Category Archives: Networking and publicising

Finding readers for my writing

It’s Publication Day!

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As my review on Goodreads says:
“I’m putting five stars as I’m very proud of this small book. The house featured in the Hermitage is inspired by four houses. They have all mingled and become one: The Hermitage at Healesville, my grandparents house at Kareela Road, Cremorne, the house in The House that Beckons by Gladys Lister and The Hermitage at Vaucluse.
I originally began writing this as a screenplay way back in 2009 but couldn’t tie up the ending. A few years ago I managed to finish the ending and cut The Hermitage in length to be eligible for a renowned radio play competition. A bad move.
Only a year or two ago I decided to look at The Hermitage again. I restored the deleted passages, added more and turned it into a novella. I hope my readers enjoy it.”

Here is a link to my publisher’s blog Alien Buddha Press where you can read the first chapter.

Here is the book at Amazon.com

Happy reading!

HNSA Satellite Event at Sutherland Library

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Last week I had a wonderful time discussing researching, writing and publishing at Sutherland Library with, from the right, Julieanne Miles-Brown, Isolde Martyn, Elisabeth Storrs, Diane Murray who chaired the event and myself. The title of the event was ‘Follow that Horse! All you ever wanted to know about researching, writing and publishing historical fiction’.

In regards to researching Diane asked each of us a number of questions including: What do you do when you have your story timeline all planned out, your characters and events all in place and you either can’t find the information you want or the information you do find conflicts with the rest of your story? What do you do if you cannot get the facts exactly right? How do you still make your story ‘real’ and what are your preferred methods of research?

On the subject of writing we discussed: When the research starts to run into months or years beyond your expectations, how do you maintain your momentum?  – how do you keep interested enough to finish writing the story even when you are totally over the character and the storyline?  And what is the average time it takes you,  from start to finish, once you decide to write a particular story, to get it to a final draft?

And finally on publishing the questions were: What is your particular winning formula for getting your books into print? How do you push your work out into the world? And for you is publishing about making money or seeing your story in print?

It was definitely a lively and enjoyable discussion and I was very pleased to be involved. I’m sure the HNSA Conference in September will be a resounding success. The countdown is on!

 

 

 

Author platforms and protecting your intellectual property

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iconsWe are constantly told that we need to work on our author platform – as many social media sites as possible. Well that’s fine. That’s the way the world is in the 21st century but how to find the time to maintain them all that is the big question! Of course it is a matter of personal preferences as to which ones you chose of the many. Personally, I have found that Pinterest, WordPress, Goodreads, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon and LinkedIn are the most useful for me – the first five in particular.

But I’m not writing this blog to say get on all these now. I actually want to talk about a problem that seems to be overlooked. And that is protecting your intellectual property. In Goodreads, more so than Amazon, I’ve found that unless an author completes their profile and identifies which books are theirs, things can get really confusing.

I am a librarian on Goodreads, a Goodreads author and a participant of the wonderful Australian Women Writer’s Challenge. What’s been happening recently for me is that I have read several books where the author’s profile is not up on Goodreads. This may not appear to be a big problem for a lot of authors. It’s just one of the platforms they don’t have time for. But what they don’t realise is that when their profile is not completed a search of their name (without a profile) will bring up all the books for that name and some of the titles will not be theirs! In other words the author is not claiming and separating from other authors, their intellectual property.

As I am, like a lot of authors:
Working full time
Writing my novel,
Doing my research,
Reading
Maintaining my author platforms
Answering emails
Blogging. And, as well:
Participating in the AWWC
And of course, trying to have a personal life…
There is not really much time for extra stuff.

That’s why I am endeavouring to help in a small way. I hope to assist all the poets that I have featured at my community page www.starvinginagarret.com in making sure Goodreads reflects what they themselves have written. I am also either putting up profiles of authors who don’t appear on Goodreads but whose book or books I have just read. And sometimes this might be an author who has died but whose work I feel deserves a new audience such as Jean Curlewis. (I still have to put up her three other books).

In regards to separating titles that is a delicate process that I only do in collaboration with the author. I cannot presume to know all the titles they have written. So authors make sure Goodreads reflects who you are and what you have written. You mightn’t want to have to tackle this but you do want readers to find your books easily – and that, finally, is what a successful platform is about.

Doing a newspaper interview

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Debbie Robson's studyI have been very lucky in that I have now been interviewed several times regarding my books. So far three interviews for Tomaree (including a magazine interview) and two interviews for Crossing Paths. One of those was a TV interview and the other was conducted at Swansea at my “bottle” launch which was a lot of fun.

