Children's Book Signing

As a children's book author, I have a number of different issues to deal with than my compatriots who write for adults. Most of the issues are positive, for example, children are often more willing to suspend disbelief than adults. However, when it comes to marketing, life can get a little sticky.

Last Saturday I held a book signing for my latest book, Trapped in Dunston's Cave. Now, I have never planned a book signing for an adult book, but I can imagine my plans would circle around a staid location (a bookstore, a cafe, or something similar), wine and cheese for snacks and a quiet reading of the book followed (hopefully) by an orderly line of people waiting to sign and purchase a copy.

When I think of a children's book signing, the first few lines of Ogden Nash's poem Children's Party comes to mind:

May I join you in the doghouse, Rover?
I wish to retire till the party's over.
Since three o'clock I've done my best
To entertain each tiny guest.
My conscience now I've left behind me,
And if they want me, let them find me.

Parents and children arrived at the location I had chosen, the Nubuke Foundation here in Ghana which supports the Arts and does a lot of work with children and literacy. The children started colouring on the sheets that I provided to entertain them until we got started. This went well with one, two or three little ones, but once we got past four and five, the quiet, organised scene began to unravel as they decided to explore the garden.

It took us some time to round them all up. When we finally got them all seated in the right place at the same time, one child who had been sitting quietly for a while piped up,
"Can I go back to my colouring now?"

I told the children an interactive story and then got them to create a story of their own, line by line, one child at a time. They chose to create a story about a dinosaur which ate the narrator's sister. There was a lot of laughter before we were able to engender some sympathy for the sister and the story turned in a direction that led to her rescue.

After this, the children were released to colour some more and to make bookmarks that they could use as they read their books. They ran in the expansive garden, ate cup cakes and by all accounts had a great time.

I was exhausted at the end, but fully satisfied. I did not sell many books, however, I felt that the children had a very enjoyable experience that could help them to associate reading with fun.

A Matter of Convention

I was at an SF/Fantasy convention a couple of weeks back. They had an autograph table set up in the dealer’s room for the author guests to use. I passed through the dealer’s room many times, and whenever I saw any of my fellow guest authors sitting at the autograph table alone I stopped and talked and bought one of their books.

I didn’t know any of these authors before the convention. Many of the books I bought from them may never get read. I’m sure they’re well written; it’s just that in a world of limited time they are not likely to make it to the top of my TBR pile. I’ve got a lot of friends who I know are writing good books that I’ll enjoy, and there are other authors who I don’t know but whose work I like. Those books are the ones that rise to the top of the heap.

Once my panel load slowed down, I went and sat at the autograph table for a couple of hours myself. A couple of folks I’d bought books from passed through. Most seemed to make an effort to avoid eye contact. I was trying to do the thing you do at autograph tables, smile and cross glances with folks who pass by. It didn’t work on my fellow authors, perhaps because they were so conscious of having done the same thing when theywere at the table.

One particular incident actually bothered me. I’d bought one author’s book at the table, for 19+ bucks. Later, while I was there with my books, none of which approached 19 dollars in cost, the same author came and sat down again. We chatted but he hardly gave my books a glance, and certainly did not buy one. He insisted I take his card, though, and then began grilling me about my publisher and what kind of deal I had with them. He was apparently unhappy with his publisher and was looking to switch. I suppose I was a bit troubled by not selling any books to fellow authors, but my interaction with that one specific author actually left me feeling a little unclean, a little used.

Then I started thinking that, instead of being irritated, maybe I should take the lack of reciprocity as a sign that I’m doing this writing thing all wrong. I understand that a writer’s objective is to sell their books, not spend more money than they take in on buying other authors’ books. That seems to translate into the need to be a bit mercenary. It means: SELL! Don’t BUY!

I’m not sure I can do this, though. I think too much about how nice it feels when someone expresses an interest in your work. I also know, intimately, how it feels to sit at a table with no takers for your wares. And how you still smile.

I guess I’m lucky to have a day job, that I don’t have to subsist on what I make from my writing. I don’t have to be mercenary. I'd love to hear from other writers about this kind of thing. How mercenary should we be? How do we seek a balance between supporting our own careers and supporting other writers?

