Saturday, April 28, 2012

Promoting Your Book / Art and Spirituality


Thought for the Week: Success means fulfilling your own dreams, singing your own words, dancing your own dances, creating from your heart, and trusting that whatever happens, it will be okay. ~ Elana Lindquist

 Promoting Your Book
 
Hope Clark’s newsletters are an inspiration to me, not just for her market listings but for the essays. Sometimes they make me smile. In her April 13 Funds for Writers newsletter she wrote about how she found herself selling books in a bar. She sold more books that evening than she did at one well-promoted bookstore event. She attributed that to the atmosphere. In a bar, people consider you more approachable. In a bookstore, you’re THE AUTHOR.

She definitely has a point. When I approach an author sitting at a table full of books at a bookstore to learn more about his or her writing, I’m often hit with a hard or seemingly desperate attempt to sell and I find it awkward to extricate myself if I decide not to buy the book. At a bar or social occasion, conversation is much more casual – we’re all just people. But I think there’s another factor that Hope did not mention.

A nonprofit women’s business owner group I used to belong to held a fundraising auction. People paid the regular price for a dinner and we offered free wine before and during the auction. People had fun and we raised more money than expected. The next year, the group decided to save money by not including the wine. We still had fun but made significantly less money than the year before. 

The third year we went back to including free wine and sales went back up. No, we didn’t get our audience drunk, but we learned that a modest amount of alcohol loosens people’s wallets as well as their tongues. It definitely creates a party atmosphere as opposed to a selling one. Something to consider if you hold an informal book event at someone’s home or other non-traditional location.
  
Art and spirituality

Print publication StoneVoices looks for articles, essays, and fiction up to 5,000 words, as well as the occasional poem, about the connection between art and the spiritual journey. "Our premise is that art – both its process and its product ‐‐ has profound connections to spirituality. The making of art ‐‐ the creative process undertaken by the artist ‐‐ can be a transformative experience..."


Sunday, April 22, 2012

Too Old?/Al Blanchard Award

You can read my humorous essay about a visit to the dentist, "Dental Correction," at You&Me. No, that's not me in the photo!

Thought for the Week: Success comes in cans, not can'ts. ~ Brian Tracy

Too Old?

How often have you heard people say, “I’m too old for this?” Some of my writer friends have said it, and none of them is close to 96. That’s how old Herman Wouk is as Simon & Schuster prepare to publish his latest novel in the fall of 2012. Simon & Schuster published Wouk’s first novel, Aurora Dawn, in 1947. Wouk’s new book, The Lawgiver, is an epistolary novel about a group of people making a movie about Moses in the present day. The story emerges from letters, memos, emails, journals, news articles, recorded talk, tweets, Skype transcripts, and text messages.

In between these two works, he penned The Caine Mutiny, winner of the 1952 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, Marjorie Morningstar, Youngblood Hawke, and The Winds of War, among others.

Not only does his life show us that we are never too old to write, he busts the myth about needing a place to write. He wrote Aurora Dawn while serving in the navy during World War II. He began writing The Caine Mutiny while a reserve officer on a training cruise aboard an aircraft carrier.  


2012 AL BLANCHARD AWARD

Deadline: April 30, 2012
Maximum word length: 5,000

You may submit up to two unpublished crime stories in one of the following genres: mystery, thriller, suspense, caper, and horror. (No torture/killing of children or animals.) Either you must be a New England author or your story must have a New England setting.
The prize includes $100, publication in Level Best Books' tenth Crime Fiction anthology, and admission to the Crime Bake Conference in November. The winner is not required to attend the conference.

  

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Poetry Stamps/Vocabula Writing Contest



On April 21, the U.S. Postal Service® will begin sale of Twentieth-Century Poets stamps honoring ten of the nation’s most admired poets: Elizabeth Bishop, Joseph Brodsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, E. E. Cummings, Robert Hayden, Denise Levertov, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stevens, and Wil­liam Carlos Williams. The many awards won by this illustri­ous group include numerous Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and honorary degrees. Each stamp features a photograph of one of the ten poets and text on the back of the stamp sheet includes an excerpt from one poem by each poet.

