Celebration

Hi fellow writers and lovely readers! I've two things to celebrate today. Firstly, it's the first anniversary of the release of Dangerous Waters, my romantic mystery - and what a year it's been! A real roller-coaster of highs and lows with the highs winning out – just. J  Sales have been pretty good for a complete unknown writer and I'm looking forward to building on that this coming year. I'm starting a blog tour later this month and also taking part in an online radio interview in the USA. So, I’m not resting on my laurels. . . .

Secondly, Dangerous Waters has just received the Silver award for Adult Fiction from www.thewsa.co.uk . So exciting!  It’s certainly an excuse to open a bottle of something  and I don't think it'll be fruit juice !

Here’s a bit more about my book:

‘Oh my God, what’s happening to me? After all this time, please, not again!’

 Jeanne Le Page, gripped by fear and panic, struggles to breathe as the ferry arrives in Guernsey – the island she had fled fifteen years before, traumatised by a family tragedy.

Now she has to return after another death. Her beloved grandmother has bequeathed Jeanne her old cottage. She intends to stay just long enough to sell her inheritance. Deeply unhappy after the recent end of a relationship, she has no desire to pick up her old life in her birthplace.

Jeanne is shocked to find that the cottage holds a secret going back to the German Occupation. She becomes drawn into learning more, delaying her planned departure. At the same time, while unveiling the truth of what happened to her family, she puts herself in mortal danger.

Jeanne has to relive the tragedy as the ghosts continue to haunt her. But over time the island works its magic, encouraging her to live and love again . . . .

              I was drawn to write this story as I’d lived in Guernsey for many happy years and thought it would make a beautiful setting. The idea of a young woman who had suffered a terrible tragedy as a teenager opened up all sorts of potential stories. And I had to include an old house holding secrets as I’m convinced that’s what happens in reality. If only walls could talk! As they can’t, it’s up to us writers to step in and fill the breach. As a psychotherapist, I’ve learnt a lot about secrets over the years and shared many tragedies with my clients. Although my book is entirely fiction (apart from the references to Guernsey and its history) there’s an element of ‘realness’ in the sense that these things can happen. Is it not often quoted that ‘truth is stranger than fiction’?

In order to celebrate both the Award and the 1st Anniversary of Dangerous Waters, I’m offering a giveaway on my blog. All you need to do is pop along and leave a comment!   http://bit.ly/10tClYd
You can find me on Twitter https://twitter.com/AnneAllen21

