In Love by Christmas – Not Your Ordinary Holiday Romance

Oh, darn! My Christmas book, IN LOVE BY CHRISTMAS, was free for two days. Before I could get this post out, I see they changed the price back. However, it’s deal at any price and I’ve got a special holiday surprise for you, besides.

How about three Sandy Nathan books for the price of one? Here’s the deal:

FIRST BOOK:  IN LOVE BY CHRISTMAS is a Christmas love story of a perilous kind. Leroy Watches Jr. is a holy man and healer whose power is a bit quirky. Sometimes it makes things worse. You may have met Leroy in LEROY WATCHES JR. & THE BADASS BULL. Yes, it’s that Leroy, the one who ended up the FBI’s Most Wanted Fugitive. This adventure offers more opportunity for misadventure.

Despite his flaw, Leroy has to save his soul mate from her addictions, her father, and Evil Incarnate or she’ll be damned forever.

Trying to unite with his true love, Leroy embarks on an adventure that takes him to the highest–and lowest–realms.

The book is currently $3.99  as an Amazon Kindle. Not free, but not super pricey, either.

 But here’s what I’m doing for my Readers: I got a new website! YAY! And many thanks to my “web guy”, Don Herion of The Sorcerer’s Workshop! Here’s my new website:

Isn't it pretty? It has all the info of my old site, in a pretty new WordPress package.

WHAT’S THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE ABOUT MY NEW WEBSITE? “YOUR FREE BOOK” YES! If you go to new website and click on FIND OUT MORE or YOUR FREE BOOK, you’ll go to a page that will invite you to join my READERS’ GROUP.

What is my READERS’ GROUP? Well, it’s something new. Through the GROUP, I’m going to keep you in the loop about my doings–I have a bunch of new books planned for 2016. I’m also going to let you know about authors I’ve discovered and think are terrific.  If I find out about deals coming up or am having specials myself, READERS’ GROUP members will be the first to know.

You are not signing up to be spammed! I can hardly get out a blog post a few times a year; I’m not going flood your inbox with junk. Nor will I sell or give away your email address. I am techno impaired; even if I wanted to, I doubt I could find your email on my server. Plus, I got writing to do!

WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER FREE NEW BOOKS, SANDY?

If you read  IN LOVE BY CHRISTMAS, you will come upon a character named Vanessa Schierman PhD. She’s a PhD with all her bonafides and the head of an ancient lineage. Vanessa figures large in  IN LOVE BY CHRISTMAS and other Bloodsong Series books. In the first free eBook READERS’ GROUP members receive, you’ll find out lots more about our resident witch. 

Vanessa Schierman's estate. Never go there.

SECOND BOOK, THIS ONE FREE: Vanessa Schierman PhD WITCH At this point, Vanessa Schierman PhD WITCH is available ONLY to my Readers’ Group members. It consists on two longish short stories and an introduction by Vanessa herself, in which she blisters my hide. I’ll add more stories to the book as I write them. I’ll contact you when I’ve got a new story. If you’ve got IN LOVE BY CHRISTMAS,  you really should join the Readers Group and get Vanessa. She appears in many more Bloodsong Series books.

Stepping off the Edge: A Roadmap for the Soul contains everything I learned, in school or out, that actually HELPED me in my life.

THIRD BOOK: THAT’S THE BONUS YOU GET FOR JOINING THE READERS’ GROUP. What is it? A goodie. STEPPING OFF THE EDGE: A ROADMAP FOR THE SOUL. STEPPING OFF THE EDGE  is a memoir that contains every insight, bit of wisdom, or academic theory I learned in school or anywhere else that actually helped me navigate the shoals of life.  STEPPING OFF THE EDGE is what I did to tame my demons so that I could sit here, writing to you.

Part guide-book, part memoir, part laugh-a-thon, STEPPING OFF THE EDGE won six national awards when it came out, including a couple from the largest and most prestigious contests. The interior is gorgeous, with a Native American theme. I illustrated it myself!  An intensely spiritual book, Stepping doesn’t favor any particular denomination, though I am true to my own. People who have read all my books have told me, “Sandy, I like your new stuff, but I like Stepping Off the Edge best of everything you’ve written.”

STEPPING is my gift to you: I hope that the book is as useful to you as it was to me.

In Love by Christmas: sterling, romantic adventure. Vanessa Schierman PhD WITCH: short stories about a person you’d just as soon not know; Stepping off the Edge: A Roadmap for the Soul. And a toolkit, too.

All the best at the holidays,

Sandy Nathan

Amazon Author Page  

HEY! LET’S WATCH MOVIES! HERE ARE SOME VIDEOS ABOUT THE THREE BOOKS:

IN LOVE BY CHRISTMAS: A PARANORMAL ROMANCE

STEPPING OFF THE EDGE: A ROADMAP FOR THE SOUL

Here I am with Diana Gabaldon, my all time favorite author. I have read her Outlander series, all fifty million pages of it, THREE times. We're hanging out in cyberspace for a few moments of eternity, the 65th and 66th most popular authors in Action & Adventure Fiction. WAA-HOO!

Every once in awhile, life presents the opportunity to be outrageously out there, to the point of being obnoxious. This is one of those times.

I recently did a promotion of my eBook, The Angel & the Brown-Eyed Boy. It was free for a couple of days and then went back to being one you had to pay for. The results astonished me. Lots of people downloaded it, and then more bought it.

The book’s rankings dropped spectacularly (in book rankings, lower is better) and my AUTHOR RANKING, which I didn’t know existed (because it didn’t before then) put me in the company of some of the world’s most famous authors, and my favorite authors. [However briefly. These rankings change hourly. I am probably in the potato cellar of the Amazon world again. Or will be soon. This book-selling world is not for sissies, compadres.]

So, it’s my time and I’m gonna crow about it.

I’ve done promos by myself before, but this time I was assisted by folks who knew what SEO meant. Turns out, that’s very important in today’s marketing world. My partners in success in this venture were Genius Media, Inc. They are primarily publishers, but also do book promotion. It was a lucky day when I ran into Genius Media.

If you are planning on giving your book away on an Amazon KDP promotion, don’t think it will necessarily turn out the way my recent extravaganza did. Don’t think it won’t, either. You never know. I’ve done KDP free days in the past, running the campaign pretty much by my lonesome self. What was it like? Think days of non-stop, back breaking work, not knowing what I was doing, going down lists of what to do posted online by people I’d never heard of. Fingers aching, eyes watering. I did get results, but it was awful.

If you’re fortunate and have professionals who know what they’re doing to assist you, something like this may happen–and getting there won’t be a nightmare.

THE FREE PART ENDED UP LIKE THIS:

This is how my rankings showed up at their highest, which is measured by closest to #1, the top ranking. Amazon reports results in terms of all the free books on the site, as well as the book's categories. Yes, that's #20 out of all the books free that day.

 

 

 

The Free results also ended up like this: 

Midway through this promo, without telling anyone they were doing it, Amazon changed its categories from these, to what's above. This makes people who know SEO really upset, because they're settings are now wrong.

If you end up in the Top 100 Free or Paid, Amazon does a nice little thing like this with your ranking and book cover:

Here's The Angel, flying to #1 Tree in Metaphysical & Visionary Fiction. This was a lovely sight.

ENOUGH OF THE FREE RESULTS. EVERYONE’S INTERESTED IN SALES:

When The Angel went off of free, what happened? This. Took a long night of screen-gazing to get this screenshot. Waa-hoo!

OK. THIS IS BLATANT GRANDSTANDING, BUT THIS DOESN’T HAPPEN TOO OFTEN, NOR DO I KNOW IF IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN. I’M GOING TO PUT UP SOME PICS OF ME AND MY NEW FRIENDS, COURTESY OF AMAZON. (AND THANK YOU, AMAZON, FOR CREATING THE VENUE FOR THIS TO HAPPEN.)

Years ago, I gave a talk on “Celebrate Your Victories.” I think I’ll post the text of that talk on this blog. Mitigating/explaining what I’m doing with this post, my talk said that we need to celebrate our wins! We need to toot our horns and let the good times flow when something wonderful happens.

Why? Given the transitory nature of success and life’s high points, you’ll be slogging through the muck soon enough. You’ll forget the wonderful high and that life is a joyful process that includes UPS as well as downs. We tend to focus on the later.

SO, HERE I AM, WITH A BUNCH OF MY NEW FRIENDS:

For years, I was too snobby to read Stephen King. When I finally started, I didn't read everything he'd written–that's HUGE. But I sure gave it a try. So, hey, Stephen, hope to hang out a lot more, buddy!

OMG. The guy who brought Jungian writing and depth psychology to everyone, my old buddy, J. R. R. Tolkien! Here I am, rubbing rankings with the master.

Orson Scott Card, maybe the brainiest sci-fi writer ever. Here we are, lovingly stacked together. Thank you, Amazon! And my READERS! Yay!

Classic sci-fi from the master George Orwell, author of 1984, Animal Farm and so much more. Nice to hang out, George! My The Angel & the Brown-Eyed Boy has been compared to 1984. And our own contemporary pundit, Chuck Wendig. Glad to meet you, Chuck!

WHAT CAN HAPPEN IN LIFE IS TRULY UNLIMITED. YOU NEVER KNOW WHO YOUR NEW FRIENDS MIGHT BE:

MAY YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE AND YOUR COMPANY REFLECT YOUR TRUE NOBILITY AND GRACE!

FREE BOOKS!!!! $$FREE BOOKS$$ UNTIL OCT. 31, 2015, I’M GIVING FREE BOOKS IN RETURN FOR HONEST REVIEWS. WHICH BOOKS? THE WHOLE EARTH’S END TRILOGY BOXED SET EBOOK We have promotions planned for Lady Grace & the War for a New World, Earth’s End II, and The Headman & the Assassin, Earth’s End III. These three books represent a treasure of adventure and … well, pretty near everything else. Romance, time travel, aliens, guys from the past, monsters, you name it, Earth’s End has it. Unfortunately, unless we get more reviews for the last two books of the series. We can’t even BUY advertising for it. [Did I tell you the three books have won SEVEN NATIONAL AWARDS BETWEEN THEM?] BECAUSE OF THIS, I AM GIVING AWAY THE EARTH’S END TRILOGY BOXED SET EBOOK in return for an honest review.

If you’d like to get the three book set for $FREE$, contact me at [email protected]. I’ll get them to you pronto! OFFER GOOD THROUGH OCT. 31–THAT’S MY TREAT!

All the best from Sandy Nathan, who, in addition to being a new mule owner, is also a bestselling and award-winning author. Check out my Amazon Author Page.

Me riding one of our Peruvian Pasos, Azteca de Oro BSN, in the olden days. This is in Monterey, CA, at the 1879 show.

I sold my horse and gave up riding forever perhaps nine months ago. This was after being advised by every medical type in my life and the Rector of my church that I would go Splat! if I came off a horse at my age and state of decrepitude. There is truth to this. I would be a dope if I didn’t acknowledge it.

The only thing is–riding is addictive. Not just the wind-in-your-hair thrilling part of riding, all of it, including picking out your horse’s hooves. It’s a physical thing: body memories, muscle memories. The part of being human that allows dancers to perform entire ballets without having to look at their notes. I’ve ridden for so long that the sensation of being on a horse can come to me anywhere. Swinging down the aisle of the local mall, for instance.

Not riding was painful.

After suffering for months, I decided that somewhere on the planet, a horse with a sufficiently low energy level must exist. It had to be a gaited horse–and this is a very important bit. Most people ride WTC horses: they walk, trot, and canter. The trot is the problematical gait: it’s the backbreaking bounce-bounce-bounce you find on most horses. People who ride rental horses once discover this gait and never ride again; it’s that jarring.

But, alternatives exist. I discovered Peruvian Pasos in the late 1980s, courtesy of my bad back. Peruvians are reputedly the smoothest riding horses in the world, a claim I believe. The only thing is, they’re a Spanish breed and many are very hot–Ole! That means if you move your pinkie, you may be in the next county before you can say, “Why am I on the ground?”

If I couldn’t find a Peruvian as sedate as what I wanted, I wanted another breed just as smooth. I had very limited goals in my post-optimal, maybe end-of-the-trail equine experience.  All I wanted to do was meander slowly around our arena and mosey down our mostly flat trails.

I also desperately needed a way of getting away from my computer. I’m an author and I spend most of my life in front of my screen playing with words and turning my spine into something resembling a pretzel. I needed a new interest! A passion! Outdoor exercise!

Last June, after another disappointing attempt to find the horse of my dreams, I was in Santa Fe NM having dinner with friends. It was really fun. They ride mules. Sue and Dick love their mules and ride them all over. “They are really friendly. They’re more like dogs.” Our friends said mules don’t go lame or break as often as horses.

A few years back, Dick started a “Meet a Mule Day” at the County Fair where mules and their people get together and ride across mattresses and through kids’ wading pools and do amazing things that would cause horses to have nervous breakdowns on the spot.  Dick described all the things his mule could do: find lost people, keep their property free of varmints, and do their income taxes. These are useful skills.

Most of my good ideas come when I’m asleep. After this dinner, I woke up with an Ahah! Why not get a mule? Mules like to go slow. They’re careful, smart, sure-footed, live a really long time (up to fifty years), and they’re sturdy. Why not get a mule? A gaited mule! I know they come gaited from seeing the Peruvian National Champion Mule at a horse show in Monterey, CA.

Great idea! All I had to do was find one. I said, “I think I’ll get a mule,” on Facebook. Lickety split, I was hearing from people I hadn’t heard from in years. The mule ladies. It was really fun. Did you know there’s a worldwide network of women who actually run the planet? They all ride mules. I began hearing from them. It was really fun and got me off of FB for hours at a time. And then back on the Net, searching for gaited mules.

I found a lot of gaited mules, all a long way from Santa Barbara, CA, and mostly in the South. I’d find one that sounded good in Alabama, another in Oklahoma, Wyoming, Colorado, and then Tennessee. Clearly, my mileage points were going to be challenged by this search.

But then, a new friend told me about trainer Lou Moore-Jacobsen and One Moore Training in Templeton, CA. She trains mules! And she told me about the Reese Brothers Mules in Tennessee.  Their family has been producing and selling mules since the 1920s! That’s even older than me. Here’s their FB page. 

I contacted Richard Reese, who handles mule sales for his family’s business. Click here and you can contact him yourself. I told him what’s above and asked if they had a mule that would fit my needs. He said he’d think about it. Somehow the fact that he would be in San Tan Valley, Arizona, at a mule auction and sale and could bring a prospect for me with him came up. All of a sudden, Yipes!, it was late July. The sale was in a few days.

Leavitt Ranch Mule Sale & Auction

My husband and I found ourselves at the Leavitt Ranch the last days of July 2015. Richard Reese had brought a gigantic semi-truck pulling an equally gigantic trailer full of mules.

It was so much fun! I want to thank Buck Leavitt and the Leavitt family for their gracious hospitality in letting all us mule-and-would-be-mule lovers tromp all over their place trying them out before the sale. And thanks to all the people that staffed the cash registers and so on. Quite a lot of work was involved in this production.

And thanks to all the people at the auction. It was such a fun event and I enjoyed meeting and being around so many new people. In my conversations with the “mule ladies” before going to the sale, one of the things I heard over and over again was, “Mule people are friendly. It’s not snobby like horse shows can be.” That was very true.

This was a totally new culture to me. I’m from Silicon Valley and lately (the last twenty-plus years) the Santa Barbara area. I’ve never been to a mule auction. Lotsa mules, folks. The auctioneer talks really fast. You don’t want to wave your bidding card around a lot, unless you intend to bid. The mules were really beautiful. Seductive, actually, moving into and out of the auction area. If you have an equine habit, this could be a danger area.

The Leavitts are going to have another sale in the spring, so if you’re at all inclined to mosey on down, it won’t be 110 degrees then. That was the only negative. The auction was hot, in all ways.

I do want to apologize to those people whose views I blocked at the auction, standing on the rail attempting to film the goings-on with my iPhone. (Which I just learned how to turn on.) I was trying to put together a video of the auction to post here. I didn’t realize I was in the way until someone told me, “You’re really blocking people’s views.” My husband said, “Yeah, you were really in the way.” Oops.

