"Rose is an unusually skillful storyteller. Her polished prose and intricate plot will grip even the most skeptical reader. " —The Washington Post

In honor of the trade paperback of The Book of Lost Fragrances  (Indie Next & Best of 2012 Suspense Magazine) coming out this week I'm giving away  a copy of each of 5 books - a veritable Rose garden of titles....to two readers. 

You'll win The Reincarnationist, The Memorist, The Hypnotist, The Book of Lost Fragrances and an advanced reading copy of my upcoming May book, Seduction, a novel of suspense. 

"The Book of Lost Fragrances... Compelling... suspenseful tale. Once you catch a whiff, you will be enchanted". —Associated Press

"Enthralling... A supple and elegant thriller...There is simply no more daring writer than M.J Rose, and her blisteringly original The Book of Lost Fragrances shows why." —Providence Journal

All you have to do to be entered to win is write to MJRoseWriter at gmail.com with “I Want To Win A Rose Garden!” in the subject.  A random generator will chose the winner.(US residents only.) 

 A special award—from authors to booksellers—to say thank you during Valentine’s season.

 We're celebrating booksellers because you make discoveries, shine light on titles that you love, and welcome readers to your stores.

 Every Indie who sells a combined 25 copies (or more) from these bestselling & award-winning authors shown below receives a tin of treats from the Dancing Deer Baking Co.

 And the one bookseller who sells the most copies will win a $500 American Express Gift Certificate.

 To qualify to win: Simply keep track of copies sold of these six titles and email AuthorBuzzCo at gmail.com by April 10 with your tallies, using the heading “Indie Love.”

 It’s just our way of taking a moment to show you some love back for all the love you show us authors.

Really?

You read Discovery of Witches and The Shadow of Night and you haven't read The Twelfth Enchantment?

Really?

You read Mr Penumbras 24 Hour-Bookstore and you haven't read The Twelfth Enchantment?

Really? 

You read City of Dark Magic and The House of Velvet and Glass and The Night Circus and you haven't read The Twelfth Enchantment?

What are you waiting for?

I was enchanted and enthralled. The Twelfth Enchantment  was one of my favorite historical novels of the last few years. It's almost impossible to me that Liss didn't transport himself back in time in order to write with such assurance about another time and place. The story is original and captivating and I just loved this novel. I'm not a reviewer so here are what other authors and reviewers have said about it. 

“Tremendously appealing characters . . . a thoroughly enjoyable, satisfying read.”—Deborah Harkness, author of A Discovery of Witches

 
“A fascinating netherworld weaves through David Liss’s intoxicating new novel, The Twelfth Enchantment. Set in Regency England, it tells the story of Lucy Derrick, a vivacious heroine in the tradition of Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet. It takes a cunning novelist, indeed, to tell a story this gripping—and magical.”—Katherine Howe, author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
 
“Truly a magical, mystical tour de force . . . Liss, in fanciful English prose, fans the flames into a literary conflagration that eventually engulfs us.”—San Antonio Express-News
 
“A unique and fascinating story, compelling characters, and the delicious combination of realism and mythical.”—Pittsburgh Historical Fiction Examiner
 
“A tale of mystery, intrigue, and magic that leaves the reader wanting more.”—Austenprose
 
“An enthralling tale of romance and the supernatural—with a heroine for the ages.”—Stephanie Barron, author of Jane and the Canterbury Tale

Imagine if every author followed F.Scott Fitzgerald's advice. Really. Just stop and imagine if we all really challenged ourself to follow this advice.  I feel so passionately about this becuase in this time of difficult discovery we need to astound our readers no matter our genre so they can do nothing less than rave about our work outloud. 

First Fitzgerald to his daughter:

Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.

And to his friend:

You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly... it was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child’s passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood...In ‘This Side of Paradise’ I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile... [Literature]  is one of those professions that wants the ‘works.’ You wouldn’t be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.

(Longer letters via Brainpicking here.)

"I want to implore you to remember to dedicate at least as much effort, if not more, to craft than you did before you started taking on so many of the business functions in the industry. Simply never lose sight of the fact that readers expect you to bring your A-game consistently, and they have more incentive than ever to walk away if you disappoint them.” - Lou Aronica, Publisher, Fiction Studio, in his last letter as President, to the membership of Novelists, Inc.

