Authors, bookstores, and “Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day”

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TakeYourChildToABookstoreBannerSandra Hutchison interviews Jenny Milchman, award-winning author of three traditionally-published thrillers and the originator of Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day, which falls on the first Saturday in December.

Jenny, how did this special day come about?

Author Jenny Milchman

Author Jenny Milchman

Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day began back in 2010 when I had two preschool-aged children I was taking to story hour at our local bookstore almost every week. I got both a latte and the chance to watch their faces as someone besides Mommy brought a story to life. What fun. In our increasingly frenetic and — ironically — disconnected world, I wondered: Did all children know the joy of time spent in a bookstore?

Inspired by days such as Take Your Daughter to Work, I floated the idea for a special holiday linking kids and bookstores. Bloggers and listserv members took to the web and, before I knew it, 80 bookstores were celebrating just two weeks later, on the first Saturday of December.

It coincides with holiday gift giving, encouraging booksellers to host story hours, author events, craft and cooking demonstrations, and even magic shows designed to give kids a special activity while their parents shop and browse. Local businesses gain increased support and families have a wonderful time.

bookstore with kidsThat first summer, my husband and I packed our kids into the car and drove cross country, visiting bookstores with Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day bookmarks and posters. We saw the United States one bookstore at a time. The trip offered us a window into different regions of this great land, while driving home the reality of how we are connected. Books connect us in a deeper way than texts or followers do. A smile is not the same as an emoticon, and the virtual world is not a replacement for the face-to-face. We met real friends, different from Facebook friends, in bookstores on the road.

By the following year, Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day had grown to nearly 300 bookstores. And today TYCBD is celebrated by over 800 bookstores, including one national chain, on five continents. The celebrations are more lavish than ever — as unique as each bookstore in which they are held. Open Book in Wadena, MN, for example, is inviting a story-loving Great Pyrenees in so that the children can read to her!

What can readers do to help get the word out?

Easy! [Cue infomercial host voice] Just read this simple bulleted list for ideas and possibilities:

  • Visit your local bookstore and ask if they’re celebrating Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day on December 5th
  • Tell friends and families about the Day and identify bookstores they can visit using our interactive map: http://www.takeyourchildtoabookstore.org/bookstores
  • On December 5th, take your own children, a child in your life, or even the child inside yourself to a bookstore. I promise you will find a gift that keeps on giving long after the last page is turned.
  • Visit our website for more ways to spread the word: http://www.takeyourchildtoabookstore.org/spreadtheword

You’ve been networking with bookstores since before you even had a signed contract. Would you say that helped you on your way to traditional publication?

Sadly, I don’t think bookstores have that power, at least not at this point — but let’s keep celebrating Take Your Child to a Bookstore Day! However, my love of bookstores certainly influenced my career once it was finally launched. In fact, during the thirteen years it took me to get published, the whole world changed, and self-publishing became a viable option. The reason I held out for the traditional path had a lot to do with how integral bookstores (and libraries) were to my dream of becoming an author.

But supporting bookstores is a smart thing to do for any writer. The bookstore you frequent may one day stock your books. You may meet an author who helps you on your way. Your local bookstore might host a writers group that offers you feedback, a book club that features your book, or an event to celebrate your launch. The list goes on and on.

You’ve been on “The World’s Longest Book Tour” for three successful novels now. What are your top tips for working effectively with local bookstores on author events?

Yay! Another bulleted list. OK, here goes:

  • Understand the economics. Unless you routinely hit the NYT bestseller list, your event is likely to cost the bookstore more than it brings in. But that doesn’t mean they won’t want to hold one — bookstores are all about supporting their community.
  • Offer to do a “value-add” event, one that will be more of a draw than a straight reading or signing. Hold a writers’ workshop for emerging authors; teach a class related to something in your book — anything from genealogy to a craft; serve drinks and treats to make it a party; pair with another author to bring in more of a crowd.
  • Events should be a reciprocal effort: invite your own friends and contacts, seek out local media coverage, hang posters around town.
  • Don’t blast social media — your Instagram buddies in Nebraska may not hop on a plane to reach your local bookstore in Tennessee. Instead, identify friends and followers who live near you and send personal messages or invitations.
  • Consider hiring an independent publicity firm. I worked with JKS Communications and they had me in front of crowds of 300 when I was a brand new author.

You’ve been remarkably open to working with indie (self-published) colleagues with your “Made It Moments” blog and author appearances. Bookstore folks aren’t always huge fans of the indie phenomenon, for understandable reasons. How do you handle that tension?

Well, see above — many of the strategies I listed will help make you appealing to a bookseller whether you’re a traditionally published or indie author. But I think the key is to understand the situation from both sides. I’ve heard many an indie author say, “I’m giving them [the bookseller] something to sell! Why aren’t they appreciative?” Or words to that effect. And the truth is that until or unless you’re a bestselling author, your book likely costs the bookstore more than it will make off of it. Stocking charges, ordering — a bookseller at Bookstore Santa Cruz in California told me it takes 1/3 of a full-time work week for her employee simply to cut checks for indie authors. With traditionally published authors, the bookseller builds one order for a few key accounts and calls it a day. When pairing with indie authors for events, I am aware of these realities on the bookseller’s part, and I try to work with the author to help balance them.

But the other thing is that I deeply respect the indie publishing movement. There are authors who might never have had their work read now walking this very tough road — pioneering it in many cases. Even if there is some inevitable tension, it’s worth it to get to be a part of these writers’ lives, and to try to blend the two different paths. At the end of the day, we all have a great deal in common. We want to share books that we love with others who might love them too.