I need to warn you more emphatically about a downside to a mule auction. So many of the mules were so cool that we could have easily ended up with, oh, three or four. Really. An excited lady at the checkout rushed home to get her horse trailer, “I just bought two mules! I didn’t think I’d buy a mule …” Her parting words were lost as she ran to her truck.

Richard Reese showed extreme honesty in telling us, “They’re too green for you,” as we inquired about this mule or that. This was very good advice. My husband, who is normally the more conservative of the two of us, caught the fire. He wanted one. Or two. But we are old codgers knowing nothing of mules.

Oh! Did we get a mule? Yep. Lil’ Annie, who had been with the Reeses one and a half years, ridden by Richard himself. She is exquisitely beautiful and I rode her all over the Leavitt Ranch. Reese Mules are known for their good manners and quality. Did it ever show! I want to share a couple of pictures of Annie when we brought her home. This is her first airline trip. She was so good!

Annie and I on the moving walkway at the Phoenix Airport.

Doesn’t this beat fighting your way through the airport on your own hooves? Once we got into the terminal, Annie’s behavior was even more remarkable.

Annie's behavior at the check-in gate was better than most human passengers.

She did have a little trouble at the airport security checkpoint as we boarded. She had to explain that she couldn’t remove her shoes because they were nailed to her feet. Also, fitting into her economy class seat was difficult.

Annie’s home now, a lovely addition to our family. How’s she doing? Freaked out, man. She’s in major culture shock. But, I got her some sunglasses and an iPhone. She’s starting to adjust to California life. Went to Starbuck’s and Trader Joe’s for the first time. I told her we’d cruise State St. and hit the beach soon. Maybe do some surfing. I’ll report when we do.

I also called trainer Lou Moore-Jacobsen. When you need help, get it. We’ll get it sorted out.

All the best,

Sandy Nathan, who, in addition to being a new mule owner, is also a bestselling and award-winning author. Check out my Amazon Author Page. Also, if you feel the slightest inclination to sign up for this blog through Google + or email, there are places on the top right of this page where you can do it. I will not spam you, posting interesting-to-almost-everyone articles only occasionally. I mean, where can you get a blog post about a mule in an airport?? It’s really funny; I’ve got thousands of FB and Twitter and other “friends,” using the Amazon definition of the term, which means you hit Like and made a comment on someone’s FB page once. But I’ve got 53 followers on this blog. It’s been like that for years. Maybe the sign-up thing is busted. I dunno. Try it and post a comment if it doesn’t work. Or works. Ciao!

BACK IN THE OLDEN DAYS: I'm showing Azteca de Oro BSN at Monterey. This was the big show in 1873. (Azteca is a horse, by the way, not a mule.)

Some of you are aware that I sold my horse and gave up riding forever perhaps nine months ago. This was after being advised by pretty near every medical type in my life and the Rector of my church that I would go Splat! if I came off a horse at my age and state of decrepitude. There is truth to this. I would be a dope if I didn’t acknowledge it.

The only thing is–riding is addictive. Not just the wind-in-your-hair thrilling part of it, all of it, including picking out horse’s hooves. Contact with the equine species is addictive, but riding is super addictive. It’s a physical thing: body memories, muscle memories. What allows dancers to remember and perform entire ballets without having to look at their notes. I’ve ridden for so long that the sensation of being on a horse can come to me anywhere. Swinging down the aisle of my local mall, for instance. The grocery store. Not riding was painful.

After suffering for months, I decided that somewhere on the planet a gaited horse existed for me–and this is a very important bit. I’m wanted an easy-gaited horse. No trot: the back breaking bounce-bounce-bounce you get on most horses. We’ve had Peruvian Pasos since the late 1980s. They are reputedly the smoothest riding horses in the world, a claim I believe. The only thing is, they’re a Spanish breed and very hot–Ole! That means if you move your pinkie, you may be in the next county before you can say, “How did I end up on the ground?”

If I couldn’t find a Peruvian as sedate as what I wanted, I wanted another breed just as smooth. I had very limited goals in my post-optimal, maybe end-of-the-trail equine experience.  All I wanted to do was meander slowly around our arena and mosey down our mostly flat trails. I also desperately needed a way of getting away from my computer. I’m an author and I spend most of my life in front of my screen, turning my spine into something like a pretzel. Outdoor exercise would fill the bill!

Last June, after another disappointing attempt to find the horse of my dreams, I was in Santa Fe NM having dinner with friends. It was really fun. They ride mules. Sue and Dick love their mules and ride them all over. The mules are nice and like their owners. “They really are friendly. They’re more like dogs.” Said mules don’t go lame or break. Dick runs a “Meet a Mule Day” at the County Fair where mules and their people get together and walk across mattresses and through kids’ wading pools and do amazing things, to the delight of all. Dick described all the things his mule could do: find lost people, keep their property free of varmints, and do their income taxes. These are useful skills.

Most of my good ideas come when I’m asleep. I woke up with an Ahah! Why not get a mule? Mules like to go slow. They’re careful, smart, sure-footed, live a really long time (up to fifty years), and they’re sturdy. Why not get a mule? A gaited mule! I know they come gaited from seeing the Peruvian National Champion Mule at a horse show in Monterey.

Great idea! All I had to do was find one. I said, “I think I’ll get a mule,” on Facebook. Lickety split, I was hearing from people I hadn’t heard from in years. It was really fun. Did you know there’s a worldwide network of women who actually run the world? They all have mules. I began hearing from them. It was really fun and got me off of FB for hours at a time. And then back on the Net, searching for gaited mules.

I found a lot of gaited mules, all a long way from Santa Barbara, CA, and mostly in the South. I’d find one that sounded good in Alabama, another in Oklahoma, Wyoming, Colorado, Tennessee. Clearly, my mileage points were going to be challenged by this search. But then, a new friend told me about trainer Lou Moore-Jacobsen and One Moore Training in Templeton, CA. She trains mules! And she told me about the Reese Brothers Mules in Tennessee.  Their family has been producing and selling mules since the 1920s! That’s even older than me. Here’s their FB page. 

I contacted Richard Reese, who handles mule sales. Click here and you can contact him yourself. I told him what’s above and asked if they had a mule that would fit my needs. He said he’d think about it. Somehow the fact that he would be in San Tan Valley, Arizona, at a sale and could bring a prospect for me with him came up. All of a sudden, yipes!, it was late July. The sale was in a few days.

LEAVITT RANCH SALE

My husband and I found ourself at the Reese Ranch the last few days of July and through the sale. Richard Reese brought a semi-truck pulling a gigantic trailer full of mules.

It was so much fun! I want to thank Buck Leavitt and the Leavitt family for their gracious hospitality in letting all us mule-and-would-be-mule lovers tromp all over their place trying them out. And thanks to all the people that staffed the cash registers and so on. And also all the other people at the auction. It was such a fun event and I enjoyed meeting and being around so many people. They’re going to do it again in the spring, so if you’re at all inclined to mosey on down, it won’t be 110 degrees then, either. That was the only negative.

I do want to apologize to those people whose views I blocked at the auction, standing on the rail and trying to put together a video to put up here. I didn’t realize I was in the way until someone told me. My husband said, “Yeah, you were really in the way.” Oops. I get a little excited.

There is a downside to a mule auction. So many of the mules were so cool that we could have easily ended up with, oh, three or four. Really. A lady at the check out rushed off to get her trailer, “I just bought two mules!” Richard Reese showed extreme honesty in telling us, “They’re too green for you.” This was very good advice. My husband wanted one. Or two. It is true that we are codgers knowing nothing of mules.

Oh! Did we get a mule? Yep. Lil’ Annie, who had been with the Reeses one and a half years, ridden by Richard himself. She is exquisitely beautiful and I rode her all over the Leavitt Ranch. Reese Mules are known for their good manners and quality. Did it ever show. I want to share a couple of pictures of Annie when we brought her home. This is her first airline trip. She was so good!

Doesn’t this beat fighting your way through the airport on your own hooves? Once we got to the terminal, Annie’s behavior was even more exemplary. 

Annie's behavior while waiting to board was better than most of the humans in line. Note her seat number, cleverly placed on her rump by the nice airlines people. She did have trouble fitting in her economy class seat.

Annie’s home now, a lovely addition to our family. How’s she doing? Freaked out, man. She’s in major culture shock. But, I got her some sunglasses and an iPhone. She’s starting to adjust to California life. I told her we’d cruise State St. and hit the beach soon. Maybe do some surfing. I’ll report when we do.

I also called trainer Lou Moore-Jacobsen. When you need help, get it. We’ll get it sorted out.

All the best,

Sandy Nathan, who, in addition to being a new mule owner, is also a bestselling and award-winning author. Check out my Amazon Author Page.

Cassandra BSN - July 5, 2015

I recently posted an article/ad about our mare, Cassandra BSN. Reach it through this link. This is the same ad, except that the photos and video on the linked ad are about four years old. Last weekend (Fourth of July weekend, 2015) we shot ALL NEW PHOTOS! I think Cassandra looks better now than she did four years ago, and she looked good then. So, for your enjoyment and perhaps consideration as an addition to your family, here is Cassandra in her present glory:

We are selling her at the broodmare price of $3,500 because she requires an excellent to expert rider. Cassandra is perfectly rideable: as noted, she’s very well trained, healthy, and sound, with lots of trail miles. She is registered and her parentage has been certified by UC Davis DNA typing. She was born on our ranch; we have owned her all her life. The mare is a very friendly, people-orientated horse, a delight to handle and be around. She’s never been sick or hurt. For us, she comes to the pasture gate to be caught.

Cassandra is well-trained and very responsive, at the hot end of a hot breed. We ride her all over our trails, up and down steep hills, with no problem. However, if she gets upset, she’s a real handful. What upsets her? Miniature donkeys and miniature horses. Goats. Alpacas. Strange unfamiliar things. Mules and llamas would probably fit that description. My husband rode her past a local roping arena when the guys were in full swing, team-roping. This was a real challenge for the mare to deal with. Barry got her past the arena and finished his ride, but he’s an accomplished rider and he knows her very well.

CAN YOU RIDE HER? OH, YEAH. HERE’S BARRY RIDING HER IN OUR ARENA AND AROUND THE RANCH. THIS IS THE FOUR YEAR OLD VIDEO: WE SHOT A NEW ONE, BUT IT’S STILL IN PRODUCTION. MAN AND HORSE LOOK JUST THE SAME. BARRY DOES THE SAME THINGS WITH HER IN THE NEW VIDEO AS THIS ONE. WE’LL POST IT ASAP.  That is one built mare, I must say. (Click the YouTube symbol at the bottom and use theater mode for a larger view. You’ll have to click back to this tab after viewing, however.)

HERE’S A GALLERY OF NEW CASSANDRA PHOTOS TAKEN JULY 5, 2015:
I’ll attach more to the end of this post. 

Cassandra BSN - Left Side

Cassandra BSN - Front View. She has an amazing front.

Cassandra BSN - Rear View. Amazing hindquarters, too.

Cassandra BSN - July 5, 2015

LET’S TALK ABOUT THIS MARE AS A BROODMARE. We’re selling Cassandra at a broodmare price, though you can ride her, as the photos show. She’s big and impressive and elegant. She’d make beautiful babies. More than that, Cassandra carries some of the oldest and finest blood in the Peruvian Paso breed.

Often when I read a horse has “Sol de Oro V” blood, I look at its pedigree and find Sol de Oro V is the four-time-removed great-grandfather. And I’ve never heard of the horses up front in the pedigree, where they have the most influence.

THIS LINK TAKES YOU TO CASSANDRA’S PEDIGREE IN ITS FULL SIZE, WITH HOT LINKS TO HORSE IMAGES.   

Cassandra’s Pedigree – Smaller version. For a full sized version with hot links to the horses on the pedigree, click the link above. Horses on allbreedpedigree.com that have a red * after their names have photos. If you want to see a horse’s picture, click on its name on the pedigree chart; the screen will go to the selected horse’s pedigree. Hover your cursor over the little box after the horse’s name at the TOP of the chart. The image will appear. Neat. 

TOP SIDE OF CASSANDRA’S PEDIGREE: When discussing pedigrees, horse people generally start with the top half of the chart, the sire’s portion. Cassandra’s father, RDS Domingo del Sur E.T., is a direct son (via embryo transfer) of the legendary HNS Domingo. HNS Domingo shaped the Peruvian breed. I can’t begin to list his show wins. Those of his offspring and their offspring are countless. I can remember seeing HNS Domingo ridden in his mid-twenties, strong and sound.

Barry, my husband, rode Cassandra’s father, RDS Domingo del Sur, which is how we decided to breed to him. I have never seen Barry get off a horse so excited and happy. He loved that young stallion. Notice that Domingo del Sur’s mother’s breeding goes back to AEV Regional and Sol de Oro V.

BOTTOM SIDE OF CASSANDRA’S PEDIGREE: This is the mother’s half of the pedigree. Here we’re talking royalty from the get-go. Cassandra’s mother, La Soberbia, was a grand-daughter of Sol de Oro V. That’s not: great-great-great-great granddaughter; she was his granddaughter. AEV As de Oro, La Soberbia’s father and a direct son of Sol de Oro V, had the best legs of any Peruvian I’ve seen. He was at our ranch for a while and I admired him greatly. La Soberbia’s mother, Soberana, was a full sister to *Mantequilla. The famous *Mantequilla, the son of Piloto and La Limena. Genetically, Soberana was as close to *Mantequilla as you can get.

La Soberbia was a genetic treasure. You don’t get old style breeding like La Soberbia’s. We owned her most of her life. She produced five offspring for us. All of them were healthy and sound into old age with fantastic legs. And very HOT. Tons of brio in that blood.

Cassandra's mother La Soberbia. (This is an old photo: she's not really green!)

Click here and scroll down to see another view of La Soberbia during her show career. She’s the fourth image down, the palomino mare ridden by a young girl. The page gives information about her and one of her offspring, Capoeira BSN, who was sold to Australia where he’s influenced the Peruvian breed there. Actually, Jorge de Moya, the expert on gaited horses who bought Capoeira BSN and exported him to Australia, really wanted to buy La Soberbia. We wouldn’t sell her.

MORE FACTS ABOUT CASSANDRA BSN: Barry and I ran out of steam for showing about the time Cassandra was born, so she doesn’t have a show record. We haven’t bred her, either. We’re winding down and retiring; that’s why we’re selling her. She’s one of our last three horses. What does the BSN behind her name mean? Those are our official ranch initials, standing for Barry and Sandy Nathan. We bred her. She was born her on the ranch. We’ve had her and cared for her with love all her life. That matters. Horses that have been abused or neglected suffer from it, often all their remaining lives. Cassandra is up to date on all her immunizations.

CASSANDRA AND JOSH: I’ve talked about how hot and hard to ride Cassandra is. I about fell over when Barry put our friend Josh on her. Josh had never ridden. The young man got on her in the round pen and did fine. Soon he was in the arena with her, then out on the trail. Then out on the trail bareback with a halter.

Magic? Maybe, but Josh is a true prodigy. Also a multi-degree black belt in Karate, an advanced surfer, and a musician. He’s got amazing balance and coordination, athletic ability, and sensitivity. He just “got” the mare instantly. Maybe you will, too.

A literally 2 second video of Josh riding her bareback with a halter is above; that’s all we got of the duo. The video is current; it was taken in the last couple of months. We can’t take more videos of the pair, as Josh is sidelined now, after being injured at a truly dangerous sport: surfing.

Here are some more recent photos of Cassandra:

Cassandra BSN Gaiting on the Lawn

Cassandra BSN - Gaiting to the Left on the Lawn

Cassandra BSN hanging out with Loki, our Chessador dog

Cassandra BSN gaiting from the rear. That's a Peruvian horse? Looks like a Quarter Horse's hind quarters.

Let us know if this horse calls you to be her owner. They do that, you know. 

