Journey of the Heart

My Jet Setting Journal: Printers Row

Posted on June 9, 2011 | 4 comments

: Award winning author Sam Morton hard at work.

Okay, I don’t exactly jet set, but sometimes I do get a little heavy in the foot and speed…shh that is a secret…so it feels like I am jetting. Last weekend my absolutely incredible husband and I drove to Chicago for the Printers Row Lit Fest.

First order of business. We had a giveway for a Slick eBook Reader and the lucky winner was Laura Pond. Congratulations and thanks for your support of Echelon Press.

Some of you might rememeber that last year (2010) I had some unhappy words to say about the Chicago Tribune and their treatment of Echelon Press and my authors. If you search back you can find my blog post, but don’t bother. After I posted that Blog I was contacted by a Trib employee and she told me she would do everything she could to help me out this year.

The men of Echelon hard at play!

Now, don’t get me wrong, I was in no way asking for special treatment, only for what we had already earned in the way of seniority and placement. At any rate, this little gal obviously moved heaven and earth (and after meeting her this weekend, I can see that she would be quite capable of doing so) and the organizers of the Lit Fest took pity on us and we ended up back where we had been several years prior. It was a grand location and it afforded us the opportunity to be in the direct path of tens of thousands of eager readers of all ages.

Award winning authors J.R. Turner and Luisa Buehler

2011 proved to be the 2nd most successful event in Echelon’s ten year history. Now, I’ve been hearing authors talk who are not all that keen on book fairs/festivals, well, I am here to tell you that Chicago has one of the BEST book fairs I have ever been to. This was our ninth year attending and I fully intend to keep going back. I would like to thank Amy Guth for all her help and for being so damn beautiful (and I don’t mean that to sound creepy), if you ever see her pictures, they do not do her justice. Best of all, she is an absolute delight!

I also want to thank the authors who attended this year with Echelon. Gale Borger, Luisa Buehler, Norm Cowie, Marlis Day, Robert Goldsborough, Sean Hayden, Sam Morton, J.R. Turner, Marc Vun Kannon, Claudia Whitsitt, and Jen Wylie. Also, big thanks to our special guests, Martin Bartloff and Tami Su.

The smallest dill pickle chip I ever sawed!

Special and sincere thanks to our two helpers Shannon (Gale Borger’s daughter) and Julia (Marc Vun Kannon’s daughter). Without the two of you we would have been in a fine pickle. You are incredible young women with hearts of gold.

In closing, I just want to say again, that the people who came by our booth over the weekend were incredibly enthusiastic and eager to meet our authors. You are a tremendous group of people and we hope to see all of you next year.

Special thanks to my absolutely, incredibly, splendiferously, wonderful husband. Goodness, how I do love you!

Marc Vun Kannon and the delightful daughter Julia.

Authors Claudia Whitsitt and Mary Welk

Gale Borger and her lovely daughter Shannon.

4 Comments

Posted in Blatherings

How Good Are you?

Posted on June 8, 2011 | 9 comments

Howdy, been a while since I blogged so I thought I would pop in and open a discussion with a few questions. I’m posing these questions to authors who have books they are promoting (or supposed to be).

1. Has your website/Blog been updated within the last two weeks?

Seriously. People tend to visit their favorite websites every couple of days, or at least once a week. If you have not updated your site in more than two weeks, chances are those people will no t make a third trip back and you will be replaced with the “California Cows” website.

2. Have you finally added a SUBSCRIBE button to your website/Blog?

I don’t know about you, but my list of favorites on Internet Explorer is long and chaotic. I try to keep it organized, but that is not my strong suit. By adding a SUBSCRIBE or Follow button, you offer your readers a chance to find you with a lot more ease than having to sift through all the clever little sites (like: Army Wives) to try to find yours again.

3. Don’t you want readers to tell others about your website/Blog? Okay, so do you have a SHARE button on the upper screen of your site?