Estimates are that in 2012 over 1.5 million books will have been published (About 20% of them coming from traditional houses). And thanks to the explosion of self-publishing, 2013 could see double that number; as many as 3 million books might grace our virtual bookstores next year! That means we are going to be awash in covers and titles, plot descriptions and characters. That means we are going to be pushing harder than ever to break through the crowded marketplace and doing it without any new methods or magic.

It means that now more than ever we can’t be writing just another book. We can’t be rushing through a draft.

There are those who say the way to win the game is to write fast and furious, and fill up the virtual shelves with as many books carrying your name on the spine as possible. In the past there’s been some proof that it was a viable strategy.

But there’s more proof that the future isn’t about endless quantity.

With so many millions of titles available, the books that will get talked about are the books that make readers talk about them. Now is not the time to try and write twookay books a year as opposed to one really gangbuster book in the next 12 or 18 or 24 months.

I’m not really talking about good vs. bad books. Not talking about quiet vs. noisy books. I’m talking about books that whatever their genre or sensibility areexceptional. If it’s a romance or mystery or literary fiction it has to stand out. Way out.

Not even the few hundred branded authors with built-in fan bases are exempt.

The playing field isn’t level; it’s so overcrowded we can’t see it. Whether we are writing about serial killers or heroines who engage in bondage or National Book Award fiction we need to be writing that “WOW” book. That book that makes readers go “Oooo.”

We need to write books that publicists and marketers and booksellers and book club leaders and librarians and readers can get excited about. That have something about them that makes them stand out. That makes them shine.

PR and marketing doesn’t sell books. It gets attention for them. It sends readers to bookstores and websites to read a few pages. We need to make sure those pages grab the reader with talons and won’t let him or her go.

Today at Writer Unboxed I have a post up that goes against some current advice. Maybe we shouldn't be trying so hard to write fast and write more - maybe we need to write better.  Read it here.

This year I'm giving as many books as I can - here are some suggestions.

For the fishnet stocking: 

The steamy first installment in the Inside Out erotic romance trilogy by Lisa Renee Jones, in the bestselling tradition of Fifty Shades of Grey.

When Sara McMillan finds a stack of journals in a storage unit, she’s shocked and enthralled by the erotic life the writer led. Unable to stop reading, she vicariously lives out dark fantasies through Rebecca, the writer—until the terrifying final entry.

 Certain something sinister has happened, Sara sets out to discover the facts, immersing herself in Rebecca’s life. Soon she’s working at the art gallery Rebecca worked at and meeting Rebecca’s friends. Finding herself drawn to two dangerously sexy men, the manager of the gallery and a famed artist, Sara realizes she’s going down the same path Rebecca took. But with the promise of her dark needs being met by a man with confident good looks and a desire for control, she’s not sure anything else matters. Just the burn for more.

When Sara McMillan finds a stack of journals in a storage unit, she’s shocked and enthralled by the erotic life the writer led. Unable to stop reading, she vicariously lives out dark fantasies through Rebecca, the writer—until the terrifying final entry.

 Certain something sinister has happened, Sara sets out to discover the facts, immersing herself in Rebecca’s life. Soon she’s working at the art gallery Rebecca worked at and meeting Rebecca’s friends. Finding herself drawn to two dangerously sexy men, the manager of the gallery and a famed artist, Sara realizes she’s going down the same path Rebecca took. But with the promise of her dark needs being met by a man with confident good looks and a desire for control, she’s not sure anything else matters. Just the burn for more.

Catherine the Great intrigued me for a long time. She was a powerful woman monarch. She was an immigrant to Russia. She was the best empress Russia has ever had. And—to me born and raised in Poland—she was also the empress who wiped Poland off the map of Europe and turned my ancestors into the reluctant subjects of the Russian tsars.

An irresistible combination.