Sandy and Barry Nathan
Rancho Vilasa, home of the Nathan family & fine Peruvian Paso horses
Santa Ynez, CA
Easily accessible in Central California, 40 minutes from downtown Santa Barbara
In the heart of the Santa Barbara wine country.
Come wine tasting and stop by and see Cassandra while you’re in the Valley. 

contact Barry at [email protected]

Rancho Vilasa reserves the right to remove horses from the market and to refuse to sell to particular buyers.

    
                                                                                                                                       Cassandra and Barry Nathan take a spin at Rancho Vilasa

Cassandra BSN being ridden by Barry Nathan

We are selling her at the broodmare price of $3,500 because she requires an excellent to expert rider. You can ride her; she is fully trained and sound. She is registered and her parentage has been certified by UC Davis DNA typing. She was born on our ranch; we have owned her all her life. She is a very friendly, people-orientated horse, a delight to handle and be around. She’s never been sick or hurt. She comes to the pasture gate to be caught for us.

Cassandra is well-trained and very responsive, at the hot end of a hot breed. We ride her all over our trails, up and down steep hills, with no problem. However, if she gets upset, she’s a real handful. What upsets her? Miniature donkeys and miniature horses. Alpacas. Strange unfamiliar things. Mules and llamas would probably fit that description. My husband rode her past a local roping arena when the guys were in full swing, team-roping. This was a real challenge for the mare to deal with. Barry got her past the arena and finished his ride, but he’s an accomplished rider and he knows her very well.

CAN YOU RIDE HER? OH, YEAH. HERE’S BARRY RIDING HER IN OUR ARENA AND AROUND THE RANCH. THE VIDEO IS A FEW YEARS OLD, BUT MAN AND HORSE LOOK JUST THE SAME. That is one built mare, I must say. (Click the YouTube symbol at the bottom and use theater mode for a larger view. You’ll have to click back to this tab after viewing, however.)

 LET’S TALK ABOUT THIS MARE AS A BROODMARE. We’re selling Cassandra at a broodmare price, though you can ride her, as the videos show. She’s big and impressive and elegant. She’d make beautiful babies. More than that, Cassandra carries some of the oldest and finest blood in the Peruvian Paso breed.

Often when I read a horse has “Sol de Oro V” blood, I look at its pedigree and find Sol de Oro V is the four-time-removed great-grandfather. And I’ve never heard of the horses up front in the pedigree, where they have the most influence.

THIS LINK TAKES YOU TO CASSANDRA’S PEDIGREE.   

TOP SIDE OF CASSANDRA’S PEDIGREE: When discussing pedigrees, horse people generally start with the top half of the chart, the sire’s portion. Cassandra’s father, RDS Domingo del Sur E.T., is a direct son (via embryo transfer) of the legendary HNS Domingo. HNS Domingo shaped the Peruvian breed. I can’t begin to list his show wins. Those of his offspring and their offspring are countless. I can remember seeing HNS Domingo ridden in his mid-twenties, strong and sound.

Barry, my husband, rode Cassandra’s father, RDS Domingo del Sur, which is how we decided to breed to him. I have never seen Barry get off a horse so excited and happy. He loved that young stallion. Notice that Domingo del Sur’s mother’s breeding goes back to AEV Regional and Sol de Oro V.

BOTTOM SIDE OF CASSANDRA’S PEDIGREE: This is the mother’s half of the pedigree. Here we’re talking royalty from the get-go. Cassandra’s mother, La Soberbia, was a grand-daughter of Sol de Oro V. That’s not: great-great-great-great granddaughter; she was his granddaughter. AEV As de Oro, La Soberbia’s father and a direct son of Sol de Oro V, had the best legs of any Peruvian I’ve seen. He was at our ranch for a while and I admired him greatly. La Soberbia’s mother, Soberana, was a full sister to *Mantequilla. The famous *Mantequilla, the son of Piloto and La Limena. Genetically, Soberana was as close to *Mantequilla as you can get.

La Soberbia was a genetic treasure. You don’t get old style breeding like La Soberbia’s. We owned her most of her life. She produced five offspring for us. All of them were healthy and sound into old age with fantastic legs. And very HOT. Tons of brio in that blood.

Cassandra's mother La Soberbia. (This is an old photo: she's not really green!)

Click here and scroll down to see another view of La Soberbia during her show career. She’s the fourth image down, the palomino mare ridden by a young girl. The page gives information about her and one of her offspring, Capoeira BSN, who was sold to Australia where he’s influenced the Peruvian breed there. Actually, Jorge de Moya, the expert on gaited horses who bought Capoeira BSN and exported him to Australia, really wanted to buy La Soberbia. We wouldn’t sell her.

MORE FACTS ABOUT CASSANDRA BSN: Barry and I ran out of steam for showing about the time Cassandra was born, so she doesn’t have a show record. We haven’t bred her, either. We’re winding down and retiring; that’s why we’re selling her. She’s one of our last three horses.

CASSANDRA AND JOSH: I’ve talked about how hot and hard to ride Cassandra is. I about fell over when Barry put our friend Josh on her. Josh had never ridden. The young man got on her in the round pen and did fine. Soon he was in the arena with her, then out on the trail. Then out on the trail bareback with a halter.

Magic? Maybe, but Josh is a true prodigy. Also a multi-degree black belt in Karate, an advanced surfer, and a musician. He’s got amazing balance and coordination, athletic ability, and sensitivity. He just “got” the mare instantly. Maybe you will, too.

A literally 2 second video of Josh riding her bareback with a halter is above; that’s all we got of the duo. The video is current; it was taken in the last couple of months. We can’t take more videos of the pair, as Josh is sidelined now, after being injured at a truly dangerous sport: surfing.

Let us know if this is a horse you’d like to have. She’s a sweetie and so beautiful.

Sandy and Barry Nathan
Rancho Vilasa, home of the Nathan Family & fine Peruvian Paso horses
contact Barry at [email protected]

    
                                                                            Cassandra and Barry Nathan take a spin at Rancho Vilasa

Mogollon: A Tale of Mysticism & Mayhem (Bloodsong 2) It's been a long time and many words since I went to Book Expo America in 2009

A member of the Visionary Fiction Alliance, a group authors, readers, and aficionados of visionary fiction, asked if the big book conventions or fantasy conventions help indie authors and small presses. I shared the following story on the Visionary Fiction Facebook page.

Or shared most of it. My post must have been too long for FB; the ending got cut off. I’m posting what I said on FB here, so readers can get the whole thing.

This is the complete story of my one time attendance at the BEA–Book Expo America back in 2009. Does it answer the question? As a statistician, I only can say that  a sample of one case does not a valid conclusion make.

In 2009, I attended the Expo, a very green author with two books in print. In 2015, I’ve got ten books out and two more in production, with stack of manuscripts on my hard drive. My books have also won thirty national awards and I’ve been a bestselling author, often for days at a time. (Sales are the trickiest part.) Now, things might be different.

Would I go to BEA or any big fantasy or other convention? Probably not, as will be explained below, but if I did, it would be after great deliberation and analysis. I’d want it to be in LA or some California city: the event has been held in NYC in recent years and will be this year. These conventions are huge. To get an idea of the scale of the exhibit, look at this floorplan of the BEA main hall in 2015.  Purple squares are rented space; turquoise is available. Hover the cursor over the space to see who rented it. Notice the huge Chinese presence: this event’s attendance is worldwide.

One new development might change my conclusions. In 2015, Book Expo America will be combined with the debut of BookCon, a new consumer event featuring the big name authors in popular writing. The new event will be a combined trade show, BEA, followed by the consumer event.  BEA-BookCon 2015 runs from May 27 to 31 for the combined events.  The addition of BookCon to BEA may tip the scales for a smaller author or publishing house. Wholesale orders could be placed at BEA, but books were not sold to  customers. Joining a retail event like ComiCon, which drew 130,000 attendees in 2013, to BEA with retail sales possible could totally upend everything I say.

Or not. Depends upon what they require of people showing at the event. Will indie authors and micro presses be allowed? Participants will have to have stock on hand to sell. Hundreds of print books? Thousands? A way to download eBooks on the spot? With BookCon, the big, big time will become even bigger.

Should I wait until BEA comes back to LA? It used to travel around the country, heading West from time to time. BEA–BookCon 2016 will be in Chicago, I understand. After that?

BookExpo America event director Steven Rosato notes in his blog, “BEA Orlando, BEA Dallas, BEA Atlanta—well, I will start looking at prison camps first.” 

He’d rather look at prison camps than Dallas? I’m glad I got to got to BEA in 2009. It’s a world-class event, and getting worldlier.

Here’s my tale of entering the big time:

* * *

Numenon: A Tale of Mysticism & Money (Bloodsong 1) my second book and ticket to the BEA.

I went to the BEA–Book Expo America–when my book Numenon came out in 2009. BEA is the largest book fair/convention in the country, then and now. The year we went, it was in LA at Staples Center. Check out the images on their website, keeping in mind that Barry and I are country mice. We went into instant culture shock in the multi-story parking lot.

Seeing that LA is only 2.5 hours from our ranch, as opposed to being on the other side of the continent. We went.

Getting in cost $150. I can’t remember that was just for me or $150 each for my husband and I. We were hosted at a booth taken by the IBPA, Independent Book Publishers Association. They’re the biggest and oldest organization representing indie authors and presses. The organization was known as the PMA back then. The IBPA hosts the Benjamin Franklin Awards, which may be the most prestigious contest for indie books. They READ every word of a book they’re judging. It’s very tough. The IBPA does great things for Indies and is worth joining.

Anyway, the IBPA maintained a booth at the BEA and allowed us micropress members exhibition space. I don’t remember if there was a charge for that or not. Probably.

Book Expo America DID have little cost in addition to the $150 entry fee: any author exhibiting there had to do a book signing and GIVE AWAY fifty copies of his/her book(s). We originally published Numenon as a hardback, to that cost was not inconsiderable.

My signing was scheduled at the IBPA booth. I don’t know why I was there as opposed to the “signing room” with all the major authors. Probably because we decided to go at the last minute and the main room was full. The “signing room” was a very large, corridor-like room with long tables running down both sides. Each author had about two feet of the table’s pristine, white-clothed real estate within which to sign books.

Carrie Fisher was there with a new book. A line of people wanting an autographed copy stacked up in front of her, moving from her perch, out the door, disappearing into the massive main hall beyond.

Here’s a funny story: we used a book consultant in producing my first two books. She’s the one who told us about the BEA and got us to go. One of her other clients, an adorable and ancient MD, had written his memoir. He had a colorful life as a Hollywood doc and I believe was a Holocaust survivor on top of that. He was signing his book at the same time as Carrie Fisher. She was swamped. He sat in front of a pile of his books, all alone.

Carrie looked over at him and shrieked, “Dr. Whatever! OMG! It’s Dr. Whatever! I love him! He’s my favorite person in the world.” He was her doctor. She jumped up and ran to the beaming physician. They embraced.

She went back to signing her book, but sent her line of I-want-your-autograph people to him after she signed her book. He was flooded with loving new fans and had a wonderful BEA experience.

I was sure that my signing would be a bust, even though BEA hires people with big signs to roam the aisles and point the crowds to authors having signings. I didn’t think they would help me. I was a two-book nobody and–Staples Center is HUGE, HUGE, HUGE! They had the main floor, a bridge over to another floor where the cafeteria was, more floors. Nooks and crannies full of authors and books.

I was in culture shock just parking the car. Where we live, cattle in the streets are the biggest traffic problem.

The big publishers, Random House and all the rest, monopolized the main floor with magnificent, specially-designed structures displaying their books. BEA is for booksellers–book stores, etc.–so the reps of the big 6 (or 5 or 3, now) publishers were all over taking orders from stores. Their presence was very professional and took up lots of very expensive floor space.

Smaller publishers, not the majors but substantial publishing houses, and I mean every friggin’ one of them, had smaller displays and booths arranged in rows radiating from the central core/temple area. The IBPA’s booth wasn’t too far back, but it was small and down an aisle. I would be forgotten.

On the other hand, the atmosphere was electric!  I leapt into the crowds and didn’t look back. The bigger booths offered wine, appetizers, seating areas, famous authors on call, and FREE BOOKS. Everyone had to give away fifty, remember. MANY famous authors were there. OK, maybe not so famous, but I remember Carrie Fisher and I got meet Mark Victor Hanson and his entourage.

Crowds filled the space like circling flocks of birds or schools of fish, ignited by a celebrity sighting. Before my signing, I joined a stampede, unable to resist the gang mentality or my own excitement! Captain Kirk was there! With a new book! I didn’t even know William Shatner could write, but I always liked the fact that he rode horses.

I cruised the aisles myself, ending up with several shopping bags of books that looked interesting. All free–giveaways of new books and galleys is good business. All the publishers offered their bounty freely. The only catch was, due to union rules that no one but union members could use wheeled carts to move books or anything else, I had to heft my gleanings in bags that ended up weighing about fifty pounds each. But it was fun!

The seek-and-find mission distracted my attention from my feeling of impending disaster at my booksigning. I expected my signing to be about the same as that older doctor’s without Carrie Fisher’s intervention. I was way back in the aisles, in a small booth with an unknown book about the richest man in the world and a Native American holy man. I would be unable to even GIVE fifty books away. I’d have to take them home. (That mind-set is a residue of my social standing in third grade.)

IT WAS A DELUGE!  Smiling people swamped the little booth, demanding that I sign my precious Numenon before giving it to them. Never in my life have I felt so popular! Being an author was wonderful! WONDERFUL! We were so smart to come to BEA! This was wonderful. The sales this exposure would generate would finance our retirement.

Only one thing marred it: Wandering around the aisles, I met a veteran of the Marines who had written his life story. He was published by a military press. Most regrettably, he’d been hit in the head by a missile as he was driving his tank in Iraq. He lived but was almost blinded, lost most of his hearing, and suffered terrible injury, from which he was rehabilitated as much as possible, which was what his book was about.

Nick Popaditch was an heroic and impressive figure in his dress uniform. His beautiful wife, a Native American woman, accompanied him. We chatted for a while and I invited him down the aisle a bit later, offering him a copy of Numenon.

I’d forgotten all about the couple when they appeared at my signing. He held her arm and walked slowly, more magnificent standing than he’d been sitting in his booth. Also grievously injured.

I’d forgotten to put a book away for him. In the melee, all of them had been given out, every single one! I gave them a copy of Stepping Off the Edge, my previous book, but the couple was visibly disappointed. I mailed a copy to the address he gave me, for Wounded Warriors. Never heard anything. They left, disappearing from my life.

I will plug his book; I found it very moving and inspiring. Nick Popaditch, Once a Marine.

Well, the Popaditch‘s didn’t get my book, but the rest had been a triumph. I had a blast with the holiday/cocktail party/star-struck/as-many-free-books-as-you-could-carry-away atmosphere. My book signing had been a great success! The books would go out into the world, and come back as sales and fame for me and my writing. What could be more fun?

My husband is very quiet and reclusive. He hated every minute of BEA.

* * *

When we got home, I looked at Numenon’s sale page on Amazon. Multiple copies of Numenon “signed by the author” were up for sale by many sellers. Also on eBay. Those excited people who came to my book signing were penny-ante booksellers grabbing free stuff to sell. They didn’t care about my book; they were trying to earn back the $150 it cost them to get in. I felt really ripped off.

OK. Much processing later. So I gave away a bunch of books. A well-known consultant to the book business once told me that books fail because there aren’t enough of them out there. “The book has to be visible. Give them away to get them into people’s hands. Give away LOTS.”

When it all shook out, I don’t know that I got a single review from those books or got anything at all.

Would I do it again? I would if I was Carrie Fisher and already had a following. Or if I was really rich and just wanted to go to a party about books and snag a couple of bags full for free. (Aside from Nick Popaditch‘s book, I don’t think I read any of those I picked up.)

That’s my experience at BEA. I did have a great time. I might have had a better time had I gone to some of the award presentations, starting the year before and in future years, when my books began to win prizes. That’s what you’re supposed to do if you win an award: pump it for all it’s worth. Get your face in front of cameras. Announce it everywhere. Scream it for the yarboards, or halboards. Rooftops. That’s called marketing. I’ve never gone to any of the ceremonies, wasting opportunities.

