Some Days Call for You Tube

Seriously?

Do I really waste my time on YouTube? Not as much as I did when it was a novelty, but I do return to favorite videos when I need a laugh.

The past month had more valleys than peaks for me and mine, so I’ve clicked these links several times. They serve one purpose: they make me smile. I’m going to list three of them and a bonus “kitty song” to hopefully brighten up your day.

1. The “Use Condoms” commercial video – it’s not dirty, just super funny. Trust me!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luZ_-E0PlXs

2. The best wedding party entrance ever filmed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-94JhLEiN0

3. A model wipes out during a Paris fashion show. It’s not the fall that’s funny, but the anchormen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JICRtY-epH4

Bonus: This song will be with you all day! Share it with cat lovers. My kids LOVE this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qit3ALTelOo

Anyone else have a favorite YouTube clip? Feel free to make us laugh!

(Can you tell I have a deadline in 3 weeks or what?)

TV, by Jess Lourey

You’re not supposed to look at the image of yourself on TV while you’re on TV. You are supposed to have a facial expression other than “frozen smile melting into fear.” You’re not supposed to stare so intently at the host that it looks like you’re wondering what her hair tastes like.

This is what I know about promoting your book on television, and I learned it all the hard way on Showcase Minnesota last week.

My publicist, Courtney, has been doing a fantastic job setting up media events to promote September Fair. She’s nailed numerous newspaper, radio, and television appearances, not because I’m in demand but because I have serendipitously written a murder mystery that takes place at the Minnesota State Fair that just so happened to be released two weeks before the Fair opened. Turns out people like a little “dairy princess getting murdered while her head is carved from butter” mixed in with coverage of the prize-winning pumpkin, the farmer whose gone to every State Fair since he was born except for the year he was away at war, and the “how to make ____-on-a-stick” recipe segments.

But here’s the dirty secret: most of us don’t write because we like attention, and we certainly don’t like being on TV. We write because sitting in front of a computer, writing, wearing pjs so worn that the butt area is more screen than door suits us just fine. When I’m on TV, I’m not thinking deep or sparkly thoughts, and I’m not having fun. I’m hoping I don’t snart, do remember the name of either of my two children, and don’t accidentally blurt out “two city busses,” the calming mantra of my two-year-old second cousin.

It does get easier, however. A little Vaseline on my teeth so I don’t flash the snaggle-toothed smile, a couple homeopathic stage fright pills that taste like sugar and probably are, and clothes that don’t cling, and I can stumble through an interview all right. Or not. You can be the judge. And wish me luck—I’m doing Fox Morning News and Twin Cities Live tomorrow. While you're at it, why don't you tell me what the worst/most embarassing thing you've ever seen someone do on live television is. I'll treat the information either as schadenfreude food (schadenfood!) or a slippery slope that I'm plummeting toward.

Title 5

Cricket McRae

Lye in Wait
Heaven Preserve Us
Spin a Wicked Web
Something Borrowed, Something Bleu
???

Okay, so the titles of my Home Crafting Mysteries are admittedly punny, maybe even a little corny. Hopefully memorable, as well. Each one does manage to touch on the home craft which serves as a backdrop for that particular story of murder and mayhem. I've never had any trouble coming up with titles. Easy peasy.

So it was with a certain amount of dismay that I realized I didn't know what to call the fifth in the series. All the other books were a title in my head first, and much of the story fell out of those few words. They had power. They were the hook on which I hung my tale when I left for the night.

Now I'm working on a another mystery, and it doesn't have a name. Oh sure, there's a working title. I don't hate it, but it doesn't resonate. It also doesn't reveal enough about the home craft behind the mystery. It's ... well, it's pretty bland.

I've thought about having a contest, but hesitate. What if I don't like any of the entries enough to choose one? Is that merely negative thinking? Why is this so important to me? Am I just being a control freak? Because, believe me, that's certainly possible. Oh, yes.

The longer I go without THE TITLE, the better I want it to be. This one needs to be clever, memorable. Punny, but in a good way. (Is there a good way?) If it's going to be this tough to come up with, it should be downright awesome.

Please understand: I'm not under the the illusion that my existing titles are genius. That's not the point. The point is the role they played in my head while I was writing. This one is different. I don't know -- maybe that's a good thing. Maybe I won't find the right title until the book is done. That's what a lot of (most) writers do, isn't it?

How important are titles to you? Do you have one when you start a piece, or does the title come out of the story after you've written it?

Dishing Out a Little Tough Love

One of the things I love best is helping new and aspiring authors. After all, many published authors gave me helpful advice when I was starting out. But today I’m enforcing tough love.

