Writers Chatting: Checking In And A New Author

by 12:30 pm. It has 116 Comments.

Did you guys know Stacey Abrams was a romance author?!  Could I love her anymore?!

Listen to here talk about it here on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me

Here’s the book she’s talking about, Rules of Engagement 

Okay, onto our regularly scheduled Writers Chatting. I received a request from a new author to highlight his book and I’m happy to do it.  If you’d like me to post your latest book, let me know. I will ask you to write something about your journey and pop in to say hi.

Here’s our newest author: John Manchester and his novel, Never Speak

 

About the book:  Read more


Authors In Our Midst and Writers Chatting

by 2:57 pm. It has 80 Comments.

How is October skittering by so quickly? My best efforts to try and do at least twice-monthly writing group posts has slipped away. I will be traveling the next 10+ days, so this will have to be it for this month.

We have another new book release this week. This time from author Vicki Delaney/Eva Gates.  This is the fourth in the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series for Crooked Lane Books:

Read more


Authors In Our Midst and Writers Chatting

by 3:00 pm. It has 74 Comments.

In our continuing series featuring Balloon-Juice author’s latest books. Dorothy Winsor has a new book out this week. I’ll let her take it from here.

Stuck in a city far from home, street kid Doniver fakes telling fortunes so he can earn a few coins to feed himself and his friends. Then the divine Powers smile on him when he accidentally delivers a true prediction for the prince.

Concerned about rumors of treason, the prince demands that Doniver use his “magic” to prevent harm from coming to the king, and so Doniver is taken–dragged?–into the castle to be the royal fortune teller.

Now Doniver must decide where the boundaries of honor lie, as he struggles to work convincing magic, fend off whoever is trying to shut him up, and stop an assassin, assuming he can even figure out who the would-be assassin is. All he wants is to survive long enough to go home to the Uplands, but it’s starting to look as if that might be too much to ask.

Here’s the tl:dr version: Street kid Doniver accidentally tells a true fortune for the prince and is taken into the castle to be the royal fortune teller. Good new? Food and a warm bed. Bad news? He can’t tell fortunes.

I’ve said on BJ before that I got the idea for this book from the old TV show “Psych.” If you recall, that’s about a fake psychic who gets involved in solving crimes. Because I write fantasy, it occurred to me I could twist that into a fake magician responsible for stopping an assassination plot.

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TaMara suggested I include something about my experience writing this book, so I went back and looked at my files and was shocked to see a complete draft from 2008. Yes, that’s right. Ten years ago. I am so slow. Not to generate words, mind you. I can do that. It’s generating insights into my characters, their situations, and whatever I want to say about the human heart that takes me forever. I am super slow about that. Now the parts of the book I like best are the ones I wrote late in the process. That early draft was competent but flat. I hope this one is at least less so!

I’m happy to talk about the book, publishing, and anything else, even Trump. This is BJ after all.

Oh, hell no on Trump. This is a politics-free thread, unless it is what you are writing about.  I thought we’d try a later time since I had a few requests for that. Let me know if it works for you guys.

So let’s chat. What are you writing these days? How’s your process? Any questions for Dorothy? Hit the comments.


Authors In Our Midst: Annie DeMoranville – Run Aground

by 1:00 pm. It has 62 Comments.

Jules Erbit Illustration

I follow a lot of our fellow BJ authors on FB, Twitter, and I know there a few publishing dates coming up. I want to remind you, send me an email with a photo of your book cover, where it’s available and the book description for posting consideration. I’m more than happy promote your work.

Also if you’d like to start the writing group again, I’m willing to do it, just need some help in how you’d like it to look. It needs to be something relatively easy for me to post weekly, monthly or whatever configuration you’d prefer. My original idea of soliciting guests to discuss writing and publishing may not work in my current crazy schedule, but I could definitely put up a general post.

Now for some shameless self-promotion from my secret identity. Our guest author:

Early this summer after several edits and about a dozen rewrites, I published the first book in the TJ Wilde trilogy. Starting with waking up from a dream knowing the character and basic story, to having friends who read and re-read the first chapters and convinced me to continue, it took me a while to decide to take the final steps. I finally hired an editor, a proof-reader and looked at what was involved in publishing.