As soon as I decided to write about Catherine the Great I began reading her letters and memoirs in search for inspiration. In one of the letters Catherine wrote to Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, a British ambassador to Russia, I came across the following sentence: Three people who never leave her room, and who do not know about one another, inform me of what is going on, and will not fail to acquaint me when the crucial moment arrives. “Her” meant Elizabeth Petrovna, the empress who invited Catherine to Russia as a prospective bride to her nephew Peter. “The crucial moment” meant Elizabeth’s much awaited death which Catherine saw as her big political chance. But who were the three spies Russia’s Grand Duchess kept in the imperial bedroom? And what stories and secrets could they reveal? 

Whoever they were I couldn’t stop thinking about them and the kind of lives they must have led: dangerous and filled with betrayals. 

The Winter Palace begins in 1744 when a fourteen year old German princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst arrives in Russia. One of the palace spies, Varvara, a Polish orphan who is trying to assure her own survival, befriends the newcomer from Zerbst and for the next twenty years watches how Grand Duchess Catherine turns herself into the empress and sole autocrat of All the Russias.

Listen to me, Varvara says, I know. 

The one you do not suspect is the most dangerous of spies.

Magical books that I loved and urge you to get a copy for yourself when you buy them for others on your list.

Shelf-Awareness says: 

For centuries, great artists have been drawn together in friendship and in love. In Artists in Love, curator and writer Veronica Kavass delves into the passionate and creative underpinnings of the art world's most provocative romances. From Picasso and Francoise Gilot to Lee Miler and Man Ray to Saul Steinberg and Hedda Sterne, Kavass' graceful and daring text provides a generous glimpse into the inspiring and sometimes tempestuous relationships between celebrated artists throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

The cover alone makes it worth giving to the art lover in your life. Click here for a wonderful article about the book and slide show about the artists couples.

Buy it here!

The couples include:

Robert & Sonia Delaunay
Alfred Stieglitz & Georgia O’Keeffe
Jean Arp & Sophie Taeuber-Arp
Anni & Josef Albers
Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera
Lee Miller & Man Ray
Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight
Barbara Hepworth & Ben Nicholson
Elaine & Willem de Kooning
Pablo Picasso & Françoise Gilot
Jackson Pollock & Lee Krasner
Dorothea Tanning & Max Ernst
Nancy Spero & Leon Golub
Jasper Johns & Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Motherwell & Helen Frankenthaler
Christo & Jeanne-Claude
Bernd & Hilla Becher
Eva Hesse & Tom Doyle
Charles and Ray Eames
Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy
Saul Steinberg and Hedda Sterne
Robert Smithson & Nancy Holt
Niki de Saint Phalle & Jean Tinguely
Marina Abramović & Ulay
Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen
Bruce Nauman & Susan Rothenberg
David McDermott and Peter McGough

 A group of  11 terrific authors (and me) have joined forces to offer you wonderful opportunity to sample our latest novels  -just in time for the holidays—  samples and quirky holiday-themed interviews in one FREE downloadable PDF.

 There's something here for every reader -  mysteries, romance, young adult, women's fiction. So take a look and make some discoveries.

 First Snow – Christine Cunningham
After The Fog - -Kathleen Shoop
A Charming Crime -  Tonya Kappes
Come Back To Me – Melissa Foster
Read Me Dead – Emerald Barnes
Dancing Naked In Dixie – Lauren Clark
The Last Supper Catering Company – Michaelene McElroy
The Hurricane Lover – Joni Rodgers
The Hounding – Sandra de Helen
Milkshake – Joanna Weiss
The Ninth Step – Barbara Taylor Sissel

Each excerpt is prefaced by information about the book and its author. Concluding each excerpt is an order page with clickable links to several online retailers

You can download the PDF “Holiday Sampler” here http://bit.ly/eBookSamples, and share by sending them this link: http://bit.ly/eBookSamples.

Thursday, November 15th 8PM, Julia Pandl, author of Memoir of the Sunday Brunch, chats with BookMovement live--Join us - click here for an RSVP reminder.

For Julia Pandl, the rite of passage included mandatory service at her family’s Milwaukee-based restaurant, where she watched as her father-who was also the chef-ruled with the strictness of a drill sergeant.

