The Writing Business – Promoting

The business, work, job, if you will, of writing is writing, but that is not the same as the business of selling, promoting, getting your book in the reader’s hands.

I love to write, but I hate promoting, selling or even talking about my books, but it is something I have to do.

Some years ago I saw an ad that said, “The business side of running your church.” They charged plenty for a two-day seminar and there are publicists who for $100 to $1000 an hour will publicize your book and probably generate sales. But if you don’t have that kind of money then you have to understand that there is a business side to any profession including any art profession. That is why singers, actors, bands etc. have business managers. In addition to writing novels you have to be a business manager.

This promoting side of writing is a new experience for me and I will probably make a lot of mistakes, but I will share those mistakes, and any successes, with you so you can avoid the things that didn’t work and concentrate only on what appears to be working.

In the last post I talked about how you have to see your writing as a job. You are an employee with certain responsibilities. Now that you have a couple of books written, and found a publisher who thinks enough of your writing to bring your book to life, then it is up to you to keep the book that was birthed alive; nourish it with sales and help it grow into a good (dare I say, “best”) seller.

In order to do that the boss part of me, and the employee part of me, have come to an agreement. For the next few months I will spend only 2 hours writing every day and five hours studying how to let the throngs of eager masses yearning to read a good book hear about, and then buy, one of my books. The employee part of me was not particularly happy with that, but the boss me pointed out it had to be done.

The first things the publisher tells you about promoting your book is: 1 – get on Facebook (did that), 2 – get a blog site (did that-you’re reading it), 3 – get a website (I shall have that up shortly), get business cards (got them). Then there is the advice about getting reviewers, running contest, sample chapters etc. etc. etc. I will do all those things, and let you know how they turn out, but those are things to do after the book is available and my first book won’t be available in print and electronically until the middle of September.

So I’ve come up with a long-term advertising campaign. Now some of you know I do pottery. My mugs and bowls sell fairly well, and more than that it is relaxing and it is great to create something and see it completed in a relatively short length of time compared to writing a book.

I was having a great day at studio trimming a bunch of coffee mugs and putting the handles on them and was about to sign them and it dawned on me that all my bowls, platters, mugs, vases etc. could be part of an advertising campaign. Now instead of signing my name on the bottom of a piece, I put the website address. It’s not much of a site now, but that’s OK, it’s still being put together.

Now that may not be as effective a billboard on the highway or a poster on the bus, but it costs a lot less and look at is this way. Every time someone washes a bowl of mine and puts it in the drain they will see my site address. When someone drains their cup of coffee the person across the table will see www.paulsbooks.net Furthermore it didn’t cost me anything. In fact they paid me to remind them to go see what is new on my site.

Look around you. Do you have a hobby you can utilize to promote your book?

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The historical novels about colonial Congo: Of Rulers and Ruled and Of Chiefs and Giants published by ATTMP is available now from ATTMP and from Amazon. The Kindle  and Nook versions are only $5.99.

Paul’s book The Telephone Killer published by 2nd Wind Publishing is now available on Amazon and from the publisher. Kindle and Nook versions just $4.99.

Everything is copyrighted so please feel free to re blog any of my posts.

The Writing Business – Writing

Avon Books, a division of the Hearst Corporation, published my first novel in 1978. Before that my agent had sold several of my short stories and I thought I was a writer. Then other things took over and for almost 30 years writing was set aside.

Five years ago I started writing again. Since the first of this year, 2012, I have signed contracts for the publication of three books. Two of those contracts are with All Things That Matter Press. In addition to those three-signed contracts I have submitted two other books. I will have another book that will be ready for submission in January 2013. I’m a firm believer in setting goals and so my goal right now is that one-year from now I will have five published books. How did that happen? Well it sure wasn’t dumb luck.

Five years ago I decided to go back to writing and I would approach it as my job. With every job there is a boss and an employee. The problem with this job is that the boss and the employee are the same person. The role of the boss is to set the criteria for satisfactory performance. As the boss I demanded that my employee spend a minimum of 7 hours a day, five days a week at the job of writing. The employee had to spend at least 4 hours a day writing and produce at least 1000 words which ever came later. The remaining time each day could be spent researching material and thinking about another book. As the employee I am very lucky in that I can be working on two or three totally different stories at the same time.

