend two hours in. And the resident cats have moved one: one of them vanished, and the other made such a hit at the local ASPCA that she is now a foster-mother for kittens needing socializing, and lives there permanently. The Museum now has a crying need for some resident cats; the mice are insatiable, even though there isn’t any food kept in most of the structures.
There was a constant trickle of visitors, since this is the last weekend of the holidays. Most of the shops along Main had very serious after-holiday sales going on. After we were done at the Museum – all the complete sets of the Trilogy sold, BTW – and Richard bought the last set himself, Blondie and I walked down Main, and stopped in at a little bookstore specializing in Texiana, where I have hopes of them carrying the Trilogy also. It used to be situated in a nook of a store specializing in Christmas paraphernalia, but the owner has sold the stock and goodwill to another shop-owner a little way along. We spoke to the new owner, who is busy setting up all the books in a larger and more comfortable space. She was very interested about carrying the Trilogy, and wanted to know where and how to order them. (She also turns out to be a descendant of the Nimitz family - yay! Another local connection in the Trilogy!) Berkman’s, at the other end of Main, where I had a signing two weeks ago, sold out of the last copies they had within a day or two; as predicted, the people who bought Book One came back to get the subsequent volumes. We finished up with hamburgers and fries at a little joint called “Buffalo Nickel”. A good day – exhausting, but a good day.

The Shape of Things As They Are, Apparently

2008-12-23T15:29:00.000-08:00

(Courtesy of the New Yorker, to whom all credit is gratefully given)

Books and More Books - Adelsverein Trilogy Signing

2008-12-20T11:10:00.000-08:00

Another signing event, last night at Berkman Books in Fredericksburg, for the Adeslverein Trilogy. Berkman’s is one of those nice little independent bookstores, holding its own specialized little niche against the overwhelming tide of big-box-bookstores and internet sales; Texiana, lots of events with local authors, curiosities, antique and used books. The clientele is a mix of adventurous tourists and local residents who don’t care to drive to San Antonio or New Braunfels in search of their reading matter. And they have two cats on the premises – I promised that I would frisk Blondie on departure, to ensure that neither of them had stowed away to come home with is. Berkman’s in a rambling old house on Main Street, a little removed from the main tourist blocks along Main Street… which, however, is slowly spreading along the side streets, and east and west from Marketplace Square. David, the owner, had ordered ten copies of each volume, and there has been considerable interest – even some notice in the Fredericksburg Standard. Kenn Knopp, the local historical expert who volunteered (kind of glumly, as he is the first to confess) to read the manuscript of the Trilogy, only to be astonished and thrilled as he got farther into it – was going to meet us an hour before the signing started. He had a friend, Annette Sultemeier, whom he wanted me to meet. Ms Sultemeier is also a local historical enthusiast, and still lives in her family’s house nearby. James P. Waldrip, the infamous leader of the pro-Confederate Hanging Band, who persecuted local Unionists during the Civil War was supposed to be buried in the back yard of her family home. Waldrip figures as the resident villain in the Trilogy, and his come-uppance under a tree at the edge of the old Nimitz hotel property was described in Book Three. Supposedly, he was buried in that unmarked grave, outside of the city cemetery, to escape desecration of his resting place. He was an especially bad hat, with many bitter local enemies.

There was a nice crowd at the signing. David had thought there would be many more people at the signing than there were, but I didn’t mind. This way, I had enough time to talk to people and answer questions. Enough of them were coming specifically for the Trilogy anyway, so I didn’t have that awful experience of spending two hours, watching customers come in the door and sidling around the desperate author, sitting at a little lonely table with a pile of books. Almost everyone bought all three books, many intended as Christmas presents. The last customer of the evening was almost the most rewarding to talk to. This was a young college student named Kevin, fascinated by local history and majoring in it, who read about the signing in the Standard, checked out my website and came straight over with his mother. He asked a great many questions about research, and bought Book One… and his mother bought Two and Three. Christmas present, I guess!
Afterwards, Kenn Knopp treated us to dinner at the Auslander Restaurant, which we had eaten at once before, and recalled as being pretty uninspired foodwise, and kind of scruffy on the inside. Apparently it has since been renovated, for now it was very comfortable, and the food was terrific; jagerschnitzel to die for, accompanied by little crispy potato pancakes about the size of a silver dollar. Blondie and I walked back to the car, admiring the Christmas lights, all along Main Street. There seem to be many nicer restaurants along Main Street now – it was quite lively on a Friday evening. Blondie noted there were many more wine-tasting rooms, too. The Hill Country is slowly becoming the new Provence, as I predicted a while ago, or at least the newest Napa-Sonoma-Mendocino, as far as wine production is concerned.

It was a great way to finish up the day – the interest in my books being almost as much of a satisfaction as the food. I have been warned, though; the event at the Pioneer Museum, on January 3rd will be even bigger, and the local history enthusiasts will come armed with even more searching questions.

Weekly Update - 14 December

2008-12-14T11:28:00.000-08:00

Does anyone else have the feeling that Christmas is heading straight for us like a train speeding down the track? OMG, it's only eleven days from today, a week and a half and the boxes to family on the West coast haven't been taken to the post office, and don't even mention Christmas cards...

A fair number of interesting developments this week, so obviously other people are getting it together:

Nan Hawthorn would like people who are visiting their local library in the near future to ask for her book An Involuntary King, through the interlibrary loan program. Relevent information is here. Many local libraries will buy a copy of a book, if it is on an interlibrary loan listing.

Jessica James (author of Shades of Gray) points members towards this book enthusiasts' website "Bookworms Dinner". Jessica says the proprieter, "Wysteria" is interested in historical
fiction, history, memoir, women issues, contemporary issues, global
issues, religion and conflict in the Middle East, and debut authors.

Pauline Montagna (The Slave and Suburban Terrors ) has updated her website "The Romance of History".

Marva Dasaf (author of Tales of a Texas Boy and The Seven Adventures of Cadida) was interviewed about her latest project at "Toasted Scimitar". Read all about it...

Paul Krupin has a wonderful, handy-dandy PDF download, a calendar to plan your publicity with, available here.

Lloyd Lofthouse's My Splendid Concubine garnered an honorable mention at this years' London Book Festival.

Another in our continuing series of authors and their characters interviwing each other, from Laurie Pelayo (An Old Fashioned Murder) here.

New member Lillian Cauldwell (The Anna-Mae Mysteries)runs Passionate Internet Voices, and would like to arrange interviews and promotions for other IAG writers. Contact her through the discussion group; she would really love to work with other members on publicising their books.

Launched!

2008-12-12T15:57:00.000-08:00

Well, there was a nice crowd at The Twig in Alamo Heights Thursday evening at my launch event for the Adelsverein Trilogy - even though all but one copy of Book One had sold, even before we walked in last night! Sort of embarrassing, since I then had to fall back on doing autographed book-plates for people to stick into the front of copies they ordered… And my daughter forgot her camera, as we wanted to have pictorial evidence.

Nice Q & A session from almost a dozen people; a nice elderly couple of ‘freethinkers’ from up Comfort way, who were familiar enough with the history to know what I was talking about and to be interested, two very knowledgeable and dedicated local fans, another couple- the wife of whom is the Queen of the Red Hat chapter I belong to, one of my current semi-employers… and a shaggy young man who had been hanging around on the back porch of Cappyccino’s - the little cafe next door, who followed us in. I think he started off being more interested in my daughter, but he seemed to become quite fascinated by trials of the German settlers in Gillespie County. I kept getting very happy vibes of approval and interest, especially when they asked questions about obscure local historical matters - like, about the massacre of Unionists at the Nueces during the Civil War, and I knew all the detailed ins and outs. One of the dedicated fans said he had read the sample chapters at my website and asked about the first chapter of “The Gathering” - had there really been German-American or German immigrants present among the Texians massacred at the Goliad? And yes, of course there were - half a dozen, according to records. I gave chapter and verse, practically page references. The fan looked enormously pleased - I had the feeling I had sailed easily over a pre-set challenge.

I read a bit from Book One, a couple of pages detailing what happens to the steerage passengers on a wooden sailing-ship, during a violent storm in mid-Atlantic. Nothing good, you may be assured - violent sea-sickness, hysteria and bodily fluids sloshing around on the deck are the least of it. Blondie says I read too much and too fast. Still and all, a much better signing than last time.

All three books are too available, here, here and here, from Booklocker.com. Amazon has them all up now, but most discouragingly shows them as being out of stock. Really, sometimes I wonder if they really want to sell my books at all. Apparently, there was a bit about the Trilogy in the Kerrville newspaper yesterday; so had an email query from a local bookstore there. They do mostly used and antique books, but they carry Texiana, and would like to carry the Trilogy. Bit by bit, sportsfans, bit by bit.

I topped off the evening with an interview on Lillian Cauldwell's internet radio station show, even thought I was so tired I practically dropped in my tracks. Something revivifying about being ‘on air’ so to speak. In the theatrical world they call this “Doctor Footlights” - the adrenalin kicks in and you feel better almost at once. (For the interview, enter the site, go to archives, then the list of hosts, pick host Lillian Cauldwell - my interview is there already - Dec. 11)

December Update

2008-12-06T07:21:00.000-08:00

Member Dianne Salerni has posted her monthly spotlight on her blog; this month, the theme is "Children and Teens". (Take note, last-minute Christmas shoppers!)

Nan Hawthorne intervies Sandra Worth, author of "The Kings' Daughter" at Medieval-novels.com, here.

New member Eileen Key sent us this link to a wonderful article, articulating the reasons that we are driven to write.

And just for fun, Al Past forwarded this picture of a very special Corn Maze...

Interview with Prospero

2008-11-19T07:21:00.000-08:00

Prospero is a physician and Theurgist in eighteenth century Vienna. Despite his unparalleled success rate, or perhaps because of it, the Holy Order of Physicians, Augurs and Theurgists (HOPAT) believe him to be a fraud. He was kind enough to let Kim McDougall interview him from his home in exile (though he was quick to point out it was simply a mountain retreat).

KM: Please tell us a bit about the Divine Sympathies. How does it work?

Prospero: It is simple. The energy of the universe, the Divine Sympathies, can be harnessed. I lay my hands on the body, and the Divine Sympathies course through my veins. In this way, I can manipulate the organs and release the malevolent humors. Here let me show you. (Prospero reaches for the interviewer.)

KM: Umm. No. That’s all right. (Chair scrapes backwards. Awkward pause.)

Prospero: It’s really very stimulating.

KM: I’m sure it is. So these Divine Sympathies, why are you the only one able to manipulate them?

Prospero: Oh, the others could, but they are too stupid. Too stuck in the seventeenth century, with their bloodlettings and leechcraft. Imagine leeches as medical therapy. Barbaric.

KM: Let’s talk a bit about HOPAT. Why do you think they banned you?

Prospero: Jealousy. Pure and simple.

KM: Didn’t they accuse you of…wizardry?

Prospero: (Sucking in his breath) You should not use such terms lightly, Madam. That is a serious accusation. I am a Theurgist. My power is a divine right, not some…not some feckless charlatanism. Even my detractors would not dare to insult me so.

KM: Says here…(shuffling papers) that Peniakoff, the President of HOPAT, accused you of wizardry before the assembled house.

Prospero: You Madam, are suffering from an abundance of yellow bile. I can hear it in your voice.

KM: (Pauses) Alright, let’s talk about your apprentice, Dr. Edouard Breugen.

Prospero: There is nothing to say. The boy is a fraud, a cheat, and a Judas.

KM: Seems you have a lot to say about Ed…

Prospero: I knew he had lustful feelings for Maria. I should have banished him from my practice, but I assumed he was too ineffectual to act on his feelings. Such an insipid boy. Only a blind girl would fall for him.

KM: Maria, yes. The blind pianist?

Prospero: Blind only because of ignorance. I cured her!

KM: If you cured her, then why is she still blind?

Prospero: I haven’t worked out that part yet, but I assure you, Edouard’s so-called psychology won’t help. Bah! Psychology is just a fad. A bunch of pundits, trying to sound intelligent while they sip sherry and stuff their faces with canapés.

KM: Yes, but getting back to Maria…

Prospero: Only the Divine Sympathies will save her. It’s really a simple technique. Please let me show you. I can alleviate some of that yellow bile. It colors your whole being.

KM: No really. That’s fine. It does seem more like hocus-pocus to me…

Prospero: Hocus pocus? Like some street-corner, potion-peddling, hex-mongering, toothless witch? Burn them! Burn them all, I say! (Prospero pauses to smooth down his frock coat and wipe the spittle from his chin) Madam, I will not sit here and be insulted by your ignorance. This interview is done. Good-day.

Read “Divine Sympathies” in Twist of Fate, 13 tales of fantasy, sci-fi and mystery. Published by Eternal Press (www.eternalpress.ca).

Kim McDougall writes “Between the Cracks.” You can check out more of her fiction at www.kimmcdougall.com . The character of Prospero is based loosely on the life of Franz Anton Mesmer.

Updates for the week ending 15 November

2008-11-15T09:18:00.000-08:00

A lovely rant and short course in layout and overall book design from new IAG member Moriah Joven, from her blog

Another in our continuing series of authors interviewing their own characters, or variants thereof... here

And the on-line version of the review of my own "Adelsverein-The Gathering" in True West Magazine is here. My, I don't recall putting in anything about tornadoes... but, hey - it's True West!

And Steve's "Compleat Guide to Formatting" is here, on the IAG Website.

Out And About - Activity Update

2008-11-08T05:12:00.000-08:00

Marsha Ward has an interview with Eunice Boeve, here

Marva Dasef pointed the way to "The Deepening" an on-line magazine that promotes and encourages fine gourmet writing.

Diane Ashcraft (Hitler and Mars Bars) is on blog tour this week, with stops here, here, and here.

And our fearless leader, Dianne Salerni has posted her latest Spotlight on.... here

Advice from a PR Pro

2008-11-08T05:01:00.000-08:00

New member Paul Krupin had this long and informative answer to a recent question about making a living from writing

I'm a copywriter and a publicist and so I guess I do make a living writing. I'm happy to share with you what I've done and what I've learned. I wrote my first news release in 1977. I went online with my first website in 1993. I've built up
my copywriting and publicity services company at home and online over the past 15 years. You can read the story about how I created my business in the book "Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur' s Soul" published by Health Communications Nov 2006. It's titled 'Ripples'. Fun story. If you want to see it send me an email and I'll send you a pdf file.

The marketing I do is pretty nominal but it is consistent, and I take baby steps to keep it going nearly every day. I'm of the belief that if people and companies have employees doing work that you can do and have more work that you can do than they have employees available to do that work, then getting paid is easy.

Can you do it?

Yes you can!

You just need to present them with a very desirable alternative turnkey to hiring you as an employee. Make it attractive and make it easy and it's a done deal.

I've found that if they have employees doing something, then outsourcing to you is often a very attractive option. You can normally charge four to six times the hourly rate of pay that they pay full time employees to do exactly the same work, but without them having to carry the overhead that they have to carry for an employee. So if top technical or professional employees are making $50 an hour, then you can charge $200 an hour. Most companies will not bat an eye at these rates these
days. You can run the numbers and see, at these rates, it's not hard to bill over $100,000 a year and do it part-time from home. The Internet and email can be a wonderful place.

So no matter what the employees or you do, you can create a short menu of options and fees that break both the services you will provides (just like an employee performs, or the deliverables they create), and format this into a short list of the fee based time or product deliverables that you can perform or deliver on demand or by schedule.

So instead of a resume, create a one page brochure that says "menu of options". Then itemize options so people can hire you in bite size chunks of payable time or for products or services by known typical units of performance (by the hour, by the day, by the week, by the page, by the document, or whatever).

This menu allows you and the client to select what you do and price it in advance, and build this into a one page contract or an email or even a phone call.

I've found that the best marketing tactics that work in this business are ones that allow you to leverage professional branding with your target audience. You should not waste time, effort and money unless it brings a professional branding message in front of someone who will potentially be amenable to doing business with you.

So I recommend you experiment, test and most importantly and track and analyze what you do, to identify how you are getting clients and where the biggest income streams come from. Then apply the basic rules of systematic continuous improvement to what you are doing. Simply put, if it works, do more of it, and if it doesn't stop and do something else.

You can use my business as an example. To this day, I get most of my new business by:

> meeting people at conferences at which I exhibit, and giving short but personal consults on the fly, and once I hear what they are all about giving them recommendations that help them a little and indicate what they can get by involving me more.

> writing and publishing articles (problem solving tips articles) in magazines, to demonstrate skills, expertise, ability, knowledge and wisdom, and create desire once they realize they want more of what I can offer.

> posting articles and responding to posted questions in newsgroups and on discussion lists, to do the same.

> adding more free articles and free downloads to an extensive highly educational and focused website, to educate and motivate people to do more themselves, or hire me if they can't do it themselves.

> adding more success stories and testimonials to my portfolio, to again demonstrate and affirm.

> sending really value added email introductions to prospects, to supply them with a plan of action that leads them to hire me.

> doing 30 minute consultations by phone, learning what clients need and delivering strategic advice and one page action plan proposals by email.

> answering prospect questions as though I was already working for them.

> carefully cultivating word of mouth off prior exceptional performance.

> speaking engagements, giving workshops and training sessions for free and for fee, but only to the right targeted company or audience.

> meeting people for lunch and listening to their project needs or dreams.

> sending them one page email proposals.

> building off referrals, and speaking engagements, and seeking to leverage host beneficiary relationships.

This last one is perhaps the most crucial. As you satisfy clients, of course, you can get repeat business. If you do work for a headquarters or a home office of a company with lots of offices all
over the country, your host contact can lead you directly to many other prospects. You then get to pitch them all or better still, the headquarters contact shares you and everyone in that business network then contacts you. This situation can be phenomenally beneficial. Lucrative in fact. Same thing can happen with speaking engagements at associations. The local speech or workshop travels up to the headquarters.

Once every few years I create an innovative post card and do a mailing. My most recent mailer was a one pager back top back. If you want to see my most recent one, send me an email message request and I'll send you the pdf file. I was using US Mail for mailings until two years ago. Now we participate in coop mailings and use email.

Nowadays I also use a show off business card. It has a picture of me fishing. It's a memorable experience to look at and to hold. It brands me as a distinctive writer.

I use email, short letters and one page business proposals extensively to close deals by email and phone. In fact, I have a rule which basically says that you never have a conversation with a prospect without making a customized personal proposal. It works very well.

I actually don't need or use formal contracts at all. I just take credit cards and bill them at the time of performance. I take very few checks and only in advance if the client insists upon paying that way. Client satisfaction with this arrangement is nearly 100 percent for many years now.

I spend NO money on advertising at all and do not care about search engine placement or ad words. Clients who call me have either heard about me or find me online through research or referral. They basically have decided to hire me before they call me so I actually do very little selling.

I've actually found that in my business, the people who search using search engines aren't the clients I seek to work with. Most of them don't have the products or businesses that I enjoy and can be successful with. The people who find my site online rarely are quality clients. So search engine ranking and placement mean very little to me. I can be found very quickly if people search for me nonetheless. In fact, search on my name and you'll see thousands of links going back 15 years.

I've also found that the decision to hire is based on people having convinced themselves that you offer needed value that can be acquired no where else at the costs that you present. What you need to do is just learn how to make the product or service you give remarkable and personal, unique, and phenomenally effective. You also need to learn how to communicate this to them quickly.

Do that and your business will grow consistently with everything you do. The key to enjoying yourself along the way is to simply focus on helping the people you can help the most. You also need to know when to say no to a project that is problematic and where you know won't be able to satisfy yourself or the client. The rule should be 'no unhappy clients'.

I learned this business model by studying a variety of other consultants and copywriters. This model is actually very easy to operate and fairly low cost. I incorporated a few years ago as a full C Corp to take advantage of the tax structure since the business bills over six figures a year.
I pay myself a salary. I also just use QuickBooks Pro to do the day to day bookkeeping myself but do hire a professional accountant to do the taxes each year. I use the merchant credit card services offered with Quicken and it does the bookkeeping entries as it processes the credit card authorizations.

The skills I acquired to conduct my business the way I do is mostly out of books. I am a voracious reader. This is in addition to reading or skimming all the client books that come to me (Fed Ex and UPS stop here nearly every day Monday through Friday). I read at the health club, I read during the day and at night, and in front of the TV. I basically am reading (or searching and surfing the Internet) if I am not writing or on the phone.

My house is totally wireless and there are two computers on plus two laptops available for use by me and the rest of the family at all times.

I can even take my cell phone and my wireless laptop in my boat and take client calls and work while fishing along the Columbia River because of the many hot spots and homes with unsecured wirelessrouters along the river. It's amazing! The technology really is wonderful these days. That makes for some very pleasant days working (yes really working) while catching salmon, steelhead and
walleye! If you've ever called me during the day you may hear me tell you that if I get a fish on I'll have to get off really quick, but I'll call you back! OK, enough bragging.

I just looked over my library and I highly recommend you basically commit to reading most every business, sales and marketing book published and get whatever you can out of each and every one of them. I still probably spend $100 to $200 a month on books in this area and have for years. My wife says it takes more to keep me well read than it does to keep me well fed. I have a 25 year collection and I still refer back to them constantly.

My favorite book authors and the books I can point you to for the best answers to this question the most are:

* Harry Beckwith (everything he writes is golden including: Selling the Invisible, What Clients Love, The Invisible Touch, and his new one, You, Inc.)

* Bob Bly (again, anything he writes is worth owning. The Copywriter's Handbook, Secrets of a Freelance Writer, How to Promote Your Own Business, and Write More, Sell More, which is still one of the best books ever written on running a writing business).

* Ralph G. Riley (The One Page Business Proposal is perhaps one of the most important books you'll ever find. It has made me tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars).