There are so many social networking sites out there now that it is just crazy for you not to encourage your readers to share the link to your website/Blog. Make it easy for them. This is all ab out exposure and I would be remiss if I did not tell you all to get out there and EXPOSE YOURSELF. I mean, not full frontal or anything, but in a big way.

The book industry is in a constant state of change and as authors and readers, we need to make every effort to keep up. Authors need to find new and creative ways to introduce their works to readers. With every book or story an author puts out, they need to be writing with one question in their mind: What makes this book stand out above the rest and how do I convey that to readers?

Readers, I beg of you, please be open-minded when you are browsing the bookshelves and online catalogs. Just because you have never heard of an author doesn’t mean they are not great at what they do. Variety is the spice of life and by opening your mind to new an exciting things, you may just come across a new favorite author, or two.

Tell you what. The first five people to post their thoughts on this Blog will get their choice of one of Echelon Press’ eBooks. You can check out our catalog by clicking on this link.

9 Comments

Posted in Blatherings, Marketing

All Depends on How You Look At It (Marc Vun Kannon)

Posted on May 11, 2011 | 4 comments

This is my last blog tour stop before my latest novel, St. Martin’s Moon, becomes officially available, and I will be in South Carolina at their Book Festival in Columbia (May 14 – 15, 2011) on that happy day (Sunday, if you must know). And I hope you must, since I’d really like for you guys to be there to help me celebrate the official release of the world’s first Gothic SF novel. I invented the category, so I oughtta know. There are other SF novels written in the Gothic style, but they go the usual route of assimilating all the Gothic stuff into the SF trope of the day (it’s amazing what you can blame on biotech and some nanobots in a low-gravity environment). St. Martin’s Moon isn’t one of them.

I’ve spent literally years trying to figure out how to describe this book. I could do one-liners, what they call taglines. I could do two-liners, the sort of short description you’d find in a TV guide, what they call a logline, but don’t ask me why ‘cause I don’t know. I even came up with a good back-cover description. But anytime I get closer to the plot than that I get tangled in all the strings.

The reason for the confusion, I decided, was in the genre I was using to categorize the damn thing. Why would a mere genre category do that, you ask? How could it? Well, genres are a sort of shorthand, a kind of box we put stories into so that someone looking for a story of a particular type can find one easily. The problem comes when a story doesn’t really fit into any particular type. Then the shorthand becomes something of a straitjacket. One would think a novel with werewolves and ghosts in it would fit neatly into the heading of a paranormal. Since it took place on a lunar colony it clearly was futuristic, right?

Yeah, me too.

While the story does have werewolves in it the story really isn’t about them, it’s about the people who become them. How do they live with the curse? Where does the curse even come from? Why does the Moon matter, and a full Moon, at that? These are all questions that the main character, Joseph Marquand, Earth’s greatest werewolf hunter, would like to know the answers to, because he hates his job. Killing the wolf means killing the man, usually an innocent man. When his latest case involves a werewolf attack on the Moon itself, it drives these questions from his mind in favor of something more immediate, but not far, not far at all.

In short, the story is more futuristic than paranormal, and more SF than merely futuristic. SF looks for answers, takes for granted that there are answers, which gives it something in common with the mystery novel St. Martin’s Moon was originally conceived as. Except that SF doesn’t allow for ghosts. It could handle werewolves, I think, since they have a trigger and are stoppable. Ghosts somehow don’t seem to fit into the same bucket. There’s a reason for this, I think, and I don’t think science will ultimately be able to account for ghosts any more than they’ll make a truly AI computer. So SF is fair game, in my opinion, to have a few genuine ghosts appear in its otherwise unhaunted halls. If I could have worked in a dark and stormy night I would have, but hey, it’s a lunar colony we’re talking about here. A haunted one.

Like many writers, I started when a story came along and decided that I should write it. Don’t ask me why. Others followed, until now I’m afraid to go out of the house with a recorder or notebook in my hand. But I show them, I refuse to write the same story twice!