Tag Archives: book promotion

Imaginary Cycle Trips, Summer Visitors & Garden Bounty

View from my stationary bike - Guenette photo

A recent knee problem has prompted me to follow my doctor’s advice on the need for a non-loadbearing exercise regime to strengthen quad muscles and make this type of injury less likely in the future. She recommended a recumbent, stationary exercise bike.

We had always planned to extend the covering over our back deck and since I absolutely refuse to ride a stationary bike inside the house, the timing was perfect. Deck cover is now done, bike is in place and I have embarked on an imaginary, stationary bike ride across Canada to visit my son in Ottawa. Things are off to a slow but steady start. It took me some time to cover the gravel road out of here but now I am onto the highway (metaphorically speaking) and rolling along.

Resistance is set low, speed consistent at about 17 miles per hour and as I recover, I’m keeping the riding time to thirty minutes per day. It’s like cruising on a very smooth track. There will be time enough to build in higher resistance, greater speed and lengthier rides. The longest journey starts with a single step. Or should I say, a spin of the bike wheel?

Emma in Save-On with Chasing Down the Night - Guenette photo

Granddaughter, Emma, at Save-On Foods in Campbell River – having fun posing with my book.

We’ve just come through an amazing two weeks of friends, grandkids, kids and nieces visiting us at the lake with all the fun, laughs and good times that go along with such times. Please watch for future posts covering the highlights. I’ve had a wonderful break from social media and am coming back refreshed and happy.

Chelsea relaxing and reading Chasing Down the Night - Guenette photo

My niece, Chelsea, enjoying a reading break. Her choice – Chasing Down the Night, of course!

Final edits on Maelstrom are keeping me at my computer for thirty minute blocks several times per day. I now set a timer and get up when it goes off. Good knee health and all of that. I find it amazing just how fast thirty minutes can fly by.

The garden has moved into high production mode and we are reaping the harvest. Yesterday I was busy making blackberry jam and tonight’s dinner features fresh green beans, zucchini and tomatoes.

Blackberry jam - Guenette photo

Reason clears and plants the wilderness of the imagination to harvest the wheat of art. (Austin O’Malley)

Back to Twitter–Tweet, Tweet

P1080084

My on again, off again relationship with Twitter is back on! A few posts ago, I wrote about reassessing my social media platform for book promotion. The discussion that followed this post was engaging and useful.

Peter Mallet commented: Twitter is very social. You won’t see value if you only tweet buy my book, or service. Instead, do those kinds of things rarely. Do have your link to your site in your profile but then try to be useful. It does come down to being social. These aren’t ad platforms, so if you’re social first you’ll find people being more interested in what you do. It’s harder, but it’s what works. It’s like speaking first (providing a service) and then having a book table at the back.

Check out Peter’s own post on this subject – Gaining Attention Without Losing Ground

I’m back at Twitter and actually enjoying it! Here’s how I’m currently making it work for me.

First, I seriously honed down the number of people I was following – probably by 100 or more and that process is ongoing. If it isn’t working, folks – change it up. I stopped following people for a number of reasons.

  • People who re-tweet other people over and over in a short time frame – say five minutes. (My impression is that they must have a reciprocal arrangement with these people. Maybe I’m the crazy one here, but – you tweet me and I’ll tweet you – defeats the purpose of being socially genuine.)
  • People who tweet or re-tweet things I find questionable. I’ve dropped most people who use foul language or mentions private body parts in their tweets. Really – is there a need for this? (But no hard and fast rules either – if it’s a funny use of profanity, there’s no reason to over-react, right?)
  • People who tweet about how many people they have unfollowed in a given time frame – who cares? (The argument here is that you must follow everyone who follows you or extreme circumstances will befall you – crap to that.)
  • People whose tweets are overflowing with mentions and hashtags – so blue, I can’t determine the purpose of the message.
  • People whom I have never seen tweet anything but – BUY MY BOOK or avail yourself of MY SERVICE – boring.

With those changes in place, I am enjoying my Twitter feed more and more. But I also needed to take a serious look at the way I was tweeting and change my own habits.

I still tweet out a link to my book on Amazon, or to let people know if I have a new review, or if I’m going to be appearing on a blog, or if something exciting happens to me in my self-publishing life. But that isn’t all I tweet (and, by the way, it never was!)