And Facebook  https://www.facebook.com/anne.allen.12327

www.dangerouswaters.co.uk

Anne Allen 

Marketing Tips

We thought we would share some great tips with you on how a writer can market their work for little or no cost. All of the following tips are from “Guerrilla Marketing for Writers”
1) Content: Publishers waste millions of dollars a year buying and promoting books that fail.
No amount of money or marketing can overcome a book that doesn’t deliver. So your first challenge is to write a book that is the best it can be. The content of your books will determine how you sell them to publishers and promote them to book buyers. Content precedes commerce.
2) Commitment: You must make a commitment to your marketing program.
Talent isn’t enough. You need motivation—and persistence, too. —LEON URIS
Once you decide on the best promotion plan for your books, make the commitment to stick with it.
The only time you can safely stop promoting your books is when you’re ready to stop writing them. Before then, commit yourself to the Rule of Five: do five things every day to market your books. Think of it this way: A diamond is a piece of coal that stuck to the job.
3) Investment: You must think of marketing as an investment in your future.
Most best-selling authors don’t strike gold with their first book. Their sales grow with a succession of books until they write the breakout book that catapults them onto the best-seller list, where they stay for the rest of their careers.
Until your promotional efforts pay off and you become a successful author, consider the money you spend on promotion as an investment that will pay for itself many times over.
4) Consistent: Your marketing must be consistent.
You must make your promotion consistent so that, over time, the media and your readers become more receptive to you and your books. One of the weapons in chapter 18 is the marketing calendar that you will create and tweak as needed every year. But once you’re convinced about the most effective way to promote your books, don’t change your approach. Make your promotion, like your books, consistently first rate. Also be consistent about the frequency with which you write your books and when they are published. One book a year is the usual pace.
5) Confident: You must make potential readers confident in you.
Consistency creates familiarity, familiarity builds confidence, and confidence is the most important factor in determining what makes consumers buy. It’s more important than quality, selection, price, and service.
6) Patient: You must be patient with your marketing.
If you’re doing all you can for your books, take two more steps: • Follow up on your efforts. • Have patience with your promotion plan, the sales of your books, and the development of your career.
7) Assortment: You must use an assortment of weapons to ensure the success of your marketing.
Small businesses shouldn’t try to use all the weapons in their arsenals at once, but should unleash them over time with a well-thought-out plan. Unfortunately, this is a luxury writers don’t have. Unless publishers make a commitment to a book, they test-market it with the first printing. To sustain your publisher’s belief in your book’s future, you have to create maximum promotional firepower for it during the crucial four- to six-week launch window when it’s published.
Firing as many weapons as you can integrate effectively into your plan is the best way to accomplish this. If your book doesn’t gain momentum fast enough, your publisher will give up on it and go on to other books. Make it your goal to use at least sixty weapons. The wider the assortment of weapons you use, the wider the grin on your face will be when your royalty check arrives. However, if you can’t use a weapon effectively, don’t use it at all.
A Web site alone will not make your books successful, nor will a media kit. Regard every weapon as 1 percent of your promotion plan. The best way to guarantee the success of your books is to use as many weapons as you can. The more weapons you unleash on publication and the more completely you integrate them, the more powerful each of them becomes. Unity and variety are two of the keys to victory in the publishing wars. The bigger your arsenal, the greater your victories.
A bookseller who was chosen to receive the Publishers Weekly Bookseller of the Year Award was using seventy-four guerrilla marketing weapons (and he was still trying to figure out how to use the other twenty-six!).
Guerrilla Marketing for Writers: 100 No-Cost, Low-Cost Weapons for Selling Your Work – http://www.bookdaily.com/book/1034711
~~We hope this helps you as an author to get your work out there to the waiting reader! K.R. and I are working diligently, daily, to put into practice all the things we read about and learn. The above are some great encouragements that have helped to keep us motivated to move forward. Another great resource, is MasterKoda on Facebook. This author/editor/illustrator/marketing group is full of people who know the real meaning of putting others first. Join us, you won’t be sorry you did.

Tamy Burns

Forgotten Memories

How many of us rely on “forgotten memories”? 

My question was prompted by Oliver Sacks’s article entitled “Speak, Memory” in the New York Review of Books.  In it he recounts his discovery, some years after publishing his memoir, that one of his most vivid childhood memories was false.  Not false, as in he made it up, but false as in it happened to someone else.  His memory was based an extensive and moving description of the event in a letter from his brother. He “remembered” the details of the event, but he “forgot” the source of the information.

His article went on to explore the difference between plagiarism and cryptomnesia.  Plagiarism implies intentionality, a conscious and willing misappropriation of someone else’s ideas or images.  By contrast, cryptomnesia (“hidden memory”) describes ideas and images that emerge in consciousness without memory of their source.  

Cryptomnesia, according to Sacks, can be a vital factor in creativity, insofar as it allows ideas and thoughts to be “reassembled, retranscribed, recategorized, given new and fresh implications.”  But how often is that “new idea” simply a remembering of an idea whose context or source you no longer remember?

Sacks has put a name to a phenomenon that has bothered me in recent months.  As I do my own blog and write guest posts on other blogs, I am constantly on the lookout for inspiration and use Google Alerts to find new sources on topics (memoir vs. fiction, letting go, mindfulness, risk-taking) that are of particular interest to me.  

Often, my new blog builds on an idea I’ve used before.  But often, it builds on someone else’s idea, much as today’s blog does.  I make a concerted effort to give credit to the author of the idea, but I do wonder how often I use an “idea” without realizing that it really isn’t mine, that I have “forgotten” where the idea came from.

This is, I think, a distinction that writers of all stripes (not just memoirists) should be sensitive to.  Aren’t we all “cryptomnesiacs”?!

                                                    
Mary Gottschalk 

www.Sailingdownthemoonbeam.com

http://twitter.com/marycgottschalk

http://www.facebook.com/MaryGottschalkWriter

http://amzn.to/J7iiI4  [Kindle URL]