Projects by Margot Justes

I'm happy to say my novella will see the light of day February 1st, in time for Valentine's Day. A Fire Within along with Amy Alessio's Blast from the Past and Mary Welk's Framed complete the Hearts and Daggers anthology. We're celebrating Valentine's Day in style, by releasing three stories that celebrate the holiday. Hallmark move over.

We talked about the novellas while I was still with Echelon Press, the project fell through, we got busy with life. It seems we never let go of the idea, because we finished the stories, but life continued to move on.

One day I received an e-mail from Amy to see if we were still interested in the project. My immediate response was yes. Yes, I am. Mary said yes, and the anthology was re-born. The next thing we need to do is let everyone know it's out there, or soon will be.

This year I made a resolution I want to stick to-no, not the diet-that is a one day at a time project, and today we won't talk about that. I want to learn how to market on line, follow in the footsteps of Joe Konrath and Rob Walker, fellow Acme blogger.

Yes, I know they are both well known authors and masters in the craft of promoting, and I'm not, but if I'm going to learn, I'm going to learn from the best.

I have an ambitious plan this year to re-release a short story in May, a newly edited version of A Hotel in Paris in June. Paris is lovely in June, well, Paris is lovely any time of year, but I picked June.

I digress here, back to my planned releases, Blood Art, my vampire tale should be all set for Halloween and there is talk we'll do another anthology for Halloween.

The time not spent at my day job, hopefully will be spent in my office, doing what I love to do. Write.

Till next time,
Margot Justes
A Hotel in Paris
www.mjustes.com

There's Psychopathy then there's Marketing Apathy!

Norm Cowie w/Rob Walker @www.loveismurder.com conference

Thanks, Rob, Morgan, and everyone at ACME Authors Link for having me back here at youZ guyZes great blog where almost everything goes. I had once been one of youZ, a regular contributor with Acme until I was sucked into the black hole of author marketing apathy - as serious a disorder as writers block!                      

On that note, it’s time for me to come clean on something that I’ve been hiding from my friends, neighbors and publishers. Something so horrible and ... well... (sigh)... let me just come out and say it.

I was an advertising/marketing major back in college.

                             Joe Konrath w/Norm Cowie in Galena, IL 2009

There, I said it. And I was pretty good at it, too. I was even selected as one of the University’s five representatives for a national advertising competition. So wouldn’t you think I’d be pretty good at marketing my books?

Nope, I suck at it. And not just a normal suck, but more like the big magic, steroid-inflated Hoover vacuum cleaner of suckage. Even worse, my instincts for knowing which way the wind is blowing pales even compared to that of a naked mole rat.

In August 2009, I went to Galena, Illinois with several other authors including Joe Konrath, Henry Perez, Luisa Buehler and Margot Justes to market our new anthology Missing. We were hosted by fellow author Barbara Anino and her husband in their Bed and Breakfast.

One late evening after we wore everyone else out, it came down to just Konrath, Perez and me lounging in the living room, wearing courtesy b&b robes and bending elbows with liquid we’d liberated from one of Galena’s many wine outlets, and Joe started talking about something he called ebooks.

Ekkk-books?

Joe (we know him now as the Pied Piper of this ebook revolution) said ebooks were going to be the wave of the future, and he was converting all of his previously unpublished work and releasing every title onto Amazon’s Kindle himself. I laughed (easy when you’ve been drinking) and told him he was crazy. Who’d want to read on a tablet?

The truth was I was a bit intimidated by the thought of wrestling with formatting a book to meet this new technology.

Joe wouldn't let it go; he insisted ebooks were about to explode in popularity, so I said, “Tell you what, Joe. How about I give you one of my unpublished books and you convert it to ebook, publish it, and we’ll split the profit?” He firmly and politely said, no, that he wouldn’t feel right, and insisted I consider doing so myself.

Well, we all know what happened with Joe and other of his friends who follwed the Pied Piper into ebooks, and I sure wish he’d have taken me up on my offer -- and/or that I'd gotten off my duff and looked into the possibilities.

Two years later, I belatedly began taking Joe's advice--as had many another 'smart' writer. My first try was with a non-fiction collection of humor essays called, The Guy’d Book, why we leave the seat up ... and other stuff. The Guy’d Book is a collection of humor essays I’d written over the years dealing with being a guy, father and ESPN addict, some parts of which had been published in the Chicago Tribune and Cynic Magazine.

I wrestled with the formatting for both ebook and printed book (using Create Space where I stumbled onto something they called their Cover Creator). With this nifty little tool, I was able to cobble together a usable cover, seeing as without a publisher, I was on my own for covers. Soon after, The Guy’d Book was available as an ebook.

Right around the same time, my contract was expiring with my publisher for my first book, The Adventures of Guy. They offered to renew, but flushed with enthusiasm I took back the rights. In hindsight, I think they were ticked off because citing a clause in our contract, they demanded I remove all images of the book cover from my sites. The clause wasn’t well written, and while I disagreed about the intent of the clause, I decided not to fight (mostly because I never liked the cover all that much in the first place). But it did teach me one important lesson: whenever possible, control your own covers.