The  IBPA puts on a great award ceremony for the Benjamin Franklin Award. Be sure and go, if you win. I was a finalist for that with my first book, Stepping Off the Edge in 2006 (or 7).  Looks like the ceremony is separate from BEA now, but it used to be held in a location near the BEA at the same time.  Also, the Independent Publisher has a great ceremony for winners in the IPPYs, its book award. Here’s a blog article by Lisa Shea, who won two awards in the IPPYs. She went to the ceremony and give a rundown of what it was like. I’ve won three IPPYs awards over the years, but didn’t go to their  award ceremonies. Looks like I missed something.

Why didn’t I go to the award ceremonies? I’m not a “goer”: I didn’t attend any of my graduations after high school. The only reunion I’ve gone to was for the employees of the Santa Clara County Planning Department, where I worked for a long time. Loved those folks.

Would I go again if a fairy godmother gifted me? Sure, especially if I had an award to pick up. Otherwise, I’d want to build up my brand and visibility with every tool I had before venturing forth. Which is what Indie authors should be doing anyway.

I hope this tale is illuminating. I don’t know if conferences devoted specifically to fantasy or genres would be any different. I’d say: build your brand, your sales, your visibility, then evaluate going.

Sandy Nathan

Sandy Nathan, who’s got a lot of cool books for you to check out. Click the link.

The article's over: the fat lady's singing.

I’ve found getting reviews for my books difficult. I was bemoaning this when I realized something: I’ve got a desk piled with books I’ve promised to review and I haven’t. It’s not that I didn’t read the books. In most cases I did, and I really liked them. (I don’t finish books that I don’t like.)

Why don’t I review them? Because it’s a friggin’ lot of work. You have to read the book, synthesize its content, evaluate its worth, put words to all this, compose the sucker, and then stick it on a website such as Amazon, Goodreads, Author’s Den, all the sites for the iBooks, Nooks, Sony Readers, and all the rest (if you’re doing a top rate job as a reviewer.) All of those sites require separate log-ins, passwords, and secret rituals to get on.

Once you’re on one of the big sites,  you may be blown out of the water if you look at the book’s other reviews. Some people’s book reviews look like they took two weeks to compose. They’re masterpieces. You can’t post the one you took five minutes to write and look dumb, can you?

The truth is, going from reading a book and saying, “I really liked it!” to a written review is daunting. It sure has daunted me.

With this realization I’ve come to forgive my friends, relatives, and church prayer group members who have accepted review copies from me and not reviewed my books.

I remain nonplussed, but I see the barrier to reviewing. I’ve done the same.

I need to enlighten those who say, “I don’t believe the Amazon ratings. They’re all fixed. People get their friends and relatives to review their books.” Hah! Not my friends and relatives. The only relative/friend who’s read all my books is my husband. He hasn’t reviewed any of them. Getting reviews is hard work. Maybe a minor miracle.

How to get around this? I have a friend whose dad is a wonderful and hard-working man. He sat in front of Starbucks with his laptop every morning for months, looking up highly rated books in the same genre as his daughter’s book. He went through the reviews of those books, finding good ones whose reviewers also left a website or email address and maybe said, “You can contact me if you want a review.”

My friend’s dad contacted all those people, sent them a letter about the book that his daughter had written, tabulated responses, and sent books to the reviewers who responded positively.

Voila! In no time at all, my friend had more than 100 reviews on Amazon. (Her father is still alive, too.) Amazon itself noticed her sales activities and picked up her book, giving it vast publicity. She’s now under contract, on her third or so book, and doing great, with her books sold around the world, including in major retailers of all kinds.

How can we achieve these results? The obvious answer is to kidnap my friend’s dad and chain him in front of a Starbuck’s to do the same for us.

Of course, that’s a federal crime.

We can enlist our own relatives or do it ourselves, giving up any hope of actually  writing more books while we’re doing it. I’ve tried this and gotten nowhere. It’s time consuming and frustrating, but does offer a way of getting positive reviews by people who are interested in your book’s content, assuming you’ve written a good book. On the other hand, I hate it when I get emails like:

“I read your review of The Upside Down Kangaroo and thought you’d really like my new sci-fi/romance/adventure/erotica book, The Rightside Up Kangaroo. I can send you an eBook copy [or manuscript in Word or just my notes on 3 X 5 cards] if you’d review it. I’d be so grateful and include you in my fan club.”

That really doesn’t cut it with me. My review policy is here. The review policy page gives you a some places to look for reviews. Here are a few more:

MidwestBook Review  The Midwest Book Review is a very well thought of review site in business long before Amazon.com appeared. They currently do charge $50 for reviews of eBooks, manuscripts and proofs. The charge is to pay the reviewer for his/her time, since they don’t get a book to sell after the review. If you’ve got a finished book to submit, reviews are free. Because of the charge for reviewing unfinished and eBooks, Amazon won’t let them post on the customer review portion of their site. You can put the review on your books’ Editorial Reviews of the sale page.

Book Review.com Looks like they charge for this one, too. $185 for an Express Review. Not clear if they charge for “stand in line and wait” reviews. The charge probably means Amazon won’t let them post on the customer review portion of their site. As with Midwest Book Review, you can put the review on your books’ Editorial Reviews of the sale page.

World Literary Cafe This is a huge site offering many benefits to authors. Doesn’t look like they offer reviews, but you can find all sorts of support services.

Remember my friend’s dad and his quest outside Starbuck’s. It worked.

All the best,

Sandy Nathan

Sandy Nathan is a #1 Amazon Bestselling Author in Metaphysical Fantasy and the winner of thirty national awards.
Sandy’s  books can be found on her Amazon Author’s Page.
Here’s her Facebook Author Page. 

Everyone knows Scandinavians are the best partiers ever!

I WRITE ABOUT STUFF THAT REALLY MATTERS TO ME ON YOUR SHELF LIFE. I write irregularly, as the spirit moves. It’s moving.  What got me going today?

This article: UCSB to Greeks: the Party’s Over.  An article from the Santa Barbara Independent talks about the fraternities and sororities at UCSB, members of which are acting up and getting the institutions kicked out in record numbers. I would have lifted images from the article, but they were all copyrighted and stuff. The first one was of a sheriff’s officer looking tough. Scared me.

But here’s a good one: “Greeks”–fraternities–are being banned from UCSB at an unprecedented rate. Since early December three fraternities have been banned and a sorority suspended. The linked article tells you all about it.

The stupid and inane behavior on the part of the Greeks that got them tossed has prompted me to share this never-before-revealed anecdote from my early years.

I never saw the reason or need for fraternities or sororities. Places for guys and gals who already felt superior to everyone to band together and throw parties that the Vikings would find offensive, and feel superior about it? Why? I thought they would have died out in the 1950s from sheer irrelevance.

I never saw the need for “acting out” either–getting so drunk or stoned I didn’t know where I was or who I was with, other than another “Greek.” Nor will I allow myself to be “hazed” by anyone or perpetrate the practice on my fellow humans. So why Greeks? Why do people join them?

There is one valid reason for fraternities and sororities. That is to introduce young people to parties so wild that they will not be horrified when they go to Scandinavia. I know this. When I was a high school senior (and what were fraternities doing allowing 17-year-olds at their parties???), I went to a frat party at Stanford. My girlfriends seemed to find them fun. I don’t know why. I’ve never seen such out of control drunken behavior in my life. It didn’t seem fun.

But, my family visited Iceland the following summer. Most of the young people left the cities and went to work on the farms during the summers. They had parties, BIG parties. I went to one in some big community building somewhere and discovered that when it comes to partying, Greeks are Pablum-eaters. I survived only because I’d been shock-proofed at that frat house.

Grow up Greeks! We Vikings have means to tame you.

So, good ol’ Stanford frat, whatever you were, thank you for opening my eyes to the potential for over-the-top depravity. They seemed to be having a better time in Iceland, too.

Despite my anti-Greek sentiments, I must confess that I am a member of a fraternity, or honorary society,  Omicron Delta Epsilon,  the International Honor Society for Economics. Or I used to be. I haven’t paid dues in about forty years.

Despite all those Greek letters, did we economists indulge in drunken riots? No. We were/are so serious that we are sometimes called in to diffuse international political battles. We do this by boring the combatants into comatose states. We’ll do it for your group, too. Just let me know and I’ll dispatch a cadre of econ nerds pronto.

So long for now,
Sandy Nathan, who’s got a lot of cool books for you to check out. Click the link.

The article's over: the fat lady's singing.

In Love by Christmas (Bloodsong 3) This is actually 20" X 30", a poster mounted on a board by Costco.

After having mugs made with images of my covers on them for Christmas gifts (an adventure), and designing a calendar for my own use yesterday (arm still aches from too much computer time), and completely giving up on ordering T-shirts from one manufacturer, I got the probably masochistic idea of  starting a store on my site. I’ve been researching that possibility and wanted to ask my readers who’ve tried it if it was worth it in terms of financial reward or anything else. Satisfaction? Also,  which services are best–I’ve got some experiences to share on this.  Well, if anyone has anything to share, please do.

My experience working with some of the main “swag”–stuff used to market books or anything–providers is below. My words aren’t a comprehensive review. I’ve included links to a few sites that thoroughly evaluate more of the various POD “printing stuff”  services, including those I mention below.  All are worth studying.

Tested: Best Sources for Company Schwag Evaluates 5 of the biggies.

Printaholic.com 2015 T-shirt rankings. Interesting. T-shirts only here. The “usual suspects” are reviewed, but they don’t end up in the order you’d expect.

Printaholic.com’s overall best 2015 rankings. They review all print-related stuff: business cards, photos, brochures, T-shirts. Definitely something to look at.

Listio’s 2008 comparison of printing and merchandising Very thorough ranking of 4 top services with comparison table and screenshots of what the sites look like and how easy they are to use. It’s from 2008; don’t seem to have done one since. They rank the sites overall and talk about site useability and the market the site seems pitched at. I.e.; kids (young people) vs. adults.  Interesting rankings.

 PRINT PERFECTION: “Our platform handles the purchasing, management, and fulfillment your company’s branded swag.” Interesting to know about if you decide to go into the swag game with a vengeance. They handle merchandising and giveaways of “A wide variety of tools to help you easily run swag marketing campaigns:”

• Bulk Orders
• Giveaways
• Social Giveaways
• Address Import

And now I hear from Valerie Douglas that YOLA.COM will set up a whole website store for you, for free, it looks like. Whoa.

You can explore these and do your own searches. I searched Google for “ZAZZLE, VISTA PRINT OTHER WHICH IS BETTER FOR MERCHANDISE STORE”

Here’s my experience with these places:

This is a handout for our "Holiday Potpourri at the Grange" I made the post on Photoshop and had reproduced as an 8" X 12" one-sheet and a big 20" by 30" image mounted on board for the sandwich board out front. CLICK THIS IMAGE: IT'S PRETTY FULL SIZE.

COSTCO PHOTO CENTER: I use this service on-line. The Photo section is separate from the rest of Costco. To get to it, sign in on your Costco account (which means you set up a password and give them your email),  and hit Costco Photo on the menu bar at top. You’ll be presented with a bewildering array of choices of stuff they make with photos.

I use them for BIG poster boards using my book covers. I display these at events and speaking engagements. (These are posters of my covers mounted to a stiff board. You can put them on easels or tripods or lean them against walls.) When I’m done speaking, I leave the big blow ups around my family room where I work. Seeing my covers writ large subconsciously reinforces that SOMETHING will come from my efforts.  We had a “literary salon”, an authors’, musicians’, and artist’s event, locally before Christmas. I made 2 of the 20 X 30″ versions of our announcement for sandwich boards outside the building. One is in my family room now. Again, makes it real.

If you want to make a poster, ask your book designer for a 16 X 20 @300 dpi version of the cover, or 20″ X 30″ if you’re feeling expansive. Some designers charge for this, others don’t. What you upload to COSTCO is what you get, so if upload a 16″ X 20″ image at 72 dpi or save a 72 dpi image at 300 thinking it will work, your image will look lousy printed, no matter who prints it.

CALENDARS AT COSTCO: They do really big, high quality calendars. I’ve ordered them for years, using the book de jour for the images. I use covers, photos of the characters and locations I’ve downloaded, new author photos, etc. This is more “Make it real”, but I love to look at my covers. A new image every month is great. Costco also allows you to customize individual days with photos and text. You can put hearts or your book’s heart-throb hero in on Valentines.  Or your real-life sweetie’s photo! Pictures of family members on their birthdays. For instance, I used a photo of my dad in uniform for Veteran’s Day. This type of customization is not particularly hard to do, just requires attention to detail.

If you do videos for your books, this is a terrific use of the images you produce for the videos. Make ‘em the photo of the month!

EASE OF USE of Costco’s photo system? Horrible. Drives me crazy. The size the COSTCO calendar I like has 14″ W X 11″ H images. What I upload has to be that size at 300 dpi to fill the calendar page. Books are typically 6″ X 9″ high, which means I have to use the high resolution poster size image and cut it down or do some fancy Photoshopping with the 6″ X 9″. Assembling the images takes forever, as does loading and arranging them on the calendar’s pages.

The way the Costco calendar system works, you create an album for each project. To upload, you click the album title and select the images. Then you have to select the album again when you upload the image(s), or it makes a new album. I forgot that second click every other time and ended up with about 8 or 9 albums, all with one or two pics in them. Took a while to figure out where my photos were, but I did. You can move the photos to the right album and delete the superfluous albums later, after you’ve found them.

So, steep learning curve. Products can be delivered to your local Costco warehouse in a week to ten days. No shipping with this option, and you don’t have to pay until you see and approve the calendar if you do this.

With all the hassle, I love my calendars and the pain of creating them fades quickly. The one I chose ended up costing $20 and change, including tax, picked up at my local Costco.

COSTCO ENLARGEMENTS: Easiest and cheapest I’ve seen. Upload at photos at home, order on line, pickup in the warehouse an HOUR later. I now use Costco enlargements of my cover images as the front of my press packets. Slick and NICE. I did an 8″ X 12″ One Sheet on Photoshop and printed it at Costco. It looks way better than one printed at a print shop: it’s a photo. Clear and distinct as clear can be.

With all it’s foibles, I love Costco, but haven’t used the other services as much. VISTAPRINT, ZAZZLE and the others also do calendars and enlargements. Maybe not big poster banners, but …

A BIG BUT–if you want to have a gallery or store from which you can sell the stuff you make, Costco doesn’t offer it. I use the calendars, etc. for my own use. Bears searching elsewhere.

ZAZZLE IS A TOP-RANKED CUSTOMIZABLE/CUSTOMIZED SUPPLIER OF ALMOST EVERYTHING THAT CAN BE PRINTED. They have lots of calendars, both to buy as is and to do up yourself. One pretty similar to the one I ordered from Costco (14″ X 11″ and customizable month image as well as special images for holidays) for $18.95 plus tax was $20.95 at ZAZZLE. It was shaped a bit differently, 11″ W X 17″ H, which is better for working with rectangular book covers. And you can mark them for sale when you design them.  And have your own store. Find out how on the site: search My Own Store. I think I’ll look into this, after plowing through all those evaluations on the sites way above. I don’t think you make much money with ZAZZLE, but set up is free and they DO handle merchandise well. How do I know?

Uh, my initial, well, my first two orders of my own stuff from ZAZZLE were a bust. Which is why I did my calendars with COSTCO rather than ZAZZLE. I ordered T-shirts for my family with my book covers on them for Christmas, having barely enough time before Christmas to get them for the holiday, my typical ordering style. ZAZZLE took the order, then contacted me a week or so later, saying they’d canceled it because I’d used copyrighted material.

Yeah, I had used copyrighted material. COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL THAT I OWNED. I hold the copyrights to the books, their covers, and everything about them.  So, what’s the problem?

“Oh,” replied ZAZZLE, “no problem, now that you explained it. Order again and we’ll make and ship your shirts.” By this time, they couldn’t produce and ship the T-shirts by Christmas. Also, when I ordered the first time, the shirts were on 40 or 50% off. The sale was over when the snafu got cleared up. They offered me 15% off the second time around. Sorry, not good enough. Got my dander up.

