by Alan Alda

Actor and author of Things I Overheard While Talking To Myself

A friend who had seen me in a play came backstage and asked if I still get nervous before I go onstage. She imagined I feel a little fright, being in front of a live audience with no chance for a second take. She was surprised when I told her that I don’t feel nervous; just very alert. In fact, if I’m rehearsed and focused, the performance can be like stepping into a safe place where everything goes right. Even tiny mistakes are lucky grace notes that never happened before and will never happen again.

But there is a certain fear for me in acting, and it happens much earlier than opening night: it’s when I’m in a chair, reading the script for the first time and wondering how I could possibly play such a part. When I’m faced with a kind of character I’ve never tried before, the fear can rise to the level of terror. But, it’s a terror I look forward to, and I don’t like to take on a part unless it scares me a little.

I’ve found a tremendous value in this kind of fear, because if I don’t wonder how I’m going to accomplish something, I’m in danger of doing it the way I’ve done it before, or even worse, the way I’ve seen someone else do it. Being scared can be a sign that I’m not headed toward an easy stereotype.

But, here’s where it gets weird. I don’t just scare myself with playacting. I scare myself in the rest of my life, too. Somehow, it seems to make me feel more alive. Once my name became known to a number of people, I was asked speak before groups of people where I had no business showing up. They probably asked me because my name was a drawing card, and they didn’t expect much; it was supposed to be smooth sailing. But when that moment comes that I realize people will be spending their evening listening to what I have to say, the boat turns over and I feel the heaviness of an ocean that has just gone from being under me to resting on top of me.

I’ve been asked to speak in front of young doctors who were graduating from medical school, graduating classes of physicists and mathematicians; I’ve even been asked to speak about Jefferson on the lawn of Monticello in front of Jefferson scholars. Sane people would not give in to the impulse to go speak at these places, but once every year or so, I agree to go. And I immediately begin to feel the familiar tingle of fear.

I know this sounds crazy, but it’s a useful experience. I know I won’t be able to coast. I’ll have to come up with something interesting. It will have to be something they’ve never heard before, but which also happens to be true. All this commotion makes me dig a little deeper, and introduces me to parts of myself I didn’t know were there.

In high school, I had been thrown out of the glee club because I couldn’t carry a tune. I would drift from key to key and not even realize it. It didn’t seem sensible that in my twenties I should audition for the male lead in a Broadway musical. But the writing was beautiful and I wanted to play the part. The fear took over and made me work harder on singing in tune than I ever had before. I was hired, and after we opened, I was even nominated for a Tony. So, I came through all right. Fear can make you come up with strengths you didn’t know you had.

The show was “The Apple Tree,” directed by Mike Nichols, and every few years Mike and I run into each other and catch up on our lives. The last time I saw him was about four decades after we’d first worked together. He was now one of the most successful directors we’ve ever had, on stage or screen. Here was a guy who could coast into his autumn years if he wanted to. I asked him how things were going and he said, “I’m amazed. I’m still scaring myself. I’m opening a play in a few weeks and I’m terrified.”

And I thought: I have to see this play. This is going to be good.
Alan Alda played Hawkeye Pierce for eleven years in the television series M*A*S*H and has acted in, written, and directed many feature films. He has starred often on Broadway, and his avid interest in science has led to his hosting PBS’s Scientific American Frontiers for eleven years. He was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005 and has been nominated for thirty-one (and has won five) Emmy Awards. He is married to the children’s book author and photographer Arlene Alda. They have three grown children and seven grandchildren. For more information on his new book Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself, visit www.alanaldabook.com

written by Lois Winston

Here’s a dirty little secret: Most editors and agents will toss a manuscript aside after a page or two if the voice/style/story hasn’t hooked them by that point. One agent has even published a book on the importance of the first five pages.

I would like to distill this down further and suggest that an author needs to hook the reader with an opening sentence. As someone who has judged many writing contests and read countless first chapters, I’ve come across hundreds of openings with what I can only describe as BLAH first sentences. The author goes on to compound the problem by then giving the reader several paragraphs, if not pages, of either backstory or boring description. The author may have a fantastic story, but if she put her readers to sleep before they get to that story, she’s got problems. A good opening doesn’t give a reader an excuse to put down a book. It makes the reader want to read more to find out what happens next.