* Dan Kennedy (The Ultimate and No B.S. series)

* Seth Godin (Purple Cow, Free Prize Inside, and Unleashing the Idea Virus)

* Mark Stephens (Your Marketing Sucks)

* Jay Abraham (Getting Everything You Can Out of All You Got)

* Dr. Jeffrey Lant (this dates me! No More Cold Calls, Cash Copy, The Unabashed Self-Promoter's Guide, and Money Making Marketing. Good luck finding these but if you do, consider yourself lucky)

* Jeffrey Fox (How to Become a Rainmaker and How to Become a Marketing Superstar).

If you need attitude and adjustment to get into the right frame of mind for running a business, then I highly recommend:

* Jack Canfield (The Success Principles)

* Napoleon Hill (Law of Success)

* Steven Scott (Mentored by a Millionaire)

* Brian Tracy (Maximum Achievement and many others)

* Chicken Soup for the Writer's Soul (Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, and Bud Gardner)

The real trick to reading is that you have to create a written plan with the ideas that come to you.

Reading and not writing simply isn't productive. Writing a plan of action turns the idea into something tangible. You must add in the tasks and place dates and performance measures so that you know that you have completed the task.

Knowledge is valuable but to turn a fantasy into reality you must take action and try, try, try till you actually succeed.

You need to create two independent processes:

The first is the process for creating quality work (writing) that you can get paid for.

The second is the sales process that you use to get customers and get money.

Once you create these success processes for yourself then you apply technology to get more of each done in less time, with less effort and expense.

In fact, if you do both of these enough, it all becomes second nature, much like riding a bicycle or a car.

At some point, it can even get boring. To avoid losing faith and being unhappy, you have to find your happiness in delivering whatever happiness and help you can to others.

And that is my belief in what life is all about. .It's my definition of success:

You achieve happiness and success when you help the people you can help the most and get rich at the same time.

The bottom line is that I believe that the opportunities to be a well paid writer right now are simply phenomenal. You can specialize and focus on any one or more of hundreds of markets. The country is huge. There are 300 million people in the US. There are 30,000 towns. There are simply millions of companies all of whom can be helped again and again.

Don't be shy. This isn't that hard to do and you've got the skills. Focus and go for it.

BTW, if you want a pdf file containing the story 'Ripples' from Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur's Soul, or the latest flyer I used in my mailings, just send me an email request. I'll send you the pdf files.

Hope this helps. Questions welcome!

Paul J. Krupin (who can be reached directly at Paul@DirectContactPR.com)

Chapter 5 - Dope Smoker

2008-11-08T04:44:00.000-08:00

Steve Knutson sent a sample chapter from his work in progress, "Valley of the Shadow"

The myth perpetrated by Lord only knows who, about the rampant and widespread use of drugs and “weed” in Vietnam were just that, a myth. I saw ONE GI smoking dope in the entire 18 months I was in country, and I knew him. He was an Army Com Van driver that made trips, with a “shotgun” between the Golf Course and Qui Nohn. He tried to time his departure from up around Camp Uplift to RON at Phu Cat and play poker with the Mafia in Barracks T-120. When he’d pull out a joint we would invite him to get the hell out of the game and the barracks and don’t come back. His name was Davy Wilson and hailed from California . I remember his name after all these years because there was some keen interest in a particular piece of Air Force property that ended up being discovered in some wreckage that also contained good ole Davy, the dope smoker.

When Davy wasn’t in the process of getting kicked out of our barracks on Poker nights, he was a step-n-fetch-it scrounge/trader/felon//Black Marketeer and anything else that is brought to mind by a vivid imagination. Need it? Ask Davy!

One night about 9PM, Davy and his sidekick knock at, we’ll call them Muff and Indian Joe’s room. I guess you’d a had to read the classic piece of American literature to know the characters. Davy is admitted to the room, nervously pulld out a doobie, I poi…, er…., Indian Joe points to the door with a scowl and Davy stuffs the doobie in his pocket. He then nervously explains he needs a link less feed system, the whole system, for a mini-gun. Muff and Indian Joe look at each other with raised eyebrows, turn to Davy and ask him which side are you scrounging for on this one?

Davy explains, with plausible detail, how he and his squad were sent in to recover wreckage from a downed chopper near the Golf Course and they discovered it was armed with a Gattling gun and they removed the gun but the feed system was shot. They “tried” to turn it in (Oh, sure!) but could find no one to take it (try the Helicopter Brigade) and now they wanted to use the gun at a Guard emplacement (now I, err…, Indian Joe sees where this is going). Davy just wants to shoot a gun he knows nothing about from some place at something, sure, wink, wink, Muff and Indian Joe will see what they can come up with, it’ll cost you ten cases of T-Bones and five cases of Burgers. A hand shake and the deal is made.

Davy and his sidekick leave, probably to smoke some dope and Muff asks Indian Joe if this is crazy, or what? Indian Joe sez, “or what” and has an adult beverage and hits the rack. And so it goes in the Land of Red Dirt and Rice Bugs. The following morning Muff and Joe concur this feed system deal will have to be kept close to the vest because of “possible” outside interest in the “item” sought. They swore an oath, swore at each other and headed for the MMS bus, a day of work awaits!

It took Muff and Joe about a week to track down a Feed System. Davy probably should have dealt with a Weapons crew mechanic who would have thrown him out of their barracks, no doubt, based solely on the price of the General Electric feed system it’s self and the misappropriation of which would garner you a quick trip to a federal facility in Kansas.

What did Muff and Joe know? Not much, apparently. Took two weeks, or more, and the system was illicitly traded for and set in an “obtainable location.” The gears were set in motion when Davy produced the Steak and Burgers. Four cases of Steak and two of Burgers went to the man who opted an insecure twenty two thousand dollar feed system. The trade was made, the Steaks and Burger were passed, the General Electric system went to the Golf Course. Four people knew the details. Muff, Indian Joe, Mr. X with the system and Davy , with his new toy. Now for the fun.

About four weeks go by and Mr. X contacts Muff and Joe in a panic. He sez there has been a “disaster” at the “Golf Course” and Davy has been caught with “his” feed system. We’re…errr, Muff and Indian Joe are talking to Mr. X and three very serious looking types approach the three. All three are led away to be “interviewed,” Re: feed systems and a gun.

Seems Davy, in his “Army” rank of intelligence, has mounted the gun in a Guard Tower and as suggested, removed the tracers from all but the tenth round of each belt of M-60 ammo fed into the de-linker to “mask” the gun. Unfortunately he had cycled it to its highest rate of fire, 6,000 rounds a minute, 100 rounds a second, a veritable lead wall. The tower is built, as are most Guard towers in Vietnam , using 4X4’s for “legs.”

The recoil from a .308, which is what the mini is, is about eleven and a half pounds. A jolt, but not horrific. Multiply that by 100 and each second of burst from a mini-gun gives you, at the cycled rate of fire, one thousand, eleven hundred and fifty pounds of recoil thrust at the top of that 35 to forty foot tower. You can guess what happened to Davy, the tower and the gun. I heard it was spectacular. I’d a paid real money to watch that show.

The interviews? Admit nothing, deny everything, demand proof! That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

IAG Author Interviews - An Interview With Ana Darcy, Part 2

2008-11-02T19:02:00.001-08:00

(Part 2 of Al Past's Interview with Ana Darcy, of Distant Cousin)

6. What is the native wildlife on your planet? What is the climate on your planet? (DS) 7. Ana, I understand you don't have dogs on your home planet - what do you think of them? (RH)

The Others did an impressive job of selecting a planet similar enough to Earth that humans could live there, after a period of adjustment, to be sure. Thomo's surface area is 1.4 times the size of Earth's, yet the planet's mass is only 1.2 times as great. Our gravity is slightly more, for that reason. It has a molten iron core, like Earth, and tectonic movement in the plates on its surface (and also earthquakes and volcanoes). Our atmosphere has a little less nitrogen, and a little more oxygen, than Earth, and we have no problem with carbon dioxide in our environment. There are nine continents totaling a little less than Earth's land area. That means we have considerably more ocean area, which influences our weather systems. Our poles are cold and our equatorial areas are warm.

The range of our climate is slightly more extreme than Earth's: the poles are colder, the deserts are drier, and the vegetated areas are more concentrated. We have large, temperate plains, good for agriculture.

There is a range of wildlife not unlike that of Earth, which seems logical to me. Biologists speak of "niches" which animals have evolved to fill, and our wildlife and plant life fill them much as they do here. At the same time, our animals and plants are not the same. I am not an expert, but I can say that all are based upon similar biological processes: cells, chromosomes, and DNA. Again, though these are only similar, and your biologists are busy studying the differences.

RH has asked about dogs, for example. We do not have dogs, in the form of canis familiaris. Yet we do have animals you would say were dog-like. The biggest of these is a wolf-like creature the size of a horse. They are hunters, carnivorous, and very clever. They have large fangs for capturing prey, paws which can seize small animals, and rows of spines down their backs. Thomans have populated three of Thomo's nine continents and finally cleared them of these creatures, and other dangerous animals. (They exist unmolested on three of the other six continents.) Our folklore and our cultural memory accords these beasts great importance. Mentioning them is a sure way to frighten young children! On Earth, I had to overcome my ingrained fear of your dogs. It turned out that acquiring a pair of sweet, young puppies helped me adjust. But I still do not like most other dogs.

I cannot begin to catalog our animals and plants. Suffice it to say that there is a wide range of herbivores and a smaller number of carnivores. A visitor from Earth would be most impressed by our larger herbivores, much larger than elephants, and our sea creatures, which encompass a similar range. A biologist could devote many careers to studying our tiny creatures. Our equivalent of your insects are even more diverse than Earth's. I can't begin to cover the microbes, which have caused us more trouble than any other life forms. They may account for my own robust immune system!

8. Who were the most important leaders on your planet? (DS)

Oh, dear. That would be like listing the most important leaders on Earth! But, now that I think of it, I suppose that would be possible. However, the list would either be very long, or very incomplete. Allow me to mention only a few, if you please. The first important Thoman leader was from Second Generation. His name was Unskett. The Others, you see, didn't understand about tribes. They transferred members of four different ones, which was a big problem. Unskett was a Counselor, not a Warrior, and his skills at compromise and accommodation enabled everyone to work together, just in time to avoid extinction. That skill has characterized Thoman tribal society ever since. Today, my Uncle Rothan, Thoman Ambassador to Earth, has found his abilities at negotiation helpful in resolving several conflicts here on Earth. These skills fall in a direct line from Unskett.

In the 13th Generation, Ferent, an early Thoman scientist, founded a system of schools to preserve and increase our hard-won knowledge. Most of Ferent's ideas are still in effect on Thomo: beginning education early, with an emphasis on practical knowledge, including science and mathematics. Education is just as important as health care in our system, and as costly.

Hleryn, in the 15th Generation, built on the works of Ferent and established libraries for the new works that were written down. These institutions were, and still are, associated with our schools. He also fostered the transcribing of our legends and epics, and began cultivating the arts, which continues today.
There were many other notable leaders in dozens of areas in the succeeding hundred generations. I'll mention just two. The first is Tereis Debergh, in the 19th Generation. Women were always important since Thomans were so few, but she was the first to actually lead a tribe. (Note that by her generation we were numerous enough to require surnames.) Many women followed, and today women head nearly half the tribes of Thomo. The second, and I must beg your pardon for this, is my father, Heoren Darshiell, of the 160th Generation. He was Chief of Clans when the first signals from Earth were detected. This news set off great excitement among our people, and he was the one most responsible for guiding the effort to launch the voyage of discovery that I was privileged to undertake. He brought our people full circle. Whatever happens in the future, whoever reigns, that will perhaps be our greatest achievement as a people.

9. What do you like (and dislike) most about the cultures on Earth? (RP)

Such a good question, and so difficult to do justice to! First, consider the culture of Thomo: we have art, we have music, we have religion, we have literature and cooking, we have nearly every basic category that is found on Earth. But on Earth, you have thousands of cultures, each with its own art and music, literature, all with their own subdivisions, and if that weren't enough, cross-contacts between them! Thousands upon thousands! Learning about and experiencing this richness has been a delight for me. If the day comes that Thomans visit Earth in numbers (and I hope it will), some Thomans might be overwhelmed by all the complex diversity. If they are, I hope people here will try to understand.

I have seen, in fact, that many people of Earth are similarly affected. People of different nations, different religions, people who speak different languages, are sometimes regarded with suspicion, distrust, or worse. While most wars seem to have been fought for economic reasons, these cultural differences often play a large role as well. This is unfortunate. Education is one way to increase understanding and eliminate the discomfort.

Also, Thomans are by nature a collective people. We live in families, clans, and tribes. We think of ourselves as members of groups, and act in the interests of the group--not always, but generally. Most of Earth's cultures value the individual as much as, or more than, the group. I confess I have found this attractive. In some ways, I did not fit in perfectly in Thoman society. I fit better here. But at the same time it seems a shame that there is not more concern by individuals for the welfare of their own groups, for other groups, and for people as a whole. Indeed, it seems that most of the environmental problems and economic inequalities the planet is facing today are at least in part attributable to that lack. There should be a better balance between the needs of individuals and the needs of groups.

One more feature that I feel two ways about is money. Thomans do not have a money culture. The notion of "capitalism" is not something we would readily understand. We have stores, for example, but they tend to contain items that people want. No one will make and market something hoping that many people will buy it. We do not have advertisements. But again, I must admit that I love shopping here. The diversity and sheer delight of discovering something useful I had never thought I needed is thrilling.

Many people here seem to feel that money is more important than people, but I do not. I think people are more important than money. Whatever we think, it also seems obvious that our peoples have much to learn from each other!

10. Why did you marry that slug, Matt Méndez? (NW)

My editor thought I would not want to answer this question, but I do. Thoman marriages are often arranged, particularly when the parents have wide responsibilities within their clans. The wishes of the betrothed are seldom considered when clan politics are involved. I was never comfortable with this. I longed for a husband who was also a friend and a partner, and who would place our family first in his heart. Matt and I were attracted to each other before my renown distorted people's perceptions of me. He was so kind and patient, allowing me time to adjust to a new way of being, without his even knowing why I had to do it. Having a husband who is my best friend and who is totally devoted to our family is much more important to me than having a man who is a great warrior or hunter, or who has high status among his peers. There is no word in Luvit for "soul-mate," but that is what my husband is to me. I consider myself blessed.

Author Interviews, Continued: Al Past with Ana Darcy

2008-10-26T07:58:00.000-07:00

Ana Darcy, of the Distant Cousin series, is the first alien to have come to Earth from another planet. She is a human alien, though, since her people originally lived on Earth over 3,000 years ago. She graciously consented to this interview in the interest of promoting the amicable unity of her fellow Thomans and the peoples of Earth. The questions were submitted by her fans (whose initials appear after each). Her responses have been minimally edited by Al Past.

1. What was the most amazing and astonishing thing that you discovered when you first set foot on earth? (CH)

Oh, my. It was the majesty of Earth, the overwhelming beauty that struck me immediately. When I arrived, I was terrified. I had lived for so many years in a tiny place. Then the passage through the atmosphere was very violent, and I was afraid the escape pod was being destroyed. I didn't know if I had landed at the right place, or if something might attack me when I opened the hatch. My first sensation was the feeling and the smell of the west Texas night-time air, crisp and fragrant, cool and dry. (Later I learned the aroma was from the juniper trees and creosote bushes.) When I climbed to the top of the ridge and saw the dawn, with the mountains and lights far in the distance, lying peacefully under the dome of the stars, it was so beautiful. I realized I was home; our people were home at last. I will never forget that.

2. Ms. Darcy, besides being a woman of extraordinary talent and intelligence, you seem to have the knack for bringing out the very best in everyone with whom you interact. Do you consciously seek to do this, or is it merely the positive effect your own personality has on others? (JW)

You do me too much honor. Thank you! I do not consciously use any particular strategy when dealing with other persons. People generally respond well to respectful treatment. Not all do, to be sure, neither here nor on Thomo, but most do. I like to be treated that way myself. It's a different matter when I am in public as myself, however. Celebrities seem accorded great license. It is often a burden.

3. Ana, I am always impressed by your character, your determination to do the right thing. You act like a serious Christian and I wonder, have you and your husband ever thought about taking your children to church? He must have been a Roman Catholic and taking your children to his church would seem natural and it would help them understand the culture too. (MM)

Yes, my husband was raised in a Roman Catholic family. He tells me they were "relaxed" about it (his word). His father is an independent-thinking gentleman, and I believe his son is much the same. As for myself, while I have been fascinated by Earth's religions, I have not found myself drawn to any to the extent of abandoning my own. I do believe there is a creator of the cosmos, but I cannot claim to understand its nature, nor can I believe that the creator has an awareness of us as individuals. But I do know the universe is orderly, even the parts we do not understand. The source of that order has to be the creator. It falls to us, as parts of that creation, to honor and maintain it in harmony, and to assist others in doing the same.

Our children have attended Roman Catholic services with their grandmother, as well as services at a number of other places of worship. They are aware of a great number of belief systems. As they mature, I expect they will be able to choose the paths that best fulfills them.

Followup question: Did you have anything like a religion on your home planet? Or did you study ethics and morals? Meditation? Anything of a spiritual nature? (MM)
Oh, yes, of course we have religion! Surely, that's one thing that distinguishes us as humans! The first of us to arrive on Thomo were animists, believing that objects and the phenomena of nature had spirits. Those beliefs were shaken by our translation from Earth to Thomo. Over time this system coalesced into worship of a dual supreme being, cosmic heads of clans, in effect. In more recent times, approximately 600 years ago, the two entities gradually melded into a single deity. Today, most Thomans believe in an abstract deity. It reminds me of what I have read of the American Indians' concept of a "Great Spirit." Many Thomans attribute a consciousness to this spirit; some do not. We disagree among ourselves about a great many things, but theology, fortunately, is seldom one of those.

As to ethics, morality, and the other branches of philosophy, yes, there are those of us who ponder these matters. Again, how could one be human and not ponder them? Meditation is not practiced as a separate technique. I suspect that the various schools of meditation on Earth are a function of your many cultures. Thomo, unfortunately, is homogeneous, and lacks the variety and richness of your cultural resources.

4. Your native language, Luvit, fascinates me, Ms. Darcy. Could you briefly explain its relationship to Earth's languages? How many languages do you speak yourself, presently? (BS)

I'll try! Luvit has been determined to be a separate branch of Indo-European, which is one of the 15 super-families of Earth's languages. Within the Indo-European family, English belongs to the Germanic branch. Russian and Polish belong to the Slavic branch. Luvit shares characteristics with both, and therefore must have branched off from Proto-Indo-European a very long time ago, perhaps 3000 years. Linguists have found it a useful source of data to recreate the original Proto-Indo-European language, which has disappeared without a trace. It is an additional benefit that since the separation, Luvit has not been affected by contact with any other human language. Though it has changed over the centuries as all languages do, it offers a much closer and purer tie to the linguistic parent of all European and Scandinavian languages, as well as Hindi and and Iranian and Afghani. I owe a great debt for this explanation to Dr. William Sledd, philologist and linguist, who together with a team of linguists, studied Luvit in great detail. I served mainly as their informant.

As for my other languages, I am most fluent in Luvit and English. I also have passing familiarity with French and Spanish, as well as very elementary abilities in Czech, Russian, Sedlak, Hindi, Japanese, and Chinese, which I studied privately for some years.

5. What stories and legends do your people have about the race which removed you from Earth and about the journey from Earth to Thomo? Did the alien race that transplanted your people to Thomo give you any assistance for survival on the new planet? Have your people ever encountered any artifacts of that alien race on Thomo? (DS)

We have only the most basic conjecture as to the beings who took our earliest ancestors to Thomo. At the time, we were not literate and not experienced enough to understand what we were going through. At first the travelers' memories were preserved in oral verses, passing through several generations, until being written down. Here is what little we know.
No one ever saw the beings directly, because they wore some sort of covering. Surviving drawings and legends indicate they were large, perhaps half again as tall as humans and maybe three times the weight of a human. We do not know if the covering was so they could remain hidden or because Earth's atmosphere, and Thomo's, might have been harmful to them. We know nothing about the method of transport, only that our ancestors were treated well. We were approximately 1300 in number.
Thoman history is counted in generations as well as in Thoman years, which would be meaningless to you (although they are 14.7 Earth months long). When I left Thomo, we were in the 162nd generation, with a generation counting as 20 Earth years. According to our stories, the beings returned seven times, the last being in the 14th generation. After that, they communicated electronically through the 65th generation. Since then we have heard nothing from them. We don't know if they disappeared or if they are still following our affairs. If they are, we have been unable to detect it.
The first generations had a very hard time. Many died. Gradually, the beings (the Thoman word for them is the Others) supplied assistance and technology. A writing system was created. Agriculture was developed. (Our ancestors had been nomads.) Civil engineering began. Over the generations, materials technology, tool making, electricity, medicine, and basic physics were introduced. The Others never spoke to us with sounds. Since the 85th generation, we have been on our own, inventing and innovating without further help. Thus, if Thomans are more advanced in some respects than the people of Earth, it is not necessarily because we are smarter. We had help!
We have no artifacts of the Others whatsoever, beyond the developments they fostered. We don't know why they moved us to Thomo. Perhaps most significantly, we do know that there is at least one race of alien beings besides humans in the universe. That has had a great impact on our thought.

(To be continued)

Author Interview with Characters: A Continuing Series

2008-10-20T08:48:00.000-07:00

(Kim set off a flurry of creativity with her interview - so it was suggested in the IAG discussion group that as many of us as possible do interviews with our characters. I have chosen to interview two of my own characters from "To Truckee's Trail", the party co-leader, Elisha Stephens, and part-time guide Isaac "Old Man" Hitchcock.)