Do you have any recommendations for indies in particular in their relationship with bookstores?

Lots — see above — but I can boil it down to one main thing: understand the realities, economic and otherwise, of the world you are trying to enter. (Sandra chimes in here to state the obvious: Buy some books there!)

How about for people who are still hoping for that traditional contract?

Hang in there. This road tends to take longer — sometimes much, much longer — but that disadvantage is offset by a relative ease of entry once you do break through. Collect reads of your work, educate yourself about the industry, make contacts through targeted writing conferences, follow authors, agents, and editors online, and know this one indisputable fact: The book is never as ready as we think it is, and it can always, always be made better.

Tell us about a special time you had in a bookstore as a child.

I remember finding “Kramer Vs. Kramer” in my local bookstore — one of four my hometown had at that time. (It now has two). I wanted to read that novel more than anything. My parents weren’t getting divorced — in fact, they’ve now been married 53 years — but this was the early 80’s, and many families were going through the social upheaval of women returning to the work force and demanding more marital balance. I really related to Daddy Kramer’s struggles, and how they impacted his son.

Anyway, we couldn’t afford new books for the most part when I was a child, so I trudged to that bookstore day after day, until I had finally gulped down the whole, satisfying story. The bookseller never chastised me for reading for free. On the final day, when I was just about to finish, one of my parents showed up. I can’t even remember whether it was my mom or my dad. Whoever it was bought the book, which I read about twenty times after that.

Jenny Milchman is a New York State suspense writer who lived for eleven months on the road with her family on what Shelf Awareness called “the world’s longest book tour.”
After a thirteen year journey/trek/slog toward publication, Jenny’s debut novel, “Cover of Snow,” was acquired by Random House. It won the Mary Higgins Clark award, was praised by the New York Times, and chosen as an Indie Next and Target Pick. “Ruin Falls” was published the next year, and chosen as an Indie Next Pick and a Top Ten of 2014 by Suspense Magazine.

As Night Falls coverJenny’s third novel, “As Night Falls,” was published in June, 2015.

The most dangerous secret is the one you keep from yourself. When two escaped convicts show up at Sandy Tremont’s mountaintop home at the start of the season’s first snow storm, they unleash the most harrowing night of Sandy’s life—and a past she has kept from her family.

Learn more at jennymilchman.com.

Do your fight scenes have enough punch? An interview with A.C. Spahn

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Sandra Hutchison interviews author A.C. Spahn, a martial artist, about writing good fight scenes.

A.C. Spahn with sword

Science fiction/fantasy author A.C. Spahn

Amy C. Spahn has been giving useful feedback on fight scenes to a number of fellow Awesome Indies authors recently, including me. While I used to write plenty of fights and the occasional battle in my fanfic days, I was a little surprised to realize there are also fights in my women’s fiction novels. But since conflict drives any plot forward, it makes sense that a good fight scene can be important to your success in almost any genre.

I’m also fascinated by what Amy says about the critical reception to just about any female character who fights.

Amy, why are fight scenes an important part of reading and writing?

Fight scenes are peerless tools for putting a character under pressure. When someone’s punching you, your reactions are completely real, completely unfiltered. You see the real character during a fight.

The circumstances leading up to a fight are also excellent character-building tools. What motivates a character to turn to physical violence tells you a lot about who they are as a person. I believe you don’t really know a character until you know what would provoke them to throw a punch, draw a weapon, and/or end a fight by lethal action.

What drew you to martial arts originally?

I’m not the sort of person who can just go to a gym and work out. I start looking out the window, counting ceiling tiles, etc. I need mental stimulation with my exercise. Martial arts training provides it.

When you throw a punch, you’ve got to think about a dozen little details: how high to aim, the shape and tightness of the fist, the torque in your hips, exhaling at the right time, etc. It’s a very mental game, especially when you string dozens of moves together in forms.

It’s also good for the soul. Since I started training, I’ve discovered a greater sense of inner peace. Even rejection letters on my writing have become easier to handle, because I’m used to pushing myself past my limits. This has been especially true since I passed my black belt test last February – a grueling four-hour ordeal where the final half was as much about psyching up for more punishment as it was the actual physical fitness. Once you’ve handled that, submitting a story to a magazine seems a lot less dangerous in contrast.

What’s your biggest pet peeve when reading fight scenes?

Fights that expect the reader to be invested, but give no thought to the details of the action. This generally takes the form of “Hero and Villain traded punches/sword strikes until one of them lost.” In these cases, the author wanted the reader to worry for the hero’s safety, but didn’t have anything particular in mind for how to make that occur. You might as well replace these scenes with the Shakespearean stage direction: “They fight.” This type of scene expects the reader to invent the drama for themselves, and it almost never works.

These scenes also annoy me because, while real fights only last seconds or minutes, particularly if weapons are involved, in perceived time they seem to last hours. When a fight happens in a book and is over in two sentences, it leaves no impression. It blows past like a light breeze, where it should have hit you like a dump truck. A good fight uses visceral words and well-placed sensory details to leave the reader as adrenaline-high as the characters. I want to smell the sweat and feel the blows, not assume they happened and move on.

How is fighting different for women than it is for men? What advantages does being female bring?