Technology and me

When it comes to technology, I consider myself to be in the middle of the pack: savvy enough to know what’s out there but not enthusiastic enough to run out and get it. I believe technology should serve a practical purpose and so I never acquire something because it’s the hot item out there. I just never see the point of having a desktop, a laptop, an IPAD, an IPod a Nook and a Kindle all at the same time.

So two years ago when Verizon Fios gave us a voucher for a Netbook, I looked around and evaluated the technology that I already had. Both my husband and I had laptops and we both had desktops. The problem though, our desktop computers were outdated running on Windows 98 operating systems. Those platforms couldn’t even support most of the new programs. Oh yes, I thought a Netbook would be great for portability, but I had a fully functioning Dell Latitude laptop. So I decided what we needed was a new desktop, especially as my kid was now learning computers in school. So instead of the Netbook that I had drooled over before, I got a desktop computer.

It was great. Sleek, fast, just what I needed to give my writing a boost. There was one drawback: I wrote best in my bed late at night. So of course, after the novelty wore off, I was back to using my trusted old Dell Latitude laptop.

Fast forward two years. My wonderful laptop has all but given up on me. It is eight years old. The initial battery died a year ago. My back up battery died six months ago. I was still determined to use it. Of course I had to have it plugged in at all times. The problem with that is the minute it became unplugged, I lost all my work. Plus it took a full twenty minutes to booth up. Finally, as if things couldn’t get worst, the keys began to drop out one by one (thank goodness I’m a touch typist).

I decided it was time for a technology update. I wanted something for my writing. I wanted something portable that was small enough to fit in a pocketbook. I wanted something with a Windows platform. I also wanted an e-reader. My daughter who’s been harassing me for an IPAD for the longest time hounded me to get an IPAD or a tablet. I thought the tablets were cool and very portable, and they worked well as universal e-readers. But they were not as practical for what I do on a computer as I’d like.

Then I discovered the Dell Inspiron Duo. It’s a tablet. It’s a laptop. It has the portability and touch screen of a tablet, the size of a (slightly larger) e-reader. Most importantly, it’s a fully functioning laptop/notebook. After much deliberation, I purchased it. I love it. I can lug it around anywhere without having to lug a heavy computer bag. It supports everything I use my laptop for. It can even be used as a phone if you so desire (not that I’ll ever use it that way). Most of all it’s given my writing (and reading) a shot in the arm. So forget the Kindle, the Nook, the IPAD, and the laptop. I’ve got my Dell Inspiron Duo.

What about you…how do you go about acquiring new technology?

Taking the plunge

Many of my fellow Dorchester Leisure authors have done it. Several current Novel Spaces members have, too, including KeVin Killiany and Lynn Emery, and a former Novelnaut, Farrah Rochon, has been the latest to take that plunge. Are you curious yet? I'm talking about authors who were formerly published by traditional houses - and many of whom still are - taking the plunge into indie publishing.

I'm next, guys, and if you don't think this is a huge departure for all of us, then you have no idea how unthinkable the concept of publishing oneself used to be up to, oh, even one year ago - two at most. To quote The Next Web:

Indie publishing, the act of an individual person publishing a book, is not a new concept. In fact, for the last several decades such activities have been panned as ‘self-publishing,’ and dealt with an attached stigma that labelled any self-published author as second-tier, and not quite good enough to find a ‘real publisher.’

But everything in the publishing industry - an industry that has been badly broken for a long time - has changed: the technology, the markets, the distribution, and the newly empowered writers/authors who are blazing trails and managing their writing careers themselves. I don't expect to immediately start smiling all the way to the bank despite the good news from authors like Gemma Halliday who are kind enough to share their indie sales figures; I'm aware that many writers who are making significant money by publishing themselves have extensive backlists that generate most of the sales and stimulate sales of their new books.

What I do expect is to experience the satisfaction of self-reliance; whatever comes of this venture will be up to me, not to an army of intermediaries only tenuously connected to my work and who control every aspect of its publication while I stand on the sidelines, invisible, impotent and in the dark about everything from pricing to print run, release date to cover image. To paraphrase Lynn Emery, it's all about control. I no longer feel ambivalent about my writing and publishing ventures. I feel empowered, positive and energised - a startling contrast to the way I've felt over the last three years. Stay tuned - and wish me luck.