CH: So, gentlemen – thank you for taking a little time from your duties as wagon master and… er… assistant trail guide to answer questions from IAG about your experiences in taking a wagon train all the way to California.

ES: (inaudible mumble)
IH: (chuckling richly) Oh, missy, that ain’t no trouble at all, seein’ as I ain’t really no guide, no-how. I’m just along for the ride, with my fuss-budget daughter Izzy an’ her passel o’ young ones. Heading to Californy, they were, after m’ son-in-law. He been gone two year, now. Went to get hisself a homestead there, sent a letter sayin’ they were to come after. Me, I think he went to get some peace an’ quiet… Izzy, she’s the nagging sort…

CH: Yes, Mr. Hitchcock… but if I may ask you both – why California? There was no trail to follow once past Ft. Hall in 1844. Neither of you, or your chief guide, Mr. Greenwood had even traveled that overland trail, before Why not Oregon, like all the other travelers that year?

ES: Nicer weather.
IH: Waaalll, as I said, Samuel Patterson, Izzy’s man, he was already there, had hisself a nice little rancho, an’ o’ course Izzy wouldn’t hear no different about taking a wagon and the passel o’ young-uns and going to join him. (Winking broadly) And it ain’t exackly true that I never had been there, no sirreebob. I been there years before, came over with some fur-trapping friends o’mine. But it was unofficial-like. We wasn’t supposed to be there, but the alcalde and the governor an them, they all looked the other way, like. Beautiful country it were then – golden mustard on all them hills, and the hills and valleys so green and rich with critters – you’d almost believe they walk up and almost beg to me made your dinner! (chuckles and slaps his knee) Missy, the stories I could tell you, folk wouldn’t believe!

ES: (inaudible mumble)
CH: Mr. Stephens, I didn’t quite hear that – did you have something to add?

ES: (slightly louder) Most don’t. Believe him.

CH: And why would that be, Mr. Stephens?
ES: Tells too many yarns. Exaggerates something turrible.

CH: But surely Mr. Hitchcock’s experience was of value…
ES: Some entertaining, I’ll give him that.

CH: Would you care to explain?
ES: No.

IH: (Still chuckling) The Capn’ is a man of few words, missy, an’ them he values as if each one were worth six bits. The miracle is he was ever elected captain, back at the start in Council Bluffs.
ES: Doc Townsend’s idea.
IH: And the Doc’s doing, missy! Everyone thought he’d be the captain of the party, for sure, but he let out that he had enough to do with doctorin’, and didn’t want no truck with organizing the train and leading all us fine folk out into the wilderness.

ES: Sensible man.

CH: I take that you are referring to your party co-leader, Doctor Townsend. Why do you say that, Captain Stephens?

ES: Knows his limits.
IH: Ah, but the Doctor, he’s a proper caution! He’s an eddicated man, no doubt. Took a whole box of books, all the way over the mountains. I tell you, missy – everyone looked to the Doctor. Everyone’s good friend, trust in a pinch and in a hard place without a second thought. Did have a temper, though – member, ‘Lisha, with old Derby and his campfire out on the plains, when you gave order for no fires to be lit after dark, for fear of the Sioux? Old Man Derby, he just kept lighting that fire, daring you an’ the Doc to put it out. Onliest time I saw the Doc near to losing his temper…

CH: (waiting a moment and looking toward ES) Do you want to elaborate on that, Captain Stephens?

ES: No.

CH: Very well then – if you each could tell me, in your opinion, what was the absolute, very worst part of the journey and the greatest challenge. Mr. Hitchcock?

IH: Oh, that would be the desert, missy. They call it the Forty-Mile Desert, but truth to tell, I think it’s something longer than that. All the way from the last water at the Sink… Me, I’d place it at sixty miles an’more. We left at sundown, with everything that would hold water full to the brim, an’ the boys cut green rushes for the oxen. Everyone walked that could, all during the night, following the Cap’n an’ Ol’ Greenwood’s boy, riding ahead with lanterns, following the tracks that Cap’n Stephens an’ the Doc and Joe Foster made, when they went on long scout to find that river that the o’l Injun tol’ us of. A night and a day and another night, missy – can you imagine that? No water, no speck of green, no shade. Jes’ putting one foot in front of the other. Old Murphy, he told them old Irish stories to his children, just to keep them moving. The oxen – I dunno how they kept on, bawlin’ for water all that time, and nothing but what we had brung. We had to cut them loose when they smelled that water in the old Injun’s river, though. Otherwise they’d have wrecked the wagons, and then where would we have been, hey?

CH: In a bit of a pickle, I should imagine. Captain Stephens, what did you see as the most challenging moment?
ES: Getting the wagons up the pass.
IH: Hah! Had to unload them, every last scrap – and haul them wagons straight up a cliff. Give me a surefooted mule anytime, missy – those critters can find a way you’d swear wasn’t fit fer anything but a cat…

CH: (waiting a moment for elaboration from Captain Stephens.) Did you want to elaborate, Captain Stephens.

ES: No.

CH: Well… thank the both of you for being so frank and forthcoming about your incredible journey – I think we’ve managed to use up all the time that we have…

Weekend Update - 18 October

2008-10-17T15:54:00.000-07:00

Member Nan Hawthorne at Shieldwall Books writes -
In December, Nine Arches Press will be launching their second pamphlet, "Lady Godiva and Me" by Liam Guilar. "Lady Godiva and Me" is a sharp, attentive and candid sequence, and so much more than just the re-telling of the legend of a lady who dared to ride through the city unclothed… If you'd like to get an exclusive taster of this forthcoming collection, they will be sending out e-poems every Monday from 20th October straight to your inbox for the six weeks leading up to the collection's launch. All you need to do is send an email with the subject line 'Lady Godiva and Me e-poems' to mail@ninearchespress.com and they'll add you to the list.

Member Kim Mcdougall has an interview with one of her characters:

Interview with Xavier Saint Amant from ‘Luminari’The elusive Mr. Saint Amant recently sat down (after dark) with author Kim McDougall for a rare interview.
KM: Thank you for agreeing to see me, Mr. Saint Amant. May I call you Xavier?

XSA: If that makes you comfortable.(A wolf howls in the distance and the hundreds of candles lighting the room, flicker)XSA: Are you comfortable?

KM: Yes. Yes. Thank you.XSA: I could offer you wine, but my assistant has locked himself in the cellar again.

KM: Does that happen a lot?
XSA: Yes. Good help is hard to come by in my line of work.

KM: And what work is that exactly?
XSA: Alchemy.

KM: Alchemy? I didn’t think there was much of a market for that anymore.XSA: I’m not in it for the money.
KM: Yes I’ve heard of your humanitarian efforts…

(XSA laughs)XSA: You’ve never interviewed a vampire before, have you, Miss McDougall?(KM shakes head.)

XSA: Humanitarian isn’t quite the word for my work. I help vampires in need. Those who can’t or won’t hunt for themselves. I’m like a soup kitchen, but I don’t serve soup.

KM: I see. I’ve heard you developed a drug that enables vampires to go out in the sunlight. The Luminari. Is this true?

(With uncanny speed XSA crosses the small space between them. He leans over and whispers in her ear.)XSA: It doesn’t work on mortals, but I could fix that for you.

(KM squirms away and stands.)KM: Yes, well. Maybe another time. Perhaps now would be a good time for a tour of your…ah…soup kitchen. My readers would find that fascinating.(A scream breaks the quiet.)

XSA: Yes, let me show you around.

(More here)

A Plea from Books for Soldiers

2008-10-06T08:59:00.001-07:00

(The following was forward to me through one of my other blogs)

Soldier Charity Faces Closure: Corporate Donations Dry Up

North Carolina – Booksforsoldiers.com has sent thousands of care
packages to our troops deployed outside the US since March 2003. But
Booksforsoldiers.com is in dire financial need now, and may close.
The site must raise $22,000 by October 31 or it will stop taking new
requests on December 1, finish filling remaining care package requests
for the holidays, and cease operations December 31.

"It's a bad economy," says Storm Williams, the founder and webmaster.
"Times are tough for all non profits." Williams says they had an
aggressive fundraising campaign that started the first of 2008.
Corporations they had previously relied upon have been unable to
repeat their support this year. "By April, we received a stack of
letters that began with, 'we deeply regret not being able to donate
this year.'"

Starting in May, they tried again, managing to shrink a $53,000
deficit to $22,000 by September's end. They also asked for help from
deployed troops, sending them US flags to fly in Iraq and Afghanistan
to give as thank-you gifts for the more generous donors. "We are so
grateful," said David, one of the site's moderators trying to drum up
fundraising. "Soldiers and Marines have flown flags for us, sending
them back with certificates signed by their Commanders. It's an
activity we used to arrange for the members. It was a lot of fun, 2-3
times a year and most importantly, for free. Now it's just to
survive."

"Right now, we are just looking to get donations. The regular members
have been awesomely generous, but can only do so much." Williams
jokes, "BFS has always been in survival mode."

"We use our website. Soldiers, Marines, airmen, sailors and Coast
Guard make requests at www.booksforsoldiers.com. The site is
secure; we restrict access to those who've been approved to send
packages."

"With our financial difficulties, we've not been able to upgrade. The
member-approval process is still by hand from snail-mail applications.
We had hoped to hire a programmer to make the site more responsive.
We are pursuing a number of avenues for fundraising, looking forward
to 2009 and beyond, but there is the very real possibility we will
close in 2008." Williams concluded, "We're broke. Our parent
organization gave us an ultimatum to stand on our own in 2008. We
have not been able to do that yet."

Donations are gratefully accepted, either through PayPal on the site's
donation page ( http://booksforsoldiers.com/donate.php ), or by check
payable and mailed to

Books For Soldiers
2008 Fund Drive
116 Lowes Food Drive #123
Lewisville, NC 27023

More details can be found here, or by sending an email here.

A Poem for the IAG - by Steve Knutsson

2008-10-03T12:40:00.000-07:00

I realize my life has run

A never ending course

From daylight’s bright expanding sun

To night’s astounding force

We are but folks subjected to

The daily whims and wits

Of those we seek to make anew

Our friends and daily hits

Our lives speed on incessantly

O’er life’s unbroken roads

We time our selves increasingly

To bear the added loads

A traveler I seek to be

In midnight sun so bright

Before the turning calendar

Turns daylight into night

Please pause with me on this fine day

To hold your friends quite near

And tell them things you’d never say

The things they’d want to hear

Weekly Update - October 4th

2008-10-03T12:26:00.000-07:00

Kim McDougall at Blazing Trailers says "Preview the Book has announced it's new editor's picks and two Blazing Trailers creations made the cut!

The first book is Maybe We are Flamingos, by Sue Thurman and the second is The Little Man in the Map. I'm very excited about both of these! The second one is narrated by my daughter Genevieve!"

IAG member Jessica James had a very long account of a day in the life of a real authors at her blog.... It's not all skittles, beer and hovering personal assistants, people!

101 Uses for an Antique Tractor

2008-10-03T07:03:00.001-07:00

(Courtesy of Al Past)

This and That:

2008-09-27T11:18:00.000-07:00

In this week's round-up of IAG author doings;

Dianne Salerni has posted her October Spotlight at her blog, here. This month, the focus is on horror, mystery and suspense. Check it out!

Nan Hawthorne has a recipe for King Alfred's bannocks at Author Cookies. Umm... and then there is an edible version, too.

Pauline Mantagna is inviting participation in her ezine, "The Romance of History"

And member Kim McDougall has opened a site for book trailers called "Blazing Trailers" - venture therein only if you have a couple of hundred hours to spare, looking at a computer screen...

Texiana - The Next Chapter

2008-09-21T16:22:00.000-07:00

These last few weeks, I’ve been in the process of wrapping up the final loose ends of the Adelsverein Trilogy. The cover for it will be done when the cover artist comes back from vacation, and my prospective-hopeful-maybe employer is going over the final draft with a fine toothed comb. She edits for a living, to the very strictest standard, and asked me if I would let her do this – she loved reading “Truckee” but said there were a fair number of spacing errors and typos in it. So – the first two books are pretty well wrapped up, and I sent out most of a box of twenty of the first volume – Adelsverein: The Gathering as review copies to various websites and publications. (I will link to the reviews as they appear)

Time to think about the follow-up writing project – what to do next? Blondie, my daughter, wanted me to do something set in Ancient Rome. She had an idea about some characters, a family of jewelers in 2nd century Rome, and a children’s adventure set in 1st century Britain, about the children of a Druid who escape the massacre of the Druids on the Isle of Mona. I just couldn’t warm to either proposition. This writing thing, creating characters and a story, making it live so that other people get into it — you have to be into it yourself. It has to kick up a spark in you, one way or the other. It’s hard work, long and complicated and pulls a lot out of you. And it also helps to already have a lot of the required reference books on hand.

So, it’s back to the 19th century frontier. I had been kicking around the idea of going back and doing a sort of prequel about the early American settlers in Texas. I had alluded to some of the incidents and accidents involving the Becker family, and thought it might be interesting to do a book about Margaret Becker, who was a walk-on character, but with a fascinating story in her own right as a society hostess and entrepreneur. I also wanted to carry on the story of some of the Becker children, perhaps with involvement in some of the hairier range wars, like the Mason County Hoo Doo War. I did fear I might beat the franchise to death, or get into a boring rut… but there were so many angles and characters I wanted to explore, and if I had given in to that impulse as I was writing Adelsverein, it would have been several times longer.

The next project came into focus when the notion popped into my mind that I should also do a book and follow the adventures of another peripheral character in Adelsverein. I had made a passing reference to the fact that this person had gone to California with a herd of cattle during the Gold Rush, had stayed for a bit and then come back. Ah-ha! I had always wanted to write a picaresque adventure about the California Gold Rush, of following the trail, and of the whole great and gaudy Gold Rush experience, when Argonauts from the world over poured into California by ship, by wagon train, mule train and on foot.

So there it is – another trilogy; independent of Adelsverein but linked to it, focusing on certain minor characters which I have already created and know something about. Three different roads, three different searches; working title “The Western Trail Trilogy”. I’ve already done a couple of chapters on the first one, and begun reading a tall stack of books. Books about pre-Republic Texas, about the Gold Rush, about range wars and vigilantes… some of them that I can even take into work with me and sneak in a couple of pages between phone calls. So there it is – something to look forward to, when you have read all of Adelsverein. Which will be available in December, don’t forget.

Author Interview

2008-09-14T11:04:00.000-07:00

Marsha Ward interviewed Jessica James on "Writer in the Pines" - the interview is here!
Jessica James wrote Shades of Grey, which I reviewed on Blogger News Network.

And if you scroll down, there is also another interview with Lloyd Lofthouse.

So..., You wanna write a book..

2008-09-02T19:26:00.000-07:00

Chapter 55

So, You wanna write a book L

Writing is the easy part, Publication is easy as well. Editing until you are cross eyed, then promoting and marketing will kill you, unless your name is Tom Clancy of Military and Political thrillers, or Andy Hilstrand of Deadliest Catch fame J It is a mud hole you may want to consider more than once before you step off into it. I was convinced I could make it work and pay some bills that were coming due. Boy, was I ever wrong J

Publishers promise a lot that they may, most likely not, be able to deliver. Things like promotional assistance, helping you with a targeted readership, assistance in obtaining meaningful reviews from people who feed those reviews into organizations that provide exposure for your book, ad nauseum. It don’t work that way, not one tiny bit. A Publisher, who you pay to purchase their grand publishing package with all the frills, thrills, chills and minor vibrations you perceive you’ll need, have only been paid to establish themselves as another middle man, standing with their hand outstretched for further payment if and when one of your books sells on Amazon or any other bookstore affair. Lemme think, what does that do? It reduces YOUR royalty because everyone will be paid. Book printer, wholesaler, distributor, shipper, retailer, and then you.

By making yourself the book wholesaler, you cut the Publishing houses out of the loop. They don’t do much anyway. Of the “Special” Publicist/PR package I purchased from one Publishing house for my book, they spammed twenty two thousand plus Press releases to various groups, ranging from Radio and TV stations to Newspapers and Religious Publications. I received six requests for copies of my book for “possible” reviews. To date, only one person reviewed the book and posted it as a “customer” on my product description page in Amazon.com. It may have helped sales a little, but you couldn’t prove it by me.

To make yourself the wholesaler, simply do what Publishing houses do, go directly to outfits like Lightening Source. They actually print over a million books a month and are the largest in the United States. You could go to off shore printers, like those available in China or Korea, but I prefer to spend what little I have at home. You could also seek out an Offset Printer who can print a book for about a buck each, but minimum printing runs will have you buying a warehouse to store an inventory of about a bazillion tons of your book. No, POD is the answer for a small publisher/writer. Lightning Source does not help with distribution, but lists with Ingram, the largest book distribution firm in the United States, Walden, Amazon, Barnes and Noble as well as other retail outlets, feed on the Ingram listings.
This is particularly applicable to POD books. The books are only Printed On Demand so no warehousing or inventory problems.

There is somewhat of an advantage to going with a Publishing House. They step in and purchase the ISBN and Bar code all books must have for salability and listing. This is of course at a labor intensive(?) inflated rate then what you, as the author could accomplish with just a few strokes of the keyboard at your home computer. The International Serial Book Number is vended by a sole source. I have no idea where they are located, but do know your book must have one. It is printed on your book cover on the small white rectangle that contains the Bar Code. The code that reports sales and inventory on the check out scanners we have become familiar with. Bar Code? “Free,” if you choose your ISBN from the right source. Fifty five bucks. You probably pay in excess of three hundred dollars for the two in a Publishing Package with a Publishing House.

Let’s see, what else? Oh yeah, getting the book printed. It must be “formatted” after it is approved and edited. You can do the editing, but it will not count as a professional edit. Those you pay for by the word or page, both are very expensive. I have had book reviewers refuse to review my book because I short-changed my readership because I failed to pay a professional to edit my trash. All formatting is, would be converting your Word, Works or Apple generated book document into an Adobe Acrobat 8.0 PDF manuscript. Pretty simple with Acrobat Wizard, just highlight and click.

What else? Let’s see, Set Up fee of seventy five bucks. Plus an ISBN of $55 and that pesky Bar Code for free. Humm? Seems like I am missing something, Oh, yeah, the middlemen who make publishing so expensive. Well, we cut them all out.

An outfit like Lightning Source makes all their revenue printing books. A 300 page book will cost around five bucks when purchased from them. They will ship via Media Mail, the old Postal “Book Rate,” so that amounts to about .03% of the cover price of a $12.95 book (mine). My Publisher now, will only ship books via United Parcel Service and if a bookstore in Alaska wanted to carry it, shipping equals 29.65% of the cover price of my book. The Publisher sells it and receives 78.46%, which includes my royalty of 20% as well as paying for the printing. Adding the 78.46 and the 29.65, you see why a bricks and mortar bookstore cannot stock it. The price is printed on the cover and the cut all involved want is over 108% leaving our retailer holding the bag.

Now let’s talk about Trade Discount. An interesting industry phrase. Most default Trade Discounts are 20%. That will guarantee your book will never see the light of day on a book shelf in a retail outlet. Industry standard is 55%, some authors can squeak by at 40%. The 55% Trade Discount has some pitfalls. In that one is your royalty is smaller, another is the bookstore will have a “buy back” privilege. That is to say you incur the obligation to buy the book back from a retailer if the book is not sold after a reasonable set time. Think about that possible nightmare. A book chain like Walden may have over a thousand bricks and mortar retail outlets. Say they decide to stock your book and purchase at that 55% Trade Discount and they want 5 books at each store. That’s over five thousand books that you now carry as a potential liability. If they only move twenty or so percent in that specified period of time, time is money you know, you may end up buying your book back at the rate Walden paid, plus any shipping as well as paying for the shipping to have them sent where ever you want them to go. Sounds kinda glum don’t it J

Now for the “good” part of POD. There are hundreds of publishing outfits like BookSurge, Wheatmark, AuthorHouse, Outskirts, Joe’s Back Yard BBQ and Book Printing Company, WeDon’tShipMediaMailPrintingCompany.com and on and on. They assume all the risk, which is none, but you pay them handsomely to do it, just stay away from that 55% Trade Discount or they’ll get further into your pocket. By that I mean you will be required to pay the publisher an “insurance premium” of about four hundred dollars to buy unsold books from retailers. They see the spots and parts of the country that consistently move your book, you don’t ever have a clue, so it is easy to move those books to favorable sales places and you will never see a royalty, not a dime, as the books now belong to the publisher. This is fun, isn’t it? Book publishing is a racket, almost criminal, but just above that line. Any down the road revisions are expensive, so do the math and decide on the price YOU want, edit until you are cross eyed and drooling on the keyboard, DO NOT purchase a PR/Publicist Package as they are expensive and about as useful as boobs on a tree trunk.

If you go with an outfit like Lightning Source, it will cost you $55 for the ISBN and Bar Code, an additional $75 set up fee and I strongly suggest a $40 proof copy, then a $12 listing fee. So, for $142 you are in print, EXCEPT, you will need to engage a Graphics Design person to collaborate with concerning your book cover. The photographs you use to festoon the cover will be yours, ones you personally clicked the shutter or you will need a copyright release from the person who did. On the back cover there is room for your “hook.” A brief synopsis of what the book is about, make it as catchy as you can, this is what sells your book to the browsing public. An estimate here, that initial $142 and a Graphics Design person, the whole shootin’ match will cost about $400 to be submitted Print Ready. One last thing, a table of contents or index is not automatic. You will need to list your chapters, although you will have no idea the page number of each chapter, only the Shadow Knows J A couple other last things, you will have to select your book size, i.e. an 8.5 by 5.5 book or whatever choices you are offered. This tells LS the total pages of the book based on Word Count. Example, a 73,453 word book is 283 pages long in an 8.5 by 5.5 book, IIRC, that is what my dining room table leveler is J Damn, I gotta check my Dining Room floors again, anybody seen my laser level? One last thing, be certain you do the Prologue and copyright pages, just look at another book and plagiarize a suitable example with slight re wording to fit your book. Further, this affiant sayeth naught. Damn, I coulda been a lawyer J

September IAG Spotlight Page

2008-08-30T12:50:00.000-07:00

It's up, here, spotlighting historical fiction set in various locations around the world.