Like it or not, there’s a psychological difference between men and women in combat. This doesn’t apply to everyone, but in general men have an easier time being aggressive than women. Go to a first-time sparring class and you’ll see the men shrug and start hitting each other without much hesitation. In contrast, the women will apologize after every good shot they land. (Five years after starting to train, I still do this. My instructor says I’m allowed to say sorry as long as I hit the opponent again immediately afterward.) So we have a larger psychological barrier to overcome in order to get in the right head space for violence.

However, once that’s happened, I think the psychological power balance shifts. Most men feel a little funny about hitting a woman. It takes some time for them to decide it’s okay to strike back with their full power. That time is a perfect opportunity for the female combatant to deal some serious damage.

Physically, women tend to be smaller and suffer from height and weight disadvantages. I’m on the short side, so I have to get inside a taller person’s range in order to land any strikes. This is tough to do, but once I get there, they have a harder time landing power strikes, while I can still make full use of my range.

In short, the same things that are initial disadvantages can turn into advantages if you know how to use them.

What’s the hardest thing about writing female characters who can fight?

The same thing that’s hard about writing female characters in general. People will judge a female character as a representation of all women, everywhere, forever.

You write a fight where a woman loses, and you get one side going, “What, are you saying women can’t fight? That’s sexist!” You write a fight where she wins, and you get another side going, “Where’s her femininity? That’s sexist!” You have her win with no difficulty and people scream “Mary Sue!” You have her struggle and take a lot of good hits on the road to victory, and the same people howl about how you’re depicting violence against women.

At some point, you just have to accept that somebody will be offended by your female character in a fight scene and write her there anyway.

What do you think of the “warrior woman” character trope? Is this a step forward for women?

It really depends on how the trope is used. While I’m all for female characters who kick butt and save the men, sometimes writers use a woman with a gun or a sword as a substitute for a woman with a personality. She needs both.

There’s also a weird backlash against “warrior woman” characters who show their emotions. People act as if allowing a strong woman to break down is a disgrace to her inner strength and an attempt to weaken her for the audience.

I see it as evidence of the character having enough emotional fortitude to accept her feelings, or as a way to show the difficulty of the situation. When something makes the warrior break down, you know it’s serious. I think until we can treat male and female characters equally in this respect, the warrior woman trope will be a bit incomplete.

We first met when you volunteered to analyze other writers’ fight scenes and I offered one of mine — what inspired that initiative, and how’s it working out for you?

I love fight scenes – reading them, writing them, choreographing them. I’ve noticed that writers often struggle with fight scenes and default to the “hit each other over and over” trope I described above, so I thought other authors might appreciate having somewhere to go to ask questions when creating scenes of violence.

The reception so far has been positive. I received a bunch of submissions right up front, and while that has now tapered off, I’m leaving a submission form open on my site so people can submit more in the future: http://acspahn.com/fightsubs/

Tell us about your latest work, “Preferred Dead,” and how fight scenes play a key role in it.

Endurance thumbnailThe book features a “warrior woman” in the character of Areva Praphasat. She’s the security chief of the UELE Endurance and has a background in undercover operations. However, she’s decided she doesn’t want to be the last thing someone sees before they die, so now she’ll only shoot at people who can’t see her coming. The other characters all have odd traits like that, and so United Earth Law Enforcement put them on the same ship to try to keep them out of the way, but their inadvertent brilliance keeps landing them in the middle of things.

“Preferred Dead” is the fourth novella in the series, though readers should be able to jump right in and follow what’s going on. The Endurance finds a planet that has been completely overrun by zombies, and the crew has to determine what caused the infection while simultaneously struggling to pass a performance evaluation.

The fights carry the story forward and illustrate various aspects of the zombies’ capabilities, which in turn help the crew figure out what happened to them. A fight late in the story also serves as a catalyst for conversation between Areva and her love interest, the trigger-happy first officer. While Areva isn’t a point-of-view character in this installment, there should be plenty of fun action for fight scene aficionados.

Many thanks to A.C. Spahn for sharing her insights with us! Learn more about her at her website, and find her books at Amazon or at Awesome Indies.

How long can one page take to load?

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Pretty long, apparently, especially while trying to draft and edit this post. For the last couple of weeks I’ve noticed a significant drop-off in traffic at my site, even during a promotion and a mailing to my audience, which is seems peculiar.

Have I suddenly become that much less interesting? Or is this a clue–?

Bluehostmisery11-12That’s an awful lot of downtime in a very short time.

Wrangling with Bluehost on Twitter resulted in an apparent fix — far fewer downtime reports, though still some — except that traffic hasn’t really recovered. Perhaps it is taking thirty seconds or more for my pages to load. Or it just fails completely, as it has done repeatedly tonight.

So, rather than posting something insightful here when I’m pretty much brain-fried (from running a promotion — “The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire” is free on Kindle through midnight tonight, Monday — AND grading research papers) I have a question for you:

Can you see this post at all? Because I can’t even get a site that tests page load time to load it.

Let me know, if you can. And in the meantime, I’ll be looking for a solution.

What gets a writer happy dancing?

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Happy-dance

Being a writer isn’t easy. Sometimes I feel as if I’m boldly seeking out new ways to experience humiliation.

That’s why we really need our good excuses for a happy dance.

Julia Spencer-Fleming tweeting about my book!
So: Woo hoo! And I’m going to say that counts as a blurb, right?