At age twelve, Julia was initiated into the ritual of the Sunday brunch, a weekly madhouse, where she-and her eight siblings before her-did service in a situation of controlled chaos, learning not just the family business but also life lessons that would shape them for years to come. she now looks back on those formative years as a source of strength as the world her father knew began to change into a tougher, less welcoming place.

This witty, honest, and exuberant memoir marks the debut of a writer who knows that humor exists in even the smallest details of our lives and that the biggest moments we ever experience can happen behind the pancake station at the Sunday brunch.

Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair is a mouth-full, but the concept of this annual event is quite simple.  What is an Antiquarian Book Fair you ask? For starters, anything antiquarian is from ancient times, whether it is a relic, monument, custom or book. 

Every fall in Boston, enthusiastic collectors and the inquisitive-minded come together to praise the printed world by pouring over ancient books, relics and popular culture.  With over 120 exhibitors from around the world, there are many books, maps, photographs and rare prints to discover and appreciate at this fair. More than that, guests are encouraged to touch and hold these historic items.  This unique ability to touch a piece of history that otherwise would be locked behind glass in a museum is a draw for many fair-goers.  For example, previous years have featured the first printed edition of the Greek book Aristotle from 1494. 

The Boston Book Fair is a full weekend event in the beautiful Back Bay of Boston Massachusetts at Hynes Convention Center.  Throughout the weekend there are discussions about rare antiquities, presentations from experts on various topics and free book appraisals for collectors.  $15 covers the entire weekend or $8 will get you a single night’s historical tour.

Times are as follows; Friday 5pm – 9pm, Saturday noon – 7pm and Sunday noon – 5pm. You can buy your tickets online through the Eventbrite site. If you need a hotel room in Boston check  www.bostonhotels.org  for the latest deals. If you need an affordable car, rent it via CheapCarRental.net. Check the website of the the book fair for a full list of exhibitors.

I was recently asked in a podcast interview, ‘How did Balloon Animals come about?’ It was the first question and it flummoxed me and I must’ve been confused if I use the word flummox so I skirted around that question.

I have no idea how Balloon Animals came about. Writing is an organic process. I wanted to tell the interviewer ‘I just sit at my computer at the same time every day and wait…’ But I thought that might’ve sounded sarcastic but that’s how Balloon Animals came about.

For me, writing is a series of join-the-dots (instances) and eventually you have the bigger picture (plot). Characters are a different story, pardon any puns: they take my hand and lead me down streets I wouldn’t have chosen, sometimes dead ends and sometimes hands I prefer not to hold.

If the interviewer had asked me, ‘Why comic fiction?’ I would’ve told her that comic writing is where I feel comfortable. I have been publishing short stories since my early twenties (now 37) and in that time I’ve tried various genres.

The turning-point for me regarding which genre to focus on came when I submitted a thriller to a London agent and she responded by asking me, ‘Is it a thriller parody?’ How could I take myself seriously after that?

Balloon Animals is comic fiction. A 299-pg novel about the belated coming-of-age tale of a 30 year-old man who takes his mysterious grandfather’s dying breaths in a birthday balloon from Ireland to Iowa is a leap readers should make if they want something other than the tired generic novel.

Twitter @ WriterJDunne
Facebook @ jonathan.dunne.505

I Never Wanted to Be a Writer by Juliette Fay

I never wanted to be a writer. I never wanted not to be a writer, either. The question just never crossed my mind.

From earliest memory, I’ve made up elaborate stories in my head, but as a young person it didn’t occur to me to turn this into a career. I didn’t know any writers. And when I read books, which I did hungrily and unceasingly, I never really thought about who was plugging away to produce them.

Fast forward through a career in human services, marriage, children … and through fifteen years of my husband, who knew my deep love for words and storytelling, badgering me to write a book. I used to say, “Honey, we’ve got a bunch of little maniacs running around here. You write a book.”

By 40, I was home full time with four young kids. I felt physically exhausted and mentally flaccid. Was it mid-life crisis time? Oh, yes. Yes, it was.

I was desperate for something that was mine, that would jumpstart my battery-low synapses, and didn’t involve wiping anything (spills, noses, bottoms). Secretly I wanted to try writing a novel, but I couldn’t imagine even starting until the kids were older.