The spotlight is on IAG Members Lloyd Lofthouse, Juliet Waldron, Janet Elaine Smith, Peggy Ullman Bell, Melika Dannese Lux, Lee Cross, Jeffery Williams, Dianne Ascroft, Glenice Whitting and Pauline Montagna

Why Trampolines Are Dangerous

2008-08-30T12:41:00.000-07:00

(Photo sent by AIG Member Al Past)

Just for Fun

2008-08-12T11:13:00.000-07:00

(Sent to me by another IAG member - hey, we could all use a good laugh)

A Texas rancher got in his pickup and drove to a neighboring ranch and knocked at the door. A young boy, about 9, opened the door.
"Yer Dad home?' the rancher asked.
'No sir, he ain't,' the boy replied. 'He went into town."
"Well," said the rancher, 'is yer Mom here?'
"No, sir, she ain't here neither. She went into town with Dad."
"How about your brother, Howard? Is he here?"
"He went with Mom and Dad."

The rancher stood there for a few minutes, shifting from one foot to the other and mumbling to himself.
"Is there anything I can do fer ya?" the boy asked politely. "I knows where all the tools are, if you want to borry one. Or maybe I could take a message fer Dad."
"Well," said the rancher uncomfortably, "I really wanted to talk to yer Dad. It's about your brother, Howard, getting my daughter, Pearly Mae, pregnant."

The boy considered for a moment "You would have to talk to Pa about that," he finally conceded. "If it helps you any, I know that Pa charges $50 for the bull and $25 for the boar, but I really don't know how much he gets fer Howard."

Meditation on Robert E. Lee and the Spirit of Conciliation

2008-08-03T15:17:00.000-07:00

(a guest post by IAG Member Barry Yelton)

As the country agonizes about war in the Middle East, the rise of hostile powers around the world, and the contentious political season, there is a powerful lesson from our history about the need for conciliation and coming together. The current political situation threatens to divide our country even more deeply than it was during the Vietnam era. We as a people need guidance. Our nation’s civil war provides many lessons about conciliation and the results of failing to reconcile. Possibly the greatest single positive example from that war was the life of Robert E. Lee.

For most Americans today, if they think of Lee at all, he was someone we read about in high school history. Perhaps we saw a portrait of him astride his horse, Traveler. To most, he is a figure from an ancient and hopelessly retrograde culture, who could not possibly have any relevance in the new millennium.

He was indeed a product of his time and his culture, a man who tolerated human slavery even as he deplored it. He led an army, which was the martial instrument of a racist and repressive society, though one which held itself to be civilized and indeed enlightened. While he did hold such a post, and certainly held it with incredible energy, creativity, and resolve; at the same time he was by all accounts kind-hearted, humble, and sincerely religious.

History itself seems mostly irrelevant to the vast majority today. “Why should we dwell on the past, when it is dead and gone? This is the Twenty First Century!” I would submit that history has exquisite relevance for this and any other generation. The people who passed before us with their combination of heroism and butchery, triumphs and foibles were, after all, made of the same stuff as you and I. The culture has changed, as have attitudes, but the human animal in most ways has not. We have the same desires, hopes, aspirations, and we all still have our prejudices, as much as we may protest to the contrary.

Lee, if he were alive today, I believe, would have a very different message from many of our contemporaries who like to wave the Confederate battle flag. Many of these “neo-Confederates” talk a lot about heritage and pride. However, the message on both sides of Confederate flag debates is divisive, and often sown with arrogance and resentment.

Lee was indeed a respecter of heritage, with a noble lineage and family ties to George Washington. His actions after the Civil War demonstrated, however, character of a type, which is very rare indeed. After a humiliating and devastating defeat, he refused to call out bands of diehards to fight a vengeful guerilla war in the mountains and backwoods of the South, as many of his subordinates and various firebrands remonstrated. He most certainly could have done that, and it would have divided the country to this day in a way, which would make what happened in Northern Ireland look like a Sunday School picnic.

Neither did Lee attempt to cash in on his name, which was venerated almost as deity in the South. One insurance company offered him $50,000 per year (a king’s ransom in 1865) to be its President. When he protested that he knew nothing about the insurance business, he was informed that he did not need to – they just wanted to use his name. To this, he quietly replied that his name was not for sale.

He also did not become bitter and lash out verbally at his former foes. Instead, he took the helm of the nearly defunct Washington College in Virginia and spent his last years in training the young to deal with the realities of the new United States of America, building what today is Washington and Lee University.

He urged his former soldiers to put aside hatreds and return to their farms and shops, and to rebuild the society, which had been destroyed, to put behind them the bloody and bitter struggle. He was a voice of conciliation and forgiveness. He neither said nor did anything to encourage the voices of discord. He put his Christian faith into practice under the most difficult of circumstances.

It is safe to assume that were Lee alive today, he would counsel the same in our society. He would encourage the races to be done with hatred, and to move on in harmony; to cease and desist from the continual one-upsmanship that pervades our social and political life today - to give more and demand less.

He was a man who subsumed his own selfish desires and ambitions to do his duty as he saw it. As war became imminent, he rejected the honor of leading the Union Army, which had all the advantages necessary for success, to cast his lot with his countrymen and kin in a dangerous and desperate struggle, because he could not lift his arm against his own. It is highly probably, given his considerable abilities, that had Lee accepted the command of the Union Army, the war would have been shortened by two years or more, and that Lee would occupy a place in history alongside Washington and Lincoln. Lee was no fool; he knew this very well. Still he chose what he believed to be his duty over self-promotion.

This is a key for Americans today. Our commercial and capitalist society, with all its advantages still encourages self-interest and greed at the expense of compassion and generosity. Our competitiveness tends to stifle the higher impulses to conciliation, which many consider a sign of weakness. In fact, it takes far greater strength to conciliate than to confront, to forgive than to hate. It is easy to show hatred and lack of compassion. It takes strength to reach out.

I believe we should learn from our past, take the best from history and from its protagonists, and use it to move humanity beyond the petty hatreds of race, class, or region. Having studied the life of General Lee, I believe there is very much about him which is truly exemplary, a pattern for modern man.

It is patently criminal that in our effort toward political correctness, we have virtually expunged his name from public school history books. Having said that, I can hear the naysayer’s chorus now. “He should have fought a defensive war...he had slaves...he alone was responsible for losing the war...he should have done this and he should have done that, etc.”

Intentional, malicious criticism of Lee is becoming sport among some so called scholars, as they sit on their duffs in their comfortable Monday morning quarterbacking chairs, whilst ensconced securely within their tenures. The vast majority of them could not lead a group in silent prayer; much less lead a rag tag army to immortality on the battlefield, as did Lee.

Spare me the jealous character assassination. The truth is that Lee was one of the best military commanders our country ever produced. More importantly, after the tragic and untimely death of Lincoln, and after the war was over, he did in fact do more to promote harmony in this country than anyone of that era.

We owe a supreme debt to him for that, not insipid criticism 135 years after the fact. Heroes are in short supply, we need to revere the greatest and learn from them, not excoriate them for their failures. Lee was far nobler than I, and he would have said to ignore the carping critics and move on with the work at hand. He would have said to build bridges, not entrenchments. He would have said to put duty above self. Now there is truly a lesson for today.

Just for Fun

2008-08-03T15:03:00.000-07:00

For everyone who has ever fiddled around with fonts - this visualization is for you.
(link courtesy of IAG member Al Past, author of the Distant Cousin Trilogy.

Writing the Range

2008-08-01T10:47:00.000-07:00

In a fit of boredom, as we flipped through the cable channels looking for something new and/or interesting, we stumbled across the Hallmark Channel. Hey, Hallmark – how bad could one of their movies be? – and wound up watching “The Trail to Hope Rose”. The premise interested us for about twenty minutes, and then we realized that although whatever book it might have been based upon may have been a very good read, the movie was a bit of a painful watch. We stuck it out, just to see if any of our predictions made in that first fifteen minutes came true. (They did – all but the kindly old ranch-owner who befriended the hero being killed by the villainous mine-owner. He didn’t… but he was deceased by the end of the final reel.) It was just a generic western: generic location, generic baddies, card-board cut-out characters and a box-car load of generic 19th century props from some vast Hollywood movie warehouse of props and costumes used for every western movie since Stagecoach, hauled out of storage and dusted off, yet again.

It wasn’t a bad movie, just a profoundly mediocre one. Careless gaffes abounded, from the heroine’s loose and flowing hair, her costumes with zippers down the back and labels in the neckline, and the presence of barbed wire in 1850, when it wouldn’t be available in the Western US for another twenty-five years, neat stacks of canned goods (?), some jarringly 20th century turns of phrase… and where the heck in the West in 1850 was there a hard-rock mine and a cattle ranch in close proximity? Not to mention a mine-owner oppressing his workers in the best Gilded Age fashion by charging them for lodgings, fire wood and groceries, as if he had been taking lessons from the owners of Appalachian coal mines. It was as if there was no other place of work within hundreds and hundreds of miles – again, I wondered just where the hell this story was set. It passed muster with some viewers as a perfectly good western, but to me, none of it rang true. Whoever produced it just pulled random details out of their hat – presumably a ten-gallon one – and flung them up there. Hey, 19th century, American West; it’s all good and all pretty much the same, right?

Me, I’ve been getting increasingly picky. Generic, once-upon-a-time in the west doesn’t satisfy me any more, not since I began writing about the frontier myself. It seems to me that to write something true, something authentic about the western experience – you have to do what the creators of “The Trail to Hope Rose” didn’t bother to do; and that was to be specific about time and place. The trans-Mississippi West changed drastically over the sixty or seventy years, from the time that Americans began settling in various small outposts, or traveling across it in large numbers. And the West was not some generic all-purpose little place, where cattle ranches could be found next to gold mines, next to an Army fort, next to a vista of red sandstone, with a Mexican cantina just around the corner. No, there were very specific and distinct places, as different as they could be and still be on the same continent. 1880’s Tombstone is as different from Gold Rush era Sacramento, which is different again from Abilene in the cattle-boom years, nothing like Salt Lake City when the Mormons first settled there… and which is different again from Laura Ingalls’ Wilder’s small-town De Smet… or any other place that I could name, between the Pacific Ocean and the Mississippi-Missouri. Having writers and movie-makers blend them all together into one big muddy mid-19th century blur does no one any favors as far as telling new stories.

Being specific as to time and place opens up all kinds of possible stories and details. Such specificity has the virtue of being authentic or at least plausible and sometimes are even cracking good stories because of their very unlikelihood. For example, Oscar Wilde did a lecture tour of western towns. If I remember correctly, the topic of his lecture was something to do with aesthetics and interior decoration, and he performed wearing the full black-velvet knickerbockers suit with white lace collars. He was a wild success in such wild and roaring places as Leadville, Colorado, possibly because he could drink any of his audience under the table. Anyway, my point is, once you have a time and a place, then you can deal with all the local characters and the visitors who came to that town at that time, have a better handle on the technology in play at the time. Was the town on the railway, who were the people running the respectable businesses – and the unrespectable ones? Who were the local characters, the bad hats and the good guys, the eccentrics and the freaks? What was the local industry, and for how long – and if not long, what replaced it and under what circumstances? What did the scenery out-side town look like? Even such details as what were the main buildings in town made of and what did they look like, over the years can be telling. Where did the locals get their food from? Their mail? Who did the laundry – even! What kind of story can a writer make of a progression from canvas tents over wooden frames, from log huts and sod huts, to fine frame buildings filled with furniture and fittings brought at great expense from the east. I had all those questions while watching this movie – and I’ll probably have pretty much the same, if I ever watch another one like it. It would have been so much a better movie if someone had given a bit more thought and taken a little more care.

Above all, if a writer can be specific with those underpinnings, of time and place and keep the story congruent within that framework – than it seems to me that you can tell any sort of story, and likely a much more interesting and entertaining one. As near as I can judge from some of the western discussion groups and blogs, like this one, writers are moving in that direction. Eventually movie producers may move in that direction as well – supposedly “Deadwood” makes long strides in re-visualizing a more specific west.

But they will absolutely, positively have to get rid of those costumes for women with the very visible zippers down the back.

At Play in the Fields of Book Marketing

2008-07-04T14:45:00.000-07:00

After giving myself a year of trying to get published the old-fashioned way, which involved getting the notice of a literary agent who would be able to attract the notice of a traditional publisher, in June of 2007, I finally said “the hell” and took my first novel, “To Truckee’s Trail” to a POD firm. The truly mind-boggling thing to me was that everyone who had read the whole thing had two reactions: “Wow!” and “Why hadn’t I ever heard about these people before?” I’ll not delude myself by that into thinking it’s great lit-ra-chure on that account, though. It’s an agreeably well-written story about a minor historical event, and reasonably accurate.

There’s a ton of books exactly like it down at the local Barnes & Noble, along with tons of other books of a suckage so total as to pull in asteroids and small moons. So one may rightfully wonder how on earth the writers of those latter managed to get agents and publishers. The judgment of the literary gatekeepers looks to be pretty iffy, all things considered. By the end of a year I could blow off receiving another rejection letter pretty well… especially those spotty fifth-generation photo-copied ones cut three or four from a sheet of copy paper. (Quelle classy, people. Really.)

After perusing a collection of blook-blogs, I came to the conclusion that writer-driven publish-on-demand may be the wave of the future, or at least a jolly great shake-up to “the way things have always been done”. Sort of like how the news and comment blogs were a shake-up to the news media complex over the past five or six years, which gives cause to wonder if the literary-industrial complex isn’t on the same Titanic-vs-Iceberg track. Writers who have way more experience than I have also been wringing their hands in lamentation at sclerosis of the literary-industrial complex, and venturing all sorts of reasons. Like the torrents of manuscripts flowing upstream towards their traditional spawning grounds, at traditional publishing firms.

Once upon a time, they tell me… there weren’t quite so many people who thought they had a book in them somewhere. Traditional publishers could evaluate and accept submissions in a timely and sympathetic manner. If a manuscript had any sort of merit, it might knock around for a bit… but would eventually find a nice literary niche. Not so now; publishers are drowning in the floods of submissions. I am told that screening them is now farmed out to agents… who have pretty much the same problem. Unless a specific manuscript pushes all the right buttons of that one agent who has to be in just the right sort of mood… frankly, I was starting to think I’d have better luck playing the Texas Lottery. And like any other sane person, an agent would like to have the biggest pay-off for the smallest work possible, so ix-nay on something that doesn’t slot into an easy category, or be likened in one sentence to last week’s big block-buster. Just safe business, after all, but it has the result of narrowing the field and reducing the odds for the next out-of-category big literary wonder. (See above, suckage vis a vis attraction to small celestial bodies.)

Lottery… which reminds me of something else; even getting an agent, and a traditional publishing deal isn’t any guarantee of happily-ever-after. I am told that most traditionally published books don’t make any sort of money. Like Hollywood, the literary-industrial complex really wants blockbusters, and the non-blockbusting writers tend to get treated pretty much like hired-help that can scribble… all the while being reminded that they are lucky to even have agency representation and a book deal to start with. So, a couple of more petty tyrants to appease, and to make the scribbler’s life even more miserable; yes, I think I’ll have another plate of that delicious filboid studge.

Oh, and it seems that the literary-industrial humongous publicity machine only gets into high gear for those few blockbusters anyway; the lesser scribblers have to do their own marketing anyway. The ambitious and driven scribbler of stories as well do POD and have complete control, rather than be nibbled to death by the petty minions.

Mirror Image - Houston and Lincoln

2008-06-24T14:31:00.000-07:00

It’s an old-fashioned study in contrasts, to look at the two of them, Abraham Lincoln and Sam Houston; both political giants, both of them a linchpin around which a certain point of American history turned, both of them men of the frontier. The similarities continue from that point: both of them almost entirely self-educated, as lawyers among other things, and from reading accounts by their contemporaries, it is clear that each possessed an enormous amount of personal charm. In modern terms, both would have been a total blast to hang out with. In their own time, however, each of them also acquired equally enormous numbers of bitter enemies. In fact, for a hero-founder of Texas, Houston attracted a considerable degree of vitriol from his contemporaries, and a level of published vilification which was not bettered until Lincoln appeared on the national scene as the presidential candidate favored by the north in the 1860 election. And both of them had ups and downs in their political and personal lives, although it’s hard to argue that Lincoln’s personal story arc was anything as eventful as Houston's, who appears as the ADHD child of Jacksonian-era politics.

But they were also opposites in at least as many ways as they were similar. The family of Samuel Houston had some pretensions to property and gentility, whereas that of Lincoln had not the slightest shred of either. Born in 1793, Houston was just barely old enough to have served actively in the War of 1812. He seems on that account to have been representative of an earlier generation than that of Lincoln, a generation only a half-step removed from the founding fathers. He came to the notice of Andrew Jackson, and thereafter spent much of his life when not strolling up and down the corridors of power, loitering meaningfully in the vicinity. He served variously in the Army or state militia of Tennessee, as an Indian agent, in Congress and as elected governor of Tennessee. He was married three times, was an absolutely legendary drunk and lived with the Cherokee tribe for a number of years on at least two occasions. He was brave, impulsive and addicted to flamboyant gestures and attire, being talked with great difficulty out of wearing a green velvet suit to one of his inaugurations as the President of independent Texas. He was also, to judge from portraits and photographs a very handsome man, resembling a rugged Colin Firth on a bad hair day.

Houston’s enduring legend was established as the hero of Texan independence; just another one of those footloose adventurers, drifting in during the 1830ies. Like those whose names would be soon written in letters of blood and gold – Bowie, Crockett, and Travis, he was under a cloud, and Texas would be their redemption. Unlike the other three, he would survive the experience. Some of Sam Houston’s cloud was of his own making. He went from a disastrously and very publicly failed marriage, leaving his term as governor of Tennessee and going on what appeared to have been a prolonged bender in the Cherokee Territory before pulling himself together and going to Texas. In the mad confusion that was the founding of independent Texas in the spring of 1836, Houston was about the only senior military commander who kept a cool head, faced with Santa Anna’s invading army. He also — and this was no mean feat — kept his cool in the tomcats-in-a-sack political wrangling that proved to be fairly typical of Texas state politics, then and forever afterwards. He pulled together an effective army, and decoyed Santa Anna into East Texas, farther and farther, until his own commanders were on the verge of deciding he was a coward and would not fight at all. But he turned, when he had the terrain in his favor, and became that rarest of heroes… the one who dies of old age in his own bed. By then he had married Margaret Lea, who was half his age at the time, a shy and beautiful southern belle with a spine of steel. She stopped him from drinking, and kept him more or less on the straight and narrow for the rest of his life.

Abraham Lincoln was born in obscurity and might very well have stayed there, save for the unquenchable burning spark that led him once to walk twenty miles to borrow a book that he had not read before. One has the impression of a ferociously hungry intellect, pulling every scrap of knowledge, of history and poetry, politics and the law into a mind never entirely content. It has been speculated recently that he was subject to bouts of deep depression. He was also ambitious, and went into politics early, while still in his early twenties before teaching himself law and being admitted to the bar in 1837. He practiced law in Springfield, Illinois and increasingly involved himself in state political affairs.

The existing pictures of Lincoln give an impression of melancholy, of someone haunted by unbearable sorrow, whereas those of Houston in his prime seem to reflect a scrappy fighter with three aces among the cards in his hand, and a fairly good idea of where he will find a fourth. Another difference between the two: Lincoln was not handsome. In the words of the country expression - he fell from the top of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. From the accounts of his closest early friends, he was the most endearing and entertaining of company, a gifted raconteur and mimic, able to reduce his audience to helpless laughter… and a shrewd lawyer, particularly relentless in cross-examination. He married the lively and cultivated daughter of a notable and politically well connected family from Kentucky, the Todds of Lexington. Mary Todd had also been courted by Stephen Douglas, with whom Lincoln would debate over the slavery issue in 1858. Possibly that added a frisson to the debates; one cannot tell at this late date, however.

In 1846 he was elected to the US House of Representatives for one relatively lackluster term, before devoting himself almost exclusively to law for most of the subsequent decade. He returned to politics again, as the question of America’s “peculiar institution”, of chattel slavery went from a simmer to a full rolling boil on the stovetop of political consciousness. The Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854 seemed to be nothing more than a crude exercise of the power of pro-slavery expansionists, in permitting the spread of slavery to territories where it had been forbidden in the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The public debates, and lectures which followed, energized that portion of the Northern public which was against such expansion, or even the existence of the institution itself and brought Lincoln to more than just local attention. He was put on the Republican ticket in the 1860 presidential contest as a compromise candidate, a moderate who would attract voters in the western states. His election was seen as a low blow by the Southern, slave-holding states, who began walking out almost before the voting was finished.

Texas was among them, even though Sam Houston was governor of the state that he had variously served as general, congressman and president. Although he owned slaves, he was a unionist, and valiantly fought a delaying action against the secessionists. Lincoln even offered to send Federal troops to keep Texas in the Union: Houston declined, and rather than swear an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy, left his office and public life.