One of the best opening sentences I’ve ever read was from KISS AN ANGEL by Susan Elizabeth Phillips. That book’s first sentence is: Daisy Devreaux had forgotten her bridegroom’s name. Now how can you not go on reading after that? What a killer sentence! It grabs the reader and drags her into the story.

The first sentence should make the reader want to read the second sentence. The hook doesn’t have to be defined in the first sentence, but that first sentence should lead you into the next. And that one to the next. Until you have a paragraph that becomes a hook that grabs you as a reader and won’t let go. That first paragraph should do for the first page what the first sentence did for the first paragraph, and the first page should do for the subsequent pages what the first paragraph did for the first page.

The opening of a book should be filled with interesting action and/or dialogue that intrigues the reader and makes her want to continue reading. One of the worst mistakes an author can make is to fill the opening of her book with paragraph after paragraph of backstory or description. The opening of a book is meant to suck the reader into the world the author has created. Backstory can come later, trickling in to tease the reader to continue reading more, not as information dumps that pull the reader from the story. A good opening will include only the barest minimum of backstory that is essential for that moment.

As for description, it should be woven into the narrative and dialogue. Nothing bores a reader more than long paragraphs describing everything from the length of the heroine’s hair to the color of her toenail polish. It pulls the reader from the story. And pulling the reader from the story is a BAD thing. It adversely affects the pacing of the book, and good pacing is something that is important to a well-written manuscript.

Sometimes the plot and conflict might not be evident in the opening of the book, but there should be enough of a tease within that opening to give the reader an indication of events to come. Dialogue or narrative action are usually the best ways for a writer to accomplish this. A good book will often begin by throwing the reader right into the middle of a conversation or event.

Be aware, though, that gimmickry has no place in good fiction. If you open your book with a situation that’s cliché or right out of a TV sit-com, it will stand out like a neon sign and not act as a hook to draw the reader into the story. The best hooks will draw the reader into the book without the reader even being aware that there is a hook. If a hook is too obvious, all the reader will see is the hook and not be drawn into the story.

However, when opening your book, don’t think in terms of ‘this could never happen.’ Remember that truth is often stranger than fiction, and just because an author creates a situation that’s unfamiliar to the reader, it doesn’t mean that the situation doesn’t or can’t exist. Think about it — the secret baby and marriage of convenience are two of the most popular plots in romance fiction. Yet how many of us have ever met someone who had a secret baby or was thrust into a marriage of convenience? What you need to think about is whether you have created a situation that enables the reader to suspend disbelief and enter the world you’ve created. And by ‘world’ I don’t necessarily mean a paranormal plot. The ‘world’ is the story the author is writing and the characters she’s created to populate that world.

So begin your books by sucking the reader into your world.

© 2007 Lois Winston

***
Award-winning author Lois Winston writes humorous, cross-genre, contemporary novels. She often draws upon her extensive experience as a crafts designer for much of her source material. Her first book, TALK GERTIE TO ME, a combination chick lit/hen lit/romantic comedy with a touch of the paranormal, was an April 2006 release and has to date won a Readers and Bookbuyers Best award and racked up nominations for a Reviewers Choice Award, a Golden Leaf Award, and a Beacon Award. LOVE, LIES & A DOUBLE SHOT OF DECEPTION, a mom-lit romantic suspense, was a June 2007 release.

Lois also contributed to DREAMS & DESIRES, a charity anthology of 19 romances by 19 authors which was released in February 2007. All proceeds from this anthology go to a shelter for battered women. In addition, Lois is a contributor to HOUSE UNAUTHORIZED, a November 2007 release. When not writing or designing, you can find Lois trudging through stacks of manuscripts as she hunts for diamonds in the slush piles for the Ashley Grayson Literary Agency. Visit Lois at www.loiswinston.com.