Weirdly enough, my writing career was launched by a neighbor’s book swap. I teased her that it was really a book dump, because people left far more books than they took away. Desperate to get rid of them, she said, “Here, take this one. You’re going on vacation. It’s a beach read.”

It was the worst book I’ve ever read. The plot was ridiculous, the dialogue was absurd, and the characters were caricatures. Fascinated by its badness, I couldn’t put it down.

It had an interesting premise, though, and my brain, as it often does, began to churn on how I would use it. Characters, conversations and an entirely different story arc began to bloom in my mind. The difference this time, however, was my desperation to find something that was mine alone, the relaxed pace of a family beach vacation, and the provocation of a squandered premise. It was the perfect storm I needed.

And so, instead of just thinking my stories as I had done all my life, I began to write this one down. And I fell in love—with my characters and their problems, but also with words that I could go back to and rearrange, expand or delete altogether if I felt like it. I was in love with the process.

I was very secretive about it. I didn’t want anyone to think that I thought I was smart enough to write a novel. But by the time I finished, I had shown it to three friends, one a writer and two avid readers, and they encouraged me to try and get it published.

Many rejections later, I did get an agent, but the novel never sold. I’m happy about that now because in retrospect it was a practice novel, and I certainly needed the practice. This didn’t deter me from continuing to write; after all, the original goal hadn’t been publication. I just loved doing it.

People often ask the name of the bad book that started it all. I keep the secret out of respect for the author, who put time and effort into producing it. I have a bad book of my own now, and I have no less love for it than I do for any of my other more successful novels.

Who knows, maybe if it had ended up on a bookstore shelf, someone would have read it and said, “Wow, this stinks. Even I can do better than that.” And another writer would have been born.

Juliette Fay’s first novel, Shelter Me, was a 2009 Massachusetts Book Award “Book of the Year.” Her second novel, Deep Down True, was short-listed for the Women’s Fiction award by the American Library Association. Her third, The Shortest Way Home, is due out October 30. Juliette received a bachelor’s degree from Boston College and a master’s degree from Harvard University. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and four children. 

Visit her at http://juliettefay.com/

“Fay is one of the best authors of women’s fiction, and her novels are not to be missed. A moving, introspective look at what it means to be family, and to be truly home.”

-Library Journal, Starred Review

In 2009 I began working with Welcome Books as an oral historian on the project The Last Good War: Faces and Voices of World War II.  This, of course, is very dissimilar from the newly released Artists in Love. 

The connection between the two projects is my love for stories.  In a way, it is fitting that I made my way from stories about war to stories about love (only to learn that there is a great deal of love to be found in war and vice-versa). 

The idea for Artists in Love had been brewing in my editor, Katrina Fried’s, mind for some time.  I believe she was most drawn to the idea of juxtaposing works of art made by brilliant artists and noticing the way they influenced one another in that juxtaposition. 

Until the summer of 2011 (after I completed a visiting curator post at the Cheekwood Museum in my hometown), Fried waited for me to send samples of the stories I would write.  I wanted them to read like short stories--the way they take you through rooms, in and out of character’s minds, into your own vulnerabilities.  I wanted someone who had never heard of a particular artist (or artists) to learn something new about their process and lives. Lee Miller and Man Ray, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe served as the first three stories. 

From there I was given the green light to write stories for the rest of the couples (and more) that have been included in the book, along with beautiful photographs and works of art.

For more info click here.

In the Beginning…

I was a magazine editor who’d written a few (unsold) screenplays when I made it to the fifth floor of a West Village apartment were fiction writers met. I’d been invited to join their group, but only because they needed a minimum of four to keep going. I hadn’t written fiction since high school but the thought of trying it excited and frightened me in equal measure.

 From the very first workshop I was hooked, obsessed, determined to write a novel. Each Monday I’d trudge those stairs—no elevator in the pre-war building. It was a hard climb. Now that the fog of fantasy about writing fiction has receded and I am a published author, I realize that pushing myself to ascend to the fifth floor was actually good training! It took five years and many drafts (and other workshops) before I had a manuscript that was good enough to secure a literary agent.