They might possibly have met face to face. They had a chance of course, being both in Washington at the same time, from 1846-1848: Lincoln in the House of Representatives, and Houston in the Senate. One of Houston’s biographers speculates that if Houston had only been a little younger, and had been considered more than briefly for the 1860 presidential slate of candidates… the Civil War might have been averted or delayed for another few years.

Or maybe not.

(This essay originally came about because I was trying to channel what Sam Houston would have thought of Lincoln, as part of writing the Civil War segment of “Adelsverein,” or “Barsetshire with cypress trees… and a lot of sidearms”. Posted at The Daily Brief)

Literary Persuasion

2008-06-17T14:48:00.000-07:00

So, I always was interested in being a writer, having actually begun to scribble down stories and adventurous narrations from when I was in the seventh grade, or shortly thereafter. Junior High school was just as deadly, and most of my peers were just loathsome enough that taking that particular refuge in imagination was a perfectly sensible response for someone whose nose was buried in a book very nearly twenty-four seven anyway. I liked to read stories, and I liked write them, and to think up stories and tell them to people… especially to my little brother Sander, who was a perfect mark for some of my best. Like the one I told him, when we were at the beach, once when he was about five; there was a factory or a power plant away down the coast, with the towers and chimneys just barely visible. I told him that it was a factory for making soap; that it sucked in all the white foam off the waves that were breaking all along the beach in front of us, and transformed it into soap and detergent.

Then there was the one for my daughter Blondie, when she lost a helium-filled balloon; as it floated away, I told her about the Secret and Mystical Island of Balloons, away off in the middle of the Pacific. It was the natural home for all balloons, where they went as soon as they escaped from children who had let go of their strings. They even, I told her, had rescue squads who ran special missions to retrieve the remains of popped balloons from wastebaskets the world over, and revive them, once they were safe on the Mystical Island of Balloons.

Then there was the time she was frightened by the original Gremlins movie; she insisted there were gremlins under her bed. Heck, I had once heard leprechauns under mine. “How did you know they were leprechauns?” asked my mother, when she found me sleeping in the closet the next morning. I had curled up there for some peace and quiet; the leprechauns were very rackety. “Because they were little enough to be under my bed, and they sounded like Grandpa Jim, “ I told her; always logical. I told Blondie that she was safe from gremlins as long as our cats, Patchie and Bagheera, were sleeping on her bed; it was a little known fact that cats were absolute death on gremlins. One of the hundreds of reasons I love small children, they are so gullible.

The trouble with going straight into writing became clear to me along about the time that I went into college for that amusingly useless degree in English, when a couple of things gradually made themselves clear to my young and wide-eyed self. One of them was that only a very few of the duly and properly anointed works of Great Modern English Literature written after about 1930 did not bore me into a coma. Seriously: the reading list for a course in the Modern Novel was enough to make me want to slash my wrists with a sharpened thesaurus, it was that depressing.

Secondly, I realized that of the writers I did enjoy, both ancient and modern… most of them had done something else! They had done something else, seriously and with varying degrees of success before picking up the old goose quill and writing. (Classic quip about trying to earn a living as a writer: “It’s like hooking. Before you start charging for it, better be sure you’re pretty good.)

Just look at the list: Chaucer— diplomat and courtier. Shakespeare — actor and theatrical manager. Dickens — newspaper and magazine writer. Kipling — reporter. Mark Twain — reporter. HH Monro— ok, so he was a man about town and wrote on the side. Sir Walter Scott — lawyer. Robert Lewis Stevenson — trained as a lawyer, worked as a travel writer. Thackeray — journalist and editor. Even the modern popular writers that I liked most had done something else for a bit. James Jones —- soldier. Raymond Chandler — oil bidness. Dorothy Sayers pottered around in advertising, and so did Peter Mayle of Provence fame. Carl Hiaason — newspaper reporter. Hemmingway — well, he squeezed in some reporting. Joseph Wambaugh — policeman. James Herriot spun a career as a veterinarian into four books plus. Only JRR Tolkien camped serenely in the academic utopia for most of his writing life, but he had served in World War I.

There were some exceptions either way, of course, but those works of literature, most especially the modern writers anointed by the academe seemed…. Well, pretty juiceless. Enervating. Arid. Given over to navel-gazing, and the weaving of elaborate language with nothing much to say. Even those few who did attempt something more in a novel than a dry exercise in special language effects seemed to look at real life, and real people as if they were something faintly exotic, carefully placed in a natural setting in a zoo and seen through a plate glass window. It almost seemed as if doing something else, anything else for a while filled a writer up with people, experiences, scraps of odd conversation and occurrences… filled them up with life and energy, and that was the kind of writer I wanted to be. Besides, going out and doing something else for a while looked like being a lot more fun than hanging around for post-graduate studies.

(Originally posted at The Daily Brief)

Last Chance for Rockaway!

2008-06-01T07:15:00.000-07:00

Stuart W. Mirsky sends this reminder about the Rockaway Literary Arts and Film Festival:

The 2008 Rockaway Literary Arts & Film Festival is nearly upon us and I'm inundated with preparations. For anyone interested in joining us on Sunday June 8th (or on the evenings of the 7th and the 8th for the films), here is a link to our official e-flyer (which contains a link to our official press release detailing the event further)

I know a lot of you are located far away from Rockaway, NY but those in town or in the area may want to come by. Last year's event hosted over 30 writers, including some who are self-published. This year, at last count, I noted we have 46 writers in the mix. We'll be offering panel discussions on suspense writing, literature and
characterization, literature and how it is driven by the authors' own lives, writing in the shadow of the Holocaust, writing about health, historical fiction, and promoting books (this one opens the festival at 10:30 AM and its with award winning iUniverse STAR program author Carol Hoenig). We'll also have live music with an appearance by disc jockey Pete Fornatale (also an author), a workshop on copyright law conducted by a Manhattan-based copyright attorney, and poetry readings, dramatic readings and, of course, more.

A local seafood restaurant, Rockaway Seafood, will be serving food all day and dinner and wine between 5 PM and 7 PM as the book side of the festival winds down and the film side kicks in (starts at 7 PM).

Many individual authors have requested tables to come and display and sell their books and we are accommodating them. So if you write and, especially, if you love books (as I do) this is a nice place to spend a Sunday.

Anyone interested can contact me or just show up (though if you want to display and sell books you need to let me know in advance).

Here are directions to the event:

By public transport:

Take the "A" train (to Rockaway Park) or the # 2 or # 5 heading toward Brooklyn, to Flatbush Avenue Junction. In either case, get off at last stop and take the bus from there to Ft. Tilden (just ask at the token booth for the bus stop and ask the bus driver to alert you when he/she arrives at the Ft. Tilden stop).

By car from Manhattan:

Take the Belt Parkway east to Flatbush Avenue, exit heading south, cross the Marine Parkway Bridge (over Jamaica Bay) and exit to the right, following sign that says Breezy Point/Ft. Tilden. Enter the fort after first light. (The fort will be on your left.)

By car from Long Island:

Take the Northern State, LIE or Southern State. Head south via the Cross Island or the Van Wyck to the Belt Parkway (if you're on the Southern State just stay on it as it turns into the Belt). Follow the Belt west to Flatbush Avenue and exit heading south. Cross Marine Parkway Bridge and follow same instructions as above.

Historical Meditation: Elizabeth and Victoria

2008-05-29T10:10:00.000-07:00

As part of the required head-games involved in being interviewed for a job, a number of years ago, I was once asked which historical figure that I identified most with, and the person who of course popped into my mind was the great Queen Eliza, Elizabeth I, of England, Wales and Ireland. There is probably some wish-fulfillment there, what with identifying with a tall, willowy and commanding red-head, an accomplished scholar and incomparable statesman, especially since I physically rather more resemble Victoria—short, plump, prim and domestic, with light-brown hair.

But the two of them, Elizabeth and Victoria are an interesting contrast, in the feminine exercise of power and authority, even allowing for how mores and politics changed over the three centuries separating their glorious reigns. Both came to power and the throne as young women, both died of old age, in their beds (or in Elizabeth’s case, in her bed-chamber) after decades of political and diplomatic success, wielding power in their various ways, earning glory and honor both personally and for the nation, so much that each of their reigns was in turn looked back upon as a golden age.

Elizabeth took a poor, fractious and schism-ridden nation, on the fringe of Europe in every sense, and saw it emerge as a major political power, a naval power, and a Protestant counter-balance to the land-power of Spain and militant Catholicism. Victoria ruled at the high-water mark of an empire that covered a quarter of the globe, saw her grandchildren married into the royal families of Europe, and technology move from that powered by horses, to that powered by great steam-powered engines, on land and sea, and even begin flirting with the idea of powered flight. Both of them distrusted their presumed successor: Elizabeth, childless, held off officially designating her heir, and jealously held power to herself and herself alone, and Victoria thought her son, Edward was an irresponsible wastrel and only allowed his participation in matters of state in the last years of her reign, when he was himself in late middle age.

Both of them, in their prime, displayed immense self-assurance, what an old Scots friend of my mothers’ called “a guid conceit of themselves”. That is, they appeared perfectly at ease with who and what they were, confident in the respect they were due as monarch of a unique people, and cognizant of the duties and responsibilities expected of them. They moved confidently among the trappings and obligations of their respective ages, although the circumstances of their lives differed in as many ways as they were similar.
Victoria, although she lived an almost suffocatingly sheltered life as a child, was clearly marked early on as the heir to her uncle and her succession was uncontested, a straight paved road to the pinnacle of the monarchy.

Elizabeth, the younger daughter of that much married Henry VIII, survived the reign of her Protestant little brother, (and the short-lived interregnum of her cousin, Lady Jane Grey) the almost equally disastrous reign of her older sister, the rigidly Catholic Mary, a couple of insurrections, a really nasty sexual scandal centered around a supposed affair between herself and the husband of her last stepmother, Catherine Parr, a stint in the Tower of London, and the abiding and deadly suspicions of a whole range of political enemies. The fashions of the age played in Elizabeth’s favor, though: she had the education worthy of a Renaissance prince, supple and subtle, whereas Victoria had only that which was thought suitable to a lady of good family in the early 19th century. But what education they were given, served them well: Elizabeth survived, and ruled. Victoria inherited and ruled. Both were respected, both worshipped by some, and feared by others.

Victoria, I surmise, was much more immediately trusting of others; the penalties for political miscalculation during her reign being immediately much less unpleasant; a matter of being "Not Received At Court and By Respectable People", rather than "A Short Stint In the Tower Followed by An Appointment With A Man With a Really Sharp Ax". Victoria was also fortunate in her marriage, to a competent and politically astute man whom she (to judge by her deep and demonstrated grief on his death, and the fact that she produced nine children with him) deeply loved and trusted unswervingly. But Elizabeth was known as “The Virgin Queen”, and I think it altogether likely that was more than just a politic bit of court flattery. When one considers how many women close to her as a child and teenager came to grief and an untimely grave through unwise affairs, ill-considered marriages, and perilous childbirth: her own mother, a stepmother and a cousin died on the block, another two stepmothers died agonizingly in childbirth, the marriages of both her sister Mary and cousin Mary diluted the political authority of both those Maries, and allowed factions to form around a royal spouse or court favorite…no, it would have been absolutely clear to Elizabeth that sex=death, actually and politically. But flirtation, and a rotating stable of political suitors, all played off against each other for England’s gain--- Her personal inclination was perfectly matched to political expediency, and allowed her to keep the reins of power firmly in her own capable hands. She survived, by keeping it that way, and becoming an icon.

Victoria also became an icon, a bourgeois icon, surrounded by her children, very much in contrast to Elizabeth, solitary in jeweled and glittering splendor, but there was one more likeness; their imperishable sense of duty. Both of them had a job to do, a lifelong job, and they did it appropriately and suitably to their time, but in two vastly different and interesting ways. It amuses me, sometimes, to wonder if the two of them could have a conversation together, what would they say?

(Originally posted at The Daily Brief)

Normandy to the Bulge

2008-05-25T00:05:00.000-07:00

I just finished watching the National Memorial Day Concert on PBS, so it seems like the right time to tell you about my uncle’s book, Normandy to the Bulge: an American Infantry GI in Europe During WWII by Richard D. Courtney. I had read the book when it was first published by Southern Illinois University Press in 1997, fifty-one years after his service ended, and my eyes were opened for the first time to the sacrifices the greatest generation made for our country. After I finished publishing All on Account of You on Lulu, I realized that I had to help get my uncle’s book back into print.

Normandy starts off with the excitement of a young man just graduating from high school and starting off to war. It goes through his grueling basic training, then his passage on the ship on his way to Europe. The mood changes as he and his fellow soldiers realize for the first time that they could be in real danger. The action begins as they exit their landing craft onto the beach at Normandy in France. Over the next two-and-a-half years, he loses dear friends and has many close calls, but his faith gets him through even the worst of it. He is involved in the liberation of more than one concentration camp, and he and another soldier accept the surrender of the 11th Panzer Division at the end of the war. He comes home much wiser but, surprisingly, not bitter. He is grateful to be alive and to be back home with his family. He cherishes his country and the freedom he helped to protect.

I re-published my uncle’s book for him last November, just in the nick of time. He’s 82, and not long after he got books in hand and starting selling again, he lost his voice. He is now in a rehab center after a lengthy surgery for thyroid cancer. His recovery has been fraught with complications but, tough guy that he is, he’s giving it his all. He still has a tracheotomy and can’t speak yet, but my aunt called a few weeks ago to order more books for him. She says he uses a white board to write on, and told her that he could still sell to his visitors, and to the medical staff. His six sons and one daughter are visiting as often as they can.

Last fall, before he lost his voice, Uncle Dick was interviewed about his combat experiences, and the writing of his book, by The Bob and Tom Show in Indianapolis, the number one syndicated radio show in America. He was supposed to do a live show with them during the winter. Because he could no longer speak, the show played part of the taped interview, and put some audio clips, his picture, and a link to the book on their website. His books are now selling very well online.

If you have a moment, listen to the audio clips. If his story isn’t inspiring, I don’t know what is.

On this Memorial Day 2008, God Bless all of our vets and their families.

(Previously posted at Quite Something)

Booklocker and Amazon Developments

2008-05-22T06:15:00.000-07:00

Just when I was beginning to think the whole Amazon-Booksurge-POD ruckus was dying down, now it begins again. Angela and Richard Hoy of Booklocker.com have filed a class action lawsuit against Amazon. Com (details here)

I had begun to hope that Amazon had seen the error of their ways, deafened by the level of outrage expressed by the many, many, many POD small presses and niche writers like myself, as well as professional associations like the The Author’s Guild, the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA), The Small Publishers Association of North America and was going to rethink their policy of demanding that all POD books sold directly through Amazon.com be printed by their in-house print service. Well, there was certainly no more talk of any more POD houses caving in , under threat of having the “buy’ button turned off on the Amazon page for any authors’ books published by those houses.

At the Independent Authors’ Guild, our members are terribly split over how to respond. Not in the sense of “I’m going to take my marbles and go home” sort of split, more the “everyone decides what is in their best interests” in the way of response. We are an association of equals; there is no corporate line to be toed. Some of us do not give a rat’s patoot if we have any sales through Amazon or not, especially after this greedy grab. Others care very much, since they make the bulk of their royalty payments through on-line retailers, of which Amazon.com is the 800 lb gorilla. One very dedicated member felt that she had no choice but to sign with Booksurge to publish her historical novel, into which she had put too many years of work to put at risk. Others of us are boycotting Amazon.com, and switching any links in our book-marketing materials to Barnes & Noble or Booksamillion. It’s not just buying books and other goods through Amazon.com – I’ve stopped posting book reviews there, participating in any of their blogs or discussion groups, or asking my readers to post reviews for “To Truckee’s Trail” there; I’d much rather throw my custom and marketing interests to Barnes and Noble. (They answer emails about my book page there much more readily than Amazon does, oddly enough. Amazon’s ‘author tech help’ runs the gamut between unresponsive and non-existent)

I’m only too proud to be a Booklocker author, and to continue to be published by Richard and Angela: Adelsverein Trilogy (aka Barsetshire with cypress trees and lots of side arms) will be available from Booklocker in December. I got my ‘economic stimulus’ tax rebate this week and am using the largest portion of it to get started. Who says that the gummint doesn’t support the arts and literature?

Writer's Digest website contest

2008-05-18T10:15:00.000-07:00

The Writer's Digest magazine editor, Maria Schneider, is running a contest on her blog, The Writer's Perspective. It just started this week--here's her post. You can nominate your website or blog (or another writer's) and it will be judged based on presentation, ease of use, and marketing effectiveness. Winners will get some pretty cool prizes such as a listing in their October print issue, their e-newsletter, and on WritersDigest.com.

The website must be created and maintained by you personally. (Read the comments to her blog if you're not sure what that means. She answers several questions about it.) Unfortunately mine doesn't qualify because I have both a designer and a webmaster. :(

Don't be shy--nominate yourself! You may also get some traffic to your site from the people who read her blog. Good luck!

(Previously posted at Quite Something)

Who Will Review Our Self-Published Fiction?

2008-05-13T18:36:00.000-07:00

If you write a novel, you have to get it reviewed. A nonfiction book can succeed without reviews if it fills a niche and is written by someone with special expertise. But a novel—even if it's a great story, well-written, edited and professionally designed—won't get far without reviews. Few people will know about it—or believe it's any good—if you don't get it reviewed. So do you just send your book off to the New York Times (like one of my friends suggested I do) and wait for the review to show up? Or do you face reality and look for other possibilities?

More and more newspapers are eliminating their book review sections, and those that remain get hundreds of review requests every week, so unless you're a celebrity, your chances of getting a newspaper review aren't great. And then there are the big pre-publication reviewers—Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and ForeWard Magazine—who require a specially prepared review copy four months in advance of the book's publication date. So if your book is already published, they are out.

And what if your book is self-published? That limits your review opportunities even more. Many newspapers and magazines have a policy of not reviewing self-published books.

In recent years, online book review sites have jumped in to fill the demand. After my novel, Too Near The Edge, was published in October 2006, I sent email queries to 15 online review sites requesting that they review my book. Of those, ten replied with requests for me to send a review copy, which I did. I got five reviews, the first within a few weeks from when I sent the review copy. I did not pay anything for any of these reviews and none of them took more than a month to complete. I did pay one site $22 to post the review their reviewer had written on Amazon and several other online sites. As far as I can see, the reviewers from the sites I used are volunteers who love books and care about writing useful reviews.

But the online review scene is changing all the time. New review sites continue to crop up and those that have been out there a while continue to change their requirements. I recently did a search on bookconnector.com—a site where you put in the type of book you've written and it spits out a list of possible reviewers for you. I put in "Fiction," "Mystery / Thriller / Suspense," "Published hardcover or softcover book," and the site came up with 129 review sites for me. And at least one of the sites that reviewed my book quickly and for free a year ago is now saying that they are limiting the number of free reviews they do each week and that they highly recommend that authors pay for an express review to get the review in a timely way.

I'm seeing discussion on author groups about the problems of paid reviews, how this cheapens the process and how these reviews are worthless. Some review sites are careful to say that the author is not paying for the review, but for getting it done quickly or posting it at various online locations. But others, including some that are subsidiaries of the most prestigious reviewers, are openly offering reviews to authors for a fee. For example, Clarion, a fee for review service now offered through ForeWord Magazine, offers authors "a professional review of your title, with the same quality and word length offered in the magazine and very often by the same reviewers" for $305. And Kirkus Discoveries is "a paid review service that allows authors and publishers of overlooked titles to receive authoritative, careful assessment of their books," for $550 (reviews completed in 3-4 weeks) or $400 (reviews completed in 6-8 weeks).

The author has the right to use these reviews as cover blurbs, in publicity materials, etc., and, if the author agrees, the reviewer will post the review in other locations. Assuming you pay the fee and get a good review is the review worth the price? Will it help your book get credibility or will it make you look desperate? Are we better off with no reviews if we can't get them from mainstream sources?

(Originally posted on The Populist Publisher)

Spell Checker Blues

2008-05-12T18:42:00.000-07:00

Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rarely ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect in it's weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.

Anon

(I thought this was a hoot, having been there on many occassions. Link here and found through courtesy of the Protein Wisdom blog. Look, I am coming down the home stretch of volume 3 of the Verein Trilogy. Places to go, self-imposed deadlines to beat)

The Lit-Major’s Game

2008-04-24T08:52:00.000-07:00

When I was whiling away a couple of years at Cal State, earning a professionally useless but amusing degree in English, my classmates and I used to entertain ourselves by working out what certain towering figures in literature would be doing, if they were professionally functioning in the arts and letters of the present- or just the last quarter of the 20th century. What would they be writing, and what sort of writing— and given that movies and television would be in the mix— what variant of creativity would be within the scope of time-transplanted literary talent?
There aren’t any definitive answers, of course; the only requirement is to be able to extrapolate amusingly. Herewith some of the proposed 20th-century career paths:

William Shakespeare: Actor turned writer; the movies, of course. Wildly popular, prolific and all over the map, quality-wise, over a long, long career.

Mark Twain: Reporter and writer of very fine magazine articles on popular culture and commentary, and the occasional book. Pretty much what Tom Wolfe, or PJ. O Rourke does now.

Henry James: Still a novelist, producing exquisitely wrought and finely detailed novels. Very high-brow, lots of literary prizes, but not very widely read. Never an Oprah Book Club selection.

Edith Wharton: Ditto.

William Thackeray: Witty, roman-a-clef novels, about people on the fringes of power in various establishments. The public is vastly amused with every one, trying to figure out who they “really” are about. Threatened with legal action on occasion, which just boosts sales figures.

Charles Dickens: Writer and producer of very long, and involved, and wildly popular TV series/miniseries. All of them have long story arcs, many eccentric characters, and enough turns and twists to keep the audiences’ attention riveted for years.