DOING T-SHIRTS ON ZAZZLE: I would make sure I had plenty of time to get my images together, and carefully read Zazzle’s guidelines for image quality. I couldn’t find any more than “Use 300 dpi.” Maybe there’s more. Remember: they run sales all the time, so get 40 or 50% off when you order. If you miss a sale, you can get the next one.

With my next order, I will include a statement that I own the copyrights to my book covers.  I wrote a note to ZAZZLE after they cancelled my order, proving that I had the copyrights.  I put links to my Amazon page, my websites, my blogs and offered to send them screen shots of the books’ copyright pages and documentation from my designers that I held the copyrights. ZAZZLE said that was fine and agreed to do the T-shirts. Too late. If I order a T-shirt from them again, I will include all this at the start.

You can do the same, telling them what happened to me and that you don’t want our order delayed the same way. (You do own the the copyrights, don’t you? Different designers work in different ways. Note that this order was not for sale, just for gifts. I don’t have the right to make swag with the Mogollon cover. My contract with the model/actor on the cover precludes sale of the image on secondary products.)

QUALITY OF T-SHIRTS ON ZAZZLE: I knew about the quality of custom T-shirts from ZAZZLE, having ordered a T-shirt for my husband from them. Wendy Potocki had some wonderful shirts designed her Halloweenpaloosa promotion in October.   I ordered a shirt from that promotion from ZAZZLE, and put the cover of my Vanessa Schierman PhD, WITCH, on the back. Vanessa Schierman PhD, WITCH was my long short-story contribution to Wendy’s promo. If you click Vanessa, you’ll be taken to my website, where you can download the short story I wrote for Wendy’s promo for free. It’s cool. I’m going to augment it with more short stories over the year, hopefully generating a book.

ZAZZLE did a high quality T-shirt with a great printing job.

These are the first mugs that arrived from Zazzle. Print is so bad you can't read it. Images are blurred and the wrong colors.

MUGS FROM ZAZZLE: Another painful story. Also for Christmas gifts, I ordered porcelain mugs with images from my book covers on them.

I LOVE PORCELAIN MUGS! So much lighter and more elegant than those honkin’ earthenware ones that break your arm to lift and chip if you look at them. ZAZZLE has some really pretty porcelain mugs that you can customize with your own images. If you order during a 50% off sale, they’re a great buy.

I put together an order for my family and uploaded it, Photoshopping up some images of the right size and resolution. Very quickly, THE THINGS arrived. They were my mugs, but with distorted colors, illegible print, smears in the design. The physical porcelain mugs were GREAT, but the artwork was mangled.

I complained and asked for a refund. Didn’t want to go through another round of the above, so I asked for my money back. This takes way longer than a store credit, but I didn’t want to try again.

By pure happenstance, my description of what was wrong with the mugs and why I wanted my money back specifically outlined their problems. I waited for my refund, arms crossed, toes tapping.

They sent me a whole new order and they were perfect! And in time for Christmas, too! Which made me think, “Why didn’t you do this the first time?”

If I were to order porcelain (also known as fine bone China) mugs again or ANY mugs, which I would, I’d put a note in my order: Please make sure the print is legible and colors and the design are not distorted. I’d tell the story of my first order right off. And also tell them that I had the copyrights.

I learned about design from this. My first few mugs I designed with the specified 3.25″ high X 3.25″ W image and applied it one on one side of the design area. Since book covers are 6″ X 9″, the 3.25″ corresponded to the 9″ high dimension, the reduced size graphic was narrower than 3.25″– about 2.2″ wide by the 3.25″ high.

After doing a few pieces with single images, I discovered somewhere on the ZAZZLE site that I could use a 7.25″ W X 3.25″ H image on the mug I was using. After that, I Photoshopped a 7.25″ W X 3.25″ H canvas  and put TWO images on it, pushing them to the outside of the 7.25″ canvas. Loaded, that gives you an image on the mug’s front and back, very slick. You can use the same image, different ones, or two colorways of one cover. Ultra cool.

I’d definitely use ZAZZLE for T-shirts and mugs, with the caveats noted.

VISTAPRINT is another highly rated purveyor of customized print materials. I’ve used Vistaprint for One Sheets (single one-page sell sheets) for my books and for post cards. Both were adequate. I’ve also used Tu-Vets (they’ve since retired) and SIMPLY BROCHURES. They were AMAZING… HEAVY PAPER, GLOSSY BOTH SIDES, killer color. Way better quality cost way way more than Vistaprint. Unfortunately, you had to order A LOT. Vistaprint was fine for the small jobs and I didn’t end up with 500 extra copies.

I tried to used VISTAPRINT for T-shirts after my fiasco with ZAZZLE. I found that they had LOTS of information about the graphics that should be supplied for the T-shits and templates for the images. I didn’t find these on ZAZZLE and thought that I might not have had the problem with the mugs had ZAZZLE included stuff about CMYK color instead of RGB.

Whatever. I found VISTAPRINT specified the image for the T-shirt had to be 12″ X 12″ CMYK color, and 300 dpi. OK. Book covers are 6″ X 9″. You may have a poster size you can cut down, but you’re going to have to do some major surgery, including butchering its design, to get your cover to 12 X 12. I designed one T-shirt out of about 10 that I wanted to order and gave up. It sat in my shopping cart until Vistaprint removed it. (Checking, it’s STILL there.)

Well,  having created another monster blog post which doesn’t fully cover the subject, I’m going to wind down. What was the subject?

What does having a store on one’s website or anywhere do for an author’s career? Does such a store even make sense? My interest in my book covers is likely to be higher than anyone else in the universe’s. Does a demand for T-shirts with Leroy Watches’ image on it, or Will Duane’s, or Elizabeth Bright Eagle’s exist?

Did my relatives even appreciate the mugs I gave them? Would they order calendars or mouse pads or mugs or anything else I might turn out if they didn’t know me? If they did?

That is the question, as is: Does the investment in time to get all this stuff set up pay off in monetary reward? Don’t have the answers, but if you have more experience, I look forward to hearing for you.

Ciao,
Sandy Nathan my website
my interactive website
my FB author page
my Amazon Author page

Authors don’t have many days like I’ve had today. I’ve read about the joy of being a bestselling author and having a #1 bestselling book, but today I’ve experienced having them. Being a bestselling author and having the book is MUCH MORE FUN than reading about the experience. The really top-selling independent authors have shared their selling techniques–Cheryl Kaye Tardif, Joanna Penn, David Gaughram, and John Locke, to name a few. They talk about using the days you’re allowed to give your Kindle books away free on Amazon as springboards to huge sales afterward.

I’ve done the giveaway part very successfully before, but it’s never carried over into the paid part, the way the marketing books say it should. This time it did. So I can post what follows.

But first, let’s give credit where credit is due. Thank you, my readers and buyers, for your support of me and my work and for buying In Love by Christmas. Without you, none of the below would have happened. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I hope that In Love by Christmas knocks off your socks, rattles your brain, and shakes up everything in between. I consider that the least I can do in performing my job as an author.

These are the happy notices I’ve been looking at today:

In Love by Christmas is a #1 Bestseller in Metaphysical Fantasy

Note that cute little orange tag to the right of the book’s name. It will carry that with it forever. It’s a #1 Bestseller. On Amazon, in the Metaphysical Fantasy category.

More good things happened. It was like winning the Holiday grab-bag at Weight Watchers–I did that yesterday, too. What a haul! Woo-hoo!

Amazon Movers & Shakers are the books that have shown the greatest jumps in sales.

So there we were, Leroy, Cass, and I tottering on top of the book cover, Number 1 Mover and Shaker on all of Amazon. For a while. These things change every hour, but I can say that I got more than 15 minutes of fame. It was almost twenty-four hours in this spot.

Amazon has a new program of ranking authors. In Love by Christmas's stellar performance got me a ranking.

Here I am: It's not number 1, but it's better than I've been able to do writing and publishing since 2006.

Just like the Bestselling title goes with the book, so does the rank go with me.

More and more goodies, just like that Weight Watcher’s gift box. Truly, I can’t say which was more fun, though that’s probably because I haven’t gotten the dinero in my paws yet.

This was a good day: In Love by Christmas hit Number 219 in THE WHOLE KINDLE STORE and …

I’m tickled about the categories where In Love by Christmas shows up. First, my heart and soul are in Metaphysical and Visionary fiction. I started writing to change the world. Save it, if I could. I haven’t succeeded too well, if you follow the news, but my goal hasn’t changed in the eight or nine books I’ve written. I write more flamboyant stories, perhaps, but their roots are in my visionary experiences and spiritual life.

Long ago, when the Bloodsong Series was forming within me, I had an explosive spiritual experience which put several of the books in my brain in an instant. Native Americans were an integral part of that experience. Writing the books of the Bloodsong Series, all of which feature Native Americans, has changed my life. Leroy Watches Jr. has also changed my life. He is what used to be called a black Indian: his roots are Native American, African American, and Caucasian. His experience is different than that of many of my characters. He talks about it in In Love by Christmas. Or lives it, more.

In Love by Christmas is a multicultural and interracial romance. It’s a beautiful love story that transcends race, but doesn’t ignore it. Leroy will tell you about it in the book.

You’ll see them all below. At one point, In Love by Christmas was top rated or close to it in eleven categories. I’m mind-boggled. And now, In Love by Christmas is ranked in all those categories. Thank you, buyers and readers!

In Love by Christmas was ranked in a total of eleven categories.

How about a present for those of you who have read this far? A MOVIE! Here’s a video of our hero, Leroy Watches Jr. as he begins his search for his soul mate.

IN LOVE BY CHRISTMAS: A PARANORMAL ROMANCE – Noel – Montreal Version + from Sandy Nathan on Vimeo.

Leroy Watches Jr. is a shaman whose Power sometimes makes things worse. Despite his flaw, he must save his soul mate from her addictions, her father, and Evil Incarnate, or she’ll be damned forever.

Trying to unite with his true love, Leroy embarks on a pilgrimage that takes him to the highest levels of European society. As he travels, his shamanic Power grows. So does the Dark Lord’s hatred of him.
His prospective father-in-law demands that Leroy and Cass be in love by Christmas. Can they be?

All my best! Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your support. Happy Holidays, whatever holiday you celebrate in this season, which includes no holiday at all …

Sandy Nathan
Sandy Nathan–My Interactive Website
Your Shelf Life, my blog for authors and readers. Oh, that’s where you are!

All I wanted to do was make a lousy video …

I’ve been grappling with Animoto.com all day, trying to produce a really good video for my new Christmas paranormal romance In Love by Christmas, also known as ILBC. I did create such a video. I produced about twelve, all sightly different. Different music, theme, words. I also fixed typos on the videos I’d just made and the ones I produced yesterday. As you know, typos multiply any time you take your eyes off your text. God knows what goes on on my hard-drive or in the cloud at night. Typo frolics of a reproductive kind.

Yesterday, I made some other videos of ILBC and posted them. Actually, I didn’t post them. Unbeknownst to me, my Animoto account has tentacles more invasive than an octopus’s, so that any little thing I finish is promulgated all over my cyber/social universe. All the “toss this stinkeroo in the trash” versions seem to end up on my FB wall. Other places, too, most likely. But, to continue …

Despite this, I really like Animoto.com as a way to make book videos. I can use their technology and produce stunning results. But PLAYING videos from their site … I don’t like so much. Those files hit so many snags they might have been using some of my old pantyhose as a power source. Takes so long to play a vid that even my MOM wouldn’t hang in there.

My web guy, Don Herion, suggested hosting my videos on Vimeo or Smugmug, as faster, higher quality places to mount my results. I tried Vimeo and found that it had superior play back to Animoto.com’s , but NOT superior enough. My MOM would lose interest after the second stall, plus all that jiggling made me dizzy. So I got on Smugmug and signed up for their free trial. Yesterday. If you hit that link in two weeks, it may not exist, as will be explained below.

Smugmug gives you this amazing website, all yours, if you can figure out how to use it. It’s very chic and stylish, design-wise, which means that if there are any controls for the site, I can’t find them. So, I won’t sign on for more than the free two weeks unless I make amazing progress in the cyber dimension. If a 69-year-old woman with two advanced degrees can’t find the friggin’ controls in two weeks, it’s not worth paying for.

Although I seem to be rambling, I’m writing about the elderly and technology. Did I mention that my husband got not only a brand new iPhone 6+, but a new Apple laptop to go with it? GO BARRY! After a week, he can competently answer the phone, without dropping the device from his belt holster. Today, he was working on ANSWERING EMAIL with his new laptop.

This afternoon, we practiced the New Intimacy: he sat at one end of our family room with his new toys while I sat on the other end with my sturdy 27″ iMac, attempting to produce the perfect video for In Love by Christmas, or ILBC, as I may have said, perhaps several times. I did make several, if I could remember which ones were the good ones. Also, I somehow erased the vids I’d previously sent to Vimeo and to Don Herion, my web guy, to post on my website. So those are all screwed up, as is the video embeds and locations I sent my publicist. This is really important, because THE BIG PUSH starts soon and he needs to get the visuals out there.

This is how the front image of "winning vid" for ILBC looks on my Animoto page.

This afternoon, I sat in my ergonomically designed chair, swearing softly at the short, computerized films bursting from the screen, listening to my husband swear at his new computer and phone. I did help him once or twice, “Push this arrow to return an email.”

This is how people relate in this new age. Sort of like sitting on opposite banks of a river, throwing electronic tomatoes at each other.

Basically, technology for those over sixty is dicey. Even for younger people, sometimes. I believe the cyber age responsible for the degeneration of our social order, which isn’t saying much. You’ve been out to dinner and looked at the next table, to find everyone on his or her smart phone. You’ve shaken your head and tskked sadly, until you got a text you had to answer.

The the problem is not technology, it’s learning how to use it. Every family should be assigned a 12-year-old from the local elementary school to teach the elders how to at least get to the gaming apps. That’s only right.

Meanwhile, here’s the vid I made on Animoto, transposed to Vimeo. You should be able to watch it easily by clicking appropriately, though it may stutter a bit the first run through. The Smugmug version will take me longer to post. I have to find the controls.

So, I did produce the #@^!! video. I’m not saying that the elderly can’t do tech stuff. We can. We may simply use unseemly vocabulary for long periods while doing it. This is not a sin. Old folks have feelings, too, and need to express them. Sometimes, %&*%#!! isn’t enough. But it was today. Enjoy the video.

Next time I’ll tell you about making Christmas presents for your loved ones using the graphics of your book covers. This is not as easy as it sounds, even given the plethora of companies promising the mouse pad of your dreams, or your hubby’s dreams. (Or porcelain mugs, my particular weakness.) That’s another story.

Sandy Nathan

And here’s the beast itself:

IN LOVE BY CHRISTMAS – NOEL VERSION 12/12/14 from Sandy Nathan on Vimeo.

Leroy Watches Jr. is a shaman whose Power sometimes makes things worse. Despite his flaw, he must save his soul mate from her addictions, her father, and Evil Incarnate, or she’ll be damned forever.

Leroy embarks on a pilgrimage that takes him to the highest levels of European society. As he travels, his shamanic Power grows. So does the Dark Lord’s hatred of him.

His prospective father-in-law demands that Leroy and Cass be in love by Christmas. Can they be?

If that doesn’t work, this link to the video on Vimeo will.

Hello all! It’s been a huge year for me, publication-wise. I’ve completed all the writing I’m going to do in 2014 and can now tackle what I really love: making movies. People have asked me, “Who does your videos? They’re really good.”

Lil ol’ me, myself, and I, on Animoto. I learned to use Animoto years ago. They deliver incredible quality and I can DO them. I load my images on the Animoto site, select the video style I want from Animoto’s menu, pick music from their library, add text, and push a button. Animoto’s clever computers do the rest. If I don’t like what I get, I push the button again. Voila! Instant genius that even an almost-seventy-year-old grandmother can master.

My Thanksgiving gift to you is a recap of my writing of 2014. You may not know about what all I did this year. The books are interconnected. Free-standing, so you can read just one and get the story, but they are a family. Grab some popcorn and enjoy the show.

THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! For your support and patronage in 2014. I appreciate it with all my heart. Much more is in the pipeline for you in 2015 and future years.

