Authors Electric

Like you, I play many parts in the writing of a book: part plotter, part pantser, part craftsman, part laborer, part artist, and part klutz. And I accept myself as all of those. But so far I've never been able to see myself as a gifted promoter--or even a mildly competent one. When I finished a book, I moved on to the next with half-hearted touts on Facebook and Twitter/X. I've steered clear of giveaway events as well as interviews. My shyness or aversion stems, I think, from my Catholic upbringing--where the flames of hell were never far from shameless self-promotion.  But in the six years spent on my WIP, I learned some exciting new narrative footwork. Result: a new kind of crime thriller unlike anything else I've done. Ans I've developed a burning ambition to share this book with readers I've never managed to reach. And this will require mastering new footwork once again--this time in marketing and self-promotion. For months I've worked on expanding and stren...

In a minute I'll get to the rotten bitch who inspired this true fable. For now, true to form, I'll stand the writin' rules on their little pointed heads and start off with the moral: Familiarity with writers may breed worse than contempt: neglect. This moral evolved from three hard-learned lessons. (And don't fret, the rotten bitch is on her way.) 1) Many readers believe the best writers are dead. 2) Most readers prefer living writers to be remote, unreachable, even a bit otherworldly. The less known about them the better, for a myth is as good as a mile. 3) Some readers who are thinking of planning to write enjoy putting down struggling writers they meet. Every put down adds more fuel to the fire of their conviction that they're better off not trying. All right, all right, already. It's time now for the rotten bitch. Setting: the Amtrak Empire Builder, a round-trip cross country excursion. In the dining car I was seated with an at...

.By now you know me well enough to know I'm not speaking of this: On line I'm far more likely to talk of first-class  vowel  movements. And this is what I have in mind for my New Year post: So, Muse, help me fix my sights. Help me focus on, er, fiber in blogging.  Inspired by an AE post by Wendy Jones (link below), I set out to increase the numbers of the two blogs I run. 1) The main blog is called Southern Scotch. I call this my everything blog: from book reviews to interviews to thoughts about writing and life...it's all here. And here is where I suffered most from irregularity--with posts averaging just once a week. 2) The second blog is Seattle-related. This has evolved from the chronicle of a cross-country move to a monthly online 'zine called The Seattle Rock. The challenge here is different--to keep building reader interest in a once-a-month event. So, two blogs with two distinct challenges...each requiring a creative approach to regularity. ...

          I hadn't heard my son coming into the office as I typed away at some self-promotional piece of blogging or tweeting or whatever was the social media flavour of that day. He only needed to stand behind me for a moment to grasp what I was doing, being a world-class reader of screens.           "Whoring yourself again?" he enquired cheerfully before ambling off to stare into the fridge for a while.           The bluntness of his comic timing made me laugh, as it often does, then I got thinking. "Whoring yourself again" is pretty much the perfect definition of freelance life. I've spent time with a great many people who have at some stage been involved in prostitution, either voluntarily or enforced. You sell your body or you sell your brain - either way you run the risk of ending up selling your soul. Most writers hate promoting themselves, al...