Amy Rose Davis http://modicumoftalent.com/ has been blogging about how writing can take over life, and she has me thinkng. I am a writer. I always have and always will be writing one thing or another. Letters to friends, poems to my beloved, stories that demand to be let out of my head, . . . I love to find the good word and the accurate description. I will always write and it will make me happy. And it always fits into a balanced, healthy life. It's the damn marketing that rips my guts out. Marketing evidently is a full-time job. If you're going to market successfully, you have to do it constantly. You have to blog, Twitter, facebook, and sell, sell, sell even if you alienate your friends like an Am-way distributer.
I have three books that were in print with vanity press, and the fourth and final one in the series in re-write. Then I went with Puddletown Publishing Inc. and the first of the books is now available as an e-book ( ) I am getting requests for the sequels, but the publishers, reasonably enough, want to sell a few more copies of book one before they launch book two. (and book three and book four) It does, after all, cost them time and money to get these things up and running. Puddletown is not a vanity press. It's not a case of throwing more money at them to get them to spit out more books. They want to turn out quality books and still run at a profit. So if I want to bring out the rest of the series, I have to start selling what I have.
Problem: I'm a writer, not a marketer. The whole process of spamming the world to get my name out there appalls me. I can not bring myself to twitter. I don't want to read those pushy, Am-way tweets I see hourly on the twitter screen. And I CERTAINLY don't want to read their damn books! Tell you what - you buy a copy of my book, and I'll come over to your house and clean the hair clogs out of your bath-tub drain, OK? Or I'll review your book if you'll review mine. The Sanna Chronicles are funny, light-hearted, swords, sorcery and knitting books with horse races, dancing girls, brawls, and evil mad-boy villains. Try it, you'll like it! $.99 on Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Sanna-Sorceress-Apprentice-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B004UCHQ3I/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Starbucks
What is it about a coffeeshop that inspires me to write? I'm kicked back with my beverage of choice (Earl Grey tea with three shots of raspberry syrup and soy milk) and the ebb and flow of humanity in this downtown coffee emporium is SO stimulating. A guy who looks flat out homeless is buying a $6 caramel macchaiatto and a $3 slice of cinnamon coffeecake. There are two exquisitely polished young women who blew in, grabbed their lattes, and are tete-a tete over one of these tiny tables, giggling and squealing, "Oh you didn't! Then what did he do?" A college girl in knee-length shorts, little canvas slippers, and four - count them, four layered cardigans in various stages of unbuttonage, breeze in, bought an iced fappe thing, and plumped down on a sofa, taking over the entire corner of the room with her books, papers, laptop, and right now she has a mirror set up on the coffee table and is braiding her pretty curly hair. The young man next to me is frowning at his laptop, checking a tiny notebook, poking a few keys, then frowning again. The baristas are young, stylish, and bored. If you need characters, go to a coffee shop downtown.
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