Rudyard Kipling: Also a newspaper reporter turned novelist, poet and short story writer, and entertainer. Doing what Garrison Keillor does now, even to the radio show.

Sir Walter Scott: Enormously popular writer of historical adventures based on historical figures. James Michener, only shorter.

Louisa May Alcott: Empowering chick-lit. Frequent Oprah guest, and Book Club selection.

Jules Verne: Science fiction, of course— but through the medium of interactive video games.

And to cross over into classical music, Richard Wagner would be doing movies too: very elaborate, special-effects laden, Kubrick-ish blockbusters, with thunderous musical scores and eye-catching set-pieces. They would be very popular, and the critics would come away from press showings bubbling over with ecstatic praise, even though they wouldn’t quite understand a lot of it.

Add your own, elaborate on or propose alternatives for mine: just be creative and above all, amusing.

(originally posted at The Daily Brief)

Standardized Writing

2008-04-22T15:02:00.000-07:00

Lately, when I ask my fifth grade students to get out their materials for writing class, I hear terrible sounds. Groaning. Sighing. Slumping. (And if you don’t think slumping has a noise, then you haven’t been in a fifth grade classroom.)

It didn’t use to be that way. My students used to enjoy writing. Fifth grade is a fantastic grade to explore creative and stimulating writing projects. In the past, my students have written clever mysteries, ghoulish ghost stories, and fantasies modeled after their favorite novels. They have written fictional letters to relatives, pretending to be survivors of the Johnstown Flood in 1889. They have written journal entries in which they imagined themselves aboard ship with Columbus or Magellan. And they have written magazine articles in which their future selves were proclaimed Person of the Year for Time Magazine.

But that was before No Child Left Behind. That was in the heyday of imaginative cross-curricular projects, when a teacher could allow students to follow their interests and choose their own topics in an atmosphere of collaboration. That was before states enacted standardized testing models and determined exactly what students should be taught to write. After all, in this great nation, we wouldn’t want some students to learn one thing while others were learning something completely different.

On our state test, students are required to produce writing samples in two out of three eligible genres: a personal narrative, an expository essay, and a persuasive essay. This year, my school decided to combat mediocre writing scores with intensive instruction in these three types of composition. We began the year with six weeks of instruction on writing personal narratives. That was followed by six weeks of instruction on expository essays. The next six weeks? Persuasive essays, of course. What else could we do? This is what our state government says the students should be learning, and our school’s funding partly depends on good scores.
It doesn’t sound that bad, until you find yourself going into the third or fourth week of writing nothing but expository essays: Write an essay about your favorite season. Write an essay about your favorite sport. Write an essay about your favorite essay topic. Along about the fifth week of this—as I listened to the groans, the sighs, and the slumps—I realized I was killing any love of writing my students might have had. And there were seven or eight weeks of test preparation yet to go.

Since the standardized tests of NCLB have become the sole and unassailable assessment of all instruction in the nation, teachers have begun to lose their perspective. I admit it; we’ve gone a little crazy. I now hear colleagues talking about something called “the five paragraph story.” That’s right. Take your basic five paragraph essay, make a few adjustments, and train your students to write a story that fits right into this structure.
Paragraph one introduces the setting and the characters. The second paragraph reveals the problem. The third paragraph discusses various attempts to solve the problem, which is resolved in the fourth paragraph. The fifth paragraph sums everything up, possibly with a nice moral. Ready to teach voice and style? Just get the students to make one personal comment somewhere in the story, and add two similes and a metaphor. Ta-da! The standardized story. The Stepford Student story.

What about those fifth grade gems of the past with titles like The Beautiful Unicorn? The Alien Invasion? The Day I Woke Up and Switched Places With My Dog? I don’t know when I will get to read stories like those again.
I miss them.

And I wonder—who will be the writers of tomorrow after we have standardized the fledgling authors of today?

***

N Yr Bkstorz

2008-04-20T07:59:00.000-07:00

And whittling away at your client base, is the meaning that I take away from this imbroglio, as reported by member Lynn Osterkamp on her blog, Populist Publisher. I’d love to make $15-20,000 from any of my books in one fell swoop, even if it was as a ghost-writer for someone embarrassing like Paris Hilton or whoever has racked up enough notoriety for the panjandrums of the literary-industrial complex to think it worth a contract and a fat advance. Money is money, even if it is for the labor of transforming a sows’ ear into a best-selling silk purse. It’s being paid for writing, for pete’s sake. Working from home, in a pair of sweats; sure as hell beats telemarketing or digging ditches.

Ghost-writers like the Penn Group are doubtless seeing their source of income threatened – at some remove, admittedly – by the ability of anyone who thinks they have something to say choosing to spend their money on a POD edition and a little free-lance publicity. It’s change, change in the way things have always been done; always threatening to someone with an investment in things continuing as they are. Kind of stacking the deck, though – in picking four not very appealing books and presenting them as ‘typical’ POD productions. Ah well, no one has put any comments on the Penn Group blog post about this matter, so that indicates something.

That, and Harper Collins new imprint, doing something a little like the typical POD publishing house: no advance, royalties only, non-returnable, on-line sales. Presumably they will be a little less focused on the celebrity and mega-established-writers. (more discussion here and at Populist Publisher

Signs of the times, signs of the times. Slowly and almost imperceptivity, the publishing world is changing, and changing in a way that is to our advantage.

WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD AMAZON.COM?

2008-04-11T10:49:00.000-07:00

(Although the following appears with my name on it, ths is actually a guest-post by another IAG member: Michael S. Katz is an attorney, editor-in-chief of Strider Nolan Publishing, board member of the Independent Authors’ Guild, and author of the comedy novel Shalom On The Range.)

Amazon.com recently announced a new policy requiring all Print On Demand authors to use Amazon’s own printing company, Booksurge, in order to be sold through Amazon. Many POD authors and publishers are understandably upset by this, as this can only serve to cost the authors money, and cost the printing companies business. But in terms of Amazon’s market share, how much business are we actually talking about?

WHO’S ON FIRST?

Sales of books totaled $2 billion in 2000, at which time on-line sales made up between 7.5% and 10% of that total.1 Amazon and BN.com now account for more than 85% of online book sales.3 Recent data shows that Amazon’s book sales are approximately four times that of BN.com,4 and Amazon has a 70% share of the Internet book market, so this translates into a 15 to 17.5% market share for BN.com.5

Amazon’s total sales in 2006 were $4.63 billion, but this includes books, music, and various other items, including a lot of high-end electronics, jewelry, and the like. Barnes & Noble actually outsold them at $4.68 billion (and they were basically limited to books, music and movies), but their on-line presence had only $477 million in sales. Why are people flocking to Amazon over BN.com?

A LOT TO RECOMMEND IT

A lot of it has to do with programming. Amazon has a reputation for being the best at tracking customer habits, having collected information longer and used it more proactively. Over the years they have collected detailed information about what its customers buy, considered buying, browsed for but never bought, recommended to others, or even wished someone would buy them.10 Amazon uses this information to calculate recommendations that boost sales.

In the entertainment industry, recommendations are a remarkably efficient form of marketing, as they enable films, music and books to more easily find the right audience.9 For example, the book Touching the Void, a tale of a mountain-climbing tragedy, was released in 1988 to good reviews but modest success. In 1998, the book Into Thin Air, about another mountain-climbing tragedy, was released and became a bestseller. All of a sudden, people began buying the older book again. Touching the Void began to be displayed side by side with Into Thin Air, and actually wound up outselling the newer book. How did this happen? Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, attributes this to Amazon.com recommendations. Amazon’s programs note buying patterns and suggest similar books to readers. Some people follow the suggestion, enjoy the book, and post excellent reviews. These purchases and reviews lead to more sales, more recommendations, and the cycle continues.9

Readers’ reviews also stimulate sales, although moreso on Amazon than BN.com. One study (Chevalier and Mayzlin) examined how sales on both sites correlated with number of reviews and customers’ ratings.12 They determined that a good review will increase the number of books sold, although with much greater effect on Amazon than BN.com. A bad review has a greater effect than a good one, based on the assumption that many 5-star reviews are believed to be “planted,” whereas 1-star reviews are seen as more legitimate.12

GETTING FROM POINTS A(MAZON) TO B(ARNES & NOBLE)

How do prices compare between the big two? A study (Chevalier and Goolsbee) collected Amazon and BN.com data for 18,000 different books during three different weeks in 2001. They determined that there was significant price sensitivity for online book purchases at both sites. But the demand at BN.com was much more price sensitive—both to its own prices and to Amazon’s prices—than at Amazon.4

A one percent increase in a book’s price at Amazon reduced sales by about 0.5 percent at Amazon but raised sales at BN.com by 3.5 percent, implying that (based on the 4-to-1 ratio in sales) every customer lost by Amazon instead bought the book at BN.com. Conversely, raising prices by one percent at BN.com reduced sales about 4 percent but increased sales at Amazon by only about 0.2 percent.4 Therefore, a customer lost by Amazon would usually wind up buying the book at BN.com, whereas a customer lost by BN.com would not necessarily go to Amazon. If BN.com keeps its prices right, they can steal away a lot of Amazon traffic.

RANK AND FILE

So how much traffic are POD authors talking about? Amazon’s book ranking system can be used to estimate the number of copies a book sells.

47.9% of Amazon’s sales consisted of titles ranked better than (under) 40,000. 39.2% of their sales were books ranked between 40,000 and 100,000.5 Titles ranked between 100,000 and 200,000 accounted for 7.3% of sales, while titles ranked from 200,000 to 300,000 accounted for only 4.6% of sales.5 Anything above that accounts for only 1% of sales.

Researchers at MIT (Brynjolfsson, Yu and Smith) studied publisher-provided data of one publisher’s weekly sales for 321 titles, and compared the figures to Amazon’s sales rankings for the same week. The observed weekly sales of these books ranged from 1 to 481 copies and the observed weekly rankings ranged from 238 to 961,367.5 Morris Rosenthal of Foner Books also analyzed performance based on a brand new book he published. 11 Combining the information culled from both studies, if a book is ranked 100,000 you’re looking at selling about 1 copy per day. At a ranking of 30,000 it’s averaging between 1 and 2 copies per day. The 10,000 ranking calculates to 2 copies a day. The 1,000 ranking is estimated at 11 sales that day.11 A book with a rank of 10 is estimated to get 700 sales a day.5

Keep in mind that a ranking at any single point in time is not indicative of actual sales. Selling two copies of a title, regardless of whether it has ever sold before, will propel it into the top 50,000 for at least a few hours. If the same book otherwise sells very rarely, or never, it will drop 100,000 rankings the next day, 400,000 rankings over the course of the week, another 200,000 rankings the next week, and so on. Eventually it will hover around 2,000,000.11

We can estimate sales figures for the majority of POD books using these rankings. Not to be insulting to anyone, but odds are that most POD books will fall within the over-100,000 rankings, which means less than one copy a day while the ranking stays close to 100,000. So it’s reasonable to assume that most POD books are selling very few copies on Amazon.com.

Another calculation we can do is by using market shares. As of a few years ago, 2 billion books were sold overall.5 On-line sales accounted for less than 10% of the book sales market, so:

10% x 2 billion books = 200 million books sold on-line.

Since 70% of all books sold on-line were sold by Amazon,

70% x 200 million books = 140 million books sold by Amazon.

As previously mentioned, 13% of books sold by Amazon were ranked worse than (higher than) 100,000. This amounts to:

13% x 140 million = 12 million books sold ranked above 100,000.

Divide this by the number of titles that are available (there are more than 2.3 million books in print and many more that are out of print but still sold on Amazon5), and the average number of books sold by a POD author on Amazon are relatively small potatoes.

WHY BOTHER?

If sales of POD books are so small, why should any company bother to sell them at all? Because the sales add up and can bring in big money.

With no shelf space to pay for, no exterior costs, and minimal distribution fees, all books are equally worthy of being carried.8 Internet retailers have a nearly unlimited inventory, thanks to centralized warehouses and drop-shipping agreements with distributors.

And if 13% of Amazon’s book sales are in more obscure titles (ranked over 100,000), that’s still millions of dollars in sales. This is known as the long tail, referring to items available for sale that may not sell in large individual quantities but will still add up to some serious financing. The long tail has been estimated at 20%-30% of book sales.9, 11 Not a segment that would be economically wise to ignore.

CONCLUSION

Let’s face it. The big publishing companies are going to advertise books written by best-selling authors to the hilt, and people are going to continue to buy those books based on name recognition alone—even though they are often books that are ghostwritten. But a bookseller who will do right by the lesser-known authors whose books comprise the long tail can still make a pretty penny.

So what is the correct response to Amazon’s new policy of forcing POD authors to use Amazon’s printing company? Start pushing people toward Barnes & Noble and hopefully BN.com will take notice. It couldn’t hurt if they were to use their brick-and-mortar stores to draw attention to obscure titles. Amazon can’t really do book signings, now can they? Barnes & Noble could do multiple author signings to increase reader interest, like theme nights, and they’d sell a lot of coffee in the process.

Furthermore, this isn’t a two-horse race. There are lots of other on-line stores with reputations for excellent service. If competitors can make inroads in price, selection, service and other benefits (such as reviews and recommendations), they can make inroads into Amazon’s sales. If Amazon is going to put the pinch on POD books, then another retailer stands to make a lot of money if they do right by this segment. This is especially so were Amazon to stop carrying titles that would then only be available elsewhere.

(Well, you know he's a lawyer - so here's all the references and footnotes! - CH)

1. American Booksellers Association, Industry News, “Overall Book Sales Up Slightly for First Six Months of ‘01,” November 1, 2001, http://www.bookweb.org/home/news/

btw/5182.html.

2. Clay, Karen, Ramayya Krishnan, and Eric Wolff, “Pricing Strategies on the Web: Evidence from the Online Book Industry” (November 19, 2000).

3. Nielsen Net Ratings.

4. Chevalier, Judith and Goolsbee, Austan, “Measuring prices and price competition online: Amazon and Barnes and Noble” (April 2003).

5. Brynjolfsson, Erik, Jeffrey Hu, Michael D. Smith, “Consumer Surplus in the Digital Economy: Estimating the Value of Increased Product Variety at Online Booksellers” Management Science, November 2003.

6. Brynjolfsson, Erik, Michael D. Smith, Frictionless Commerce? A Comparison of Internet and Conventional Retailers (Management Science Vol. 46, No. 4, April 2000 pp. 563–585).

7. Smith, Michael D. and Erik Brynjolfsson, “Consumer Decision-making at an Internet Shopbot” (July 23, 2001).

8. Italie, Hilltel, "Amazon's Bottom 10: Not Exactly Page Turners," Chicago Sun-Times, August 17, 2001.

9. Anderson, Chris, “The Long Tail,” Wired (2004).

10. Linn, Allison, “Amazon.com Knows, Predicts Shopping Habits,” Associated Press, March 28, 2000.

11. Rosenthal, Morris, http://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2005/08/a_methodology_f.html and www.fonerbooks.com/surfing.htm.

12. Chevalier, Judith and Dina Mayzlin, “The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book Reviews,” September 2005.

13. Rosenthal, Morris, http://www.fonerbooks.com/booksale.htm.

The Joy of Lex

2008-04-07T07:22:00.000-07:00

Odds on, the first thing that anyone walking into any of the various places that I have lived- starting with the enlisted barracks in Japan in those dear distant days when female troops lived in a female-only dormitory was something along the lines of “Gosh – have you read all of those books?” To which the answer was some kind of polite rephrase of “Of course I bloody have! Did you think I had put them up as decorating elements?!!”

Yes, I have books. Lots of books; books in the bedroom, books in the den, books in the hallway, books in the living room and even a shelf of them in the kitchen – what better place for the cookbooks, pray tell? There aren’t any in the bathroom; first of all, the light isn’t that good and secondly there isn’t any place for shelves.

I used to buy books that I liked, just so that I could have copies of my own, which I could read any time I felt like it. Then I wound up overseas, where English-language bookstores were few and far between, and the Stars and Stripes Bookstore was pretty limited; if you saw it there and thought you might want to read it - better buy it quick, because it wouldn’t be there next time, and even though the base library did their best – well, there were other seriously committed readers out there. (When I moved from Spain, the packing crew had a pool going, on how many boxes of books there would eventually be; 63 and no, I don’t know what the winner got. Probably had many cervezas bought for him, after they finished nailing up the packing crates.) And then I came home, and discovered second-hand stores and services like Alibris, and the online behemoth which must not be named because they are behaving like total d**ks in regard to POD publishers… oh, off-topic. Never mind. Books, the topic was books, the love for (or addiction to!) and constant acquisition of such.

Now, I review books, for Blogger News Network, and for iUniverse Reviews, with the result that I get a constant trickle of books from other writers asking for reviews through the Daily Brief or the IAG. But writing books myself is another splendid excuse for buying more; for the research, you see. The shelves of my writing desk (built by Dad for Blondie’s use, but too big for her room) are now crowded with Texiana and various books on aspects of the Old West. I had a fair number of them already – it’s as if I knew there would be an eventual use for that Time Life series about the Old West. It’s not so much the text in that case, but the pictures.

Blondie and I went to the library book sale on Saturday, at the Semmes branch on Judson road. There’s always a crowd for this, the room where the sale is set up almost instantly achieves a ‘black hole of Calcutta’ degree of heat and overcrowding. Fortunately, most of the people lined up for admittance –many of them armed with large plastic tubs and canvas shopping bags - are intent on the novels or the children’s books. I am on the lookout for more Texiana and western stuff – especially with illustrations, especially with contemporary – that is contemporary 19th century artists. I need pictures of all sorts of things; horses and wagons, of old forts and plains river valleys covered with buffalo herds, of buildings and animals and people, something for my imagination to fix upon, so that I can build all the other living elements around it.

I scooped up a couple of prizes almost at once – Don Troiani’s American Battles and a thick coffee-table treasure-trove called “The Art of the Old West: From the Collection of the Gilcrease Institute” which has color plates of practically everything, and a collection of Frederic Remington’s black and white magazine illustrations – all for considerably under 20$.

There’s enough pictorial stuff in those books alone to start me off with ideas for another book of my own. My only problem is that I am running out of shelf-space for all of my necessary research materials - but it’s a happy problem.

(Cross-posted at The Daily Brief)

Rockin' at Far Rockaway

2008-04-03T07:46:00.000-07:00

(Shamelessly cut and pasted from Stuart Mirsky's news release)

On Sunday, June 8th, 2008 more than 40 authors will gather on the Rockaway peninsula to talk about their works, do book signings and participate in a series of planned panel discussions about books and writing, in southern Queens at Gateway National Park's Ft. Tilden. An evening film festival, presented on both Saturday and Sunday evenings (June 7th and 8th), will round out the planned event.

Author panel discussions will cover a variety of topics including mystery writing, historical fiction, the challenges of local journalism, staying young, the Holocaust experience, choosing wines and spirits for your table and much, much more. Films will include documentaries and features by locally based artists.

The Written Word

Irish novelist Tom Phelan will talk about his latest work and describe the plight of Ireland's WWI soldiers while authors from the newly published Queens-based anthology, Queens Noir (Akashic), will discuss the challenges of writing dark fiction. Jill Eisenstadt, a novelist who grew up on the Rockaway peninsula and whose first book, From Rockaway, captured the eighties beach scene contributed to Queens Noir and will join a panel led by editor Robert Knightly that includes authors Jillian Abbot, Maggie Estep (Flamethrower) , Alan Gordon (The Fools Guild Mystery series), Patricia King, Liz Martinez, Kim Sykes and K. J. A. Wishnia (23 Shades of Black).

Rockaway resident and popular thriller writer Thomas O'Callaghan (Bone Thief, The Screaming Room) will lead a second panel of mystery and thriller novelists including Alison Gaylin (Trashed), California-based author and former Rockaway resident Aileen Barron (The Gold of Thrace, The Torch of Tangier), and returning author Jay Lillie
(Pacific Rebound, Havana Passage).

Other participating authors will discuss how their fiction intersects their lives and the importance of developing fully realized characters. Darcy Steinke (Easter Everywhere: A Memoir, Milk: A Novel) will join returning author Ellen Meister (Secret Confessions of the Applewood PTA), along with Helen Schulman (A Day at the
Beach), William Frederick Cooper (There's Always a Reason), Anne Landsman (The Rowing Lesson), David Evanier (The Great Kisser) and Anya Ulinich (Petropolis) in two panels which will be moderated, respectively, by Carol Hoenig (Without Grace) and Pamela Popeson, a Rockaway playwright whose most recent full length play, What Comes Next, was recently performed Off-Off Broadway at the Access Theater.

Historical novelist Stephanie Cowell (Marrying Mozart) will join Mina Samuels (The Queen of Cups -- a novel about the wife of famous American philosopher C.S. Peirce) to discuss the historical experiences of women married to well known, but often difficult, men, in a discussion moderated by Pennsylvania based author and former
Rockawayite Dr. Steven Porter (America's Dying Democracy, Hannes Klar).

The Holocaust experience will be discussed by survivors and others who have written about it. Former Rockaway resident and Brooklyn College professor Tibbi Duboys (Teaching the Holocaust) will join current Rockaway resident Miriam Sorger (A Raft on the River) and past Rockawayite Rena Bernstein (Bitter Freedom), along with novelist Cheryl Pearl Sucher (The Rescue of Memory), to discuss the impact of the Holocaust on their own lives and on those around them.

The Broad Channel based writing team of Dan and Liz Guarino will be on hand to talk about their own new book, Broad Channel: Images of America, and discuss the special factors involved in joining words with pictures. Fellow panelists will include Breezy Point-based Kenneth Hogan (America's Ballparks, The Old Firehouse), Brooklyn-
based Ben Gibberd (New York Waters) and New Jersey-based Brian Yarvin (Farms and Foods of the Garden State).

