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Showing posts from 2011

What They Got Right

This is the first time since December 2010 that I have not had a deadline looming within the next thirty days. I have written, formatted, designed, marketed, promoted, and published four books in the past eight months. Seriously. So that’s why you haven’t heard from me in awhile. I currently have 18 books under the Blue Merle Publishing logo, and I am finally beginning (and I do mean beginning ) to feel like a real publisher. And let me tell you something: it’s hard. There are people who have been doing this far longer than I have, and who have far more claim to expertise than I do, so I don’t pretend to set myself up as an authority on the subject of independent publishing. However, with all the rockets buzzing around the internet about what traditional publishing has done wrong, my recent experience in indie publishing, juxtaposed against twenty-plus years in traditional publishing, has pointed out to me that there is a reason why traditional publishing has survived for over a h

The Million Dollar Deal That Ruined My Career

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Now available at Amazon.com Before Harry Potter, before Twilight, before the hundreds of thousands of vampire , wizard, demon, zombie, angel, fairy and just-plain-strange books that proliferate the marketplace today, I wrote a book about werewolves. It wasn’t, in my humble opinion, just an ordinary book, and these were not ordinary werewolves. It was at that time the best book I had ever written. Believe it or not, I wasn’t the only one who thought it was pretty good. The Passion (and its sequel, The Promise ) sold after a ten–day auction for a phenomenal amount of money (to be strictly accurate, it was not quite one million, but by the time sub-rights were sold the difference was negligible, to me, at least). Within the week, offers for audio, foreign, and large print rights were pouring in. James Cameron and Stephen Spielberg were both interested in film rights. And then it all went to hell. For reasons I still don’t entirely understand, the publisher abandoned the book. Possibl

The Reader's Prayer

Tell me a story.   Hold out your hand, take me on a ride.  Entertain me, transport me, amuse me, inspire me, educate me, uplift or enlighten me. Engage me. Tell me a story.   Don't waste my time with pretentions of grandeur.  Save the world on your own dime.  I'm here to be delighted, enraptured, moved and transformed.  I want to believe.  I want to be transported.   Make me angry, make me weep, make me afraid, but for heaven's sake, make me care . Tell me a story.   Keep me awake at night, turning pages. Haunt me through the day. Draw me in to your world, wrap me in the shimmering, glittering colors of your imagination, let me drown in your words. Make me never want to leave.   Take me, I'm yours. Tell me a story.   --Donna Ball

Writing Without a Net

It's hard to believe that it was only eighteen months ago that I first starting dipping my toes into the chilly waters of e-publishing. For the first year I was still under contract with my print publisher, and I experimented timidly with uploading some of my backlist titles to Kindle. All the time I kept daydreaming about sitting down and actually producing a new title-- an entire book--exclusively for self-publication. Finally, in May of this year, I got the courage to do it. And everything changed. Three weeks ago I actually withdrew a book from submission because a) I realized I could make more money by publishing it myself b)the book was too important to me to see it massacred, as so many other of my books have been, by the Big Six publishing system. So wow. I guess I am now officially on my own. Papa Publisher is no longer there to pat me on the head, tell me what's best for me, and make all my decisions. My safety net is gone, and it's a long way down. In my car

One More Time

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Words written since last post: 57,323 Words deleted since last post: 17,201 Words rewritten since last post:  way too many! Okay, back to a semi-regular schedule after tornado recovery, internet failure and yes, in the midst of all this, the completion and publication of my very first original e-book! On that subject, I am still getting e-mail from readers complaining about my decision to publish digital editions of my books.  Some of these are a little snippy.  Some are simply hurt and confused.  Have I abandoned books?  What will become of those who don't have, or want to have, e-readers?  Don't I care about my reading public? These letters are particularly disheartening when they begin by saying, "I just got your last three books from a used book store/book exchange/friend or relative..." since, as we surely all know by this point, neither authors or publishers receive money from these sources and a lack of money is precisely why publishers don't buy b

Confessions of an Introvert

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So here’s the thing: I have danced with my dog on stage in front of three thousand people and a television crew. Swear to God. I have been featured on television talk shows, news broadcasts and documentaries dozens of times. I’ve stood before audiences in aggregate of the tens of thousands over the years to give speeches, workshops and key note addresses, and my heart never skipped a beat. I am not shy. In fact, some people might even say I shine in the spotlight. Most of the time. You see, I am at heart an introvert. That means, among other things, that I spend more time thinking than acting. That I value my privacy. That I give one hundred percent of myself to every experience and because of that, I choose my experiences carefully. And that I suck at social media. I have to point out that I am not talking about the comfortable, day-to-day interaction with my readers through e-mail, my blogs and discussion groups.  I  could not live without the encouragement from  and contact wit

In Review

Long, long ago book reviews were an elite art form. They were written by professional journalists and established writers who were considered masters in their field—Mark Twain reviewing James Fennimore Cooper, for example, was a masterpiece in itself—and carried an appropriate amount of weight. The majority of book reviews appeared in newspapers, magazines and trade journals, and most readers never saw more of the review than the pull quote placed on the book cover by the publisher. The internet has changed all that. Today the self published or small press book is likely to be reviewed by the same blogger who reviews top selling hard covers from major publishers. A hundred great customer reviews can easily overrule one mediocre review in the trades—and let’s not even talk about what a hundred one-star customer reviews can do. So in this time when everyone has an opinion about everything, and anyone with an internet connection has the means with which to express it, it might be a goo