But there are, of course, other occasions that make authors want to dance:

  • The first good review by someone you don’t know in the slightest.
  • Any meaty review that suggests someone “got” exactly what you were going after.
  • The first positive review that arrives after a nasty one that sat up there at the top of the “most recent” reviews.
  • When someone highlights a section of your work that you particularly love, too.
  • Watching on Kindle Unlimited or Goodreads as someone swallows your book whole.
  • The first time you sell more than a hundred copies in a single day.
  • A single sale anywhere when they’re not coming steadily anymore.
  • When a librarian says not only do they want to have you talk, they want to buy ten copies of your paperback.
  • When a librarian posts a great review of your book on her library’s site.
  • When colleagues or friends make references to you as a “famous author” and aren’t being sarcastic. (Wrong, yes, but at least not sarcastic.)
  • When you finally find a good way to write yourself out of a plot corner in your current draft.
  • When you find out your book got clicked on or downloaded far above a promoter’s usual range.
  • When you discover a new way to promote that looks as if it might actually allow you to make some money.
  • When a blog post or tweet goes viral.
  • When you get whatever yes you’ve been driving toward … publication somewhere, a full, an agent, a contract, a second contract … even if you know it’s just one milestone on a long, long road.

How about you? Have you had any good reasons to happy dance recently?

Girls, women, boobs, bras, and the march of time

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A flat chest and smoking ... two things that are not as stylish today as they once were.

A flat chest and smoking … two things that are not as stylish today as they once were.

This post was inspired by a new event at the local arts center that seeks to collect new bras for women living at the local YWCA. I know some of those women, and I think it’s a great cause. Although I clothe myself largely out of thrift stores, I know that the chance of ever finding a bra I’d want to wear in a thrift store is pretty slim.

It got me thinking about my own fraught relationship with support garments.

Today I have what doctors call “medium-sized breasts” on their mammography reports. But I’m not really a fan of what they call medium. They seem annoyingly big and floppy to me, especially now, as middle age and gravity set in.

I wish I were smaller. Like I was in junior high. Except not really. Because I hated being as small as I was then — smaller than EVERYONE ELSE. Once in seventh grade a girl sitting behind me in music class tried to flick my bra and realized I didn’t have one on. Or maybe she’d already known. “Why aren’t you wearing a bra?” she asked — loudly.

Everybody’s head swiveled our way. This was meant to shame me, of course. Who can resist a good public body shaming in seventh grade?

“Because I don’t need one,” I said, my tone pitched to suggest that she was an idiot.

“Oh,” she said, and dropped that line of attack completely. I had successfully faked her out. Because, of course, I was only pretending that I wasn’t horrified at being called out to the whole class for my bra-less state.

Seventh grade was when we first started changing for gym class and realized that we were in a grim race to develop just enough at just the right time to avoid the shame of being too big, too small, too flat, too busty, too tall, too short, too fat, too hairy, or not hairy enough.

And I was way, way behind. A boy who had a tube draining fluid from his brain was the only reason I wasn’t the shortest kid in the whole junior high school. And he was of no help at all when it came to me being the flattest.

So I didn’t need a bra yet, not at all, but I went home that day and told my mom I wanted one. It would, of course, be a training bra, which is a really weird term, as if breasts need to be trained to grow into the right shape, or putting on bras requires balance and skill. I suppose it’s really about training us into the idea that we’re probably going to be wearing one of these contraptions every day for the rest of our natural lives.

I stayed in training bras for a while. My height shot up in eighth grade, but my breasts took longer to develop. I actually grew almost inch in height my freshman year of college and I think I grew one or two cup sizes then, too. It was more than I was willing to admit, so my bras were too small for a good part of my life.

From what I’ve read, cup size denial is a major force in the universe. It’s why women are often urged to get expert bra fittings. I once tried to seek help at a Victoria’s Secret when I needed a foundation undergarment for a fancy dress that just wouldn’t work with any bra straps. It was awful. The clerks were young and had tiny perky breasts and had no idea what to do with a woman who didn’t know that she should have gone to Macy’s and thrown herself on the mercy of some older clerk who really knew her way around mommy boobs.

Through trial and error in that Victoria’s Secret dressing room with those terrible strapless foundation garments, I did finally discover that I was a whole cup larger than I thought. Apparently straps can let you get away with a really bad bra fit, or at least allow you to think you’re getting away with it.

In the back of my mind I also thought that when I got older, all bra-related angst would disappear. Why would I even need a bra? Who’d care whether I wore something under my frumpy old lady clothes? There would be no more gym classes, and no more mean girls.

But I wasn’t counting on gravity. Now, when I sit around the house without a bra on, I get boob sweat under them. And I once saw a boyfriend’s frail elderly grandmother’s breasts when I was helping her get dressed. They were long and skinny and so pendulous she probably could have thrown them over her shoulder. She was in her nineties and she still needed her bra.

That’s why I applaud the organizers for putting this event together, and why I contributed some money towards bras myself (they’re getting a good wholesale rate on them). I’m not going this year, maybe because I subconsciously associate formal dinners with things like that closet at Victoria’s Secret. If you’d like to hear other women’s tales about their bras, though, it should be quite entertaining!

In other news….

MissionaryDatingfinal“Missionary Dating and Other Stories” has been free for the last month, but I’m about to either price it up or take it down. It’s not doing much but serving as a distraction. I’d say the market has spoken on that one. So if you ever wanted it, now’s a good time to grab it.

You may wonder why I don’t pull down “The Short, Spectacular Indie-Publishing Career of Matilda Walter” while I’m at it, since it only has two Kindle reviews, but I’ve noticed that after someone downloads that one, a paid purchase is like as not to follow. So Wally and Jonathan and their little romantic comedy are at least earning their keep.