Recently, someone asked me about promoting and marketing her book. From our conversation, I assumed that her book was done and she was at least in the searching for an agent/publisher phase. Not so. When asked about the book’s status, she told me that she was in the final edits, which she estimated would take her another couple of years.

A couple of years?!!!!! To edit genre fiction? Boggles the mind.

More and more I’m being asked for advice about marketing from folks who have never finished a manuscript. They are putting the cart before the horse. They are getting geared up to play author without first doing the work that makes one an author. And the brutal truth of it is, unless these folks change their ways, they may never be published. Or if they are, will find it difficult, if not downright impossible, to handle the demands of a writing career.

While publishing seems to move at a snail’s pace, in reality it is a face-paced business – for the author. If you write a series, your publisher will expect a complete book a year, or at the very least one every eighteen months. Putter in your kitchen. Putter in your garden. There is no puttering in the business of professional writing.

Tips for puttering writers who are serious about becoming professional novelists:

1) You’ve heard it before, but I’m saying it again - decide on a writing schedule and stick with it. If you are serious about becoming a published author, you will make the time. If you don’t, you need to rethink your commitment to writing. It’s really that simple.

2) Pick up your writing pace. Which is not the same as slapping a book together. Learn to focus your writing so that it is more efficient when it hits the page. Editing is an important part of writing, but you can keep massive edits to a minimum if you organize your plot points and character development better. Use index cards, Post-Its, a white board, computer notes – whatever it takes to keep your manuscript on track. Learn to do this now, not when you’re staring down the double-barrel of a deadline.

3) Make steady progress by setting daily, weekly and/or monthly goals. Tell yourself that you MUST complete so many words or pages in a set amount of time. And hold yourself to those goals. Learn to sacrifice to meet these goals.

4) Put marketing and promotion on the back burner. Don’t waste valuable writing time worried about something you don’t need yet. About the time you start looking for an agent (when your manuscript is done), put together a marketing outline for your book. Your agent may want to use this when approaching publishers.

5) Do not start promoting your book until you have a publisher and a release date. Otherwise you may lose the element of excitement when the book is finally released.

Now go forth and write … and don’t forget to have fun doing it!




Ghost a la Mode, the first Ghost of Granny Apples mystery, is out NOW!
www.sueannjaffarian.com
www.sueannjaffarian.blogspot.com

Where Do You Get Your Ideas? (And Does It Matter?)

"Where do you get your ideas?"

I mean, really, is there any other question so ubiquitous in the life of an author?

That said, it’s also a GREAT question because I know as a reader I often find myself looking up from the page and thinking, “I wonder how the author came up with this?”

After all, since the birth of the Internet we all have access to scads and scads of information. So how can it be that two people might look at the same occurrence or the same news article or the same commentary and then disappear into their offices to write two entirely different books? How can it be that Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse (once called her “Southern Vampire” series) be incredibly different from Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight? Which is different from Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat? Which is different from Bram Stoker’s Dracula? Which is different from Rosemary Laurey’s Kiss Me Deadly?

Truth to tell, there’s nothing new under the sun. Or, ahem, under the full moon either.

Today I found an old handout from Lou Heckler, one of my favorite speakers. Check him out at http://www.louheckler.com/ It would be difficult to find a more thoughtful, entertaining and erudite platform professional. If you ever get the chance to see him, by all means do. (While you listen, pay careful attention to the structure of his talk. He’s very canny about the order he uses to present and emphasize information. Really, each time he speaks, it’s a master class in the art of giving an effective presentation.) In this particular handout, Lou discussed how “theme” is not the same as “slant.” You see, all those books I mentioned above have vampires as their theme. Each book, however, has a different slant.

Charlaine Harris’s work raises questions about xenophobia, what it means to be human, and whether our prejudices might stem, in part, from our religious beliefs.

Stephenie Meyer’s work takes the form of a romance novel with its extended riff on unfulfilled sexual promise, but she is writing about the trauma of being an awkward teenager.

Anne Rice’s work had a decidedly gothic theme and a religious viewpoint. Their setting—New Orleans—was as vibrant as any character.

Bram Stoker’s work wasn’t the first mention of vampires in literature, but it was probably the great granddaddy of most of what we think about the undead, blood-suckers. Written in epistolary form (diary and newspaper articles provide much of the information), it sprang from the legend of “Vlad the Impaler.” The novel is supposedly a riff on the clash between the new world and the old.