Then I turned down my second publisher’s offer to publish WereWoof, the sequel to my first YA vampire book Fang Face, and released it myself on Kindle, followed shortly by my newest adult humor title, Bonk & Hedz, a caveman ... and woman... story. I took my own advice to design and do the artwork for both books.

I now had six books, four of which were self-published, and I sat back and waited for everyone to discover me.

I wasn’t active in forums, did no advertising, no blog tour and otherwise totally neglected my blog, and basically my marketing efforts consisted entirely of watching reruns of Big Bang Theory, doing angry political tweets and checking the ESPN website for news of Peyton Manning’s recovery from neck surgery.

You can probably guess what happened with my book sales. Though the Guy’d Book once nipped into the Top 100, my others were flotsam in the Amazon jet stream. Readers aren’t Christopher Columbus. You have to bring the New World to them, not vice versa.

So I’m finally stepping into the marketing pool encouraged by the seemingly idefatiguable Rob Walker and his results with Kindle Select and other authors who are carving a path to show how to get books out to readers. I'm following his methods along with Joe's these days. Another suggestion Konrath had made was to do short stories, so I’ve released a few onto Smashwords as companion pieces to my other books. Rob's been great at advising me on many otherlooked steps I should be taking as well.

In other words, I’m finally getting off my butt, climbing out of the black hole of marketing apathy and putting fur on my naked mole rat.

So, hi, it’s good to meet you all ...again, and I hope you will please leave a comment. Finally, thanks to all the Acme family here for having me back!

The Guy’d Book is available for free with Kindle Select lending. Here’s my Amazon page: http://amzn.to/l9d9Ya , http://www.normcowie.com

NORM COWIE

The Right Writing Age: Attitudes Struck & Myths Dispelled

Whenever I begin a new Creative Writing Class, I stand at the board and ask people in the class--people of every size, age, stripe, to give me a list of reasons why they find themselves unable to write...what negative reasons one's mind gives the would-be writer to give up before they begin and invariably, high on the list beside "I am too young to write, too inexperienced" is the opposite: "I am too old to begin writing now! Too old to start a writing career, too old to dabble, etc., etc..."

Trust me, I get a long list of negatives on the one side of the board, and this is followed up by asking the class to help me REWRITE all these negative statements into POSITIVE statements such as "I am at the perfect age to write. This is a wonderful time in my life to write."

As awful a negative as I have heard - "I can't write because my job, working with kids all day, sucks all my imagination out of me..."  and "I can't write because my mind is on worrying about my dying wife" these too can be rewritten and the attitude that these are damn good reasons to write can prompt wonderful results.

On a Five Star chat group among Five Star authors, a negative similar to those above came up and suddenly Jim Ingraham (author of Sahara Dust, and Evidence of Evil, work in progress: Duff Kerrigan)  leapt into the fray with the following comments that I believe every 'older' or just starting out author, young or old, ought to hear.  Here's Jim in his own words after all this came up via the catalyst of my urging authors to take up the standard of becoming an Indie Author publishing with Kindle/Amazon.  Here's Jim in his words:

"It's not how age affects me as a writer that's important. It's how it affects me as a man. Because I have shed many illusions about myself and my life and have accepted who I am and who I have been, my relationship to people and to my work is more sensible than it once was. I am no longer crippled by fears that I won't "make it." I know that "making it" is an illusion. The only important result of writing is the work itself.

I liken it to playing golf. Winning a tournament is fun, but trying to is not what keeps me playing. The real reward is striking the ball well, that feeling coming into my hands when I watch the ball sail down the fairway, when I watch it fall into the hole from 30 feet across the green.

If the reward of your work is something other than finding the right word, building a solid paragraph, turning out a well-crafted story, then you miss the true rewards of being a writer.

If I am true to myself, the results of my work will reflect the gains I have made over all the adversities that have plagued my life. I hope that readers grow from my work. It pleases me that others enjoy my stories. But I write, not to please others, but to please myself."

Jim Ingraham
following is a photo of Jim & his son at the piano!

                                                                        
Wow...Man, wish I had Jim in my class. Jim is 87 years old by the way. Read his book Sahara Dust from 5-Star, and Evidence of Evil on Kindle/Amazon.  And do find Jim at http://www.jimingraham.com/ - great website. You won't regret it.

Now I am outta here, kiddies, kiddos, and kid-kids.  Happy Writing and do affect the right attitude. Attitude is the one and only thing we ultimately can control in this life...that and sometimes our characters.

Rob Walker
Chidren of Salem, Killer Instinct, and coming soon to a Kindle near you, Titanic 2012 - FREE first 14 Chapters for a click found at http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/  That's seven chapters per each storyline, 1912 and 2012