I’m now working hard to be much more social. I pull off a brilliant one-liner in response to someone else’s tweet, re-tweet other people’s blogs or articles, tweet out some value-added information. Recently, I took three days to tweet my whole dirty dozen list of bad communication styles from my Saying What Matters Blog.

And some days, I just tweet for fun.

Here’s a link to a excellent post I found today on (you guessed it) Twitter – How not to annoy your Twitter followers. Belinda Pollard at Small Blue Dog Publishing has this subject nailed and if you follow the link to her site, you’ll discover this for yourself.

And another I discovered while participating in a great sharing event, Tidbit Tuesday – Twitter Prose: The 411 on Crafting Good 140’s

It’s all about attitude. Social media platforms don’t sell books. Books sell books, one reader at a time. If you’re only on the social media bandwagon to sell stuff, you’re bound to be disillusioned pretty quickly. I love the way Peter Mallet says – be social first, but you can still have the book table in the background. That’s me – social foot forward, and if you’re interested . . . I did write this book . . .

P1080215

We even get social here at the lake now and then Open-mouthed smile

Getting inside a Writer’s Head–Part 2

DSC_0107-2

Here is part 2 of my interview from Pamela Cook’s,  Flying Pony Blog

Can you describe for us your writing process, from getting the original idea to completed manuscript?

Disappearing in Plain Sight came out of me in a rush. It was like having some kind of virus. I couldn’t stop until it had run its course. The first draft was a bare bones thing. I shelved fiction writing for a time – too long, but life does intervene. When I came back to my tattered draft, I found parts that didn’t make as much sense as they could have and themes that screamed to be tweaked and expanded. The second draft added one hundred pages. With a trembling hand, I sent my baby to a few beta readers, and the response was positive. That’s when the idea, that this book could be more than a mere indulgence, began to take root. Serious rewriting followed.

Then came that magic moment when I thought the book was finished. Like many such moments, it was fleeting. Lucky me (and I mean that, hands down), I was told in no uncertain terms that I needed an editor. The story was good, the characters were gripping, but the mechanical aspects of my writing needed work and the ordering of events throughout the book was clunky.

I was able to work with a fantastic copy editor as well as a proof reader all rolled into one sensitive package. (Check out the difference between these two types of editing on Change it Up Editing – a great site.)

I put the manuscript through a major revamp. Like many novice writers, I had crammed the first few chapters with far too much backstory. Correcting this was painful. I felt as though I had torn the book to pieces and was on the floor, crawling around, desperate to glue it back together. Like so many difficult processes in life, the hard work paid off.

Then there were point of view issues to address. Parts of the book contained messy head-jumping from character to character. For every scene, I had to ask myself, who has the most at stake here?

Endless rounds of chapter by chapter, line by line editing followed to correct the messy mechanical errors. The process wrapped up with final proof reading.

My current novel, The Light Never Lies, (the sequel to Disappearing in Plain Sight) is clearly benefiting from what I learned the first time around. I’ve worked from a detailed outline with a clear sense of beginning, middle and end. I’ve addressed some of my more obvious grammatical errors, though that is a constant and painful learning process. I won’t be adding material in subsequent drafts; more likely I’ll find myself in a slashing process. What is it Stephen King says? First draft – 10% = Second Draft

Describe your path to publication.

I decided to pursue self-publishing without first going through, what many report to be, a painful and time-consuming process of finding an agent or submitting one’s manuscript to traditional publishers. The gatekeeping function of many publishing houses struck me as a significant stumbling block for a new author. I researched what other self-published authors were saying about their experiences and decided it was the right path for me.

I went the route of assisted self-publishing. (See my previous post on Reassessment Time )

Which aspects do you least love (or detest!) about the process to date?

I have now had a taste of the promotion and marketing aspects of self-publishing. It is exciting and chalk full of unique experiences. And it is terrifying and time-consuming and draining.

P1060784

I am an introvert and I’ve never been a fan of blowing my own horn.

When the dust settles, I imagine that my promotion and marketing will end up being what most of my life has been – a collaborative process. I’ve already enlisted the help of a flaming extroverted friend or two to help me navigate the social aspects of book promotion.