Rosemary Laurey’s work is incredibly romantic and yet very modern. It follows many of the ideals of popular romance novels, but adds in the sort of questions that are part of our zeitgeist.
As I write this, I think of the classes I’ve taught about getting published. Many times students will tell me they fear having their ideas stolen. That’s reasonable. That can happen. But most ideas for books are fungible. It’s the slant, the plotting, and the author’s voice, that make a book unique—and therefore, salable.

Tooting Our Own Horn

My daughter is a master of promotion.  She turned eight on Saturday and everyone in the county knew about it. 

For one thing, she wore a glitzy tiara (is there any other kind of tiara, actually?) that was fringed with pink faux fur.  She wore this crown in public during our many shopping expeditions and for at least a week before her birthday. (I figured…well, why not?  I’ve learned not to sweat the small stuff.)

Why did she wear it?  So kind ladies and gentlemen would sweetly inquire why she had such a lovely tiara on.  And she would have to explain about her imminent birthday...it would be rude, after all, not to respond to a grown up.

Not only that, but she had a sign outside her bedroom door that said “Birthday Princess” on it.  The tiara rested on the balcony railing right outside her  door when it wasn’t on her head.  You could see it from the front door downstairs.

In late May she started counting down the days until her birthday.

She’d told so many people about her birthday that she sent out invitations to her party over a month in advance (and didn’t even say who the invite was from…after all, it had been well publicized.)

She’s a natural promoter.

I also think she may  prove to be a foundling.

Promoting is hard for me.  I personally know a writer who had a clever shirt made up after the movie The Sixth Sense came out.  The shirt read: “I Write Dead People.”  I thought it was wonderful, but I’d never be able to get away with it, myself. 

What’s been my salvation?  The internet.  I had an August release only a few weeks before my daughter’s highly publicized birthday.  I did a countdown of sorts online--I’d mention the day of the release and what I was doing to prepare for it.

I’ve connected with readers, writers, and reviewers via Twitter, Facebook, blogging, and my website.  My efforts seem to be going well---folks are reading my book.  I’m getting emails from readers saying they enjoyed the mystery and asking when the next one is coming out.

The face-to-face promoting that my daughter is so awesome at?   I’ll have to work on that one.   

Passion

You can tell when people have passion. The glint in their eyes, the bubbling enthusiasm in their voices, the frantic energy in their hand movements when they talk about what excites them. It's the fire inside that drives people toward a goal, often against long odds.

Passion and creativity seem to feed off each other. Go to any art, craft, or hobby show, and you'll see "creators" of all stripes, using a variety of media to produce works that are elegant or complex or just plain awesome.

Almost without exception, they're passionate about what they're doing, about what they've created with their minds and hands and hearts. They have to be, to endure uncomfortable metal folding chairs for hours, often getting weird looks and weirder comments about their objets d'art. And the pay? For most, I'd wager the money they receive doesn't begin to cover the costs of the materials, let alone compensate them for the hours and hours spent on their craft and the basement full of "not-quite-perfects."

Writers are a passionate bunch, too.

I can tell passionate authors from the first page, through their voice. Their passion is what gives the story that extra oomph, that unique sparkle. I know if authors have passion, I'm going to get a good story.

These days, writers also need passion to get their book into the hands of readers. I don't see how writers could spend months--or years--working on a single project, without any assurances that it will get published and read, unless something spurred them on.

This passion was on display at the Virginia Festival of the Book I attended back in March. Held in Charlottesville, the Festival is a great event, bringing scores of authors together with their readers to talk books. There are panels, lectures, how-to sessions, displays, and, of course, book signings.

After lunch, the keynote speaker, Brad Meltzer, set up shop in the lobby to sign books. The line snaked all the way through the lobby and down an adjacent hallway. Close to a hundred eager fans waited patiently for a chance to get their book signed by a famous author.

But it was the action in the back of the lobby that grabbed my attention. This area was reserved for authors to market their own books. I'd wager that no one--outside of a small circle of friends and family--had ever heard of these authors. Many were self-published, some were with small presses, some were with microscopic presses. Their genres ranged from local history to memoir to military strategy to "making better times happen" through chrono-cognitive therapies (technically, probably not a "genre").

There were no lines stretching out the door for these folks.

Instead, these passionate authors-turned-salespeople hustled. They had a product to sell--one they fervently believed in--and they stood beside their little tables, doing whatever they could to attract the browsers. Some shook hands of everyone who passed, some resorted to calling out like carnival barkers, others gave away candy or bookmarks or postcards or Xeroxed pamphlets containing excerpts. All sported broad smiles.

It wouldn't surprise me if Brad Meltzer sold more books during his single signing than any of the other self-pubbed authors sold throughout their book's lifetime.

But I do know this--they share one thing.

Passion.