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If your book or novel doesn’t fit into a well-defined mass market box that the large publishing houses cater to, you may find yourself researching smaller publishers. In today’s world, that seems to mean e-publishers.

So, now that you’ve been offered a contract from an e-publisher you’re ecstatic. It feels great to say, “A publisher wants to publish my book.” But once you come off that high by reading the small print, your euphoria is replaced with questions. Reality sets in. What, exactly, does signing with an e-publisher do for you that self-publishing does not? Or is there an advantage to self-publishing over signing with an e-publisher?

Now that self-publishing without upfront fees, through Lulu, for example, is available and many e-publishers are either dispensing with an automatic print run, charging you for print, or making print dependent upon number of sales, it’s time to examine what exactly an e-publisher does for you versus self-publishing. So, let’s take a closer look at each scenario.

E-publish

You now have a publisher’s name to announce. You can tell everybody, “I’m published by “so-and-so.” In return, the e-publisher may:

* Provide a web site
* Format the book during production
* May or may not edit the book and you may or may not agree with the edits
* Provide a cover
* If print, they will provide the ISBN and get your book into Amazon and Barnes and Noble, although some e-publishers charge a fee for print
* Determine the release schedule
* Bond with other writers with the same publisher
* Draw traffic to your book by readers of that publisher if similar in genre
* May or may not provide your book in print
* Insist you spend time promoting, including participating in author chats

Self-publish

You have to go it alone. Sometimes you will be dismissed as being “self-published” and reviews will be harder to obtain. In return, you can:

* Create your own web site presence
* Control the schedule
* Design your own cover, including the ability to use the cover in promotion
* Format your book design during production
* Edit as you wish or hire your own editor
* Set your own price above POD fees, although ISBN packages may set price too high
* Determine availability in electronic and/or print
* Retain the rights to sell to one of the big publishers
* Control promotion of your book and not have it listed in areas you deem inappropriate

You may have noticed that it really comes down to how much you’re capable of or have the desire to do yourself. Especially if you have your own web site, and the professional editing, graphic, and production skills. With self-publishing you will have to get your book on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, which will require the purchase of an ISBN or the ISBN package that Lulu provides. But the additional distribution fees may raise the price of your book to a point that will not sell. Or you could self-publish with Lulu, without purchasing the ISBN package, thereby, setting your own price.

But self-publishing may be worth it if you have your heart set on seeing your book in print and the e-publisher has set a certain number of sales before they will put it in print. Note: some types of books do not sell as well in e-format and will never get enough sales to then move into print. The e-publisher will retain the print rights for a set amount of time and you’ll have to wait for them to expire before you either sell them to another publisher or self-publish it yourself anyway.

Only you can determine which publishing method is best for you and your book. But, whatever method you choose, promotion is really going to be up to you.

Kathy Holmes writes women’s fiction while raising an awareness for women over 40 and fatherless daughters. She has self-published a nonfiction book called “Myths of the Fatherless” about her journey to find her father and her first novel, “Real Women Wear Red.” She can be reached at http://www.kathyholmes.net.

As CEO, founder and tour coordinator for Pump Up Your Book Promotion, I get many questions that run the gamut from “What is a virtual book tour?” to “How many books will I sell during my tour?”

To explain virtual book tours, it’s simply an online tour where you will be stopping off at various blogs giving interviews, receiving reviews for your book, or guest posting during a set time.

Sounds easy, but it’s a lot of work that the author may not realize until he or she does one.

The beauty of virtual book tours is that your book will be appearing all over the Internet without ever leaving your home. Everyone by now has heard of them and quite a few of you have been on one.

But, for those who have not, I’m going to explain what virtual book tours can do for you and how you can make full use of one if you are going it alone.

I have been running Pump Up Your Book Promotion Virtual Book Tours for a scant three months and already we are booked solid with great names such as Jane Green, Caridad Pineiro and Sandi Kahn Shelton. But, right along with these bestselling authors are unknown authors trying to pave a way into the vast book buyer’s territory; namely, those readers out there who have never heard of them because they aren’t well-known authors and perhaps would have never known about them if it weren’t for online book tours.

And that’s the beauty of online tours. Anyone can do them.