Tricks of memory and a beautiful New England autumn

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I went away this weekend to visit one of my brothers and his family in Western Massachusetts and deliver some books for appearances I’ll be doing there December 5 at the Greenfield Public Library and in January at World Eye Bookshop. (Greenfield inspired the setting of The Ribs and Thigh Bones of Desire.) Along the way I stopped in at an old haunt I’m using in my next novel to see if I was capturing it more or less correctly.

Ha!

I got the ledges themselves right. Here’s how I describe the place. This book is still in rough draft, so I might still change it to be more fictional, since the town it overlooks is going to be a mish-mash of Shelburne Falls, Buckland, Charlemont, and whatever I feel like.

The High Ledges was an Audubon bird sanctuary on a mountainside overlooking Jasper and the Deerfield River. It was notable for Lady Slipper orchids along shady woodland paths and for the rocky ledges with the great view of the valley below. For birds, too, but Dori was no bird watcher. She was not surprised when she drove up to find only one other car in the visitors’ parking lot; it was a place that was tricky to find if you didn’t already know where it was, and the gates would be closing in less than an hour.

The last time I was there I was in my twenties. I remember parking the car and the ledges being a brief stroll away. My first clue was when a gentleman coming down the trail said, “Doing a bit of mountain climbing today?”

“Not any serious mountain climbing,” I said, adding, “I hope.” And no, it was not serious mountain climbing. But it was chilly, damp, and took a good twenty minutes — mostly up hill.

No doubt I’m less fit. (I’m sometimes amazed to contemplate distances I used to cover on an old three-speed bicycle.) I suppose the car parking area might have changed in the interim, too. And I suppose it was still a fairly short walk by hiking standards — not to mention beautiful, with plenty of foliage left to enjoy even if it was a bit past peak.

Thankfully, the view at the ledges was as stunning as I had remembered. This is looking down toward Shelburne Falls and Buckland.

Here’s the view towards Charlemont:

 

When I visited Peterborough, New Hampshire a couple of years ago I had a similar moment of puzzlement and confusion. I had remembered much of the town correctly, especially the diner, when I was writing The Awful Mess. But the bridge and river running through the center of town were not at all what I remembered.

It was the warmest day since she’d arrived in Lawson, New Hampshire, a sunny day in March of 2003, and the Took River was swollen with melted snow. For the first time since Mary had begun these daily walks, there were other people clustered on the Main Street Bridge to watch the river. Uncomfortably conscious that she knew none of them, she considered hurrying past, but told herself that it would be ridiculous and stopped at her usual spot at the bridge railing.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” a man said, and settled in next to her at the railing.

Here’s the actual Main Street bridge in Peterborough. It doesn’t even have a railing! The river was quite sedate, too, though that could be a seasonal issue.

Contoocook River for FBI like my version a little better, frankly. Good thing I write fiction instead of memoir. Has your memory of a favorite place ever turned out to be unreliable?

Foraging for food — and for good reading

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Last week I read a delightful book called “Eating Wildly.” EatingWildlyCoverAva Chin, who used to write a column called “Urban Forager” for the New York Times, tells us about her foraging for wild edibles in Brooklyn. Her adventures in the field are entwined with tales of her Chinese American family and her love life. She not only shares the joy of discovering wild food sources (and love), she shows us how she turns it into yummy meals (and family). The result is a memoir that is charming and instructional at the same time.

One of the issues she runs into: Some Times readers (and the occasional bureaucrat) inform her that foraging in local parks is not cool and/or not allowed (though the National Park Service does allow it). They say this even though the people foraging are usually careful to harvest in a sustainable way — after all, most hope to return and forage again in the future.

applesIt struck a chord with me because for the last few weeks I’ve been foraging off my neighborhood’s bounty. There’s an apparently abandoned apple tree one block over with apples that are just falling and getting piled up with the fallen leaves. They have a few tiny sooty blotches on them, but they taste wonderful. So I’ve often paused in my walks to pick apples from the branches overhanging the road and stuff my pockets.

I also recently stopped and asked another neighbor about her tree full of pears. Was she going to pick them before the freeze this weekend? She invited me to help myself, and we had a conversation about the variety, which I’d never heard of. I was just as excited to make a new gardening friend as to get free pears. (I took her some of my tomatoes and zucchini in return.)

Saturday morning I woke up thinking of apples and pears, then went off to my urban church to help offer free day-old Panera bread to our needy neighbors. (Panera gives all its leftover baked goods to charity at the end of each day.) I suppose that’s a form of urban foraging, too. I probably should have tracked down the owner of the apple tree, and asked if I could do some serious picking for my church’s food ministry. Maybe next year.

This reminds me that at a “community conversation” on hunger I attended recently, a fellow told a full auditorium that he never bought food because he could get everything he needed dumpster diving. I’m not sure anyone saw that as a particularly helpful suggestion, but I don’t doubt that it’s true. An enterprising soul probably could survive pretty well eating out of our city’s dumpsters. Ideally, of course, more could be done with good food before it ends up in dumpsters.

Hunting food in parks and roadsides and yards isn’t necessarily more dignified than staking out dumpsters — or seeking out charity — but what you find actually growing is often really great to eat — fresh and full of flavor, and healthy, too.

Why not forage widely for ideas as well?

We all consume food, but many of us also consume books. We could stick to bookstores or chain stores or the local public library for our book reading, and do quite well. But readers who are especially adventurous also forage out there in the wild — among the indie authors and publishers.