Last week I was interviewed by the delightful Georgia Osland and I must say that although she was the youngest of the reporters, she was wonderfully efficient. I threw a lot of facts at her in regards to my writing career and she deftly weaved them into a coherent article.

Here is the newspaper interview in The Star

I owe this latest interview to my involvement in the Local Writers Showcase this Saturday 31st August at Warners Bay Performing Arts Centre where eighteen writers will talk and/or read from their work.

Here is the list of writers involved:
11.00am Welcome from Lake Mac FAW Linda Visman, President LMFAW
11.10 Official opening by Greg Piper, MLA, Member for Lake Macquarie
11.20 Group presentation with: Magdalena Ball Poetry; Fiction; Non-fiction; Jaye Ford Psychological thrillers; Judy Johnson Poetry; verse novel; novel; Beryl Mullard Local History
12.15pm LUNCH BREAK
12.35 Rina Robinson Short story, Poetry
12.40 Lachlan Ness (Tony Lang) Non-fiction: Memoir & stories
12.55 Kaz Delaney (Kerri Lane) Young Adult Fiction
1.15 Carol Wylde-Browne/ Claire Shields Wangi Sailing Club Local History
1.30 Carol Heuchan Poetry & Performance
1.50 Jean Kent Poetry
2.10 Jan Mitchell Biography & Memoir
2.20 Debbie Robson Fiction – historical & contemp.
2.40 Christina Batey Young Adult Fiction
2.50 Linda Visman Young Adult Fiction
3.00 Karen Davey-Phillip Non-fiction: Raising children
3.15 Linda Brooks Non-fiction, Fiction (children’s & adults), Publishing
3.40 Elizabeth Horwitz Getting started in Writing
3.55 Close and thanks Linda Visman

It should be a wonderful day! Come along if you are in the Newcastle/Lake Macquarie area.

My twitter community and why they are so important to me.

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I went to the #NewyTwistmas party at Honeysuckle Thursday night attended by 60 plus and had a wonderful time meeting fellow peeps, most for the first time. I chatted to so many interesting people, including @CCLETS a dedicated potter, @whereismymuse a poet and @kimcoo and her husband who are relationship counsellors. It is a community that know me as a writer. That’s who I am – @lakelady2282, BookCrosser, author, amateur photographer. I tweet photos and the progress of my WWI novel The Grey Silk Purse. I also tweet/retweet about books, writing and history. That’s me!

To my friends and family, I am something else. With my family I’m mum and grandma. With my girlfriends I’m just a single woman in my fifties complaining about the lack of interesting men. (I have this theory that 75% of the single male population in their forties and fifties have been beamed to another planet and nobody’s noticed. But that’s another story.) My friends know I write but I don’t think they are aware of how much my writing means to me and in that sense they don’t know me.

My twitter people do. My wonderful Crossing Paths publisher @SkiveMagazine knows how important writing is to me and I love tweeting about his mag. The latest edition is an erotica collection so peeps get out there and buy it. Also @drdrdr09 knows. He became aware of how much I was agonising over finding an historically accurate way to get my main character from Le Havre to Salonika, late 1917 (avoiding submarines and nasty Germans). I tweeted in frustration to my twitter community and he stepped into the breach (WWI speak) and we had a fun time tweeting back and forth.

In my “normal” life, I mentioned to my friends the other day that I was having trouble with my epilogue. There was dead silence and then a change of conversation. In all fairness what can most non-writers say to such a statement? Some people would suggest a writing group. After all you get to sit down with “real” people and discuss writing problems but I’ve tried a few groups and they weren’t for me. (I once joined a screenplay writing group and one of the participants said, “I hate writing dialogue. Do you think that will be a problem for me?” She was serious). I didn’t go back.

For me twitter is my writing group, my photography group, my friends group, my “did you hear they found the cave from Island of the Blue Dolphins?” group. It is my arts world in a way that Facebook (that funny other social media with all the thumbs up things) has never been. It is where I’m lakelady2282 and it’s where on Friday morning I tweeted I had lost my job. I didn’t message my friends. I still – as of writing this article – haven’t posted it to Facebook. Without thinking I just tweeted. It was the community that I wanted to tell.

Doing a TV interview

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It was fantastic. I’m not quite sure how Channel Ten Sydney came to approach the Adelaide BC group but bookcrosser Newk put up the information at BCAUS, the yahoo BookCrossing group, that the station was looking for bookcrossers. Yours truly, never backward in coming forward, put up her hand and also contacted the station.