Whether you set one up yourself or you hire someone to run your tour for you, you start out by targeting book blogs and bloggers who write the same genre. The reasoning for the latter is that if that particular blogger has friends who visit because of the genre, your book will be more appealing to them.

However, that’s not a die hard rule.

The key is exposure to all audiences. While John Smith might like to read a good horror book, he might enjoy a good art book. Even though the two genres are completely different, don’t pass up a chance to appear on a blog that doesn’t match your genre if the host invites you because you just never know who might stop by.

Which brings me to the point of this article. A virtual book tour is perpetual. Even though your tour may last a month and you may or may not sell books (although not selling any is highly unlikely), as long as the host keeps your interview in their archives, your stop will be linked up in the search engines forever.

The key to making your tour successful is to get on as many blogs as you possibly can. The more blogs you appear, the more links go into the search engines and this ups your rankings for your particular key search words.

So, not only is your tour perpetual, your rankings in the search engines go through the roof and that’s the sole purpose of a virtual book tour. While it’s fun to watch your tour in progress, what’s really going to matter is afterwards when your tour is long over.

The beauty of virtual book tours is that, if the bloggers have thought to use tags in your interviews, your tour stops should come up on the very first page of the search engines using your key search words. It’s a known fact that if your book does not come up on the first three pages of the search engines using any given search words that describe your book, you’ve just lost a customer.

Millions of people use the Internet each day. By incorporating SEO (search engine optimization), which our company is known for, your tour stands to outshine the rest.

Virtual book tours can be fun, but they can also be a crash course in finding out how blogs and the search engines work and how you can make it work for you to make your tour something to be proud of.

Dorothy Thompson is CEO/Founder of Pump Up Your Book Promotion, a full service public relations firm specializing in online book tours. You can visit her website at http://www.pumpupyourbookpromotion.com.

PUMP UP YOUR BOOK PROMOTION VIRTUAL BOOK TOURS
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When someone asks why write? My answer — writing is like making love. When they ask how to write? Same answer. For each writer the act of writing is as individual as his/her own personality.

I write because I have to. I have to because I want to. I want to because I love it. When I was a journalist for the Hollywood Reporter magazine and Capital Style, I wrote my pieces in a smart-sassy magazine journalist’s voice. In my head, I was a cross between Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday and Dorothy Parker. But when I started to write my first novel — historical fiction set in Paris in the time of the Impressionists, I discovered I had to develop a new way of writing, a new “voice.” This voice was more lyrical, even poetic. I did read poetry to develop a capacity for metaphor. I read or re-visited classic novels written decades, even centuries ago to understand why they endure.

I feel presumptuous giving advice to writers on how to write. There are far better sources for that: E.M. Forester’s Aspects of the Novel is a classic and as useful today as when it was written in 1927. There are dozens of excellent how-to books for writers that outline the craft. Creating Unforgettable Characters by Linda Seger is helpful. Is writing a craft or an art? It’s both. To learn the mechanics of the craft, consult those manuals. To learn the art, consult your heart. I would like to share my experience writing my first novel and hope it resonates with other writers.

Inspiration. I believe the inspiration, the idea, for a book comes from the Universe. In my experience, my novel came to me as I was studying for an exam on the Impressionists for my class at Christie’s Education graduate program. For me, reading that art history textbook was as fascinating as reading a novel. Were there any novels about these people I wondered? In the year 2000, I didn’t know of any. I had seen clips of a film about Vincent Van Gogh starring Kirk Douglas. And of course, the musical Gigi loosely based on a story by Colette. But these were both Hollywoodized and set after the truly important years of 1860-1870.

Characters. My novel began with the characters. I knew it was important for my main characters to change as they experienced their lives. I wanted the heroine, in particular, to become a changed person at the end of the story from who she was in the beginning because that is true to real life. I wrote concise back-stories on index cards for each character so I would know where/when they were born, their parentage, their childhoods — all the factors that shaped them to become who they were in the novel. I didn’t use the back-story in the narrative, but the footprint was there between the lines.