Then and Now

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I hardly ever use this blog to promote my own work-- well not much, anyway! --but I have had such an interesting experience preparing SANCTUARY for release that I thought it was worth commenting on.  Briefly. A few years back (quite a few, actually!)  I sold what is called a "breakthrough" novel ( THE PASSION by Donna Boyd ) at auction for a great deal of money.  I had been a hardworking, steadily selling midlist author until this point for ten years, and I understood that what I had written was  really, really good.  I thought it deserved all the attention it was getting.  But when my editor said to me, "It must feel wonderful to write such an extraordinary book!" I remember replying, "Yes, it does.  But this isn't the first extraordinary book I've written.  It's just that no one noticed the others." SANCTUARY  is one of the books that no one noticed. In the early nineties, I sold the manuscript for Sanctuary to a  somewhat cheesy publ

How Vampires Killed Publishing

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You know me. If I can possibly blame anything on vampires—from the Russian Revolution to the current price of gas—I will. So here’s my theory about why publishing houses are crumbling, book stores are closing, and tens of thousands of writers are wondering how they are going to feed their families this year. It has absolutely no basis in fact, so please don’t look for one. From : Editor @ Bigass Publishing To : Pathetic Writer @ Nowheresville Subject : Sorry, Charlie Dear Pathetic, I’m afraid I have bad news. Despite the fact that your last two coming- of- age novels set in Small Town, USA, have received excellent reviews and done reasonably well for their genre, and even though your new proposal about a young nun who is struck blind and receives the gift of healing while on an archealogical dig in Syria does have a certain appeal, I’m afraid we will not be offering another contract at this point. The consensus of the editorial committee is that, while your writing is lyrical,

It's March, and I'm reading...

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Patrick Taylor’s An Irish Country Courtship , of course! There is something about these Irish Country books that, for me, define the word “cozy”, although I’m quite sure that in terms of genre they are not categorized that way. They transport me to a quiet and peaceful world, where folks tend to meander rather than stride, where the problems are real but manageable, and where no one ever, ever texts. This is a world I want to live in. But because I can’t, I look forward once or twice a year to visiting there. As I look back over my reading life I realize that my love affair with peaceful, orderly worlds is decades old. I discovered the novels of Georgette Heyer when I was a teenager and devoured every one, pulling them off the library shelves like they were candy waiting to be unwrapped. Of course I realize that these books were technically Regency romances, but they were at heart stories about a kinder, gentler world where the rules of society were clearly understood and observed

The Worst Book EVER

You know I rarely give bad reviews. I respect the work of the author—however misled he/she might have been—too much to publicly defile it. I know what it takes to write 70,000 words. I know they can’t all be jewels. But O.M.G. I have just read the worst book ever written… And it was mine. The heroine was so stupid I wanted to slap her. Get a life, already! Are you supposed to be real, or did you just step out of a Marvel comic? Ever heard of a little thing called backbone?? Grow a set, already! The hero at least had two dimensions: flat, and flatter. Excuse me, even actors need motivation. Do you have any background whatsoever or did you spring full grown, Glock in hand, from the mind of a singularly demented writer? Are we supposed to believe that dialogue? Give me a break! And the plot! Don’t get me started. First of all, can we say Paranoid Delusional? And pul-eeze, it’s the freakin’ 21st century. Ever heard of a little thing called CSI? Not that hard to solve a crime, cupca

The Great E-Book Experiment: Conclusions

Well, this has been a fascinating few days. I thought the learning curve was high when I first began to tackle the process of formatting, uploading and designing covers for my e-book backlist, but I hadn't even scratched the surface.  In the past 72 hours I have written nothing, created nothing, accomplished nothing.  I have been down the rabbit hole and back.  I have read hundreds of thousands of words (ok-- maybe only tens of thousands) of blog and forum entries and posted comments on most of them. My quiet, calm, essentially secluded  writerly world has been invaded by dozens of internet personalities I don't even know.  I have an agent waiting for a proposal, a book I need to edit, and I can't seem to drag myself away from the internet long enough to do either.  I am about ready to start ravng like Charlie Sheen.     BUT... I have learned something. 1) I hate The Social Network, don't want to be a part of The Social Network, could care less what The Social Netwo

The Great E-Book Experiment: Results

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This month marks the one- year anniversary of my Great E-book Publishing Experiment. With 11titles now live on Kindle and 5 live on all other platforms via Smashwords , I am here to report the results. Here’s a hint: they are somewhat less than spectacular. Background: around this time last year I became intrigued by the success of authors such as Joe Konrath who had begun making their backlist and original titles available on Amazon.com’s Kindle platform, and whose staggering monetary rewards far outshone any print deal offered them (or me!) by traditional publishers. One of my own print publishers had offered one of my titles for free on Kindle over the 3 day Christmas holiday and over 60,000 copies were downloaded (more importantly, my spring royalty check was 5 times higher than it had ever been before) Even more surprising to me was the fact that many of the most successful Kindle authors were completely self-published, with no previous New York publisher to give them a pla