Lots of hugs,

Sandy Nathan

The only problem with Animoto on my computer is that sometimes it’s balky replaying. You have to let it play through once to buffer. That might be because we live out in the country, where ground squirrels carry the images across the fields in their mouths. They are a little slow, especially after large meals. My Computer Guy said to counter this by using Vimeo. (This is my Vimeo account. See ALL my vids!) I’ll attach the Vimeo version,  in addition to the Animoto . Thing is, sometimes it’s balky, too, and it stutters. It’s right below, followed by the Animoto version. The combined show is probably enough to make the ordinary computer explode with excitement. You, too, I hope.

There’s another problem with sharing videos: Even though I proofread the **** thing far into the night, when I had it made the video high resolution and played it full screen, I found typos. Argh! Count ‘em if you want. I’m done.

I LOVE TO SEE YOU SMILE––A THANKSGIVING GIFT FOR MY READERS from Sandy Nathan on Vimeo.

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From Sandy Nathan on Animoto .

Happy Thanksgiving! This is a day for gratitude–and for telling people how much they mean to you. Readers, you mean a very great deal to me.
I love to see you smile and I’ll do my darndest to see you keep on smilin’

LEROY WATCHES JR. & THE BADASS BULL

I tried to tell you about it beforehand on my trusty blog, Your Shelf Life, right here. Yep, Leroy Watches Jr. & the Badass Bull, the award-winning, almost 5 star rated, Western bit of craziness was free. And I didn’t tell you about it here. I tried.

I don’t know if you’ve put on an Amazon KTP Promotion. Amazon makes it easy to give your book away free for a few days, but the hard part is letting the bazillion potential readers know about it. That requires contacting an infinite number of sites that will tell people about your freebie. When I say INFINITE, I mean it.

Lord have mercy. I have a  wonderful person who helps me, but even so. I mean, other wonderful people and I were cranking out the free eBook download––in addition to the free LEROY download––until minutes before the free day started. Cranking, loading, writing, Photoshopping.

I finally got a moment to whack out a Your Shelf Life (YSL) article. I opened the Dashboard on WordPress … and discovered I didn’t have a blog. YSL was gone. $#@$%&!! WHAT!!??

Turned out that my URL address had expired. How could that happen? Uh. Well, we had some fraud on our credit card and had to get a new number. I contacted everyone I could think of and used often and changed the number with them. But not PowerHoster.com where I buy my URLs. They had YSL on auto-renew, so what’s the problem?

Big problem. YSL’s auto-renew had not been renewed because they didn’t have the right card number. AAAAHAAHHHH! Not only was I freaking out over the promo, I have so many really good articles on YSL. Articles to make a great book for self-pubbers and writers. Articles that weren’t backed up anywhere. Gone. This was HUGE.

I paid the delinquent fee, changed my credit card number to the good one, and checked the net. NOTHING. NO YSL. GONE, ALL GONE.

CUT TO THE CHASE:

I opened the Dashboard this AM and YSL was back. At least enough for me to write this. I’m writing fast.

The promo was a great success. Leroy Watches Jr. & the Badass Bull hit #1 in free Westerns, #2 in Metaphysical & Visionary and topped out at #125 in the free store (I was asleep at that time: my friend told me.) About 9,000 books were free that day; hitting 125 out of the pack was not bad. Not only that, a bunch of people got their Leroy and went over to my website, Sandy’s Website, and downloaded the eBook I created for the occasion–for FREE. Yep, made it just to give away, for a limited time. More on this below.

Not only was the Leroy giveaway fabulous, a dear friend of mine, Vallibus Apache Sherwood, started a fan site for me: author sandy nathan  So hop over there and say howdy! Please join my little group. It may be small, but I’ve got some great friends and fans! And appreciate Vallibus so much.

What did I say about the free eBook, in addition to the FREE LEROY? Oh. I was a participant in a very fun and awesome event my friend Wendy Potocki throws for the month of October: Halloweenpalooza II. Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, for the sheer wackiness of it and lack of any serious purpose. Also, I like the concept of getting dressed up and wandering around town. I don’t actually do that, because it’s a lot of bother. I don’t like the part about kiddies going into sugar comas over the potentially poisoned candy they score, but the rest of it is great fun.

Especially the graphics. Check out Wendy’s Halloweenpalooza II FB page above. You’re lucky enough to get this post so you can still read the guest posts and scary thing Wendy has planned.

Wendy has various guest authors write stories, tales, and descriptions of real paranormal events they’ve experienced and adds her own magic. I wrote “The Richest Person in the World”, posted right here on Wendy’s blog, HALLOWEENPALOOZA: 31 DAYS OF HALLOWEEN. We featured my visionary fiction/romance/horror combo, Mogollon: A Tale of Mysticism & Mayhem. I gave away some eBook copies and then Wendy presented “The Richest Person in the World”, the short story I wrote for the event.

Long short story. All I need to do is add three more and I’ll have a full length book. Which is what I intend do do. That’s how Vanessa Schierman PhD, Witch came into being. I had “The Richest Person in the World” formatted nicely and got Clarissa Yeo, my brilliant cover designer,to do up a cover. Voila! Something to give away for more than a day.

VANESSA SCHIERMAN PhD, WITCH

I wasn’t able to get news of Leroy Watches Jr. Free Day to you in time, but I can tell you about this. For a limited time, I’m going to give this brand new, never launched, never seen by anyone but those involved in producing it eBook–and it’s as big as some eBooks you see–away free. Yes, FREE! It’s more important than that. Grab your copy and I’ll explain why. Go to my website and punch the button right in the middle. It looks like this:

HIT THIS BUTTON TO GO TO SANDY'S WEBSITE AND THE DOWNLOAD PAGE

Why should you care about Vanessa Schierman Phd? What has she done for you? Well, turns out she’s a major character in my upcoming novels, starting with In Love by Christmas, which should be debuting the last week of October. Halloween? Never heard of In Love by Christmas?

You will. It’s the sequel to Mogollon: A Tale of Mysticism & Mayhem. It’s also the sequel to Leroy Watches Jr. & the Badass Bull! Yes, the series really is a series. If you read Mogollon and then read Leroy Watches Jr. and Vanessa Schierman PhD, Witch, you’ll be in the know. You’ll be ready for In Love by Christmas:

In Love by Christmas (Bloodsong 3)

In Love by Christmas will be out before Halloween! I promise–I ain’t jokin’. This is the story that completes the others. This is the novel that will break your heart and rend your soul. You’ll fall in love, and be scared to death.  You’ll be glad you read Mogollon and Leroy and went to my website and downloaded Vanessa.

Happy trails!

Sandy Nathan

Mogollon: A Tale of Mysticism & Mayhem (Bloodsong 2)

MOGOLLON: A TALE OF MYSTICISM & MAYHEM is free on Amazon Thursday, 9/18/2014, ONLY.  That’s the US link. In the UK, Mogollon is found here.  

MOGOLLON: A TALE OF MYSTICISM & MAYHEM has not been free on Amazon before and I have no plans to put it up free again. Is it time for you to GET MOGO’D? Mogollon is one amazing trip. Follow the link and download away.

I’ve got another reason for you to download Mogollon tomorrow: It’s sequel is coming up in weeks. That’s right. IN LOVE BY CHRISTMAS, the Bloodsong Series 3, should be out in early October. You’ll be able to flow right into it after reading Mogollon. More info on IN LOVE BY CHRISTMAS follows the reviews of Mogollon.

IN LOVE BY CHRISTMAS is an offshoot of the action in Mogollon. Grandfather’s grandson, Leroy Watches Jr. arrives at the Meeting late, as usual. He arrives a couple of days after Mogollon ends, but the retreat is still going. He’s given the assignment of finding his soul mate, who’s in desperate trouble. Cass Duane is super-capitalist Will Duane’s bad-girl (very bad-girl) daughter. Cass is so bad, you don’t even want to know how bad she is.

Leroy has to find and heal Cass Duane by Christmas. Or what? Read IN LOVE BY CHRISTMAS and find out. But first read Mogollon––

Mogollon is the story of the meeting of a great Native American shaman with the richest man in the world. They come together a retreat the shaman, known only as Grandfather, gives in the New Mexico desert. Sound sort of cutesy and woo-woo? Think again. This ain’t your ordinary shaman, nor is it your ordinary retreat. As the shaman seeks to move the very corroded capitalist’s soul, all the powers of evil in the universe focus on the retreat. The result is big, big mayhem.

WINNER OF VISIONARY FICTION CATEGORY

MOGOLLON WON THE VISIONARY FICTION CATEGORY, 2014 NATIONAL INDIE EXCELLENCE AWARDS!

What are readers and reviewers saying about Mogollon: A Tale of Mysticism & Mayhem? They’ll give you the straight scoop:

Mysticism, Western, and action thriller all rolled into one! June 14, 2014

♥ Epic Tale ♥,July 11, 2014

A captivating, mystical read,June 6, 2014

Cat Jones – See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Mogollon is a compelling mix of mysticism, romance, and action that I found impossible to set down once I started reading. I didn’t realize there was a book prior to this and so picked up Mogollon with no clue where it was heading, but the book stands on its own beautifully and I wasn’t left scratching my head due to lack of prior references. Nathan did a great job of blending the back story I needed to know.
The story centers on Will Duane and his staff’s experiences at a spiritual retreat at the Mogollon Bowl, a place where anyone could become psychic and all your problems could disappear. As a tech industry hot shot, Duane is out of his element among the rez cars, rocks and dirt. Accustomed to five star hotels, he wouldn’t even be here if he didn’t have business to complete. But this is a place where he isn’t in control, and as events unfold he finds himself at the mercy of something larger than himself.
Excellent writing and well fleshed out characters make this a captivating read. I will have to pick up a copy of Numenon to get all of the back story now.

Defies Genre,February 2, 2014

Colleen M. Albert – See all my reviews

This is the first book I read by Sandy Nathan, and though it’s a second book in the series, I had no problem enjoying the book as a stand alone as well. That’s how well it’s written.
Mogollon is a very intense story that follows Will Duane and his employees on a spiritual retreat, unlike any other. This book is equal parts horror, spiritual, romance, and action. From page one, it is non-stop, a page turner that leaves you on the edge of your seat, seeing where it’s going next. It follows not just Will on his journey, but many connections develop as Will and his team begin becoming inseparably linked with several of the Native American warriors and attendees. Nathan does an amazing job depicting the cultural and spiritual aspects of the story in a very respectful way, which as a reader, I really respected. I also just loved her turn of phrase, and many times I just said, “YES!” out loud at the great way she chose to describe something that otherwise could be mundane, or has been described the same way for centuries. Nathan has a voice all her own and it’s powerful.
Nathan also did an amazing job with character development; there are several who still stick with me today, some in a good way, and some in a revolting way. Nathan does a masterful job of making you FEEL while reading this novel. I guarantee you, you will be changed and spiritually moved after reading this book.
Mogollon seriously defies genre, in the absolute best way. I cannot wait to read the next one!

The brillliant and captivating cover of In Love by Christmas. Thank you, Clarissa Yeo!

IN LOVE BY CHRISTMAS. When I was writing Leroy Watches Jr. & the Badass Bull, a novella I wrote to give readers something to munch on after Mogollon––which you might consider reading yourself ––I fell in love with Leroy Watches Jr., Grandfather’s grandson, a shaman born and bred, and also considered a dufus by almost everyone. He’d not a joke; he’s beset by Coyote, his People’s meddling, interfering, and Trickster.

I’ve always wanted to write a Christmas book. Why not combine it with something about Leroy Watches? How about something with a sweet cover and lots of holiday joy?

Holiday joy is in IN LOVE BY CHRISTMAS, but also holiday terror. And romance. And Leroy. This is a long, tall dose of Leroy (he’s 6′ 8.5″ tall) as he travels the world on a mission of love. You won’t believe what happens in this story. I didn’t believe it when I was writing it.

A feast awaits you. All you have to do is take a little bite …

Mogollon: A Tale of Mysticism & Mayhem (Bloodsong 2)

Boy, there’s a title for a blog article that will SEO like like last month’s pablum! I’ve been doing all these itty-bitty crazy making things today. For instance, we’re planning a sales campaign for Mogollon: A

2014 NATIONAL INDIE EXCELLENCE AWARDS

Tale of Mysticism & Mayhem for … oh, maybe next Thursday? We’re talkin’ about it. Plans are  heating up.

I’ll let you know if they actually get hot. It would be a free day Thursday September 18th, with increased savings available for the weekend through Amazon’s “dribble it out” program. Why do they make it so hard to find the NAME of something?

So, think about free to lowered prices on Mogollon, the ebook with the fabulous cover featuring Native American actor, model & philanthropist Rick Mora. While the cover of this book is amazing, I’d say that the interior of the book––it’s content––is just as stellar.  If you want the maximal immersion, get the paperback version. The cover is KILLER. Front and back.  Mogollon won the Visionary Fiction Category of the 2014 National Indie Excellence Awards. All that beauty and a prizewinner, too.

My Lady Grace was a Freebooksy Featured Book

How about submitting to them for Mogollon‘s free day? Good idea, but while I was on the site, I noticed that they have a new free app that you can install on your Facebook Page, that converts it into a mini-version of your Amazon sale page. Whoo-hoo! “You can install it in thirty seconds.” Or two hours, if you were born before 1974. People in my age group should take two or three years to install that puppy.

I got it up in in one day! The only problem is that while loading my books, I assumed that the app used the first loaded is the bottom position on the stack method, which made sense to me. I loaded my books, thinking I was ordering them so that the most recent ones that I wanted everyone to see would be the top of the list, and the older ones on the bottom. That isn’t what the app did, so … I’ve got the books that I want you to see most on the bottom. That’s why people go crazy and run screaming through … fill in your own place for running amuck.

YOU FIND THE NEWLY DISCOVERED, ENTICING APPS UNDER THE "ABOUT" ON MY FB PAGE AND ABOVE THE PHOTOS. CLICK THE BUTTONS TO EXPLORE.

I was filled with joy, having successfully installed that Freebooksy App on my Facebook Fan page. That’s THIS FACEBOOK PAGE, MY FAN PAGE, a opposed to THIS OTHER FACEBOOK PAGE, MY PERSONAL PAGE. In doing the installation, I looked at my page for the first time and discovered the already existing apps on it that should bring me much closer to … heaven? I dunno. You, I hope. This is what they look like. (To the left) You find them on the left side of MY FAN PAGE under the ABOUT bit and above the PHOTOS.

I love having people join my mailing list, going to extraordinary lengths to write funny, informative newsletters with special offers in them. In the process of installing Freebooksy app, I discovered that I had a previously semi-installed thing where people could sign up for my newsletter from my Facebook page. This is marked Join My List on my page. All I had to do was complete the installation process I’d started in prehistory. All I needed to do was sign in with  Constant Contact, which involved  CC accepting the password and username that it has been accepting for the last ten years. How many tries did it take? Let me count the stars in the sky. But I got it working. You can sign up for my newsletter and be first to know my news and get special deals available only there. 

Does anyone hate the Constant Contact mailing service like I do? That intensely? I find it horrendously hard to use. Expensive.  They do have great templates and lots of them, but learning them? There’s the on-going thing about it not accepting my passwords.

Mail Chimp – The Mail Service Everyone but Me Uses Now

I’d hop over to the free Mail-chimp in in a minute, but it took all of my cyber-muscles to figure out how  to use Constant Contact’s templates to send out the lousy three newsletters I do a year. Having to learn a new system from scratch would kill me. Having said that, I expect the Thought Police from Constant Contact to bust me any minute.

 The Goodreads App was the final app already existing on my FB Fan page. It was hooked up, too. It takes you to my Goodreads author page, or a facsimile.

How does everyone feel about Goodreads? It has about fifty bazillion members, all rabid readers. No, avid readers. Authors are told that they absolutely must get out there and interact with Goodreads reader community. “It’s a marketing gold mine.”