Place and time. The more hours I spent at the library researching the history, the art, the politics, the changes in technology and social relations, the more at home I felt in that setting and knew I could transport others there with me. The number of reference books I read is prodigious. But I’m a nerd and love that aspect of writing. I worked as a library assistant in college and still feel in a safety cocoon in the musty stacks of a library.

Plot. Plot unfolds as life does — as a consequence of characters’ choices, actions and reactions. In my case, plot was also guided by history because historical fiction must be accurate at all costs on the “history” side. The fiction side can be pure fun. Writers are all a bit mad, I think, and I am no exception. I remember waking up in the middle of the night, hearing in my head the perfect dialogue between two of my characters for a scene. Of course, I got up and scribbled down some notes before falling back asleep.

Music true to the time period was helpful for me at some points in the narrative process. I deduced that listening to the music that my characters would have listened to in 1867 would help put me in their world. It was transgressive and I credit the verisimilitude of some emotional passages in the book to those waltzes of Strauss and Offenbach.

Polishing. Finally, the most enjoyable part of writing for me is rewriting. It feels like putting the final touches on a painting, adding highlights and correcting mistakes. I remember spending three hours changing the wording on just one paragraph. But what a paragraph it turned out to be!

Writer’s Block. For me, it doesn’t exist. If you have something to say, then write. If you don’t, go do something else. Come back when you do. Then you can write a heartbreakingly beautiful novel and experience the joy of those two little words . . .

The End.

© 2007 Debra Finerman

Debra Finerman attended Christie’s Graduate Program in Connoisseurship and the Art Market. Mademoiselle Victorine: A Novel (Published by Three Rivers Press. July 2007;$13.95US/$17.95CAN; 978-0-307-35283-5) is her first work of fiction after a career as a journalist in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. She worked for The Hollywood Reporter Magazine, Beverly Hills Today, Beverly Hills Magazine and Capital Style. She currently lives in New York and Connecticut.

For more information, please visit www.debrafinerman.com or www.mademoisellevictorine.com

by Michael LaRocca

The big question. Do you submit directly to publishers, or do you find an agent who will do that for you? Based on anecdotal evidence I’ve heard, it can work either way. Many publishers refuse to read unagented submissions, but on the other hand Tom Clancy and John Grisham sold their first books without an agent.

The bottom line is, if a publisher reads what he can sell, he’ll buy it. It doesn’t matter if it comes from an author or an agent. The trick is getting him to read it. That’s always your focus.

Some people swear by agents because they’re the ones who will get you larger percentages and advances. I’ve decided I don’t care quite so much about that. In the case of a new author, I sincerely doubt that’ll happen anyway. Maybe later. I’d hate to lose my first sale because some greedy agent asked for too much money. Not that I believe that’ll happen either.

There are also those who swear by agents because many publishers won’t look at an “unsolicited manuscript.” That’s true enough. They ain’t got time. They’re using agents as a preliminary screening process. A good agent will also know which publishers are most likely to be interested in what YOU write.

Someone recommended that once you’ve selected some potential publishers, phone each one and ask how they would like to be approached. Ask to whom specifically you should address your work. Then you can honestly call it a “solicited manuscript.” (Always be honest in your correspondence.)

If this doesn’t work, because you can’t phone or the secretary refuses to cooperate and tells you things like “we only accept material from reputable literary agents,” then mail your query letter, bio, synopsis, and sample chapter. They can only say no, or they can say your query looks interesting and they want to see the rest of the manuscript.

If you hook a publisher this way, odds are the publisher will like for you to have an agent. So this is when you can call one, after you’ve hooked the publisher. The agent gets 15% for doing practically nothing, so he’ll take the job. The publisher will become more interested when your agent phones saying he’s (or she’s) looking after your interests in this matter.

The most important step is to get your presentation looking as professional as possible. No mistakes. None. Zero. Nada. The vast majority of rejections aren’t because the story is bad, but because the Acquisitions Editor concludes that it’ll be too much work to make it “ready to read.” With new authors, publishers usually lose money. Advertising, print inventory… don’t ask them to invest a great deal of editing time as well. They won’t do it. It’s just that simple.
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by Sophfronia Scott

A few years ago having a website was a nice little feature to have for your business or to keep your family and friends up to date. But these days, especially in the book business, having a smart website is a necessity. The site has to do many things: get you known, get your subject known, get people to buy your book on the subject.