 All I had was a time period when I showed up the first night. “I want to write about the 16^th century,” I said to the other, rather startled, writers. (This was 2007, before The Other Boleyn Girl and Showtime’s The Tudors.) Since I adored murder mysteries, I thought I’d set one in the reign of Henry the Eighth. Then I decided to make it a thriller too. I fused all the things I loved: Tudor England, a juicy murder, a high-stakes thriller plot.

 But picking a protagonist—that took me a while. I wanted to put a woman in the center of the book, and while I didn’t want to make her a royal, I feared it would be too difficult to find reasons for an ordinary woman to be in the center of a tense, fraught situation in 1537. When I decided to try a nun—specifically, a novice of the Dominican order—that led me to some interesting places.  This was a time of tremendous upheaval, when Henry VIII made himself head of the church and imposed the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

What would it be like to live in an age of destruction? The more I read about it, and the more I thought about it, I became convinced that the upheaval that Sister Joanna Stafford struggled with was one that readers could relate to today. In fact, I plotted my book and developed my characters when a recession hit New York City and I watched friends lose jobs and homes. A writer friend said to me, “It’s almost like you dealt with disintegration by writing about dissolution.”

 Hmmmm. I think she may be right.

You can reach Nancy at www.nancybilyeau.com 

11 Things Not To Do Before Your Book Launch at HuffPo to celebrate the launch of What To Do Before your Book Launch

Backstory: Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von Bingen by Mary Sharratt 

For twelve years I lived in Germany where Benedictine abbess, composer, polymath, and powerfrau Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) has long been enshrined as a cultural icon, admired by both secular and spiritual people. In her homeland, Hildegard’s cult as a “popular” saint long predated her belated canonization in May 2012 and her elevation to Doctor of the Church in October 2012.

I was particularly struck by the pathos of Hildegard’s story. The youngest of ten children, she was offered to the Church at the age of eight. She reported having luminous visions since earliest childhood, so perhaps her parents didn’t know what else to do with her.

According to Guibert of Gembloux’s Vita Sanctae Hildegardis, she was bricked into an anchorage with her mentor, the fourteen-year-old Jutta von Sponheim, and possibly one other young girl. Guibert describes the anchorage in the bleakest terms, using words like “mausoleum” and “prison,” and writes how these girls died to the world to be buried with Christ. As an adult, Hildegard strongly condemned the practice of offering child oblates to monastic life, but as a child she had absolutely no say in the matter. The anchorage was situated in Disibodenberg, a community of monks. What must it have been like to be among a tiny minority of young girls surrounded by adult men?

Hildegard spent thirty years interred in her prison, her release only coming with Jutta’s death. At the age of forty-two, she underwent a dramatic transformation, from a life of silence and submission to answering the divine call to speak and write about her visions she had kept secret all those years.

In the 12^th century, it was a radical thing for a nun to set quill to paper and write about weighty theological matters. Her abbot panicked and had her examined for heresy. Yet miraculously this “poor weak figure of a woman,” as Hildegard called herself, triumphed against all odds to become the greatest voice of her age.   

Sometimes what you mustn't do is just as just as important as what you must do.

I've had a dozen novels published and have made far more than a dozen mistakes. Which is why Randy Susan Meyers and I wrote a guidebook to help authors avoid making our mistakes. This list contains just a few my "must nots" inspired by the much longer list of "must dos" from What To Do Before Your Book Launch that just launched last week.

1. Don't assume everyone will wake up the day your book comes out and rush out to buy it . (No one can buy a book they have never heard of.)

2. Don't spend more than 10% of your marketing/pr budget on a trailer. Trailers have to be marketed too. So far too many authors wind up marketing their trailers instead of their books.

3. Don't spend more than 10% of your marketing/PR budget on your website -- people only find your website after they hear about the book and no one goes looking for a book that no one has ever heard of.

4. Don't plan readings for bookstores that include you reading all 20 pages of the first chapter unless you're a stand up comic and there is only one joke on each page.

5. Don't be in awe of your own talent, book, brilliance, success or transcendental prose. It's better to have someone other than you, the author, praise the book.