After three years of writing I had material I thought was ready and I started looking for an agent. My former agent had died and no one there, or at any other agency, wanted to handle me. Obviously I was going to have to find a publisher on my own. That’s where Preditors and Editors came in.

With Preditors and Editors the research becomes finding a publisher that publishes your kind of material. The agent is one who is supposed to know what different publishers are looking for. Now it is up to the writer to find someone who likes what he has written.

About the writing itself. I have heard people talk about “writer’s block.” I don’t know what that is. As I mentioned earlier I am usually working on two or three different books at the same time. I may arrive at work in the morning and decide that I want to work on a murder mystery or an adventure story rather than a historical or romance novel. My boss is quite agreeable to this as long as I put in my hours and produce the required number of words. To me the excuse of “writer’s block” is the employee calling in sick because I want to do something else that day. However, my boss is quite willing for me to take a Tuesday or some other day off as long as I make it up on Saturday or Sunday.

I never suffer from “writer’s block” but there are times when I want to say something and I am not sure exactly how to say. That is not “writers block” but a question of method. When that happens I go to my exercises. When a pianist, or violinist or other performing artist cannot render a passage they way they would like to, they goes back to the basic exercises.

For me the exercise is this. – The four basic parts to every story are: the characters (people, dogs, birds, whatever), the action (conflict), the setting (where the action takes place) and the theme (the message you want to convey – good triumphs over evil, or whatever).

There are also four basic ways of telling the story: exposition (stating the information – that’s the worst method. That’s how textbooks are written and that is why they are so boring),  Narrative description (drawing word pictures for the reader), introspection (thoughts – stream of consciousness) and dialogue (two or more people talking).

I know where the story is going, I just may not know how I want to say it. Then is when I go to the exercises. Let’s say there is a character. Am I going to describe him from an omniscient point of view – using narrative description? Or maybe describe him by having two other characters talk about him – using dialogue. Or from the point of view of someone just thinking about him – using introspection. Well you get the idea. A little while in the exercise room and I pretty much know how I want to say it.

Happy Writing.

Paul’s Books – The Telephone Killer to be released 9/15/12 by 2^nd Wind Publishing.
Of Rulers and Ruled and Of Chiefs and Giants to be released early 2013 by ATTMP.

Train Station Fear Attack

Interior of the Cape Town main train station, South Africa. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Five months and three weeks after arriving in Cape Town (seven months since we left our home in the northeast Belgian Congo), my parents were seriously talking about returning home and I was filled with the fear that I would never get on board a ship.

Then there was a call from the agent at Cooks saying there was a ship going to South America that could accommodate all six of us. There had been possibilities in the past that two or even four of us might get passage, but my father had always insisted that the family had to stay together.

The first problem with this wonderful news was that the ship was in Durban, a thousand miles away and passengers were to be aboard within seventy-two hours.

The second problem was that it was now 2 PM and the one daily train to Durban had all ready left. The next one would be at ten the next morning, 20 hours from when my parents were talking with the Cook’s agent. The trip over the mountains from Cape Town to Durban would take forty-two hours. That was sixty-two hours of our seventy-two hours used up before we had even arrived in Durban, let alone onboard. The agent assured my parents that would be plenty of time.

I was not so sure. I didn’t want to miss the first steam ship voyage of my life. Although he wouldn’t tell us the name of the ship, or where it was docked, he promised that a Cooks’ agent would meet us at the train and take us to the ship.Waiting to make your first ocean passage is not easy especially when your father does not take getting there on time as seriously as you do.

During the six months in Cape Town my father had spoken in several churches, some of them rather large and my mother had spoken at all kinds of women’s meetings. Consequently when it came time to board the train there was a hundred or more people on the platform to say good-bye.