Unfortunately most writers aren’t internet experts, much in the same way that they aren’t marketing experts. But to be successful with your book these days you have to be both. This primer will get you going. FYI, one of the smartest writer’s websites I know belongs to Tim Bete of http://www.TimBete.com. He won the 2005 Writers Digest Award for Best Writer’s Website and he provided a few of the tips below when he spoke to The Book Sistah Inner Circle in September 2006.

Don’t Wait: Put Your Website Up First

A lot of writers tend to think of a website as a promotional tool that they’ll put up after they sell their book to a publisher. But here’s the thing: if you don’t have a website it’ll be really hard, if not impossible, to sell your book to a publisher. As we’ve discussed in this newsletter before, when a publisher buys your book, they’re really buying your platform, or the audience that you can bring to the table. One writer recently emailed me that her agent had been told, “Why would anyone buy her book? No one knows who she is.” Unfair or not, that’s the way most publishers think.
But you can use your website (or blog) to get yourself known. You can start servicing your audience, posting articles and soliciting publicity for yourself and your work. This is where you start.

Use Your Name

There’s a big trend around having a domain name that reflects your subject matter (LivingWithToddlers.com) for instance. But remember, as a writer, your brand is YOU. You want to get your name known. So no matter how many domain names you own or use, make sure one of them is YourName.com. It’s easier for people (especially editors) to find you when you use your name. When you have an unusual name, like mine, you can also use your first name alone as a domain. I do both!

Connect With Your Audience

A website is your opportunity to engage your reader. Get them talking to you! Publish a newsletter that provides valuable content for your audience. Give them insight on what you’re working on, let them in on your thinking process. Once they know you and your work, they’ll be all the more excited about buying your book or books when they come out. Your audience can also help you write your book–ask them what they want to know, what they need help with. Send a brief survey telling them you’re gathering information for the book. Here’s a great secret: people want to help! They’ll be more than happy to pitch in–and more likely to buy the book because they helped create it!

Put Up Writing Samples–And Distribute Them

Your website is a great place for editors to find you. You may not have to work as hard seeking out a publisher or freelance assignment because when you have a solid website, chances are the editor will find you first. To be ready for them you’ll want your site to have lots of writing samples available. Perhaps you post your newsletter articles on your website as well. You’ll want an editor to be able to see immediately that you’re able to deliver the goods.
Here’s another tip: allow your newsletter articles to appear on sites other than your own. Distribute your work on sites such as EzineArticles.com or iSnare.com. Your work will appear all over the web on other people’s blogs, newsletters or websites, making it that much easier for your name to turn up when an editor is searching for a writer.

Learn How to Update Your Own Site

You’ll want your site to be alive–meaning fresh material, updated information and correct information. That can be difficult to do if you’re constantly having to find someone to make these updates for you. Do yourself a favor: purchase HTML editing software such as Macromedia’s Dreamweaver and learn how to make simple updates on your own. It’s not as difficult as you might think–many of these programs are similar to or as easy to use as your average word processing program. I bet you’ll be creating your own pages before you know it!

© 2007 Sophfronia Scott

Author and Writing Coach Sophfronia Scott is “The Book Sistah” TM. Get her FREE REPORT, “The 5 Big Mistakes Most Writers Make When Trying to Get Published” and her FREE online writing and book publishing tips at http://www.TheBookSistah.com

Sophfronia is also author of the bestselling novel, All I Need to Get By. If you liked today’s issue, stay tuned for more because The Book Sistah also offers FREE audio classes, FREE articles, workshops, and other resources to help aspiring authors get published and market their books successfully.

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by Brad Grochowski

Obviously, Youtube and Myspace, as well as other similar sites, have revolutionized the way that video is presented on the web. Used to be, you had to host bandwidth-hogging, giant-file-sized videos on your own web server, and embed them in your site with HTML code that you wrote yourself.