VOCABULA WELL-WRITTEN WRITING CONTEST
http://www.vocabula.com/popupads/VRWritingContest.asp

Deadline May 31, 2012.

Send “200 to 500 words of readable, well-written, even beautiful
writing,” fiction or nonfiction, no poetry. Your first entry is free. $15 fee for each entry after your first.

1st prize $200, 2nd prize $100, 3rd prize $50. Winners and honorable mentions receive a one-year subscription to The Vocabula Review.
The web site has a link where you can read the prior winners.

Monday, April 9, 2012

Writing Caterpillars/You and Me


Writer’s Thought for the Week: There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly. ~ Buckminster Fuller 

Have you ever written a “caterpillar”?  I have.

Four years ago I wrote a humorous essay about a dental appointment during which I felt treated me like a much older person than I was. I targeted the essay for the “Back Page” section of the Smithsonian magazine. I submitted it, but never received a response. I followed up so I knew they received it. Submitting to Smithsonian, I knew I was aiming high, but I like to do that. I can always lower expectations if it’s not accepted.

Next I tried a local nonfiction writing contest. No luck there either.

I found You & Me, an online magazine that publishes medical essays, mostly humorous from the samples I read on their web site. According to their guidelines, my piece was too short so I did not submit it.

My critique group and I agreed that most of the essay was good, but the ending was flat. Before my next dental appointment, I rehearsed a speech to enlighten the staff on how older but not yet ancient people consider certain remarks condescending in case more such remarks were uttered. But I never received my “cue” at the next appointment so I never delivered my speech and this was nonfiction, so I could not ethically fabricate a different ending.

After that, the essay sat untouched inside my computer for several years. Prime beef may improve with age; untouched writing does not.

A few weeks ago, a fellow writer mentioned her success being published in You & Me and urged me to try it. I figured out I could pumped up my ending by including my thoughts as I rehearsed my speech on the way to my followup appointment. By adding other details, I increased the word length so it now met the low end of the required word range for You & Me. My e-mail query, submitted last Tuesday, received a positive response the next day. I submitted my essay that afternoon and received an acceptance and an agreement this weekend. I electronically signed the agreement this afternoon (Monday). I don’t know when it will be published, but I should receive a check with two to three weeks.

This isn’t the first time I breathed (wrote?) new life into an old piece. Some of my classmates were late bloomers; some of my writing is, too. My point is we all need to save our writing orphans that never found a home or were never finished. Who knows when the muse will deliver a new angle that will please a publisher?

You & Me publishes only nonfiction about the human aspects of dealing with medical issues. The preferred word length is 1,000 to 3,000 and they pay on acceptance. 


Sunday, April 1, 2012

Free Writing Analyzer/Fantasy Story Competition

Writer's Thought for the Week: God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much, the reader ceases to get under the bed. ~ Mark Twain

Free Manuscript Analyzer from Christopher Park

In my critique group, we often comment that a manuscript repeats a certain word or words. A free program that you can run online or download to run under Windows analyzes your writing and list all words and their corresponding count. It also flags “FOs” or “frequent offenders”: words like “just” and “that” and phrases such as “old as the hills.” You can customize the list of words and phrases that the program flags so it captures your own personal nemeses - or Twain’s thunder and lightning.


5,000 to 20,000 words

This free competition runs until May 5, 2012 but they accept submissions year-round. Entries received after May 5 will be considered for the upcoming year's competition.   

The Zharmae Publishing Press (TZPP) holds the competition as one way of recruiting qualified authors to work with for full-length books. Many of the winning writers, especially those in the Top 5, get offers to work with TZPP on future works. In addition to cash prizes, all winners receive publication in their annual anthology plus three free copies of that anthology.

Cash prizes: 1st Place $400, 2nd Place $350, 3rd Place $300, 4th Place $250, 5th Place $200