English: Railway coach 1st and 2de clas with 3 axels. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

After getting us settled in our compartment, my father went back down to the platform to talk to the people. He was not making a speech or anything but was darting from one person to the next trying to make sure he shook hands and said something to everyone.

My mother sat on the end of the berth talking through the window to people who came by. My two younger brothers kneeled on the berth across from my mother leaning out the window, looking back and forth, waiting for the train to start moving. My sister sat next to my mother and occasionally leaned forward to reply to someone who had spoken directly to her. I sat in the middle of the berth from which my brothers were looking out the window, looking straight ahead, not interested in talking to anyone. All I wanted was for the trip to get started.

The conductor walked along the platform calling, “All aboard!”

Still my father kept talking to people.

I pushed my two brothers aside and hung out the window. I watched the conductor walk along the platform calling out his warning. At the last car he climbed onto the platform and leaned out waving his flag. He disappeared into the last car and there was a jolt that shook the car. Another yanking lurch and the train started to move.

“Dad! Dad! We’re leaving,” I shouted in desperation. Couldn’t he see the train was leaving?

He turned and smiled, waved to me and then went back to talking to the people around him.

I bounded from the compartment, along the passageway to the car’s rear platform. I got there just as it got even with my dad. The train kept moving. I crossed to the forward platform of the next car and through the door. The passageway ran along the side of the car away from the platform and I ran past the compartments. Halfway through the car the passageway crossed over to the other side and through the windows I could see him on the platform ahead of me. The car caught up with him and I walked along the passageway keeping even with him on the platform. From the back platform I called again, “Dad, we’re leaving!”

I was desperate. He was the one that had saved me from falling to my death into the Lucilubi. He was the one that had shown me at least twenty different trails to the top of Table Mountain. He was the one who had told me how wonderful it was to be at sea, and now he was just standing there talking to all those people as thought going to sea didn’t matter. I wanted to get off the train and be with him if he should not get on in time, but I didn’t want to miss getting on the ship.

“It’s alright, Son,” he called back.

As far as I was concerned it wasn’t all right. Maybe a little bit right in that the train had not yet pulled out of the station without him on board, but it was not ALL right.

I ran through the cars, keeping even with him on the platform, until I got to the last car. Still he kept talking. The train was pulling away. He turned then as thought he had suddenly noticed what was happening and ran along the platform. He caught up with the train, grabbed hold of the handrail and jumped onto the bottom step. He climbed the three steps and put an arm around my shoulder while he waved with the other hand to the crowd standing on the disappearing station.

He stopped waving when the train went around a curve and we could no longer see the station. He stood there with his hand on my shoulder and the other one on the wooden capped railing of the rear platform and said, “Well, Son, I guess we really are on our way.” He shook his head a little as though he couldn’t really believe it was happening and I knew he wouldn’t have missed this train if President of the United States had been on the platform and wanted to ask him a question.

Selected from
Ramblings of a Wanderer 
Copyright © 2000 by Paul J. Stam
All rights reserved

Big Ben, the War and Me

The Radio

The short-wave radio, dark grey, almost black in color, sat in the corner of the living room close to a window. The copper wire that acted as the antenna was almost invisible where it ran out through the bottom of the window. Outside the window, it ran up the wall, across to the nearest porch pillar and then from pillar to pillar halfway around the house. I helped my father string that antenna and we tried several different ways until we thought we had the best reception.

Half an hour before the news came on we started the 12-volt generator located on the back porch. After cleaning the sediment cup and filling the one-gallon tank of the small generator, my father pulled on the rope, again and again, adjusting the choke until the little engine sputtered and then started. It was allowed to run for half an hour to charge up the batteries. At five minutes of four it was turned off so the loud putt putting of the two-cylinder engine would not interfere with hearing the radio.

For half an hour everyday, twelve to fifteen missionaries, crowded in front of the radio. Those that got there first, getting the seats closest to the radio. This was adult business so we children were allowed to stand quietly at the back of the room provided we didn’t say anything.