I had my only scary on-line experience on Goodreads. Imagining that I’d find marketing nirvana, I hopped in and joined my genre, Really Nice Fantasies about Fun Things. I had read about Goodreads members being a little bit prickly about rules, so I studied everything about the group and its functioning before posting anything. My group had a bunch of subgroups: Fun Fantasies Involving Torture, Nice Fantasies about Clouds, Fantasies about What You’d like to Do to your Mother-in-law.  They were all my area, so I signed up for all of them. The voluminous instructions to participating in the group said, “Post… somewhere. I forget where… a bit about yourself by way of introduction.” I did this. And then I wrote pretty much the same message in all the subgroups, “Hi, I’m Sandy Nathan, I write fluffy fiction about clouds and I have this book …”

Before I could say “roll me over with a steam roller and keep the change,” some guy got on my case about spamming. I hadn’t spammed. I followed all the rules. Then the group got in on my alleged spam. It escalated. Had I advocated barbecuing children, it couldn’t’ have gotten much hotter. Right when they had my head on the guillotine’s block, the moderator intervened saying, “She didn’t spam. You all belong to the same groups. That’s why you got multiple messages.”

I never went  back to Goodreads. Then there was all the uproar about the young first-time author who got a bunch of low ratings on a book that wasn’t out and no one had any information about. She complained on her own blog, to find her book listed on really nasty lists. So much for the authors’ marketing bonanza.

Any Goodreads experiences to share, readers?

 NEXT TIME, WHICH WILL BE VERY SOON, I’LL LET YOU KNOW IF WE’RE HAVING THAT PROMOTION NEXT THURSDAY! YES!

SANDY NATHAN 

The brilliant and captivating cover of In Love by Christmas. Thank you, Clarissa Yeo!

THE HAPPY STATUS REPORT: Oops. Never check the facts. The MODERATELY HAPPY, BUT NOT TOO ECSTATIC, STATUS REPORT on IN LOVE BY CHRISTMAS, my in-development Christmas book.

Last Sunday, I got my complete response to my editor’s first content/developmental edit back to her. [That means: I rewrote the whole friggin' thing and shipped it off.] The first editorial pass is the one done with the golden machete. You send your manuscript in, thinking, “I’m *** ****. Boy is this good.” It comes back shredded, with little red and blue comments all over and half the text deleted. The other half says, “Show me, don’t tell me.”

Every time I send a manuscript in, I expect it to come back with, “YIPPEE! THIS IS THE BEST BOOK I’VE EVER READ. YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO A THING,” on it. This never happens. When the second go-round comes back, it always looks machete-ed again. How she can find more things to put those “little notes” by, I do not understand. After taking a few days to stop being hysterical, again, I get to work rewriting. Because, ****, although I hate to admit it, my editor is mostly always right.

I originally started to write this progress report, saying, “YAHOO! I finished redoing the first chapter. I’M 1/37th of the way done with the rewrite of the SECOND EDITORIAL PASS ON IN LOVE BY CHRISTMAS.” I thought it had 37 chapters. 1/37th is pretty good, huh? In not more than a month, working at a pace a normal person might work, I could have the the manuscript really tight.

It has 53 CHAPTERS. I’m 1/53rd of the way through the rewrite. Not so good.

That’s OK. Don’t worry. I’m petitioning the Universe to move Christmas to March 31st this year. Plenty of time to get my Christmas book done. [Responding to the content edit is not all that has to happen to the book. There copy-editing and proofreading and then formatting, wherein it's turned from a Word document like all your letters to your mom and such into a real book and eBook. If you've ever wanted to be an author, you should read this and decide to be an accountant.]

Writing gives you faith. Also takes it away, sometimes. Prayers accept that this sucka gets off the ground before Groundhog Day.

Ciao, everyone!

Sandy Nathan
Sandy’s Other Website, the Interactive One
Sandy’s Amazon Author Page
Sandy’s Facebook Page
Sandy’s Pinterest Page-I’m having fun with this!
Sandy’s Vimeo Page–even more fun. Check out the Chessadors!
Sandy on Twitter-I strongly dislike Twitter. I don’t answer messages or tweets or nuthin’. Try Facebook.

IN THE PREVIOUS POSTING, I COVERED THE  GOOD, BAD, AND VICIOUS TYPES OF BOOK REVIEW. HERE WE MOVE TO THE STUPID REVIEW, OR TO BE MORE COMPASSIONATE, THE DUMB OR MISTAKEN REVIEW Phew! It’s good to get out of the province of trolls and witches into the land of idiocy. HOWEVER, this type of review really bothers me. It’s the type of negative review I’ve received most.

Tecolote and I. I thought I'd have him for ten more years.

Before giving you examples of Dumb Reviews, I’m going to reveal a treasure trove of information readers can use to select books, in addition to the reviews of other writers. It’s called the book’s Sale Page. You find it on Amazon or wherever the book is sold. You already know about it: it’s the page you went to to buy the book!  All sorts of info is on this page to help you buy a book you’ll like.

Here’s a screen shot of part of the sale page of one of my books, Tecolote: The Little Horse That Could. This is a heartwarming story of a baby horse born prematurely on our ranch. Baby horses don’t do prematurity well. A foal born two weeks premature dies. Teco was born 10 days early during below freezing weather conditions. This little horse had no chance of living when he was born. But he did, and grew up to be a wonderful riding horse. My personal riding horse.

TECOLOTE: THE LITTLE HORSE THAT COULD

What this screenshot shows you, in addition to my sub-basement level of sales, is a bunch of useful information. Right up top, Amazon tells you how big the file is. It’s 36 pages. That’s short. That’s because it’s a kids’ book. Tecolote’s reviews, the handful of them, for which I am very grateful, are very good. Amazon pulled common comments in the reviews and placed them front and center. The top one says the “story is perfect for children.”

Way down at the bottom of the sale page, Amazon lists their rendition of the book’s category. Amazon’s categories are NOT the same as the official “BISAC” versions. Amazon does the reader a disservice, when its categories are different  than what the author officially specified when publishing the book. In the case of  Tecolote, the official BISAC code was Juvenile Nonfiction. Nothing for adults at all. Amazon also places its category information almost off the page, where almost no one will know to look for it.

Maybe that’s why this poor reader was so confused and gave Tecolote this review:

This is what frosts me as an author. Of course, it’s short like a child’s book. That’s what it IS. But three stars isn’t that bad a review and the author was disappointed.

How can an author make sure a reader sees what’s in front of his/her face?

I’m very sensitive about this book because Tecolote ended up being my riding horse. You need to know how tight that bond is. To horse people, asking to borrow another person’s horse is like asking to borrow her husband for the night. Tecolote was MY horse. While his book was coming out and winning awards, Tecolote contracted pneumonia. I’d never had a horse with pneumonia. He didn’t get better.

Turned out, he was in heart failure and the pneumonia tipped the scales of life or death for him. As the book awards rolled in, Tecolote went downhill.  My beautiful, sweet, kind horse died. What I’ve got left of him is this book and a hunk of his mane. I ended up in the hospital with chest pains induced by a broken heart.

So when I see stuff like what follows, I want to bite anything within reach.

What? This doesn't make sense. Apparently the reviewer thought the same: I noticed that this isn't the original review that blew my mind so thoroughly. The "Also a great story of survival." on the title has been added. The review after "But also …" is new. The star rating hasn't moved. Wha …?

While not as bad as a 1 star review, two stars is considered a bad review. The above review of Tecolote that makes no sense. The review itself is very good, but it isn’t the review that originally went up–that I remember. The original headline was: Young kids or weird teenagers are qualified. The rest was added later, presumably when the writer’s mother found it or its writer had a fit of conscience. The original review read: Good for little kids or strange teenagers who are weird. The rest is an add-on.

A review can be modified by the writer, as it was here, but the star rating wasn’t changed. Can it be? Or is that momentary click of a button the same as casting a moment’s pique in bronze?

I had so many feelings about this book that I added the following message to the book description. It’s the first thing a prospective buyer sees:

This is the first thing a potential buyer of Tecolote sees. Sorry about the quality of a screen shot. This message gives the book's official category, its page count, and the fact that it was written for children.

Did this work? Maybe. No more reviews like that on Tecolote. I did get a two-star review on the older version of my Stepping off the Edge saying it didn’t give instructions on how to do different spiritual practices and wasn’t particularly spiritual. The first review of the book, located right under the book’s title says, “Not a How-to Book.” All the other reviewers raved about it’s spiritual impacts. Its awards were for spirituality, among other things. What’s a writer to do? I put this in the book description:

This sits top, front, and center on Stepping's sale page. "It isn't a 'how to' book …"

Stepping off the Edge originally was published as a modern spiritual companion in 2006. Know what? Nuthin's changed since 2006.

I’m announcing this right here: the text of the new edition of Stepping off the Edge: A Roadmap for the Soul is virtually identical to the old version.  If you read the old version, you may want to skip the new one. Or not. Why? Because the condition I write about, the human condition, hasn’t improved since the first book. On-line addiction, infatuation with celebrities, effects of drug and alcohol abuse, general abuse, evil so bad that the devil itself could have done it: all the big nasties we have to deal with are the same. So are my remedies. So’s the book. A refresher is often good. I’m pulling the old version of Stepping Off the Edge off the market today.

THE PAINFULLY DUMB REVIEW. I’m sure it’s clear to everyone by now that authors read the reviews readers write. I try to ignore mine as much as possible because 1) I’m always working on something new and I don’t have time, 2) a one or two star review can not only ruin my day, it can throw off my current writing. Bad reviews can have such extreme effects on me (if I deem them warranted), that I’ve removed one book from sale A book that cost me nine years of my life to write. Even if the review is based on missed or erroneous information and I don’t agree with it, it will gall me, as I’ve shown here.

Either way, bad review = bad day.

Life is rough, but you could have contacted me first …

HOW TO KEEP AUTHORS YOUR FRIENDS [Special Your Shelf Life Extra!] Say you’re “friends” with an author, as much as anyone can be friends with someone they’ve met only through electronic impulses. You didn’t like the author/friend’s last book and want to let them know it. So you write a review saying that. Freedom speech and all that. This is not a wise course of action if you want to keep things copacetic with your on-line buddy.

Remedies exist for the problems I outline above, problems of “missed information.” These are remedies that reviewers can apply before dropping their bombs. One is thoroughly checking the info on the book’s sale page before initiating Star Wars. Asking questions. Amazon now lets potential buyers ask questions of past ones. They probably do it for books. You can contact other reviewers, if they put contact info on their pages.

More than that––Did you know that you can contact me and other authors and communicate about your considerations about their books? This may be harder with the big name authors, but you can get through if you’re persistent. Try Googling this name: Sandy Nathan. Bingo! One click and you can see my new author picture, get my website and every social media I’m on and all my contacts. I have a contact page on my website that sends messages right here. To my desk. You could email me in seconds if you wanted to. If you’re clever enough, you could probably march up my driveway in an hour and a half.

Contacting me is not hard. If you have a beef about something I’ve written or are planning a bad review, talk to me. Yes, I know, it’s harder than slamming around low stars. It does require some courage and integrity. But you never know what might happen. I’ve heard of authors giving back the cost of a book a reader doesn’t like. I’m not saying that I’d do that, but I might. You might also learn things that might be pretty embarrassing to you if you had delved deeper. Like the author is in the middle of writing exactly what you wanted or has just had a heart attack.

Say you don’t realize this and just want to drop your load. We live in the age of diffused blame and hostility looking for a target. Shoot first, aim later.

Leroy Watches Jr. & the Badass Bull - An Award-winning Contemporary Western. This is the original cover.

For instance, my new book Leroy Watches Jr. & the Badass Bull  has won one national award (in Western) and had all five star reviews until recently. It is a novella, a short novel. Rules exist in the industry defining the lengths of various forms of fiction.

Standard Numbers of Words by Type of Fiction

Searching through my files yielded the most recent Word version Leroy, which allows me to see the number of words. Leroy Watches Jr. has just under 37,000 words, placing it on the high side of the novella word range. Amazon clearly states its length on its sale page: 132 pages. That indicates a short book. When I uploaded the book, I added a note to the sale page about it being a Novella. This is the first text the reviewer sees, just below the book description. It’s also cheaper than any of my other books, which should be a clue.

Leroy's novella length is reflected in the number of pages reported on its Amazon sale page. Leroy is actually a ittle long for a novella; they range around one hundred pages.

I was so excited about the novella concept and the fact that writing a 130 page book is easier than writing a 454 page book, that I wrote this little note, shown at the very top of the text in the Amazon sale page.

I think the concept that Leroy Watches Jr. is a novella, which is shorter than a regular book, should be clear. Novellas are all the rage now, by the way. See this great blog article from Anne R. Allen, “Why Novellas Are Hot and How to Write One.”

All this defining material is not enough to prevent a review like this:

With all the information that should have told the buyer what s/he was buying, this happened.

I’ve beaten this to death, but I want to let my readers know that they can contact me, though any of the easily available ways. I would love it if they did before posting something like this. (Not that it’s a one-star review. Three stars is considered OK, neither good nor bad. And its tone is polite.)

If this reader had contacted me, s/he could have been among the first to know that I’m writing another book about Leroy Watches Jr., In Love by Christmas. It is full length–it’s 60,000 words right now and I haven’t even gotten to the bits about polo and fox-hunting.

Reviewers should realize a few things: writing a book is hard. Everything about the process is hard, taxing, and will make the author and all concerned want to scream and throw things, often at each other.

It takes much longer to write a long book than a short one. I wrote Leroy Watches Jr. because I wanted to give my readers a little tasty morsel to gobble down after reading the “big book,” Mogollon: A Tale of Mysticism & Mayhem while they were waiting for the next biggie. I can’t turn out 492 page whoppers three times a year–they take time.

My writing plans for the rest of the year are ambitious. I plan on getting In Love by Christmas out in time for Christmas buying. AND I’m planning on getting another book, the sequel to Mogollon: A Tale of Mysticism & Mayhem, at about the same time.

The brilliant and captivating cover of In Love by Christmas. Thank you, Clarissa Yeo!

In Love by Christmas is the “most badass Christmas story ever written.” Leroy Watches Jr. takes the most dangerous ride of his life as he rescues his soul mate, Cass Duane. Cass is the daughter of Will Duane, the richest man in the world and the hero (after a fashion) of Mogollon.

Phenomenon: A Tale of Mysticism & Miracles,  Mogollon’s sequel, takes the crew at Mogollon’s retreat through the week; Mogollon ends on Wednesday night. The retreat is over on Saturday. That’s plenty of time for everything that didn’t happen in Mogollon to happen. And it does.

If I succeed in finishing these to books and getting the two new books published before Christmas, I may be dead, but I’m giving it my best shot.

In other words, I’m going to be working my buns off through the summer and fall for you. For me, too, but for you, my readers.

You may say, “Well, Sandy, you’re taking this review thing pretty hard.”

You bet I am. Writers and artists are among the most sensitive creatures on the planet. That’s why we can write. I would like the people who review my work to exhibit the courtesy and commitment to excellence I try to show them in my writing.

For instance, after receiving the above review, I instructed my cover artist to change Leroy’s cover so that The Bloodsong Novellas appears on the front and rear cover of Leroy so that no one else is disappointed.  This is a good idea. Wish I’d thought of it earlier. We’ll do that for the up-coming novellas, too.

See: There it is, right on the cover: A Bloodsong Novella.

So there we have it: the most benign of the bad reviews, the Oops-missed-something review. Most people drop them and never look back. Is there a cure? Instant “check your info and get things right”? No. But talking about it feels marvelous.

Ciao, everyone!

Sandy Nathan
Sandy’s Other Website, the Interactive One
Sandy’s Amazon Author Page
Sandy’s Facebook Page
Sandy’s Pinterest Page-I’m having fun with this!
Sandy’s Vimeo Page–even more fun. Check out the Chessadors!
Sandy on Twitter-I strongly dislike Twitter. I don’t answer messages or tweets or nuthin’. Try Facebook.

This article deserves appropriate illustration. I wanted to present a sampling of truly awful book covers. I found many, some totally hysterical, but they were in use on books currently for sale and as such were very copyrighted. I had to settle for what was in the public domain.

