This week, my fellow author Beth Lapin and I made our public access TV debut, in which we discussed "Navigating the Publishing World Today." As I say in this video, I don't know everything, but I know a lot more than I did when I first began pitching my novel(s). If you're new to this business, or just would like to find out more about how I got started on the road to publication, you should find something of interest. I would love to hear from my readers about what you think of this video.

For some reason, the half-hour segment is divided into two files, so Part 2 is below. Happy viewing! Peace.

I'm kind of tired today. In twenty-four hours I have pulled together a WordPress web site almost entirely from scratch (well, there was a theme at least), created a member survey for a hereditary organization, baked bread, written dozens of emails, started a spreadsheet of grant submissions & outcomes, posted on Facebook, and been mom (the last being the most challenging job of all). I'd kind of like to lie around and maybe read some of the titles piling up on my Kindle.

But no, here I am thinking about publicity. Specifically, I'm thinking about blogging, covers, and book trailers, and about organizing a publicity plan for my forthcoming novel (did you see the cover??). I recently read a quote attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald saying something to the effect that writers are not one person, they are multiple people trying to fit inside one body. Anyone who is a writer or a frustrated writer knows what that means - we stand in the shower telling ourselves stories, we pretend that the random people we see in the supermarket are really ninjas ready to attack, or we wonder what would happen if a virus suddenly gave everyone amnesia, or... you get the idea.

We also think (fantasize) about the ways in which we will tell the world about our fabulous books. Some of these are purely fantastical (c'mon, I do write fantasy), such as meeting Jim Butcher on an airplane, while others are eminently practical, involving blog tours, guest posts, reviews, and the like. However, the answer to every problem a writer has is almost inevitably, "write more" - and that includes publicity. 

So despite my exhaustion, I'm going to open up the MSS for Sequel #1 (dang, I really need a title!) and take a look. I'm going to shut off (more or less ignore) the impulses to search out new review venues and the like, and concentrate on what I really need to do. 

The bread is 10-grain, by the way. It's delish. Peace!

I'm told I've been making a mistake with this blog. I've focused on the processes of writing and publication, and that doing so is deadly dull if I want to "connect" with readers. Sorry 'bout that. I didn't intend to serve as your nightly dose of boring.

Instead, I'm supposed to tell you about me. Hobbies, likes, dislikes, etc. Apparently readers are fascinated by authors' private lives. My problem is, I can't imagine what on earth to tell you about, nor why you'd be interested. I mean, my life is pretty much like many, many other people's.

Today I picked apples with my kids. Later, I peeled, seeded, and strained tomatoes in preparation for making sauce. Then, I went to the mall, bought things I most certainly could have lived without, and came home to turn 10 lbs of baker's-grade Honeycrisps into applesauce. As I write this I'm heating the water to finish the canning.

Woo hoo! 

On the other hand, I'm trying to figure out how much it would cost to charter a corporate jet from Austria to Bangor, Maine. It's a minor plot detail for Sequel #1, but I like to get these things right. In my head I'm imagining tomorrow's installment for my novel-in-tweets, and figuring out how I can possibly incorporate fireworks into an epic showdown in the underworld... isn't that stuff a lot more interesting?

But the applesauce is delish.

Peace!

It's a sin, right? Or at least, a peccadillo. 

But of course, we all do it. Think about the last time you strolled through the aisles of a bookstore (if you still have access to one) or in the library, glancing at the hundreds of thousands of titles available to you. Something on the spine of one causes you to pause, to slide your fingers onto it, pull it out for a better look... hmmm, the image(s) on the cover look "wrong" for your mood... you push it back into the stacks and continue your quest... aha! Here's one... you free it from its confinement, letting the cover see the light of day, perhaps for the first time... hey, that looks cool... into the basket it goes. And so on.

Once upon a time, book covers were limited to a title printed in block caps, not even an author's name. Maybe some gilt if you were really lucky. Then things got a little fancier, and certain top-shelf authors such as Mark Twain and RL Stevenson got "special editions" with nifty one-color graphics PLUS the gilt. Woo, hoo. 

Then came the penny dreadfuls, and the pulp fiction of the 20th century, with their full-color but bad art. When speculative fiction became a "thing" in the mid-20th-century (of course, it had always been around under other names), a new art form was born: sci fi/fantasy art created especially for the novel within the pages. Some of it was weird, some of it was beautiful, and nearly all of it was eye-catching. These covers began making other fiction look plain by comparison.

Not to be outdone, the romance biz, long a bastion of luridness, came out with photo-realistic covers featuring gorgeous male chests and scantily clad heroines that more than hinted of the eye candy within. Fast forward a couple decades, and in the era of the ebook covers are now a centerpiece of the marketing for a new title. We have "cover reveals" for forthcoming novels months in advance of their release. Jpegs get passed and posted all over the Internet. Covers are king.

Of course, the hype is exactly that. A great cover can help stimulate interest and hopefully boost sales, but if what's inside is terrible it's still a bad book. What's more, readers have not the slightest clue or interest in what is involved in designing that fabu-licious cover. They want a good book. To readers, covers are branding, and branding is the promise of a product to live up to the consumer's expectations. The cover is the unspoken message explaining genre, protagonist, setting, and content details (is there action? romance? paranormal elements?). The book had better deliver on that message.

I've been thinking about covers because I'm in the process of finalizing my own with my editor. It's been an interesting and fun process. I've looked more closely at covers than I've ever done, and it turns out that while there are several formulas, there's no hard and fast rules, even within a genre. I can say that with the advent of low-cost, high quality stock illustrations and someone clever with design software, producing a great cover is cheaper and easier than ever. I doubt that specially-commissioned cover art is going away for top-selling authors, but I imagine that new authors, mid-list authors, and small presses are going to be producing their covers entirely digitally. In a way, we're back to the late 19th century.