Big Ben (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At exactly one minute of four by the clock on the top of the radio that my dad reset whenever it needed it to conform to BBC time, my dad would turn on the switch. The three dials with wavering needles would glow yellow. Over the speaker would come the squeaking and rattling static until my dad had it tuned. Because the signal would fade in and out, my father would hover over the gray box, one hand on the tuning dial and the other in the volume. At precisely 4 PM we would hear the deep, resonant sounds of Big Ben striking the hour. After the sounds of the clock were the words, “This is the BBC, London …” and then the news.

It was in that living room, staring at the dark, grey box with its yellow dials and black knobs, that we heard the devastating reports of the German invasion of Denmark and Norway in 1940. A month later there was the news of the invasion of Belgium and the Netherlands. We heard of the defeat at Dunkirk and ten days later that German forces occupied Paris.

We heard Prime Minister Winston Churchill speak to his countrymen. Almost all we heard was of losses and defeats. It was by way of the BBC that those missionaries, all of them Americans, huddled around that radio, learned about the attack on Pearl Harbor on the other side of the world.

Slowly the news began to change. In November of 1942 we heard about the English and American invasion of North Africa. We knew about that war. For months the great, yellow, desert trucks had driven along the road below the station on their way to Field Marshall Montgomery in North Africa. We talked with the British soldiers in those truck, and every night at the family devotions we would pray for those soldiers. Less than nine months after the invasion, Rommel and his troops were driven out of North Africa and the trucks stopped rolling past our station.

There was the invasion of Sicily and Salerno and the capture of Naples by the Allies on October 1^st 1943. There were times when the news created anxiety. Other times there was cause for optimism. But most of the time it seemed that things had not changed much from the day before and I sometimes wondered why everybody made the effort to come to our house only to strain so hard to hear what was said between the squealing and crackling.

But always, no matter what the news that followed might be, there was something reassuring about the sound of Big Ben over the House of Commons striking the hour and the words, “This is the BBC, London…” It meant, they at least were still there.

Tea was always served on the porch after the broadcast. Often, after the guest had left, my mother gathered us around her. Once she asked us, “Why are the allies fighting the Germans?”

My youngest brother, the precocious one, answered, “They want to capture Big Ben. You see they can’t hear it in Germany and so they can’t feel good when they hear it like we do.”

We were in Cape Town on June 5^th 1944 when we heard that the United States Fifth Army had liberated Rome the day before. There too people gathered around the radio to hear the news. There was the news from the local Cape Town radio stations, but people still listened to the BBC news.

It was in Cape Town, one week before we caught the ship that was to take us to Argentina that we heard Big Ben striking and then again the reassuring words, “This is the BBC, London. The Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces announced today that the invasion of Europe from the West has begun…”

It didn’t make any difference where we were, at a remote station in the northeast corner of the Belgian Congo, or in civilized Cape Town, or on a British freighter crossing the South Atlantic, we always felt better hearing the sounds of Big Ben before the news.

When we left the freighter that took us from Durban to Buenos Aries we never again listened to the BBC. We didn’t have a radio and all broadcast were in Spanish. When we got to the United States there was all kinds of war news from dozens of stations and we sort of forgot about Big Ben and the reassuring sounds of it striking the hour. But to this day, when I hear the sound of Big Ben striking the hour on some TV show or movie, I get the warm, fuzzy choked-up feeling that goes with hearing something good.

Selection from
Ramblings of a Wanderer 
Copyright © 2000 by Paul J. Stam
All rights reserved

Mom, Her Grandpa and Me – 2

Tugboat 2

“It wasn’t a very big tug,” my mother went on. “Couldn’t go out into the ocean, or handle ships of any great size. Mostly it moved barges and such around the harbor. Maybe it was a little wider than this kitchen and about four times as long.…”

We were sitting in a ten by ten kitchen in our home in Minneapolis, which is about as far away from any ocean as you can get unless you are in the middle of Africa. Nor are there any harbors around unless you call those things up on Lake Superior harbors. The Mississippi River which separates Minneapolis from St. Paul has docks. I don’t think the Mississippi has a real harbor until it gets to New Orleans.

