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Showing posts from July, 2013

Are your writing problems: wine, waste paper, or manure?

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Authors wear at least three hats – writer, publicist, and business executive. Instead of investing time and money in another seminar on how to manage your time more effectively, consider reading Murder: A New Way to Lose Weight . Don’t shake your head no, keep reading! Set priorities In Chapter One of Murder: A New Way to Lose Weight , Linda Almquist receives this advice on setting priorities when she begins a new job . “There are three types of problems. A few problems are like wine; those situations improve if you delay decisions and let them age. Most problems are like waste paper. You can ignore them because they don’t matter. Unfortunately like waste paper, they tend to be messy when they pile up. And some problems are like manure. You must identify them quickly before they stink.” Most of us are so swamped by our “waste paper” problems, that we ignore the “manure problems.” For example, I dribble away my time agonizing over the position of pictures in

Here I go Again!

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Yes, I'm planning another blog tour. I forgot how hard it is. This one is for my next Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery, Spirit Shapes . According to what I've been reading on different author lists, unless an author is a big name, they might as well forget trying to get a buzz for a coming book before the book is published. That's not what I'm doing here. My blog tour won't be going on until the book is available. However, in order to get the tour set up I have to begin now. I have to find 30 bloggers willing to host me for a day. I'm almost there, have on four empty days. Of course this meant emailing people and asking if they are willing. Some of the likely candidates were people who have been guests on my blog. Surprisingly, some of them don't have blogs. Of course keeping track of all this is also important, I need to have the date and the person, the URL for their blog, their email address to send the blog post when it's ready, and if they have s

The Rowling Experiment

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There’s been a lot of discussion recently about J. K. Rowling’s experiment in publishing a crime novel under an assumed name. For the benefit of those who may have been in limbo and out of touch with the news, Rowling—famous for her Harry Potter juvenile novels—decided to publish a debut detective novel under the name Robert Galbraith, alleged to be the married father of two and a former undercover investigator. Though the book sold about 1,500 copies in hardback (not bad for a debut mystery), sales didn’t really begin to soar until her cover was blown in a newspaper article. Some have accused Rowling of engaging in chicanery and leaking her identity to the press. Whether you believe that or not, is of no concern here. What is obvious, and hasn’t been stressed enough, is this fact: Names sell. This has always been true to a certain extent, but is even more true today. Readers, deluged with tons of books being published each year, must rely on certain fa

Dynamics of Change by Cindy Carroll

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Today my guest is Cindy Carroll who tells us about change and how it affects her writing. "The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress." ~  Charles Kettering  Nothing stays the same, even though for someone who hates change as much as I do, I wish some things would stay the same. My inability to embrace change was so bad that my work actually sent me on a course - Dynamics of Change. It was right before they laid a bunch of people off so I question their good intentions. For stories, as soon as I start writing them I start changing them. That's the only area of my life where I don't mind change. I embrace it even. Because I know when I change things I'll make the story better. At least I hope I'll make it better. The story I just released didn't start out how it finished. I had the idea in university (mumble years ago) and I wrote it with a specific intent. I wanted to fluster my professor. She was prim and pr

Going in Several Directions at Once

This seems to be the way I operate all the time. I've finished with my big job of putting together the Public Safety Writers Association's conference program. I will still be around to "back-up" my replacement, Mike Black. (Nothing like having an 80 year old woman as your back-up--will certainly be different for Mike.) I'm nearly finished with a paid job--it is writing, but of a different kind--putting together a program design for a new residential facility. And there is another looming in the near future. I spent quite a bit of time updating a book I got the rights back to when the publisher closed her doors. And was surprised at how many mistakes were in it--even wrong names. Amazing since I won a prize with that book. When it comes out again, it will have a new name. We're had lots of company and celebrations. My granddaughter and her family are back in California and visiting every weekend. Love seeing and playing with our great-granddaughter. And

E-book or Print

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Judy Alter give her thoughts on this question: I plunged headlong into the book world both as author and publisher in the 1980s, a different world from today. Hardcover books were the norm, and we used to agonize over the print run—1,000 copies, 1500? We didn’t want to run out but neither did we want a stock of unsold books in the warehouse. It was strictly a crap shoot—sometimes we lost, sometimes we won big time. After a book came close to selling out its cloth edition, we went to trade paper, assuming sales justified it. Then along came Print on Demand (or Print to Order as some call it) and e-books, and the whole publishing world turned topsy-turvy. I’m not sure it’s righted itself yet. Don’t get me wrong—I think both technological advances are great for both publishers and authors. I retired from publishing (I was director of a small academic press) four years ago and turned my attention to what I really wanted to do—writing mystery novels. After the usual