And yes, some of what we find out there might be the equivalent of spoiled food, or poisonous  mushrooms (best not to guess with them — Chin makes that clear), so it pays to examine every new find carefully. But some of it may be great. Some of it may be tarter, sharper, more incisive, or just more our thing than the committee-chosen, market-driven products of traditional publishing.

Of course, whether you forage for food or ideas, you’re going to get some other folks giving you grief about how you’re going to ruin everything for everyone. What if a dog peed on that? The park will be destroyed! There won’t be any day lilies left! Bookstores are dying! You’re ruining literature! And, of course: Ewwww!

But just as some of the weeds we once overlooked have a way of becoming haute cuisine (think ramps, dandelions, lambsquarters), indie publishing gives authors who don’t fit into the conventional mode a chance to find a foothold. A few will “take” and flourish. And yes, a lot of people will survey the landscape and think, “Are you kidding? This is a wasteland!”

But I suggest you look more carefully. There might just be a great meal out there.

Blooming furiously before the frost: the usefulness of deadlines

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She climbed into the middle of the front garden and took a deep breath, trying to calm down amid the flowers and the fat, droning bees. The annuals were at their full height and blooming furiously, as if they knew this was their last chance to set seed before the frost — just like her, really.

cosmos bouquet plus living room 003I thought of this passage from “The Awful Mess” this week as I was cutting cosmos to bring inside before what was supposed to be a cold night — though we were spared a frost. I always cut a lot more flowers as frost approaches. It’s because I know they will soon be gone.

The passage from “The Awful Mess” is a reference to infertility, but it applies equally well to writing. I always write more when I am feeling mortal, conscious of a final deadline for saying what I want to say, rather than focused on the more immediate day-to-day responsibilities I have as an author, teacher, homeowner, mother, stepmother, grandmother, daughter, sister, friend, pet owner, parishioner, neighbor, colleague, gardener, taxpayer, or citizen.

The novel in progress just keeps taking second priority, though part of that is me dithering over a key plot point. So I’m taking a risk (at least by my own you’d-think-I-grew-up-in-the-Great-Depression standards) this spring. I’m trying a form of “going pro” by taking next semester off from teaching to get the draft finished and revised. And since I’m buying  myself that time, I have a clear deadline to meet.

It’s a bit of a risk, and it may not ever pay off. But that’s okay. As she sits among the flowers, Mary reassures herself that there will be social services to keep her and the baby she’s bearing from starving. As I contemplate 16 weeks fully devoted to writing, I can reassure myself that writing is, at least, its own reward.

Once in a while I get to see students suddenly “get” that their writing can be a way to make meaning out of their lives — that it can be an act of profound discovery, and not just a chore to be gotten through. It becomes something they take genuine delight in and not just a hurdle they must overcome in order to get a grade, or a paycheck. (And in this publishing climate, it’s probably just as well to think of any given writing project that way.)

Autumn is a good time to put the garden to bed, stock the larder, and buckle down to a long winter of writing (or perhaps an earlier NaNoRiMo for some of you). Whether you expect it to pay off or not, I hope you will enjoy it. May you make many happy discoveries!

When you probably shouldn’t self-publish (and when it might be best)

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When is self-publishing going to be more trouble than it’s worth, or downright counter-productive? Here’s when:

#1 You just want a single book to share with friends and family

Everyone tells me I should write a bookLet’s say you’ve written a memoir about your long and interesting life, and you want to be able to share it with people you love. Everyone tells you that you’ve really had a fascinating life, and you really have. But you don’t plan to make a career out of writing, and you don’t want to make a career out of publishing, either.

Unless someone who does have some knowledge of publishing (traditional or self) gets excited about your book and wants to get it out there, you’re going to be better served just getting some books printed up and understanding that this is really vanity publishing. Which is okay. That’s exactly what it exists for.

Yes, you can do vanity publishing cheaply through self-publishing outfits like Createspace or BookBaby, and you may want to take advantage of some of the extra services they offer to help you create a nice book. But since this isn’t going to be your career, it doesn’t have to be perfect. You don’t need to research the market. You don’t need to study up on everything, or buy your own ISBN at $125 a pop. You just need a physical book friends and family can read.

For many people in this situation it might make more sense to use a local vanity press. In my area, the folks at Troy Bookmakers know what they are doing and can guide you towards a nice paper book. You’ll pay more than you will going to a big online firm, but you’ll get more personal help along the way. They’ll stock it in the two related independent bookstores, and you can have a signing in one of them. A lot of local bookstores are developing this kind of service.

Unlike some other operations — Author House, iUniverse, etc. — they won’t try to sell you over-priced or fraudulent services or suggest that you could experience great publishing success. (Tip: Any time you’re asked to put significant money into a publishing undertaking, check Preditors and Editors to see if there are complaints about that company or individual, and evaluate other books that entity has published.)

And although most presses and publishing services will make it an option, maybe you shouldn’t create an eBook. Think about it: If you’re someone who doesn’t have any social media marketing savvy and has never even read an eBook yourself, trying to sell one is going to require a tremendous learning curve. Is that something you want to undertake for one book?

#2 Your fantasies include book tours, bookstore signings, or seeing your book on the shelf.

That isn’t going to happen with 99.9% of self-published books, except perhaps in your local bookstore with a kind and supportive bookseller. It doesn’t always happen even with traditionally published books.

So if this is what you really want, your best bet is to slog through the traditional publishing process. Revise and polish that novel (or novels, if required), build your platform, network in your genre, get an agent, get a contract, and work like a demon to promote the book so that you can continue writing and publishing that way.