6. Don't spend all your money hiring a PR or marketing firm that no one you have ever heard of has used. Equally don't hire firms that don't specialize in books.

7. Don't do a crazy expensive contest giving away something like an iPad -- thousands of people will enter the contest to win the iPad -- but not be incentivized in any way to buy the book. In fact most will only take notice of the words "iPad" and not even register title of your book.

8. Don't expect all your writer friends whose books you have not read and not praised, to read yours and praise it.

9. Don't use your advance to buy an antique sports car, diamonds by the yard or a bottle of wine from Thomas Jefferson's cellar instead of investing in your book.

10. Don't put the "buy the book" links on an inside page of your website where no one can see them or hide them in a corner -- it should never take more than 2 seconds for someone to figure out how to buy your book. It is not crass to make it clear how to buy the book that no one has ever heard of before and that you are trying to sell.

11. Don't drop into your local bookstore and yell at the booksellers because there aren't twenty copies of your book on the front table.

As Randy's grandmother always said, it's easier to be nice. My grandmother wasn't nice so she never had anything nice to say.

Wha are ten things you think should happen that could improve it?

Here's  a great article by Jane Friendman about the future and the present in publishing.  She's got some wonderful ideas here aobut how publishers could help authors and be better partners.

It's a blue sky article - it would take some radical thinking but she's talking about things a lot of us have been asking for- for years. Maybe if more and more of us ask and write about changes that we'd like to see  - someone will listen. 

If I could just pick two ways publishers could help authors starting this year:

1. publishers help authors steer clear of shysters – I can’t tell you how many times a week an author contacts me via AuthorBuzz.com who has spent untold thousands on pr or marketing that never showed up – just never appeared!

 PR and marketing don’t always move the needle but it needs to show up – if someone buys a service it should be a legitimate one that has at least a chance – not a $5000 video that is dumped into YouTube or a PR service that faxes 10,000 releases into the ether.

2. Publishers help authors cross promote with each other - don't keep us separate. If you have a dozen suspense authors help us to help each other. There are so many ways we could do that. Sharing posts on blogs/facebook is just one. Make all our books available to each other - let me read the house's other authors - maybe I'll invite them to blog here -maybe they will tweet about me. We all know a reader telling a reader about a book they love is way more powerful than an author touting his or her own horn.

The Back Story of A Fine and Dangerous Season by Keith Raffel

Who knew that future president John F. Kennedy had spent the fall quarter of 1940 at Stanford Business School in my hometown of Palo Alto, California? Well, once I found that out, my historical thriller A Fine and Dangerous Season was the inevitable result.

First, I asked myself the two-word question that all thriller authors ask: “What if?” What if during his time at Stanford, JFK becomes fast friends with someone from a completely different background who is Jewish, not Catholic, San Franciscan rather than Bostonian, with a famous left-wing father, not a buccaneering capitalist one? And what if JFK and this fictitious character, Nate Michaels, have a falling out? And then what if JFK needs this guy’s help 22 years later during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Research was next.  I wanted the book to feel real. As a first step, I drove by 624 Mayfield on the Stanford campus where Kennedy lived in a guest house that he rented for $60 per month. The house is long gone, but it did get my imagination’s tachometer up into the red zone. 

At the Palo Alto Library, I found old menus from JFK’s favorite hangout, L’Omelette. The prices seemed reasonable enough--a quarter for a martini and six bits for a French lamb chop dinner! Back at the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, I found a teasing and witty letter from Kennedy’s Stanford girlfriend Flip Price, who chided, “You wouldn’t exactly win a prize for the world’s best correspondent.”

Doing the research on the Cuban Missile Crisis itself was much easier than the work I did on Stanford in 1940. Few modern events have been more scrutinized by historians. With a preference for primary sources, I relied on the book The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis, some 500 pages of word-for-word transcriptions of administration deliberations. The only change I made is to place Nate in the room sitting just behind JFK.

The magic of writing A Fine and Dangerous Season transported me right back to Palo Alto in 1940 and the White House in 1962. Even today, when driving down El Camino Real in Palo Alto, I pass the corner where the old L’Omelette stood and see a hazy outline of John F. Kennedy at the bar surrounded by a passel of admiring women.

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