Eve Neylon the segment producer was wonderful and the online intro the station put together to explain BookCrossing to the general public was one of the best examples I’ve seen. BookCrossing really is a parallel universe. It is a tricky thing to explain in a few minutes but the bottom line is that www.bookcrossing.com is about sharing books. If you love books and want to share books with others, read reviews of your favourite books, meetup with people to discuss books and even receive books in the mail from faraway places then BookCrossing is definitely for you.

For me discovering the site has literally changed my life. I have not only been to 4 conventions: Adelaide, SA in 2006, London in 2008, Greece in 2008 and the Sydney Unconvention in 2010 but it has also inspired me to write my second published novel Crossing Paths: the BookCrossing Novel.

One of the questions my interviewer Paul Henry was going to ask me was how did I get into BookCrossing. Well, a week before Christmas in 2003 I saw an ad in an Australian Publications mag about the site and immediately I was intrigued. I couldn’t wait to get home and sus it all out!

After an hour or two going over the site (it is a very comprehensive with a lot to take in) I immediately realised “This is so me.” I love books and I love synchronicity and BookCrossing is about both. After a little while I also realised that BookCrossing was also a book – a book that I could write. I remember working out that amazingly people can be tracked through BookCrossing. And you could also anticipate where people might be travelling to next, by the books on their “virtual” bookshelf.

I also remember, within a day of discovering BookCrossing, studying my “real” bookshelf to try and work out what books my character would take with her and how many. I initially decided on 10 but then lowered it to eight to allow for books she might pick up on the way. Also important was where she was going to release the books and so began my journey of writing a book inspired by an online bookclub, the doorstopper that I managed to hold up in my TV interview, as you can see for yourself. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PAqoC94Sis

Doing the interview was a wonderful insight into how segments are produced. Eve was very thorough. First interviewing me by phone, keeping in touch by email, phoning me again to confirm the appointment, asking more questions and a day or so before emailing me with background information that the interviewer would be reading to prepare themselves (Paul Henry as it turned out) for the segment and questions they would be asking to give me a chance to put together my best answers.

We only had three minutes and because the station decided on producing a small online intro to BookCrossing, that freed Paul up to ask different questions. He asked one or two on the list but the rest were dictated by his curiousity and the way the conversation went. Although he did interrupt a bit I’m glad he did because that’s how we managed to cover quite a lot in in such a short timespan.

I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to do the interview. It was such an enjoyable experience. I was lucky to have my friend Gina drive down with me from Newcastle and she was allowed to sit offscreen and watch the segment. Everyone was so friendly – the makeup girls, Lana, Eve, Paul and Kath. Thank you Channel 10! It was fun!

Reading Out Loud

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Yesterday afternoon I read out loud to, well…. no-one in particular, really. I am participating in Newcastle Library’s program Out Loud as part of the National Year of Reading 2012. I even had a fancy chair to sit on. My timeslot was the last of the day, so with Crossing Paths marked with post-it notes I climbed up on the swish chair and began to read.

This was only my third reading of Crossing Paths, my first was last year at Sunset Books and ABC http://www.facebook.com/#!/sunsetbooks and immediately I realised what an easy book  it is to read from, mainly because of the Bookcrossing www.bookcrossing.com journal entries at the end of each chapter. Like mini reviews – these are perfect to dip into and were what I mainly read from at Sunset Books, Raymond Terrace.

My second reading, at Wangi Library’s Books and Biccies in January this year was really more of a booktalk. I spent most of the half hour or so explaining bookcrossing itself and how I used it as the framework of the book. The whole world of bookcrossing forms the structure linking the eight main characters together.

Today was quite different in many ways. It wasn’t so much about discussing the book as about reading out loud. At first I found it a little odd that most people were just walking past – choosing books and borrowing books and looking a little askance at me on the white chair but after a while I just forgot about everything but the words on the page. My timeslot was from  4.30pm to 5.00pm. After about ten minutes I began to read as a reader rather than an author and the experience was comforting somehow.

At some point I heard the Newcastle Town Hall clock strike but decided it must be the quarter hour. A little later one of the librarians came over to me and said: ‘You can stop now, you know.’
I said, ‘Oh, can I?’
She said, ‘It’s a quarter past five.’
I asked, ‘Really?’ and she told me that a lot of the authors reading out loud during the day had been surprised how quickly the time passed. She also commented on the wonderful atmosphere the readings created in the library. It was the first time I think I’ve read aloud without fear of judgement. There was instead the rhythm of my words and the joy of reading.