But a tug four times as long as our kitchen seemed like a nice size boat to me. My lightening quick mind made it out to have a forty-foot length and a ten-foot beam, which was just about right. I guessed it might have a draft of three of four feet.

For as long as I could remember I had been studying boating magazine of one kind or another so I knew about length-over-all, length-on-waterline, beam and draft. At fifteen I couldn’t wait to turn eighteen so I could run away and join the Navy. I knew it wouldn’t really be running away, but running away sounded much more adventuresome than joining-up. But I digress again…

My mother went on, “Everything was so exciting that day. After breakfast we went across the harbor to pickup a barge that had to be moved. We tied up to the barge and then had to wait for a while for some reason, which make Grandpa mad. He would start to curse and then remember that I was on board and he’d catch himself.

“What did he say?” I asked. I wanted to hear my mother swear but she just looked at me sideways with a little smile on her face and ignored my question.

“I don’t remember exactly where we went that day,” she said, “but I remember the harbor full of ships of all sizes; three and four-masted sailing ships, and steam ships with tugs alongside and other little boats and the ferries, everything moving every which way and I was sure sometimes we would hit another boat, but we never did. Sometimes we just missed them by a few feet and Grandpa would call over to the other tug and they would talk while they passed.

“The back half of the tug…”

“That’s called the stern, Ma.”

“I knew the bow from the stern before you ever thought of coming into being, son. Don’t interrupt me. Like I was saying,” she looked at me with a smirk, “from midships aft, there, is that alright, the whole back half of the tug was flat, with no rails along it. There were the ballards, of course, do you know what a ballard is, son?’ she asked knowing full well that I did, but wanted to firmly establish that if she wanted to call the stern of the tug the back, that was her prerogative. I didn’t answer her because she knew I knew.

“Pa kept telling me not to get to close to the edge, but that was the best place. I would sit on a ballard with the deck only about a foot above the water and I could just watch the water slide by, or at the stern watching the turbulence from the propellers.

“We were underway with a barge alongside by lunch time. That was fun. The sound of the engine and the rocking of the tug in the waves from other ships.

Lunch was pork chops and fried potatoes. Grandpa had four chops and his plate piled high with potatoes. Well, you’ve seen pictures of Grandpa. When the desert came it was apple pie. The cook set it in front of Grandpa who cut it, first in half one way, and then in half the other way. He took a piece, gave me and Pa a piece and pushed the rest of the pie, which was only a quarter of the pie, into the middle of the table and said, ‘Divvy up, boys.’

“The cook said, ‘Cap’n, that pie was for all of us.’ Grandpa just put a forkful of pie in his mouth and said, ‘I can only cut a pie in four pieces, Cookie. If you want more pie, bake another one.’

“I really was too full to eat a quarter of a pie,” my mother said, “so I pushed my piece out toward the crew. Grandpa scolded a bit, but I finally convinced him that I couldn’t eat that much and Pa didn’t want all of his so we shared. I learned later that the cook got an allowance for food every month and what he didn’t spend to supply the tug with food he could keep. No wonder cookie never liked seeing Pa and me come for the day. He probably hated it even more when your uncle George was old enough to join us.”

Uncle George, as you may have guessed was Ma’s younger brother. I met Uncle George just once in my life. By the time I was born in Central Africa, Uncle George had joined the Navy. I met him soon after my mother told me about her grandpa and his tugboat. I was fifteen when Uncle George stopped to visit us in Minneapolis. He was a Chief Warrant Officer in the Navy and on his way to assignment in San Diego. That was just before the end of WW II so he was in uniform and totally my hero.

My Navy duty

I have a dozen or so other uncles and aunts. Many with whom I spend a great deal more time than I did with Uncle George. But of all my uncles and aunts, I remember Uncle George the best. That is probably because he was the embodiment of what I always dreamed of at that age: of oceans, sailing, the Navy and even someday owning my own boat.

Waiola – My sailing days

I sailed the oceans while in the Navy and on my own sailboat. Both my parents in their own unique ways encouraged my love for the sea. Many times while building our boat or sailing her I thought, “Dad would like this,” or “Wonder what Ma would say?”