Fried Chicken

 by Charlotte Hinger

 I found this really great cartoon in The New Yorker. It was perfect for my Type M post. I really wanted to use it. It featured this chicken and the ridiculous efforts a certain social media company  (you can bet it will remain nameless) uses to win users to their network

I can't use it. People who know what they are doing (not me) say that nothing will get one sued faster than copying images without permission. What's really sad is after many years I have mastered the knock of inserting pictures into blogs. Some of my friends mastered the art at the very beginning. They just went plink with their index finger and voila--witty entries appeared that were illustrated.

The cartoon was so applicable to what's on my mind: marketing. I can't use the cartoon, but I can tell you what it was about. A guy is walking down a hotel corridor carrying a chicken, knocking on each door, telling each occupant that he would like like for them to join his professional network.

I thought it was hilarious because it summed up the sheer looniness of much of today's marketing efforts. The number of books being published every year is astronomical. Far too many for the market to absorb. The industry counts as a book a work that has an International Standard Book Number. No doubt there are many more that do not have this number. 

The whole purpose of marketing is to get a book into the hands of persons who might want to read it. One of the surest ways to do this is to win an award given to writers in that genre. I always read the Edgar winners and the finalists. I read the winners of Western Writers of America Spur Award. I read the Pulitzer prize winners for fiction and some of the finalists. There are many other contests that interest me.

Another sure way to focus attention on a book is through reviews. Unfortunately, the publications with the most influence (New York Times, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and BookList) receive so many books in a week that it's difficult to make the cut. The New York Times receives about 1000 books a week. Of course, there's a substanial increase in sales of a title when it's featured. 

Sadly, with the winnowing of small town or regional newspapers there are fewer publications that try to call attention to local authors or novels that have something to say about issues in that locale. 

Marketing is an important part of the business. I've always thought those of us who have had the good fortune to be traditionally published have a duty to our publishers to do our best to sell our books. 

There's always someone waiting in the wings who would be tickled plumb to death to take our place!

 

Cooks In The Kitchen

                                            

If you've ever written a book, you know what a solitary process that can be. It's just you and those ideas in your head that you're trying to get on the page. But what happens when it's not just your ideas but someone else's? I've worked as ghostwriter on over a dozen books so I'm well aware of another set of eyes looming over my shoulder as I peck away at the keyboard. Some of my clients have been quite generous with feedback while others have given me broad latitude to interpret their vision of the work. Other gigs have been collaborate efforts with other writers, either fleshing out a new concept or in a deep revision process. Despite all the good intentions, the old proverb comes to mind: Too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the broth. 

But that hasn't been my experience. Another writer and I worked on a screenplay and after drafting the story outline, we divvied up the scenes. Afterwards, we were amazed at how well everything meshed together with little break in continuity. What helped was our empathy for the protagonist, a down-and-out goon hired to eliminate a snitch while investigating the suspicious death of his daughter in an S&M episode gone wrong. Much perviness and violence which I guess is why we were in such synch. Another collaborative venture, albeit where I worked as a ghostwriter, was on the high-tech thriller, The Natanz Directive, and again, our contributions joined seamlessly.

More recently, I was asked to collaborate in the rewrite for The Bane of Yoto. While I don't have any experience writing epic fantasy, I do understand the mechanics of dialog, character, and narrative structure. The efforts of our writing team paid off as Booklife of Publishers Weekly, gave us an A in every category.

 

Gritty, vividly told, pulsing with a spirit of old-school adventure, Bane of Yoto is steeped in the history and present of its genre, drawing from the pulps, comic books, video games, and—in its seamless three-author approach—shared-universe collective storytelling...All this is delivered with welcome earnest confidence, as the authors resist the temptations to wink at their readers or to overcomplicate their characters. The villains are villains, full stop, and the heroes, though often preoccupied by vengeance, fight for freedom. Readers eager for moral ambiguity should look elsewhere...