It was tricky, and it took the right setup to make it work.

But now, not only can you, simply, upload your video to someone else’s server, your video is search-able, view-able, rate-able, and comment-able within a community that is out there just looking for new video material to watch.

Not only that, but these sites offer cut-and-paste embedding that make it really so simple to get your videos onto your own site - again, without a band-with or disk space cost to you.

This is all happening at a time when video promos of indie-published books are really catching on as a way to get attention for your book.

It doesn’t take a whole lot of time/money or resources to pull together a pretty great promo video. Especially now with the suite of applications that come standard with a Mac - including GarageBand and Imovie - with a little bit of savvy you can pull together a nice teaser.

Or, if you would rather not do it yourself, or would rather push it to a higher level of professionalism, you could always hire a video promotion company to put it together for you. This will cost you more, of course. But it may well be worth it when you consider the time and effort you will save, to say nothing of the higher production quality you are likely to end up with.

One company that specializes, in fact, in promo videos for books recently contacted me. I took a look at StoryPromos.com, and generally liked what I saw. Their sample videos look really well done. They seem more comfortable producing “scary” videos with baritone voice-overs and chilling music - but this may be a function of the material they have had to work with.

But in any case the pieces work. There is a great promo for a screenplay called “Malled” which, considering the stretched pun of the title, and the fact that it seems to be about a shopping mall that comes to life and eats people or something, I probably wouldn’t have given it much of a second though.

I have to admit that “Malled” is presented so well in the short clip - the voice talent sounds top-notch - that I am far more intrigued than I would ever have been had I seen only a website.

You can see some of their samples at their MySpace page, or look up their services and rates that their website.

So anyway, all of this to point out that I would be foolish to not recognize this trend, and incorporate it into AthorsBookshop.com. Because you have control over your book’s information, and because most of the fields are HMTL enabled, you can embed your promo video right into your book’s page! So, you can place the best tool for selling your book in the exact spot where shoppers are going to have the option to buy it!

In the near future I plan to set up a more integrated method of posting your videos to your book’s page, but in the meantime it seems to work really well. Here is an example which, though it isn’t a promo (it’s a clip from a local news program) it demonstrates how effective the combination of YouTube and AuthorsBookshop.com can be:

www.authorsbookshop.com/thisbookcooks/

I certainly don’t think video promos are the end-all marketing tool that will, alone, push your book sales into the best-seller stratosphere. But, combined with the many other tools and strategies that are surfacing, they can be a powerful tool to hook people into what your book is about.

About the Author:

Brad Grochowski is the founder and owner of AuthorsBookshop.com. He is also the author of The Secret Weakness of Dragons.

by Michael LaRocca

One of the nice things about being an author is that we can break any rule we want. (I just did.) It’s part of our job description. Language changes through usage — definitions, spelling, grammar — and authors can help it do this. But on the other hand, we have to have some sort of agreement on the language or we won’t be able to talk to each other.

When we as authors break a rule or two, it’s not because we’re ignorant. It’s because we have reasons to break them. That’s one of the joys of writing.

Having said that, now I’m going to explain some rules. There are two types of writing in your novel. There is your narrative and there is your dialogue. The rules for the two are not the same.

For example, comma use. In dialogue, it’s not so difficult. Put in a comma wherever your speaker pauses in his/her speaking. In narrative, you have to consult the style guides and hope that you and your editor, working as a team, can sort it all out.

NARRATIVE

A cop thriller like my VIGILANTE JUSTICE has a simple set of rules for the narrative portion. Third-person, straightforward writing, light on adjectives and adverbs, easy to read and grammatically correct. Sentence fragments are acceptable if communication is achieved, and you’ll note that I use them often in this article. Why? Simply because it’s more effective that way.
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by Peter Pagnamenta, co-author of Sword and Blossom: A British Officer’s Enduring Love for a Japanese Woman

In 1982 a retired Tokyo teacher was going through boxes in a storeroom, when she found a stash of old letters, still in their original thin white envelopes, with foreign stamps and sealing wax. They were bundled tightly together and there were over 800 of them. The letters inside were on rolled, thin, hand made “makigami” paper, and many of them contained pressed flowers which disintegrated, as they fell out. They were from a British officer who had been sent to Japan to learn English in 1904, written to his love, Masa Suzuki, and they spanned a period of nearly thirty years. The finder of the letters was a relative of Masa’s by marriage, and she had heard about the Englishman. But she had no idea of the full story.