The Piracy Pirates and Ebooks

A fellow author sent myself and a few other authors an email about a site that had free downloads of ebooks. Two of us in particular discovered that our books were included on the site. Needless to say we were not happy. I posted a reminder on Facebook that day that we do not write for free. Well, at least that's not the intention.

First thing the next day I sent an email to my publisher who forwarded it to their piracy department. I'm sure there were other authors on my publisher's list who were also on the site. Well, by the end of the day, that site was gone, poof, pow, see ya!

We were elated! Not sure if it was the publisher or some other reason or combination of reasons that did the trick, but the link is not valid (hopefully that's not temporary).

After that, the other author from the group who realized her books were on that site and I discussed the fact the there are other sites as well. She found one other that include hers, and I found two that include mine.

Is it like killing one single ant, when there are eggs just waiting to hatch? There are so many people who do this, and being that ebooks are a sign of the times, how do we really monitor this, or should we even bother? I'd like to think that I will report each site that I discover, also handling it myself if it's a self-pubbed title, but I also wonder if it will be like killing that one lone ant.

There are so many other aspects to writing and publishing that we must give attention to. And just as with the music industry, and movies, books are obviously not excluded from feeling the hit of piracy.

What are your thoughts on how to monitor this or best deal with it, if at all?

And still, I write!!

Suspension of Disbelief

My daughter took me to see Immortals Wednesday. I was reminded of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct stories, Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series, Allen Drury's Washington, just about anything by James Lee Burke, several columns about verisimilitude in writing by Lawrence Block, and of course Naked Came the Stranger. (Really must do a column on NCtS one day.)

In writing Immortals, the Parlapanides brothers did to ancient Greece and its mythology what Stephanie Meyer did to vampire and werewolf traditions. Though the gods do not sparkle in sunlight, the five extras from 90210 who represent the pantheon do wear gold lamé and pout when thoughtful. They also have more trouble with the Prime Directive than Captain Kirk. In Immortals Greek villages are Pueblos carved from cliffs hundreds of feet above the sea – and the Hellenic "wine dark sea" is actually dark with oil that makes everything except the Virgin Oracle's scarlet gown look like Prince William Sound. I was annoyed by the Titans being about five feet tall and jumping around like rabid flying monkeys but got a kick out of Athens being fortified by a model of Hoover Dam (one of the characters actually says it was originally built as a dam). My favorite bit was the horizon-spanning salt desert covering the heart of Greece where nothing grows and even the buildings are carved from salt, but which inexplicably has fresh water oases; this is the location of the salt mine. (My daughter's favorite was the people being tortured in the iron bull breathing through rubber hoses attached to plastic masks held in place by elastic straps – but I see that more as a production issue than part of the storytelling.) And – though Frieda Pinto's naked bottom does have a cameo – it's the storytelling, the plot's inconsistencies, that reminded me of NCtS. (Example: Hyperion spends the first few scenes torturing priests and sacking villages looking for the Virgin Oracle. Survivors are sent to the salt mine, in the middle of the salt desert, where he's been keeping the Virgin Oracle prisoner for weeks. No fear, she leads a prison break, so perhaps Hyperion was just being proactive in his torturing and sacking.)

Despite all of that, Immortals was a guilty-pleasure blast. Freed from the constraints of plot, history, or logic, director Singh was able to focus on overwhelming our senses with wide-screen spectacle. Everything from special effects to costumes to sets to dialog is over the top without slipping into campy. While it seemed clear no one in front of the cameras gave much thought to acting, every man jack of them devoted their hearts and minds and various other body parts to the cause of entertaining the heck out of us. And they delivered.