A panel on the challenges of aging well will include Heather Hummel (Gracefully: Looking and Being Your Best at any Age), Rockaway writer Renee Lee Rosenberg (Achieving the Good Life After Fifty), and former Rockaway resident Alan Geller (Scary Diagnosis). It will be moderated by Rockaway-based health writer Nancy Gahles.

The challenge of writing for locally based newspapers will be discussed by local newspaper staff, including Rockaway Wave editor Howard Schwach and Rockaway Point News editor, Noreen Schram in a panel led by Queens Ledger reporter Arlene McKanic. A workshop on breaking into print for new and aspiring writers will be presented by returning author Carol Hoenig (Without Grace) and Beverage and Media Group Editor Perry Luntz, author of Whiskey & Spirits for Dummies, will speak to attendees on the finer points of selecting liquor and liquers.

Music, poetry and dramatic readings will occur throughout the day and will feature popular WFUV disc jockey Pete Fornatale, talking about his new book, Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends.

Winners of a peninsula wide school based student writing contest will be recognized in a special ceremony and given the chance to discuss their work while younger children will explore their own creativity under the supervision of arts professionals in a specially designated "kids' area".

The Big Screen

Flanking the literary event, on the evenings of June 7th and 8th, festival organizers will present a series of films by local artists. Saturday evening's feature is award-winning director/producer and Rockaway resident Brett Morgen's The Kid Stays in the Picture, about the producer of Chinatown and The Godfather Robert Evans' seduction of Hollywood. Morgen's feature will share Saturday's bill with
Westchester- based filmmaker David Baugnon, whose special on artists who fought and painted their way through World War II (Art in the Face of War) will kick off the evening. Returning filmmaker Mark Street's new documentary, Hidden in Plain Sight, capturing the street life of four major cities around the globe, will complete Saturday evening's fare.

On Sunday evening, following the literary festival, Rockaway auteur Kevin Breslin's The Other Side of the Street, a short homage to Jimmy Breslin, will be shown. This will be followed by award winning Rockaway filmmaker Bob Sarnoff's new entry, Dispatch, viewing the world from the dashboard of a local car service. Sarnoff's earlier films include the well received Irish Ropes which was shown widely last year at film festivals around the country and on TV.

Rockaway-based playwright Pamela Popeson will present a short video from one of her stage plays and, at 8:25, the evening's feature, The Limbo Room, by Rockaway filmmaker Debra Eisenstadt, a comedic, existential look at the life of an off-Broadway understudy, will be shown.

The evening will conclude with an offering by Rockaway based filmmaker Yisrael Lifschutz presenting his new documentary, The Jewish Basketball Hall of Fame.

Admission to all showings and panel discussions is free.

Food and refreshments will be available on-site from the newly opened Belle Harbor-based restaurant at B. 129th Street, Rockaway Seafood.

Books will be offered for sale throughout Sunday's book festival by Manhattan-based bookseller Mobile Libris with authors available to talk about and sign books for interested readers.

The Rockaway Artists Alliance and the Rockaway Theatre Company have generously assisted in making this weekend cultural event a ground-breaker for Rockaway and all of Queens.

The Gateway National Recreation Area's Ft. Tilden can be reached by public transportation from Manhattan (#2 or # 5 trains to Flatbush Avenue, transfer to the Q35 bus to Ft. Tilden, or by the A Train headed south to Rockaway Park at B. 116th Street, transferring there to the Q22 bus to Ft. Tilden). The fort can be reached by car via the Belt Parkway to Rockaway where it is located just across the Marine
Parkway Bridge (bearing right, following the signs).

Round Two of the Great Amazon Imbroglio

2008-04-02T16:17:00.000-07:00

Well, this is getting interesting – last weekend the writing world – or that portion of it that doesn’t have a pen-name which oft frequents the New York Times best-sellers list - was all agog over Amazon.com’s fiat that all books sold through Amazon must be printed by it’s POD subsidiary, Booksurge. (Gruesome details here in my post of Sunday last).

Many of us ink-stained scribbling wretches are being advised to A-remain calm, it is not the end of the world as we know it and B- that Amazon doesn’t own the bloody world yet, anyway so change over all of your links to Barnes and Noble and sit tight.

Angela Hoy at Writers Weekly has the latest development here; yes, a couple of POD firms have caved, given yesterdays deadline to stand and deliver, or else their authors ‘ buy buttons’ be disabled on Amazon’s website. Angela has some shrewd guesses about why and how this is all going down the way that it is, as well as a link to further developments – and the cheery news that no buttons have actually been turned off or harmed in the making of this power-grab/controversy.

The Independent Authors’ Guild forum has been all of a twitter though: what would Ingram/Lightning Source do about this? (Break out the terrible swift sword and start trampling those grapes of wrath, would be a nice idea!) How would the various POD firms react ? (Stand tall and tell ‘em “Nuts!”, some of us hoped!) And how would the general public react? A volcanic outburst of rage would be nice, but perhaps a little much for us mere scribbling mortals to hope for. Some of us still have day jobs, you see, Although book-blogger PODdy Mouth has a nice takedown here, including a number that can be called…

OMG Amazon has a actual telephone number for people to talk to a real live human?

Well, OK, you'll probably connect with some poor barely-minimum-wage call center drone, so keep it civil and dignified, people. It isn’t their fault; the guys whose bloody brilliant idea this was are well beyond being reached by a phone call. Maybe not beyond subpoena… eh, call me a dreamer. It goes with the territory, I write historical novels and would like to make a living from it, for heaven's sake!

Given that there are so many lawyer-bloggers, perhaps some searching analysis of whatever basis there might be for anti-trust action? All well and good; and this sort of controversy is bread, butter and circuses to the blogosphere.

But I have long predicted that the towers of the literary industrial complex would totter, crumble and fall when a certain technological point was reached – when there was a desktop gadget that would print and bind a nice little paperback or hardbound book. Even if it was so expensive to buy that only places like Kinkos would have them, even if it could only crank them out one or two at a time, even at a individual unit cost substantially above that of one of those industrial print shops that could churn out a thousand in a minute – it would mean the end of the literary-industrial complex. Anyone could take their book content and cover file, with ISBN and everything, down to the corner copy place, pay them to print and bind a couple or three or half-dozen copies of your book… and you could mail them to whoever had bought them. Or who you wanted to send them! That’s the future, and according to this release, may be here already, in the form of the Espresso Book Machine. Think of this as Ingram/Lightning Source looking across the poker table with a steely gaze and saying, “raise.”

“It’s always been the holy grail of the book business to walk into a store and get any book,” said Kirby Best, president and CEO of Lightning Source. With the signing of today’s strategic agreement with On Demand Books, proprietor of the Espresso Book Machine, Best sees that goal coming a little bit closer.”

And savor the discription and call me a prophetess: “We’re building a new machine that’s much smaller that can be mass produced, version 2.0,” said cofounder and chairman Jason Epstein. Neller adds that a beta machine, which will be the size of a copier at Kinko’s (3’ X 2-1/2’ for the finishing unit with another 2’ for a duplex printer), will be ready in the fall. If all goes well, a less expensive model will begin leasing in 2009. “The point of this machine is to represent the ultimate in POD,” said Epstein, who sees it as the best way to preserve backlist. If the machines catch on and proliferate like so many Starbucks outlets, the marketplace would become radically decentralized and book distribution would require simply an Internet connection.”
Oh, yeah… definitely we’re into round two. Pass the popcorn.

(Cross-posted to The Daily Brief)

The Eight Hundred Pound Gorilla

2008-03-30T15:23:00.000-07:00

Question – Where does the eight hundred pound gorilla sit?
Answer – Anywhere it wants to!

The Amazon-Publish America imbroglio is achieving a melt-down-and-drop-through-to- the earths’ core degree of nuclear passion. The implications of Amazon’s recently announced policy of requiring that small independent and publish on demand (POD) presses who want to sell through Amazon must print their books through Amazon’s “Booksurge” publisher-printer are being chewed over like a mouthful of rubbery and vile-tasting bubblegum through this weekend.

Print on demand technology allows a printer to print up copies of a particular book as they are ordered from a formatted electronic text file. Because they are usually printed in small batches, not in 10s of thousands at a whack, the cost of the individual copy is higher, but not all that much. And because they are printed to order, the matter of warehousing thousands of copies doesn’t come up; all very ecologically sound. It allowed writers who couldn’t or didn’t want to publish through a traditional publisher and couldn’t afford to pay for a print run from a so-called vanity press to pay a small set-up fee for their text and cover, which would be available to the printer. Whenever orders came in for their book, the printer could run off as many copies as needed and drop-ship them to the customer. Sensing an opportunity, a whole host of new publishers sprang up or morphed from their previous incarnation. Most of these are internet-based: Author House, iUniverse, Booklocker, Booksurge, Publish America, Lulu: just check out the IAG books and members page to get an idea of the range. A fair number of authors set up as publishers themselves, since the actual printing of the books was now relatively inexpensive and accessible. While a good many of the resulting POD books are just as much vanity publications as ever were and pretty dreadful besides – quite a few are not. In fact, the best POD books are as quirky, literate and as high quality as anything available from the big traditional houses – and those authors who took it seriously have reached a wider audience. As another IAG member pointed out, readers don’t much care how a book that they love to read was published – they just want to read it. Nothing is in stasis for long – POD publishers grew, or were absorbed by others.

Amazon.com purchased the POD publisher Booksurge in 2005; not a large publisher or a particularly well-regarded one. In fact the worst POD book I ever reviewed was a Booksurge product, although that seemed to have resulted from author stubbornness rather than Booksurge incompetence. Still, it didn’t seem to be terribly out of line for a book retailer to be also in the book publishing business – and Booksurge books didn’t seem to be given any special favors among all the other POD books available from Amazon… until this last week. If anything, I thought it might indicate that the bright sparks at Amazon thought that POD published books were the wave of the future.

The main printer for many, if not most POD publishers is called Lightning Source; it’s owned by Ingram, the mega-huge book distributor. It’s essential for POD books to be included in the Ingram catalogue; it’s a main line into brick and mortar bookstores; otherwise you might just as well be back in the vanity-press days, with a garage full of copies to hawk around. But it’s also essential for your books to be available on-line and on-line means Amazon.com – the proverbial eight hundred pound gorilla of internet book marketing. If it’s published - anywhere! it’s available from Amazon. Over the last couple of years, Amazon.com has been relatively welcoming to readers and writers alike; offering opportunities to review and blog about our books, to do Kindle reader editions of our books, to do wish-lists and recommendations, to set up discussion groups; as a matter of fact, the Independent Authors Guild started as an Amazon discussion group.

So last Friday’s action by Amazon.com, demanding that POD publisher, Publish America now and henceforward have their books be printed by Booksurge, or else their authors books would not be sold directly through Amazon comes as a rather thuggish slap in the face. (Publish America’s news release is here.)

Worse – as reported by Angela Hoy at Writers Weekly – it looks like other POD publishers are or will be getting the same treatment. (there’s a long bloglist of other reactions to this at Writers Weekly)

In essence, POD writers are being told to make a choice between doing business with our chosen publisher and printer…or being sold through Amazon. Amazon might be able to make this stick – they are, after all, the eight hundred pound gorilla. But pissing off people who bought as well as sold a fair number of books through them is perhaps not as good a business model as previously assumed.

Shifting Publishing Paradigms - On the Cusp: In Conversation with Hal Zina Bennett

2008-03-19T16:32:00.000-07:00

Hal Zina Bennett is the author of over 31 books, both fiction and non-fiction, including Write From The Heart: Unleashing The Power of Your Creativity. He has taught and coached writers for over 30 years. Among his success stories are dozens of best-selling authors and more than 200 published authors. He presents seminars throughout the United States and coaches writers one-on-one. We are fortunate to have him as our guest today discussing the shift in the publishing paradigm in the 21st century--JGR

Janet Riehl:

Hal, as we’ve discussed what’s happening in publishing today—from traditional mainstream publishing to small presses to university presses to Print on Demand (POD) technologies that author-assisted publishing makes use of, you’ve consistently argued that what we’re seeing here is a paradigm shift in how books are made and distributed, and by extension, how each of the players—author, publisher, and so on—are now regarded. Could you say more about this?

Hal Zina Bennett:

We need to be saying, "Look, technological change has always spearheaded new paradigms in every society they've touched. Think in terms of how the world was changed by Gutenberg's printing press, by the sewing machine, the cotton gin, railroads, the internal combustion engine, the splitting of the atom, chemistry and so on.

Technological change doesn't just change how Bibles are printed, fabric is produced and stuck together, how people move around on the planet, or how we produce energy and manipulate our biology. It totally changes how we all live, how we think—it produces huge consciousness shifts.

It's no different with Print on Demand (POD) or the digital production and dissemination of the written word. In the world of writing and publishing, POD and ebooks are spearheading huge shifts in our consciousness. Defending these technologies, and independent publishing, as being better or worse than the old paradigm represented by commercial publishing, misses the point by a country mile—or more.

Janet: What’s your sense about most of the deeper, more important questions we, as authors and publishers, need to be asking at this point?

Hal: We've got to look deeper at what it means to be able to produce and distribute the written word in these new ways. We can't just take the position that people took with the advent of the internal combustion engine, who argued in favor of the horse versus the horseless carriage. That's blind and unimaginative. It prevents us from exploring the wider scope of what these new technologies mean to us all. You know, these technologies are not going to go away. In fact, they are growing at a tremendous rate.

We need to dare to be prophetic. How does the technology change society? How is it revolutionizing the way we think and act and feel? What new creative freedoms do these technologies promise? What’s the downside—and I don’t mean simply comparing what’s self-published to what’s published by corporatized publishing companies.

Janet: Where does the dialogue need to go to become effective?

Hal: My position is that you've got to shift the dialog entirely, from a defensive posture, of saying indies are "better than," or that commercial publishing has its limits, too, to a more fully proactive position of envisioning a very new paradigm.

iUniverse's Diane Gedyman and Susan Driscol, in their book “Get Published!” have articulated a path that is at least pointing in the direction of the new paradigm.

Trouble is that a lot of people who don't know the realities of commercial publishing are basing their arguments for that old paradigm on sheer fantasies about publishing that way, and most of what's said is naive, uniformed, and mostly silly. Take it from someone who has made an excellent living working in that industry for the past 40 years!

The world is already moving way beyond comparison between traditional commercial publishing ala NYC and these new delivery systems for the printed word! Anybody still caught up in the old defenses of self-publishing versus commercial publishing is living in the dark ages.

Janet: What do you see as some of the advantages of this shift in the paradigm?

Hal: At the very least, POD and ebooks democratize the dissemination of the written word, in ways that are probably at least as dramatic as the way that Gutenberg's little invention made it possible for millions of regular people to own Bibles (at the very least) for the first time in human history. That's a huge shift of consciousness! There are some who still argue whether it's a good thing for people to be reading their Bibles without the "quality control" and the "learned interpretation" of the high priests, of course. I suppose the same could be said for those who argue that putting control of the printed word into the hands of multi-national corporations is a good thing.

Janet: There’s currently a debate that we can tag “quality control.” What would you say about that?

Hal: Is it a good thing to let just anybody publish their own books? What about quality control? Do we trust just anyone—rather than Bertelsman (a multi-national corporation) and his ilk—to screen what our society makes available to readers? Is it too idealistic to think that maybe it's a good thing for readers to have more choices?

Janet: What kind of trends do you see emerging?

Hal: The road ahead still isn't very clear with these new technologies, but just as with Gutenberg's printing press, the genie is out of the proverbial bottle, swimming around in the ethers, mixing it up in the collective consciousness in ways we are only barely beginning to realize. Watch carefully! Even commercial publishers are getting into POD to try out new writers, build their backlists and hang onto books whose sales fall below 500 or so copies per year.

As recently as six months ago, Publishers Weekly was predicting that ebooks were just a fad that was withering on the vine, and soon it would go away. Meanwhile, Sony has stepped into the picture with a pretty decent ebook reader and a large program that by now lists even front list books by mainstream publishers. A few months after that Amazon announced its Kindle program.

Amazon has invested over a billion dollars on Kindle, and they've signed up 60% of the big publishers, as has Sony for their ebook reader program. And Amazon also has launched a program inviting independent publishers to join the Kindle program.

Look carefully, There are over a dozen successful ebook distributors around, some of them, like www.ebookwise.com, doing very well with the rather old-fashioned (by now) Rocket ebook and Palm technologies.

And nearly every computer company is now making their aftermarket documentation available in Adobe Reader and Palm formats—with some introducing Kindle and Sony reader formats.

Janet: What does this paradigm shift mean for authors and readers?

Hal: It gives a creative boost and new freedom for authors. Readers having a greater range of choices. More widely, the world consciousness is profoundly affected by the explosion of independent publishing that these technologies produce. Take a look at the parallel changes in independent film-making, made possible by the digital revolution; independent films now dominate that industry. Similar things are happening in the music industry; the old guard has all but disappeared in the recorded music world. Will the same picture repeat itself in publishing? I think that corporate publishing will continue to dominate, and that’s okay. But I also see expanding education programs, and independent services such as editing, distribution, and PR, to help authors make the most of these technologies. Think potential parallels between publishing and the music world—with iPods, etc.—and the independent film world’s Netflix and Spiritual Cinema Circle. Independent distribution is happening for books on the Internet, and I don’t mean just with Amazon. Explore the ebook world on the Internet. There’s a whole world there that seems to be ignored by the media, even the independent media.

I think we’ll always have paper books. I love them, and most of the writers who are around today have a special love affair with printing on paper. It’s not easy to cozy up with an ebook reader, for example, but I’ve got to confess that I have a certain fondness for my “old fashioned” Rocket ebook reader. You know, there’s something rather nice about lounging in bed late at night, staring into the glow of its screen and reading a good mystery. And in that little handheld device I have, let’s see, ten other books that I can instantly switch to if my interest wanes on the one I’ve been reading. Hmm. You see, those simple pleasures are part of what’s driving the digital revolution.

Visit Janet Grace Riehl's blog "Riehl Life: Village Wisdom for the 21st Century" at http://www.riehlife.com for more thoughts and information about making connections through the arts, across cultures, generations, and within the family. You can also read sample poems and other background information from "Sightlines: A Poet's Diary" on Janet's website.

Expanded from: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Janet_Grace_Riehl

When the going gets weird...

2008-03-08T11:20:00.000-08:00

...The weird turn pro, and apparently write a memoir about it, which is all very nice when it sells a LOT of copies, and the writer becomes FAMOUS and sells a mega-jiga-million copies, and everyone remembers that they knew you when… maybe. Journalistic fabrication is so last year (Stephen Glass, Janet Cooke, whatsisface at the NYT), the current flave of the moment must be the memoir. One’s own life, but with with improvements.

The fun begins when everyone who knew you when--- the people next door, brothers and sisters, employers, co-workers, ex-spouses, friends and former friends score a copy and begin to realize that there is a whole ‘nother reality reflected there, one with which they were completely unacquainted. In light of a couple of fameous and fraudulent memoirs in the news this week the lesson should be for memoirists to linger meaningfully in the general vicinity of verifiable facts, either that or wait to write it all when everyone else is dead and can’t argue the point with you. If you really can’t wait that long, perhaps it would be less embarrassing to just call it fiction, loosely based on your own life. Even if the stuff that really happens is sometimes stranger than you can ever make up.

About two years ago, there another such a case of a writer with a dicy memoir --- somewhat less well known since Oprah didn't personally have to rip him a new one on national television--- who wasn’t a Native American at all. What is it with wanting to be a Native American, all that mysticism and wilderness wisdom? And Timothy Barris wasn’t the first, ( Grey Owl, anyone?) only being a porn writer may have been a little less embarrassing than the resume and club membership of this best-selling but unfortunately fraudulent Indian. Carlos Castenada and Rigoberta Menchu still have passionate defenders willing to deny or discount certain uncomfortable findings.

Really, I feel quite sorry for people who begin with a little fib, a touch of exaggeration and eventually wind up believing it… some of them do not take contradiction well, and and for some it is way too late in the game to administer very painful cross-examination... like to writer and memoirist Lillian Hellman. (But Mary McCarthy tried, anyway.)

Fraudulent memoirists like Frey and Barris may be a passing evil, best selling or not. Grey Owl and Asa Carter although not as advertised, were possessed of a lovely and sympathetic writing style. They may even have done good with their output, in the long run. But Menchu and Hellman, with the deeply politicized aspect to their writings and public personas probably have not.

After contemplating how their books inflamed or warped the perceptions of certain public issues, it is a positive relief to contemplate Ern Malley and Penelope Ashe, two last literary frauds which were done for no more reason than to make a point, and for their perpetrators to have a little fun putting one over. A self-consciously literary magazine called “Angry Penguins” is just begging to be sent up. As for “Naked Came the Stranger” - it was proved in 1969 and for a hundred years before and ever since, that trash with a naked woman on the front cover will sell.

I do, as matter of fact, have my own little memoir still in publication, with the following corrections noted: Mom says the Toby-dog got stuck on the fence in the morning, not evening... and Pippy says that her rabbits' name was Bernadette Bunny. Not just Bunny.

(The original version of this was posted in January 2006 at the Daily Brief)

Blogging Basics 101: Getting Started and Keeping Going

2008-03-07T10:17:00.000-08:00

Four generations of Riehl-Thompson-McCarthy authors

Blogging basics on how easy it is to get started, but how it takes passion to stay going. Mission drives your blog to stay the course.

1) Blogging experience

Q: How long have you been blogging?

A: Riehlife's blog birthday is January 13, 2007.