As a matter-of-fact, during most of the duration of our writing group here, it sat finished on my office shelf, mocking me to do something, anything, with it. I learned so much from all of you, I began the next steps. I will tell you hiring the editor and the first edits were in self-defense – Bailey had just died and I needed something, anything, that would direct my energies from the pit I was in.  Read more


Authors In Our Midst/Writers Chatting Chapter 14

by 12:28 pm. It has 141 Comments.

Reading – Mathis Miles Williams

I follow WereBear on Facebook and the other day she posted a note that she was now doing consulting and I thought it would be a good time to ask her to revisit her path to publishing, website and now cat consulting for our Writers Chatting posts.

From WereBear:

Reverend Jim, foundation blog kitty. His rescue started it all!

More on my adventures in self-publishing. This is a vital next step in my plan to extend the reach of my cat advice website, WayofCats.com (click here) which started with a book. Which no one wanted to publish. And here we are: don’t need a publisher!

The last time I used Kindle for a book this amazing angle was still new and not yet fully developed. The conventional wisdom at the time was to create novella length PDFs and see how it went. So I wrote a concise cat care/problem solving manual (since some of the worst cat problems are care problems) and racked up some nice reviews and it sold for a while.

Now, eBooks on a site like Amazon are THE ballgame. The younger a person is, the more they expect a book to be available electronically. Amazon has added new wrinkles to its platform to acknowledge this adjusted reality. This led me to some hoop-jumping as I prepared my new book for Pre Sale. Pre Sale lets even a self-published author put the book up to accumulate sales before it is available for purchase or accepts reviews.

Somebody like Stephen King has months long pre-sale periods, because fans will buy it anyway. Someone like me gets two months, and it seems most people are thrilled… but waiting But this is a fine sales tool, because it lets an author promote the work and allows people to purchase it ahead of its release. This really was nice for me, as I wanted to give it one more polish — every writer knows how that goes.

Just don’t indulge too much, folks: there’s penalties for yanking the Pre Sale. It makes Amazon pouty and your ability to do so in future goes on probation. However, this tactic has made me #1 in Cat Training, and I get a little flag on my book page. So there is that.

The book, The Way of Cats, (available here) is the first in a series, and that’s where the new Amazon thing got strict. I had thought I was going to make the Cat 911 manual part of a series, back when I put it on the site. But now all that has been superseded, and the upshot of it all was, I took it off Amazon. Don’t want to confuse potential readers, who now expect actual books when they, yanno, buy books. Important because a series is a very important tool for both fiction and non-fiction. A mystery reader loves getting back to the next adventures of a favorite detective, (which also means we find the body sooner.)

While this works better for some genres than others (romance would not work unless it was a bit niche) a continuing character is usually a winning addition to our fiction ambitions. In fact, my next book will be the first in a cozy mystery series (so-called because they take place in a contained subculture with an amateur sleuth, downplayed sex and violence elements, and lots of psychological intrigue) so the subject is top of my mind lately.

Kindle Series are now difficult to shift on the fly, so be sure you have some thought put into this kind of commitment before getting everything set up in Amazon’s publisher panel. There’s a variety of ways to upload, but Amazon also has decided their default will be the complete document in Word’s latest format. But don’t panic if you are not a Word fan, since Google Docs, Apple Pages, and my beloved Scrivener are word processors who can export into a DOCX file. (The X stands for the Office Open XML standard, so many programs have embraced it.)

The very good news is that it is easy to format things the way you want them, even photographs and charts, and have it look good once it gets Kindled. Then, use that same file and format it to be a traditional book through the Amazon CreateSpace, an on-demand publishing platform that lets people order your book in paperback, too. An author gets a bulk discount for batches of these, perfect for those fun signing parties at the local bookstore… provided you have one these days.

Thanks folks, and remember that I am also available for Cat Consultations (click here) via Facetime, Google Hangouts, or telephone. I’ll be hanging out in the comments if you have any questions about taking this wild and whacky journey.

Thank you, Pam! Okay, back to our writing chat. How are things going for you? Where are you at these days? What’s got you stuck? And what’s going well? Email me if you have something in the pipeline you want to talk about.

Hit the comments and be kind.