What advice would you give to writers who are working towards publication?

DSC_0837Don’t give up. From initial idea to publication, Disappearing in Plain Sight took four years of my life. I went through periods of despair along the way. The journey was long and difficult. When I held my book in my hands and saw it up on Amazon, all the effort was worthwhile.

Give yourself permission to accept that what you’re doing is serious. When I supervised graduate student researchers, I would advise those who struggled with doubts about their writing, that the only critic they needed to satisfy was the one in their own mind. I think this speaks to an important truth; we worry a lot about how others will judge our ideas and work. When it came to being a writer, the only person I had to convince was me.

P1000925When Disappearing in Plain Sight was published, my son told me, “Mom, many people say they have a book in them, but how many of them do the work to make it happen? You actually did it.”

Naturally we had to celebrate – tower of onion rings and a beer Open-mouthed smile

Yay me, and yay you for not giving up!

IMG_6425 (2)

I Go Public with Disappearing in Plain Sight

P1060757

Yesterday, I partnered up with my wonderfully extroverted friend, Marion, at the mall in the nearby community of Port Hardy. We rented adjacent tables, and she sold her beautiful, handcrafted scarfs and hats, and I sold my book.

What an experience. I wish you could meet Marion. She knows everyone there is to know197577_18156494096_8734_n[1] in Port Hardy. She called people over to the table and introduced, “her writer friend, Fran.” She told everyone she was reading the book, and it was fantastic. People she regularly has coffee with at a local diner, gathered around to talk and even buy a book.

 

I heard all about a new phenomenon in Port Hardy – wind mill guys (but there are also gals). A large wind farm is being installed on Knob Hill, near Cape Scott on the Northern tip of Vancouver Island. The project employs a lot of people from far and wide. Marion’s friend pointed a few of them out to me as they cruised through the mall on their way to the local grocery store. She nodded knowingly and said, “Wind mill guys”. She told of a fellow who showed up at the local Legion’s turkey dinner wearing a pair of $3000.00 shoes. She gave another sage nod. “A wind mill guy.”

IMG_1292

(One of the windmill blades being moved across the highway outside of Port Hardy on route to the site)

My writer’s imagination went wild with thoughts of a book about what happens to a small community when an influx of wind mill guys blow into town.

I chatted with a woman who is writing her own book with surprisingly similar themes. Thank the stars I have read widely because I was able to talk knowledgeably about various books people mentioned that they were currently reading. I had a chance to catch up with a woman I have known forever. She was in the mall with her oldest daughter and two adorable grandchildren. She bought a book and then her daughter bought one, as well.

People stopped and talked about health concerns, the local council, and the previous night’s very wild and crazy event at a local pub that featured a Newfoundland band.

I also heard a captivating story about some guys someone had once met who had been hauling a load of bathtubs across the prairies. They had some engine trouble and ended up stranded in a small town waiting for a part. One thing led to the other, and they were still there three days later. There was a heat wave going on, and a local blues festival had the camp grounds overloaded. The enterprising men had unloaded the bathtubs and set them up in a row by the river. They were filling them up and selling baths. According to the storyteller, people had lined up around the bend, dropping their towels by the open-air tubs and hopping right in. Only on the Canadians prairies, you might well conclude that. Once again my imagination was working overtime thinking about how I could work that story into a book sometime.

For my first public appearance to promote and sell my book, it went exceptionally well. I wasP1060756 thrilled with the way the book looked, copies of it stacked on the table. I enjoyed talking about the fact that I had written a novel and what it was about. I loved watching and interacting with “the locals” – remembering that I am a North Islander, too. It was delightful to ask people, “Did you want me to sign your copy?” And having them respond, “Of course.”

 

One comment about my photos for the event – I brought my camera with every intention of getting all kinds of terrific candid shots. I only took two pictures, and those were when we were setting up. If you want pictures of any event, don’t imagine you will have the time to take them yourself. Make sure you assign the task of taking photos to someone else. Lesson learned and noted.

Thank you, Marion and thank you Port Hardy for a great day!

DSC_0814

(Photo of me on Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles, enjoying the best ever Margarita. I felt this happy last night. I offer up a toast to everyone who made me first book outing so great.)