And no, as Jane Friedman has explained quite well, self-publishing is not a shortcut to traditional publishing. Not an easy one, anyway.

#3 Literary status matters to you.

Untitled design-1Maybe you’re secretly competing with that guy in your writing group who got a three-book deal, or maybe you need publications in order to get that teaching job you want, or maybe you just really, really want some official affirmation of your talent. Self-publishing will not serve your purpose. The stigma associated with self-publishing is not as bad it once was, but it’s still there.

If this matters to you, but you’ve had no luck getting published mainstream after a heroic effort, you might find your goals can be met by a university press or well-regarded regional or small press. You won’t always need an agent to sell to them, either. (Some previous literary publications may be required.) Just be careful out there.

#4 You don’t want to give your precious creation to “those blood-sucking Big Five publishers and agents.”

This is where we find people pointing out that self-publishing pays a higher royalty rate than traditional publishers pay, or asking why they should give an agent 15% of their writing income, or bringing up bad contract clauses.

And some of the people saying these things are published midlist authors and they may have some legitimate complaints, but what you need to remember is that if they were at any time midlist authors they were by definition already doing better than the vast majority of self-published authors will ever do.

Both agents and traditional publishers bring substantial expertise to the publication process. They will usually help you publish a better book than you can publish on your own. An agent will also usually get you better placement and a better advance than you would have gotten on your own.

Second, earning 70% on an eBook is no substitute for a good advance, especially since most self-published eBooks sell fewer than 200 copies. Even with a bad advance, your publisher is better positioned to sell your debut novel successfully than you are. (Remember, advances don’t have to be paid back.)

Publishers make money by putting out a bunch of new books each season, a few of which do very well and keep the lights on, a few more of which do well enough to keep that writer publishing, and a good many of which fail. They try to pick the best bets. It’s a tricky business, with low margins, and the pressure to meet corporate and individual goals doesn’t exactly foster risk-taking. But it’s not, in fact, a conspiracy to defraud authors of all the fruit of their labor (not that this means authors should be willing to put up with some of the more egregious contract terms). Most people go into publishing because they love books.

And only traditional publishers can easily distribute to bookstores, which still drive a lot of the book business. (Bookstores also exist because people love books.)

It’s a no-lose situation, because having a traditionally published book or two to your credit is an advantage if you eventually choose to self-publish. Those traditional titles are a badge that says “This author doesn’t suck.” (Just make sure your contracts don’t bar you from going indie in the future.)

But yes, there are still some GOOD reasons to try self-publishing

Just understand the #1 requirement for all of them:

You are comfortable either doing or supervising every step of the publishing process, from writing to editing, cover design, interior design, proofreading, distribution, sales, promotion, and finance. You have reasonably good knowledge of the genre you are publishing and how readers find and purchase those books online.

Furthermore, if your goal includes making money from it, you must be willing to keep doing it on a steady basis until you have published enough books in the same genre to reach a critical mass and begin to gain some traction in the market place. (This actually applies to traditional publishing, too.)

Beyond that, maybe you fall into these groups:

  • You already have a base of readers who appreciate your work as a consultant or speaker or blogger, and your book will complement that area of expertise and sell alongside it. Ideally, you also already have a nice long list of email subscribers. Furthermore, you couldn’t find a good traditional publisher for this book even with that excellent author platform.
  • You’re passionately writing types of books that traditional publishers have no interest in because the market is too small, or they think it’s too small, but you are certain it could find an audience online. (Think Amish science fiction.)
  • You write for a voracious niche of the eBook market. Furthermore, you write and publish good books fast. Ideally, you write highly addictive series.
  • You have a whole stable of out-of-print traditionally published books you’ve regained control of, and you want to give them a second life as eBooks.
  • You’ve had one or two failed books in traditional publishing and nobody will talk to you anymore, so this is your only option unless you change your name, and you don’t want to change your name.
  • You want to take your time building an audience instead of feeling under pressure to succeed with that first book or two, because you know that if they fail you’re probably done. (Of course, if all your eBooks fail, that won’t help.)
  • You enjoy publishing in itself (I thought this was me, but I no longer fantasize about publishing other people’s work. This is mostly because I’ve discovered I hate accounting. I already put it off until tax time for my own books. That won’t fly if I’m publishing other people.)
  • You don’t have the years that it may take to find an agent, get a sale, and wait for publication. Maybe you’re ninety, or you have a degenerative illness, or your book is extremely topical and truly won’t interest people a year from now. All good reasons to just get it done.
  • You’re more interested in gaining readers than literary status or income, and you won’t fret about your sales rank or compare yourself to other authors. You’re willing to give books away to gain more readers, and even after a bad review or two, you consider it all great fun. (This is what I try for on a daily basis, though I won’t claim to have reached quite this level of Zen contentment yet.)

Your thoughts?

Adventures in Amazon keyword padding

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by Sandra Hutchison

Note: The specific keyword examples mentioned in this post are out of date now, because Amazon has changed the way keywords are input (possibly to cope with just this kind of issue). However, you might find it amusing anyway — and I suspect I could have gotten into just the same trouble using the current form. (This is also a reminder, fellow Kindle authors, to check your backlist titles to see what’s going on with the keywords.)

Authors sometimes work very hard to get keywords into their product descriptions on Amazon, but there’s actually a better way to come up in Amazon searches. It’s a technique called keyword padding that I first learned about in this helpful post by David Penny.