2) Starting a blog

Q. Was it difficult to get started?

A. No, it's not hard to get started. The difficult thing is to have a focus and to keep going. If you're going to have a blog, you want to maintain it. While my blog is in fact my website and took some doing to get designed and up and running, it's also possible to get blog going for free in five minutes on blogging sites like Blogger.

3) Amount of technical knowledge needed

Q: Do you have to be a real computer whiz to blog?

A: Absolutely not. If you can send an email, you can blog. There is a bit of a learning curve, but truly, it's not overly difficult and it's pretty intuitive. The technical side is the least challenging part of blogging in my experience.

4) Blogging frequency

Q: Do you blog every day?

A: Mostly, yes. I view Riehlife as a magazine I edit that includes content by others as well as myself. I don't want to let my readers down. Since my blog is Village Wisdom, in some sense it is a collaborative blog, though shaped and run by one person. I feature authors, published and unpublished on my blog.

5) Focus

Q: Do you have a particular subject in your blog?

A: My theme is "connection." More specifically my mission is to create connections through all the arts (writing, visual and performing) and across cultures and generations. I frequently feature the work of my 92-year-old father on my blog and both he and my readers get a kick
out of his wisdom and wit.

6) Audience

Q: Do you have a target "audience" when you blog?

A: I write my blog for people with similar sensibilities and yearnings. Somehow, that's created a niche for me.

7) Benefits

Q: What is your favorite thing about blogging?

A: Just as the theme of my blog is connection, that's also the part I enjoy most: using Riehlife as a tool for connecting thoughts, disciplines, and people. Since I'm in St. Louis I've been doing a
series on African-American fine artists and that's been helpful in forming friendships here and becoming part of the arts community.

Folks blog for all kinds of reasons. Some use their blogs as a marketing tool, others as an on-line diary (web-log = blog) without a lock, others for for friends and family, and so on.

The most important thing you can do before you begin you blog is to understand what your purpose and mission is.

__________________

Expanded from http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Janet_Grace_Riehl

2008-02-22T15:59:00.000-08:00

The Populist Publisher Blog Author Survey

"This is a survey for authors who have published books through subsidy publishers. (Publishers who charge authors a fee to publish their books--sometimes called POD publishers or self-publishers.) If you own your own publishing company, please don't complete this survey. All responses to the survey will be aggregated and will not be connected with you as an individual in any way. Please complete this survey only once. Thank you."

The Literary Game

2008-02-18T16:31:00.000-08:00

Is that the right word… literary? I’m not at all sure it applies to me, really. I fled academia years ago, whimpering softly to myself. Especially after the one Mod Lit class that I was forced to take… well, not forced, exactly. It just fitted in with my schedule, and I thought maybe I ought to be a little more conversant with the Giants of English Lit who had published something after 1940?

Well, it turned out to be a bad move, and I never made that mistake again. If it’s in the approved canon and published after the Depression then it’s probably a tedious and politically correct wank-fest, passing laborious to read, and generally about as much fun as do-it-yourself root canal surgery. Life is just too short, and I am an equal opportunity fugitive anyway. I’ll run just as fast from “The DaVinci Code” as I will from “The Corrections”. Oprah’s Book Club be damned… unless she picks one of my books, in which case I will cheerfully play along. (Scribbling notes to myself… Oprah Book Club… is there someone I have to sleep with, or something? Will they accept decorating advice or home-baked cookies, in lieu?)

Just don’t pop off the name of the literary wonderkind-du-jour in front of me, and expect any response but a blank expression, and the question. “Umm… who is that?” Look, I read all of Raymond Chandler, once. Surely that counts for something.

So… I am not literary. I tell stories. I tell stories about people, and interesting times, with a bit of vivid color and a lot of historical research, and I try to explain about how things were, and how they happened the way they did, and how it all felt to the people who had to cope with the resulting messy situation. If I identify with any literary heroine, I’m afraid it would be Flora Post, who hated team sports and untidiness.

(a variant of this essay previously posted at The Daily Brief some months ago. Look, it's the done thing to recycle.)

BAMC – Bookshelf: Follow Up

2008-02-03T07:56:00.000-08:00

(Background for this project here)

Mary Simonsen and I delivered a box and then some of books donated by IAG writers on Friday afternoon. We had agreed to meet at the flagpole in front of Brooke Army Medical Center’s main entrance at 2 PM, and take the books up to the Patient Library, where we would turn them over to the volunteers who keep it in order.

There was zilch local media interest, I’m afraid – which might have been a good thing, because doing a formal presentation through the Public Affairs office would have meant involving approval of the Commanding Officer, and the Judge Advocate General’s office taking a stern eye at the value of the donation… in brief, a lot of bureaucratic fuss and waaaaaay out of proportion to our aim… which is – to put our books in front of a large number of readers who otherwise might not have encountered them. And to do a good deed for some young servicemen and women who richly deserve any good thing we can do for them.

And there was one more snag – my daughter hadn’t realized that the registration on her car had run out, as of the last day of December. The gate guards wouldn’t allow her to drive onto post with expired registration – presenting somewhat of a challenge, since we would barely make the 2 PM deadline for rendezvous at the flagpole. I had her drive me around to the south entrance; a shorter distance to hoof it with a heavy box of books.

I used to work at a corporation close by – and for my lunch-hour break, I would pop onto post and walk a brisk circuit around the facility – so I at least knew exactly were to go and the shortest way to get there. Nice to see that the rehab facility, which was entirely built with donations, is finished and open for service; so are the two new Fisher houses. They were still under construction when I left that particular employment.

So – puffed up the long drive to the main entrance, met Mary and her sister, and bro-in-law, infiltrated the facility and stealthily found our way up to the fifth floor. The patient library is a small office ante-room just off the main fifth-floor elevator lobby, entirely filled with bookshelves and books, a pair of chairs with a low table and a GSA-issue magazine rack. And there was no one there at all. We weren’t even that late! Nothing daunted, we tastefully arranged the books we had brought on the low table, stealthily took two pictures to prove we had been there and departed; mission accomplished.

We went back to my house for tea and scones; recipe for the scones available upon request.

Thanks to everyone who sent books: besites ourselves, donors included Frances Hunter, Tony Burton, Christy Tillery French, Jack Dixon Michael Katz Diane Salerni, Joy Collins, Donna Nordmark Aviles, Laurie Pooler Pelayo, Marva Dasef, Al Past and Melika Dannese Lux. I made an attempt to read as many of them as I could fit in, and to write and post a review at Blogger News Net. I’m only sorry I couldn’t read them all – I’m a fast reader, but not supersonic.

Newsletter Now Available

2008-01-30T14:45:00.000-08:00

The Declaration of Independents
February, 2008

Imagination and Will

2008-01-26T08:20:00.000-08:00

Sometime around the middle of the time my daughter and I lived in Athens, the Greek television network broadcast the whole series of “Jewel in the Crown”, and like public broadcasting in many places--- strictly rationing their available funds--- they did as they usually did with many worthy imported programs. Which is to say, not dubbed into Greek--- which was expensive and time-consuming--- but with Greek subtitles merely supered over the scenes. My English neighbor, Kyria Penny and I very much wanted to watch this miniseries, which had been played up in the English and American entertainment media, and so she gave me a standing invitation to come over to hers and Georgios’ apartment every Tuesday evening, so we could all watch it, and extract the maximum enjoyment thereby. We could perhaps also make headway with our explanation to Kyrie Georgios on why Sergeant Perron was a gentleman, although an enlisted man, but Colonel Merrick emphatically was not.

On occasion, the Greek broadcasting network screwed up, and the next episode of “Jewel” didn’t air. Penny and I would talk for a while, and Georgios would encourage my daughter to all sorts of rough-housing; pillow fights, mostly. (Blessed with two sons, the Greek ideal, Georgios rather regretted that he and Penny didn’t have a daughter as well.) On those Tuesday nights when “Jewel in the Crown” didn’t air, the Greek network most often substituted something appropriately high-toned, classical and in English. Brought out from their library and dusted off, most likely--- the Royal Shakespeare Company, in all their thespian glory. And Penny and Georgios and all I noticed on one of those warm spring evenings, that Blondie was sitting on a cushion on the floor, totally absorbed, wrapped up in one of the Bard’s duller history plays. She was then about four years old--- but she was enchanted, bound by a spell of brocaded velvet words, swirling cloaks and slashing swords, glued to the television while we sat talking about other things, drawn in by a spell grown even more lightening-potent over the last 400 years.

And it happened, the next time that “Jewel” was pre-empted… it was the RSC again, and Blondie was glued to the television, her concentration adamantine and almost chillingly adult. I was quite sure she had never seen anything of the sort before, I wasn’t one of those frenetically over-achieving mothers, stuffing culture down the kidlets’ throat. I barely had time and energy enough to be an achieving mother: we hardly watched TV at home, VCRs were barely on the market and her favored bedtime reading was “Asterix and Obelix”, although we had branched out as far as the “Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings”. No, it was not anything I had done… it must have been something innate in Shakespeare, a spell that has been cast, and drawn them in since Shakespeare himself was a working actor and playwright.
I have recently gotten this book--- it’s a book club bennie--- and gone as far as the first three or four chapters. It’s a good book, a speculative book by necessity, since we know so very, very little for certain of the real William Shakespeare. The author is dependent on speculation and imagination, much given to assuming that if such and such were happening in the neighborhood of Stratford-upon-Avon in the lifetime of the glove-maker’s son, then he possibly would have known about it, and might have reason to weave it into one of his spell-plays. Did he have a good education… or not? Might he have been a school-teacher? A soldier? A clerk? Might he have been a Catholic sympathizer? Might his marriage been unhappy, his father a drinker… we have no way to know for sure, in ways that would satisfy the strict accountants of history.

In fact, many have been the symposia, the experts, the finely honed intellectual authorities who have insisted over the years that the Shakespeare who was the actor, the manager and entrepreneur, the son of a provincial petty-bourgeois, simply could not have written the works attributed to him. Such expert knowledge of statecraft, of law, of international polity, of soldiering and the doings of kings and nobles… no, the tenured experts cry… this could not be the work of any less than an intellectual, highly placed and noble, gifted with the best education, and extensive mileage racked up in the corridors of power! Any number of candidates, better suited in the eyes of these experts to have written the works attributed to Wm. Shakespeare of Stratford are advanced, with any number of imaginative stratagems to account for it all… but every one of them I have read, leaves out the power of imagination itself.

Imagination, which takes us out of ourselves, and into someone else--- the common thing all these great experts disregard, as if it were something already cast into disrepute, something useless, of no regard…but it is the major part of the actors’ craft and entirely the part of the writers… that part that is not given up to intelligent research. All those great experts seemed to be saying, when they credit other than Shakespeare, the actor and bourgeois householder of Stratford and London… is that imagination is worthless, null, of no account or aid. It is impossible for a writer to imagine himself, or herself into anything other than what he or she is. One cannot imagine oneself convincingly into another time or place, gender or role in life. Imagination is dead… you are stuck with writing about what you are.

How sterile, and how horrible. How pointless and boring--- but that is what the highly-educated would have of us. We must not, under pain of what the academicians judge, imagine what it would be like that it is to be whatever we were born to be.When I was about 17, or so, I wrote a story for a high school English creative writing class, incorporating an account of a historic event which I couldn’t possibly have witnessed--- because I had been born fifteen years after the events I described. But I had done research, and even at 17 I was pretty good at writing description… and I had the imagination. It creeped the hell out of the creative writing teacher. He knew of the events that I had written about, and I had gotten it pretty well right.

So, imagining again; what would have prevented a young actor from sloping up to a friend of his, in a tavern someplace, a friend who was a soldier, or a law clerk, a priest or servant in the house of a noble, and saying “Say, I’ve got this thing I’m working on… what d’you say about it? What do you think, how would it work, really?”
Which was the creepy, magical part, the part that academicians and writing teachers cannot fathom… which is how far the intelligent and well-researched imagination can take us. To insist that Shakespeare couldn’t have written Shakespeare, is to deny the power and authority… and even the authenticity of imagination.
Which may explain the relative shittiness of novels written by all but the most deviant of academics. Education--- all very nice, but nothing will take a writer farther than imagination and some good contacts in other fields. Imagination… it’s what we have that separates us from the beasts. Never underestimate it, use it what you must. Especially when it’s necessary to get out of what you are, and see through the eyes of someone else.

(This entry originally posed here)

IAG Authors to donate books to Brooke Army Medical Center in San

2008-01-20T16:57:00.000-08:00

On February 1, Mary Simonsen and Celia Hayes will deliver about 35 books by IAG authors to the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio where many of those wounded while serving in Afghanistan and Iraq go to receive treatment. We hope to duplicate this effort in military medical centers around the country—a small thank you for their service to our country.

NEW LISTING: Pemberley Remembered at Amazon

2008-01-10T18:30:00.000-08:00

Pemberley Remembered
by Mary Lydon Simonsen

The celebration of the life and works of Jane Austen continues with the publication of my first novel, Pemberley Remembered. It is the story of a young American, Maggie Joyce, who lives in London in the years immediately following the end of World War II. While visiting Montclair, an 18th Century Georgian country house located in Derbyshire, England, Maggie is told that the former residents of the mansion, William Lacey and Elizabeth Garrison, were the inspiration for the characters of Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen's masterpiece, Pride & Prejudice, and that Montclair is the novel's Pemberley.

During her visit to the nearby Village of Crofton, Maggie meets Beth and Jack Crowell, both of whom have ties to the Lacey family and Montclair, and who know if the legends associated with the house and Fitzwilliam Darcy are true. While exploring the truth behind the romance of Darcy and Elizabeth, Maggie is drawn into the love story of the Crowells, who married in the midst of the horrors of World War I, as well as her own relationship with Rob McAllister, an American who flew on bombing missions over Germany during World War II, and who has returned to England for his own deeply personal reasons.

Pemberley Remembered is available at amazon.com.

INTERVIEW: Julie Ann Shapiro

2008-01-05T20:04:00.000-08:00

SIX RANDOM QUESTIONS:
Julie Ann Shapiro

1) What is the flower on your website? Tulips?
Yes

2) Is Julie Ann Shapiro your real name?
Yes

A few questions about your novel: Jen-Zen and the One Shoe Diaries

3) Fictionwise.com suggests that it will take 226-317 minutes to read Jen-Zen and the One Shoe Diaries, do you agree? Are you a fast or slow reader?
I'm a fast reader. But if I love a book I may savor it and read favorite passages over a couple of times. I'd say it's a weekend trip kind of book or more of a leisurely mind vacation thing spread out over a week.

4) Most book covers just put the author's name, on your novel you add "Written by". What reason do you think a psychoanalyst would give for this?
"It's by....or shall I say bye bye reality...I'm in the world of the book now." No, just kidding. Oh, this is a really fun question. The ebook cover has "by" in it as the "shoe" photographer added that on there. I think of it in the ethereal sense of the book.

The trade paper back doesn't have the word on the cover. That's because it's in sync with the more traditional book climate. Here's the link to the review that NewMyths.com did which has the paperback cover.

5) Is there a reason you haven't used Amazon's "search inside feature"?
I want to have that feature activated. My publisher, Synergebooks contacted them about adding the feature. My guess is that with the holidays and all it got put on the back burner at Amazon.

6) When Scott Barnes wrote: "Although they say that if you leave a million monkeys in a room full of typewriters long enough they will eventually write the entire works of Shakespeare, I can't imagine that they would come up with Jen-Zen and the One Shoe Diaries. This is a singular book, original in voice, thoughtful in tone." Was he saying you were better than Shakespeare, or just more original? :)

That's Scott's sense of humor.and his take on the whimsical, wacky lyrical world of my novel and style of writing. I mean who thinks up a novel about shoes left on the beach, adds a love struck photographer named, Brad who can't stop taking shots of the singular shoes he sees everywhere. It's his grief coping mechanism. And if that's not wacky enough...there's his love interest, Jen-Zen. She is a poet who is dead and still haunting Brad. He family thinks he's nut. A shaman tells him to look in the shadows and all the while Brad's listening to his heart which is saying..."I know why it's happening...there's a message in the shoes themselves."

I think my style in this novel is magic realism with Shakespeare and a barrel of monkeys along for the ride. It's a fun novel, give it a read.

Warmly,
Julie

COVER ART: January vote!

2008-01-04T19:21:00.000-08:00

To get things started I collected nominations on other sites and pulled together a short list. Now all you need to do is vote for the best cover--to be featured on the blog sidebar during February and reviewed at POD People. Please vote for the cover you think has the best overall design! For a better look you can click the image, or check out the links. Please vote by reply to this post :) -- voting will be open until Jan 25th.

If this proves a popular idea, nominations will be taken for a second round in February.

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REVIEW: High Spirits: A Tale of Ghostly Rapping and Romance--Dianne K. Salerni

2008-01-03T17:15:00.001-08:00

Little did I know when I set out to tell the story of the Fox sisters that I would be following a new trend in teen fiction towards protagonists with a less-than-steady moral compass. ForeWord Magazine recently published a feature article on the new YA anti-heroes: protagonists who lie, cheat, and find themselves mired in ethical ambiguity. My nineteenth century celebrities, Maggie and Kate Fox, fit right in!

Dianne K. Salerni

THE HERO STANDS ACCUSED: a ForeWord Magazine Feature

“The new teenaged hero doesn’t behave as expected, and he could have a criminal record. On the other hand, she might have a skeleton in the closet, a guilty secret, or questionable motivation. Failure at the central task is entirely possible, and success may come at the cost of disturbing self-knowledge …

High Spirits: A Tale of Ghostly Rapping and Romance by Dianne K. Salerni stars the Fox sisters of upstate New York, originators of the mid-nineteenth century Spiritualist phenomenon. The girls fake contact with spirits by posing questions aloud and tapping answers. But newspaperman Horace Greeley believes, as does proto-feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Even First Lady Jane Pierce wants help contacting her deceased son. Celebrity Arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane loves Maggie Fox, though occupations and a chasm between classes present towering hurdles. Both Maggie and the younger, less conflicted Kate are under the sway of much-older sister Leah, who lacks remorse for the skullduggery. Maggie’s a reluctant huckster who sees herself as a solace provider to the bereaved. “My sister may have been a trickster but my own purpose was pure.” The (anti)heroines confront threats, violence, and public humiliation.”

Read the entire article at here

IN THE MEDIA: The Little Publisher Who Could--Michael S. Katz

2008-01-02T18:11:00.000-08:00

It's not exactly a Pulitzer Prize, but my book Shalom On The Range was mentioned in the December 28, 2007 issue of Entertainment Weekly (as the runner-up to the best book title of the year). Although they didn't list my name--just the book title--it's still no small feat to be mentioned on the same page as J.K. Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Stephen King, especially for a pocket-sized publishing company like Strider Nolan Publishing. Or for a Western, for that matter, the toughest genre to sell these days.

Hopefully my second book (due out in 2008) will have a decent chance of getting reviewed in the magazine. I don't know if the title will be as clever (I'm leaning toward either "Takeout At the O.K. Corral" or "With Six Shooter You Get Eggroll") but I'm sure the first sentence will be a kicker: "Two Jews walked into a bar."
Shalom, y'all!

Michael S. Katz
www.stridernolanmedia.com

[click image to enlarge]

Independent Authors Guild

This and That May 24th Update

Mid-May Update

Word of Mouth

Sunday Afternoon at the Old German Free School

Spring has Sprung...

March Round-Up

Name On the Marquee in Lights!

Wild West Monday

Weekly Update - 21 Jan

Imagination and Will

Oh, Pioneer Museum!

The Shape of Things As They Are, Apparently

Books and More Books - Adelsverein Trilogy Signing

Weekly Update - 14 December

Launched!

December Update

Interview with Prospero

Updates for the week ending 15 November

Out And About - Activity Update

Advice from a PR Pro

Chapter 5 - Dope Smoker

IAG Author Interviews - An Interview With Ana Darcy, Part 2

Author Interviews, Continued: Al Past with Ana Darcy

Author Interview with Characters: A Continuing Series

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A Plea from Books for Soldiers

A Poem for the IAG - by Steve Knutsson

Weekly Update - October 4th

101 Uses for an Antique Tractor

This and That:

Texiana - The Next Chapter

Author Interview

Recommended Link - The Publishing Contrarian

So..., You wanna write a book..

September IAG Spotlight Page

Why Trampolines Are Dangerous

Just for Fun

Meditation on Robert E. Lee and the Spirit of Conciliation

Just for Fun

Writing the Range

At Play in the Fields of Book Marketing

Mirror Image - Houston and Lincoln

Literary Persuasion

Last Chance for Rockaway!

Historical Meditation: Elizabeth and Victoria

Normandy to the Bulge

Booklocker and Amazon Developments

Writer's Digest website contest

Who Will Review Our Self-Published Fiction?

Spell Checker Blues

The Lit-Major’s Game

Standardized Writing

N Yr Bkstorz

WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD AMAZON.COM?

The Joy of Lex

Rockin' at Far Rockaway

Round Two of the Great Amazon Imbroglio

The Eight Hundred Pound Gorilla

Shifting Publishing Paradigms - On the Cusp: In Conversation with Hal Zina Bennett

When the going gets weird...

Blogging Basics 101: Getting Started and Keeping Going

The Literary Game

BAMC – Bookshelf: Follow Up

Newsletter Now Available

Imagination and Will

IAG Authors to donate books to Brooke Army Medical Center in San

NEW LISTING: Pemberley Remembered at Amazon

INTERVIEW: Julie Ann Shapiro

COVER ART: January vote!

REVIEW: High Spirits: A Tale of Ghostly Rapping and Romance--Dianne K. Salerni

IN THE MEDIA: The Little Publisher Who Could--Michael S. Katz