Which of course relates back to Evan Hunter (McBain), Allen Drury, James Lee Burke, and Lawrence Block. Allen Drury loved Washington – the city and the politics – and when his characters are in the halls of Congress or the streets of Georgetown you know he has seen every detail he describes. My impression is Hunter loved New York City, but he did not want to restrict himself to the reality of the place; the city of McBain's 87th precinct is never identified but it is made up of neighborhoods and locales lifted from NYC then repositioned to serve the needs of his stories. Lawrence Block also loves NYC and sets his stories there, but he fudges just a bit on the geography. I'm told you can always find the neighborhood, maybe even the street corner identified in his story, but you'll never find the exact hotel or bar or alley where the action takes place. Even so, New Yorkers I know aver he gets the city, they know he's one of them when they read his stories. (John D MacDonald did the same thing with south Florida; you'd get lost following his directions, but he got the feel of my home in the 1960s exactly right.) I've spent a total of three weeks in New Orleans – the last thirty-five years ago – and I have no idea how accurate James Lee Burke's descriptions are. But the man has a gift for description that amazes, and if the reality of the region doesn't match what he's created, then – to paraphrase John Milius's opening to The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean – if this isn't the way it was, it's the way it should have been.

And that's important. We are storytellers, not historians, not cartographers, not scientists or biographers. Everything we do, every tool that comes to hand, must serve the story – that is our craft. We should respect facts, we should use them whenever possible. Not just because they're true but because they are the hooks on which we hang our fiction. But we have to use facts in a way that strengthens the story and moves it forward. In teaching English as a second language I frequently returned to the theme of the difference between literal meaning and contextual meaning. (For example, whenever an alarm goes on, most English speakers say it went off.)
Sometimes we have to subsume the literal facts to the facts of the story. This can be as subtle as Lawrence Block capturing the spirit of a neighborhood while using addresses that don't exist or as in-your-face as Tarsem Singh choreographing a Jet-Li-esque kung-fu smackdown between the gods and the Titans. If we do our jobs right, our readers will willingly set objective reality aside and join us on our journey.

Loving The Writer's Life



My niece and nephew, Christmas 2007





Thanksgiving 2011 is distant memory, but I'm still counting my writer blessings. A big one has to be the family I was born in, bless their southern eccentric hearts! Southerners love to tell a tall tale. My uncles could lie, I mean tell a good story with the best of 'em. But great storytelling is an equal opportunity skill, because my aunts, older cousins and grandmother were just as entertaining. The holidays have always been a time of family coming together, and as a kid that meant eavesdropping on the adults. Of course there is an art to listening in. You have to be a chameleon- blend into the woodwork or furniture so that the grown-ups forget you're there. That way you can hear the really juicy stuff. Ah yes, the holidays packed my gift bag with loads of material for books.

Here are a few tales from warm family gatherings:

One of my maternal uncles used to work for a man who was very rich. This man's wife used to have strange "spells". That was the polite southern belle term for it. My uncle put it more bluntly, she was nuts. This rich man, from an old southern family, put up with his wife but just barely. He'd married her for money and her family name, both sets of parents expected them to wed you see. Translation- you want to inherit the family loot? Marry the right person. Anyway after many years a tragic accident happened. The poor wife wandered into the pond on the family estate and drowned. No doubt during one of her "spells". Then my uncle at the end of this sad story leaned forward, his voice low and said, "I don't think she ended up face down in that pond by accident." A murder mystery!

One of my ancestors (great-great-great grandmother I think, the story is murky) was a Choctaw Indian bought as a slave before the Civil War. Her master was a doctor from Manchester, England. They had two sons. Reportedly he never married, and doted on their mother. He died and left his sons his land. There was outrage from the white population when one son defiantly tried to petition the court for his inheritance. With help from the sheriff, they set out to kill him, but he escaped into the frontier (Opelousas, land of Jim Bowie). No one knows what happened to him after that. Rich source for a sweeping historical saga!

Finally from me, a heartwarming memory of Christmas. My father worked for the local company, Gulf States Utilities. Each year they would sponsor a Christmas party for the children of employees. What fun, but not because of the toys. No, the fun was watching "Santa". GSU hired Santa to give toys to every child. He'd sit on a stage in an auditorium, and all the kids would line up to get their gifts after a brief program.  Sometimes our Santa had a nip of "cheer" before he got to the program. One Santa would break into blues songs like, "Merry Christmas, baby. Ya sho been good to me!" Another one would admonish rambunctious kids not to be naughty, with a gruff, "Hey, stop actin' a fool!" or "Shut up, and sit your butt down!" Gotta love old Santa, huh?

I wish you a Merry Christmas. I hope you have wonderful family memories, great food and a few stories to tell.

Lynn Emery

For a spicy Louisiana holiday romance check out

Happy New Year, Baby