But you’d better be careful how you do it. I learned this the hard way.

TheAwfulMess 396 x 612 pixelsMy first novel, “The Awful Mess,” was on sale for a time in August, with a BookBub promo in the UK, Canada, and India and some other support for US and international sales as well. When I found out about keyword padding I thought, “Hey, great! Maybe I can leverage my current rank to capture a few more readers!”

A more cautious soul might suggest that I should enjoy a strong rank for a while without fiddling around.

“The Awful Mess” is in two main fiction categories: contemporary women, and literary. My seven keywords at the time of the promotion were romance, American, general humor, dating and relationships, love story, suspense, divorce.

Divorce isn’t really a strong theme in the novel (unless you count the increasingly  problematic ex-husband), so I replaced that one with a padded keyword:

“progressive Christian novel about an Episcopal or Anglican priest committing adultery in contemporary take on “The Scarlet Letter” set in a small town in New England during the time when openly gay Bishop Robinson was being elected.”

You can have up to 400 characters. What you can’t have is a comma. I could just list terms one after the other, but I’m a writer and English teacher and that felt like cheating, so I wrote it up as a (ridiculously long) keyword phrase instead.

I wanted to get “The Scarlet Letter” in without having to add it to my product description, where it would probably scare away everyone who remembered hating that book in high school. (Although a reviewer or two has noticed and mentioned the correction, that never makes it show up in Amazon searches on “The Scarlet Letter.”) EDIT: Turns out adding another title to your keyword is a violation of KDP policy. I’m not sure why this made it through. It may be because nobody would attach their book to “The Scarlet Letter” and expect to generate significant sales because of it. It’s not like putting in “Harry Potter.”

I wanted “Episcopal or Anglican” because the terms vary in the rest of the world, and the book should interest some folks who like to read fiction about Episcopal/Anglican priests (if they can stand the sex and irreverence — I’m no Jan Karon).

When I first published this book I actually used “Episcopal” as a keyword, but that’s a tiny, tiny market and thus not worth spending a whole keyword on — but here it’s just one of a whole bunch of little niches I can mention. Note also that although I have always had the words “Episcopal priest” in my product description, the book usually would not come up in searches on Amazon for that.

“Bishop Robinson” in that padded keyword phrase is a reference to the heated debate that was going on at the time and place this novel is set. Gene Robinson was the first openly-gay Episcopal priest elected a bishop in the United States — in New Hampshire. Gay rights are a sub-theme of the novel (the hero’s sister is a lesbian in a committed relationship, though her father the Evangelical doesn’t know it … yet).

And the result of this change? About 24 hours later in the UK my novel was immediately ranking in the top 100 for Christian women’s fiction and Gay & Lesbian fiction.

#9 in Christian in the UK

Unfortunately, this book is not what readers would expect in either category. AND these two markets are pretty much mutually exclusive.

In theory, this gave me added visibility. But it didn’t strike me as worth confusing and quite possibly offending my readers. My companions in the Christian women’s fiction category were largely Evangelical, and their readers might have little sympathy for my characters — sinners that they are — or, worse, the suggestion of liberal theology. Not to mention, my main character is an agnostic for 99.9 percent of the book and it’s debatable what exactly she is for the other 0.1 percent.

Meanwhile, someone looking for gay and lesbian fiction to likely to be pretty unexcited by what is predominantly (and pretty clearly described as) a heterosexual love story, though presumably the inclusive theology wouldn’t offend this audience.

Anyway, though it may be coincidental with a natural slide a month after my price promotion, sales that had been percolating along in the UK immediately slid a bit. But on the plus side, my book DID come up when I did a search on “The Scarlet Letter” and on “Episcopal priest fiction.”

I wanted to keep those, so I ran and changed my padded keyword again. I took out “progressive Christian” and “openly gay” and used something like this instead:

Episcopal or Anglican priest committing adultery in contemporary take on “The Scarlet Letter” set in small town New Hampshire in New England at time of election of Gene Robinson.

I decided to stick New Hampshire in there, too, since New England was working, and I used “Gene Robinson” because a search on that at Amazon had turned up a bunch of books that targeted Episcopalians … so why not? Of course, if I had thought the least bit carefully, I might have predicted that this change would result (about twenty-four hours later) in this:

geneticengineeringwtf

Yes, I was now writing science fiction about genetic engineering, thanks to Bishop “Gene” Robinson. And while Bishop Robinson may indeed have caused a revolution, it was not in human genetics.

Oops. Let’s try that again. Today, my seventh keyword reads:

“Episcopal or Anglican priest committing adultery in contemporary version of “The Scarlet Letter” set in a small town New Hampshire or small town New England at time of Bishop Robinson”

That could still use work (it’s clear I was in a bit of a panic when I wrote it). However, the categories are back to what they should be, and the book now come up in searches for “The Scarlet Letter” and “contemporary version of the Scarlet Letter.” It also comes up in searches for “Episcopal priest” and “Anglican priest.” (Faster if you add “adultery.”) It comes up in searches for “small town New England.” (Both novels do, actually.)

So, dear colleagues, I invite you to go for it. But please… be careful out there!

Update October 12: My sales at Amazon slid so abruptly after this post that I became paranoid they didn’t like me writing about keyword stuffing. But it’s probably just coincidental with me pulling back from some day-to-day marketing. So this technique is not a huge instant boon for sales, clearly, but it can help readers who are searching for something very specific find you. I would also think that if you write nonfiction, it might be absolutely invaluable.