Those letters are the principal source for our book, and we could only reconstruct the story by working through them, and finding the clues, and the chronology, which allowed the narrative of this relationship to emerge.

Momoko Williams and I were not the first to see this extraordinary cache — the Japanese writer Takako Inoue had looked at many of them and written a book published in Japan, but she had not been able to do any research in Britain, so her version was not complete. She helped set us on our way, but it was only when we got full access to the original letters that we realized what a daunting task we had taken on. They were difficult to decipher even for a Japanese, because the language and the ways of writing characters had changed so much, and Captain Hart Synnot’s language and syntax, specially at the start when he was learning, were not very good.

We spent nine months going through the letters, one by one, from 1905 to the 1930’s. We worked in real time, sitting at a table. Momoko would try and read them, and I would transcribe and type the contents in rough English as we went along, so we could pick up the references and ask each other questions. There were Japanese allusions that she could catch, or could ask others about, and there were English related references that I could understand. So there was a lot to do before we could get to what, for most books, would be regarded as square one.

One of the difficulties was that Arthur had helpfully (for Masa) rendered all the English names, of other officers, or places in Ireland, or family members, into phonetic Japanese. For example we were confronted with a cast of characters with strange sounding names — Blododo, Toku, Sarmondo, and had to check army lists and other sources until we found he meant General Broadwood, or Major Toke or Captain Salmon. He called her “Dare” and for a long time Momoko couldn’t work out what this meant, until she realized, from just one letter in which he used some English as well, that this was his Japanese spelling for “Dolly”. That was what he must always have called her.

As we went on we built up an index of names and places, and dates, and then started to do lateral research into army records, birth certificates, marriage certificates, wills, and land records in Japan, England and Ireland, to build up the picture. The newspapers of the time yielded vital information. We ploughed through yellowing copies of the small English language papers that had been published in Tokyo and Yokohama for the foreign community, and one of their staple ingredients were columns listing passengers arriving and departing by ship. In the “Japan Weekly Mail” for March 12th 1904 we were pleased to find: “per British steamer “Java” from London via the Chinese ports — Mr F.J. Abbott, Mrs F.J. Abbot, Miss Abbott and nurse, Mr H Fleming, Master Fleming, Mr G. Kingswell, Captain Hart Segnott” They had the name wrong, but it was good enough for our purposes. There were only three European style hotels that westerners used in Tokyo then, and the same papers published lists of guests who were staying. So we were able to place him at the Imperial in Tokyo on several occasions, or staying at Hakone, and for three or four years it was possible to track most of his comings and goings around the Far East, and check these dates against his own letters. The Japanese system for registering births and deaths was much more difficult to crack — the “Kosekki”.

Our greatest piece of luck was finding the diaries of two of the four other British language officers who were in Tokyo at the same time, because they described this world of foreign bachelors, the trips to the sumo wrestling, the tea houses, the picnics with the girlfriends at cherry blossom time, and Arthur and Masa flit in and out of them.

There was one major element we hoped to find, but never did — and that was the correspondence in the other direction, and Masa’s own letters to Arthur. We know where they were at various times, but they disappeared, probably during the Second World War.

© 2007 Peter Pagnamenta

Author
Peter Pagnamenta is a writer and television documentary maker, with a special interest in Japan. He conceived and wrote the eight-part BBC series Nippon, an archive and testimony history of Japan’s recovery after 1945, as well as Bubble Trouble, about Japan in the 1990’s. Other series for the BBC include the twentieth-century industrial history All Our Working Lives, for which he wrote the book with Richard Overy, and the twenty-six-part People’s Century. He is a former editor of the weekly current-affairs television program Panorama.