I am treading on dangerous territory. Authors are cautioned everywhere: IF YOU GET A BAD REVIEW, SUCK IT UP. DO NOT COMMENT, EVER, NO MATTER WHAT. NEVER RETALIATE OR EXPLAIN ON-LINE OR ANYWHERE ELSE.

Why? This is the viral age. At times, authors have been so hurt, provoked, or rendered insane by bad reviews that they unleash on-line diatribes against the review’s writer(s). These diatribes show the authors as groveling, sniveling, rolling-on-the-floor crybabies with snot and tears all over their faces. Either that or they come across as fruitcakes. These reactions provide terrific fodder for those who love to see their fellow human beings quivering like the Jello-O molds your aunties used to make in the 1950s. (The green kind, with cottage cheese.) The author may explain, “I don’t do this very often, but what he/she said flipped me out.” Doesn’t matter: in the cyber age, an author’s worst moments can become the defining statements of her career, thus tanking it.

I feel pretty safe writing this, as NOTHING I’ve written has gone viral, including an important blog post about water allocation in California which should interest everyone in the state who drinks water. (Now, had it been about wine, that post would have covered the globe.)

Therefore, I feel at ease writing about reviews from an author’s point of view. I would like to do a bit of teaching, enlightening readers about writing reviews and some pitfalls they may leap into, only to feel silly/stupid later. I’m not going to teach readers how to band together in semi-feral groups, organize and attack authors with the intent of sinking books and destroying careers. Those of you prone to do that already know how to do it.

LET’S DO A LITTLE REVIEW OF REVIEWS. (DUE THE AMOUNT OF INFORMATION TO BE IMPARTED, THIS TOPIC CONTINUES IN THE NEXT POST, WHICH COVERS THE STUPID REVIEW, THE EMBARRASSING-TO-ITS-WRITER FORM OF THE BAD REVIEW.)

THE GOOD REVIEW: (Spoiler alert: This is an example of a good review, but it packs a spoiler.) “This brilliant novel illustrates what can be achieved devoting one’s life to studying invertebrates living in Iceland’s volcanic hot pools. Character development was superb, especially that of the heroine, a  Naegleria fowleri amoeba, who spent her entire life in the hot water of one pond. The way she infects the villain with  meningitis was amazing, killing him by entering his brain through the nasal passages.  This marvelous tale doesn’t bode well for Icelandic tourism, but man, it sure was a relief from those lousy vampire stories. Great plotting, pacing, use of language. An A+. I will read everything this writer produces.” (signed) A. ARTIFACT, #1 Amazon Reviewer in the Universe.

Authors scream in ecstasy when they receive reviews like this. I have only one question when I read such a review: How do I get a hold of A. ARTIFACT?

Hansi. What a gal!

BAD REVIEWS: Three types of bad review exist, the Regular Bad Review, which can be the basis of the Good Bad Review, and the Bad Bad Review:

“Stupid from it’s opening sentence to its final phrase, Fillydelphi Dreams, a period romance set in the late 1700s, is a loser. The heroine and hero are a rich plantation owner and her hot Jamaican slave. The historical research behind this book is horrendous. No rich, upper class woman would be seen traipsing around the barnyard clad in her “stays” at 2 AM, while trying to find her beloved Yorkshire terrier. Yorkshire terriers didn’t exist until the nineteenth century. That’s dumb. Dumber is the fact that the author mentions Victoria’s Secret as the provenance of the stays. Also, in an earlier dinner scene in her mansion, Her Ladyship is shown lacking in skills that would be possessed by any upper class woman in that day: she does not know an oyster fork from a pickle fork. She has nothing else to do but memorize silver pieces; she should know her forks. Back to traipsing around in the barnyard. She finds more than her dog, of course. The sex in this book is its high point, as the man Her Ladyship would have as her lover runs screaming, saying he ‘ll be flogged to death if he does what she wants. Besides, he has a wife and family and doesn’t want her. She says she’ll have him flogged to death if he doesn’t do what she wants. His whimpering cries as Her Ladyship has her way with him are the best part of this book. It’s horrible, one human being using an other so, but also realistic. Still, I’d rather read a vampire novel than this s***.”

This is a true Bad Review. The reviewer has read the book, formed articulate opinions about it’s various elements, and states them in the review. He does not personally attack the the author, only what she’s written.  Authors don’t like to receive reviews like this, but they can be a learning experience. (Victoria’s Secret incorporated in 1977 BTW.)

THE GOOD BAD REVIEW: This is a bad review, but it turns into having a good impact on the literary universe because of the author’s response to it. My first novel, Numenon: A Tale of Mysticism & Money, was greeted with wild, over the top positive reviews. It also won six national awards, including a Silver in the IPPYs and Silver Nautilus and four more, was #1 in Mysticism on Amazon for over a year and cruised at about 1,500 in the overall Amazon ratings. Yowser, wowser! The book had some problems, but many reviewers loved its spiritual authenticity.

Years later, the other reviewers found the book. Stating their comments more emphatically than I am here, these reviewers said it was too slow and had too much back story, plus the bad guy was underdeveloped, and the book ended too quickly, making it half a book. There were reasons for all this: it was my first novel and I didn’t know what I was doing, I had the sequel written and thought it would be out right away, not knowing that I would be paralyzed by writer’s block for years. That didn’t stop the other reviewers from ripping it to shreds.

What did I do? I pulled Numenon: A Tale of Mysticism & Money off the market. The folks who gave it bad reviews should rejoice at this. I began rewriting the novel, addressing the issues brought up by the reviewers. The part I rewrote was killer; far superior to the tortured prose and characters of the initial (now dead) version. But, when I started the rewrite of Numenon,  I the clouds of writer’s block that had prevented me from finishing Numenon’s sequel Mogollon: A Tale of Mysticism & Mayhem for six years thinned and disappeared. The right words appeared in my brain.

When that happens, you gotta write, because those words do not hang around. And then the novella Leroy Watches Jr. & the Badass Bull and the reissue of Stepping off the Edge burst into my consciousness. I had to work on them. But, if I ever finish rewriting  Numenon: A Tale of Mysticism & Money, it will rock. I show Will being a womanizer, instead of having his secretary tell you about it. Will is a major a slime bucket before he meets the shaman, Grandfather.  I’ve grown as a writer: earlier, I was too embarrassed to show Will’s nasty bits.

This is a case a bad review having a good outcome by provoking appropriate action in an author.

This isn't so bad a cover, but as I said, all the really bad ones were on books currently for sale. Some I checked out were ABSOLUTELY HYSTERICAL, and inappropriate for Your Shelf Life. "Games to Play with your ********," for one. Google "really bad book covers."

THE BAD BAD REVIEW: “Susan Wallawallawhoopsie is an idiot. She is so stupid that she wrote about a woman having a Yorkshire terrier in the 1,700s. Everyone knows they weren’t invented yet. And getting her stays at Victoria’s Secret? VS didn’t exist, either. Anyone who’s stupid enough to think she just went to VS to get undies is dumb. This author is so dumb, I’m surprised she didn’t say she got them at Costco, but that shows more brains than Susan’s got.” And on and on.

This is a rant. Often, like-minded souls (called trolls by everyone but themselves) will band together and attack a book/author heaping one star reviews of this ilk on a book or books. I’ve read reviews of type. Some don’t sound like the above “Bad Bad Review.” Some sound reasonable, until you read the book, which is pretty darn good and bears little resemblance to the one-star wonder described by the reviewer.

We live in review wars,  Star Wars’ ugly cousin. Typically, reviews posted on sellers’ sites are permanent, smelling up the site on which they are written forever. Some review platforms, Amazon, I understand, allow authors to get such defamation down, if they work hard enough. Other review sites are bloody free-for-alls with no author recourse.

What triggers attacks by trolls? Success. If your head sticks up above the cyber-crowd in any way, swarms of virtual vipers may be attracted to your work and attempt to destroy your career. The situation is on-going and is so bad that I’m not going to say any more about it. I have a number of instances (that most writers know about) that I could cite, but the authors involved asked me not talk about them. What do these examples involve? Death threats. Professional destruction. Really nasty verbiage flung hard. Books sunk by coordinated attacks of one star reviews. Do you feel fear?  If you don’t, you’re not on the writer side of the aisle.

Those wishing to understand the behavior I’ve described can visit the Center for Internet Addiction, founded by Kimberly Young, PhD, the clinical psychologist who identified ‘net addiction in 1996. The Internet has created new forms of psychopathology: the attacks on authors are manifestations of the rage states that overtake some people on the ‘net. Flaming-–an individual or a group group exploding and heaping vitriol on a member–is one manifestation of these new mental illnesses. Dr. Young describes more. Internet addiction isn’t just piddling your life and money away on auctions. When I was writing the first edition of my book Stepping off the Edge around 2003 to 2006, I stumbled into internet addiction–my own, in the form of an eBay addiction. Dr. Young’s writings. particularly Caught in the ‘Net, really helped.

The anonymity of the ‘net fosters all sorts of behaviors that people would never indulge in person.

But if no one can see them … There’s no sanction of what they do … If they have a bunch of friends and egg each other on … A culture that says what they’re doing is  OK?

Let’s get to something more pleasant: The STUPID REVIEW, the topic of my next post.

Sandy Nathan
Sandy’s Other Website, the Interactive One
Sandy’s Amazon Author Page
Sandy’s Facebook Page
Sandy’s Pinterest Page-I’m having fun with this!
Sandy’s Vimeo Page–even more fun. Check out the Chessadors!
Sandy on Twitter

MY PLATFORM AND HOW I GOT IT

I received a message from a fellow author wanting to know how I, as a successful person (and assumed, successful author) built my platform. She loved what I was doing and asked for advice on what to do to gather her own tribe and have her message resonate with potential readers. She mentioned a bunch of stuff she was doing, in addition to writing her book and sharing it widely. What else should she be doing?

I thought to myself, I can answer this in two ways: Give her the truth, or make up a bunch of **** and sell it as a seminar.

Truth or consequences? I may end up doing both, but I’ll start by telling the truth. Here’s the basic question, authors: If you aren’t already making a living with your writing, do you need to for some reason? Some people make big bucks as authors. That’s cool. But if you are struggling to make a living with your writing, thinking any day will be the big break through––I would suggest that you change professions. That’s even if you did take a course on following your dream and living your passion. Writing is just a dismal, hard way to earn a buck. I wrote a blog article somewhere about the tens of thousands of Bureau of Labor Statistics job categories that will earn you more than writing. Pick one of those and do your scribbling in your spare time.

If you already make tons of money with your writing, cool. If you don’t currently rake in the dough and don’t need to make a living with your writing, you won the jackpot. You can have lots of fun without spending too much, and maybe make some money, if you pay attention to what I say below. If you don’t pay attention, you’ll end up crazy, just like authors trying to make living at the dismal occupation. (The unofficial name for economics is “the dismal science.” It’s not as dismal as writing.)

I used to be an economist. It was easy: just earn straight As for at least a BS and an MS, and a PhD if you can. (Though I only did a year of the PhD.) While in school, wow your professors with your erudite and insightful grasp of the subject, so that they enthusiastically recommend you to their friends, who are in a position to hire you. (Remember the days when a person got out of school and there were jobs?) After getting a job, I found success was a simple matter of analyzing the **** out of whatever my bosses pointed me at. And presenting it at professional meetings and to local governments. I did that, and my bosses loved me and so did their bosses, and even people like the economists and analysts at the RAND Corporation and National Science Foundation. Easy peasy.

Not so with writing as a career. The woman who asked me “What do you do to build your platform?” does not want to know what I did to succeed or for how many years I did it. I did everything any writing pundit, no matter how obscure, said, for years and years. Enough so that when the IRS audited our literary adventure and I told them what I had done to be a commercially successful author, they fell to their knees, sobbing, “Oh, you poor baby.” No, the IRS does not do that. But we won. Anyway, I did everything that the major books about what you should do to succeed as a writer say.

After years of study and doing everything, I have formed the following basic principles about succeeding as an author that I’d like to share with you. Buckle your seat belts, compadres: my maxims pack a wallop. (I wrote this yesterday when I was in a feisty, facetious, and, indeed, flippant mood. Perhaps too flippant. I’m going over this today to make sure I said what I really meant and to clarify where needed. This “turn all the rules on their heads” model is new to me. I’ve tried it in previous years, often for days at a time But I always fell back into the crazed maw of obsession with sales that is the publishing world. Well, the worm-ette has turned. I’m going for what feeds me. And that’s below:)

1. FORGET YOUR MARKET. ALSO FORGET YOUR TRIBE. THINK ABOUT YOURSELF.
All the marketing/authoring pundits say the opposite. Great. They aren’t you and they don’t live in your skin. If you feel lousy because you’re hanging your well-being on your Klout score, your writing will stink. I need to amplify that.

Of course you want your work to succeed and you want profession friends and buddies. Of course you want to show up effectively in whatever genre you write. But at what cost? Your individuality? Your soul? Do you want to sound like everyone else–”Grow your tribe.” “Establish your platform.” Do you want to lose yourself running from one pub-guru to another? This is funny, because I’ve been self-pubbing since 2006. Most of the dudes giving the classes and seminars had not heard of independent authors or presses then. There’s a scene in my book Stepping off the Edge where I’m in Mark Victor Hansen’s huge MEGA Selling University. The MEGA University is reduced to a set of CDs now, but it was a big deal when I took it. In that scene, an editor from a Major Publisher speaks, and the floor tilts toward her as thousands of publication-lust-maddened wannabe authors stampede toward her … The scene captures the world in which independent and traditionally published authors find themselves as well as I could capture it.

I am going to be extremely snobby and judgmental for a bit. I write visionary fiction (Amazon calls it Metaphysical Science Fiction and Fantasy. Amazon will call it whatever wants. That’s the thing about a monopoly.) To me, visionary fiction is fiction–made up stories–with a moral core. That means that right and wrong, good and evil, exist and the book is about the struggle for right over might. Doesn’t mean good will win. In addition to having a moral core, my kind of visionary fiction features at least a few characters who reach a higher level of human development. I don’t go so far as some writers in positing that the species elevates to the woo-woo sphere, because I see no empirical evidence that our species is on anything but a dive into the nasty. But to be my kind of visionary fiction, some people in the book grow in spirit and consciousness.

This type of writing is more demanding of the writer than, say chick-lit (Most likely. I’ve never written chick-lit, nor have I written romance or other addiction-based genres. Yes, that’s judgmental.). My soul writes my books and does everything else for me. For this to work, my soul must be cleaned up so that it coughs up verbal sparkles of enlightenment, rather than dirt clods. Chiefly, this means taming my major addictions and being whole spiritually. What does this mean in concrete terms?

This is what I feel like if I’m in good shape spiritually: I feel the outlines of my body, a solid core. I feel my heart beating. It radiates, light, love and good will. That’s what hearts do. It’s state pulsates outward. I feel my chakras, those pesky energy centers that no one can see but are there anyway, lined up from my tail-bone to the crown of my head. My energy is pulsating and I can feel all of it.

Nothing disturbs my equanimity, my peace. I’m not reaching out trying to grab for something, living in a state of lust. I’m not attached to getting anything, nor am running in terror or any kind of aversion from anything in my world. I am free and blissful.

“Detached from aversion and attraction, the yogi lives in peace with a silent mind.” (The Bhagavad Gita says something like this. Google wouldn’t find it for me.)

You can write some killer visionary fiction from that state. Any kind of fiction or nonfiction, too. My Stepping off the Edge, a cross-genre nonfiction memoir/self help for writers and everyone else, was written in that state and higher. (Meditative states have an infinite up side.) I expect that regular writers do their best work from that sailing “wheeeee” that accompanies the state I just described.

Say I read a  book or go to a seminar and someone tells me that I have to find my tribe and grow it and have a brand and follow the hottest, sure-fire marketing plan? How about I start charting my daily sales figures and looking at my website stats all the time? What if I read all the writers’ blogs and FB threads about everything I have to do to be a writer? What happens?

I lost my tribe, before I found them. And my sales . . .

My chakras deflate in an instant. If I’m hanging on people, numbers, friends, or likes, I cripple myself as a writer of spiritual fiction or any kind of work that requires “soul clarity and truthfulness.” I might be able to cough up a salable book or two, but they won’t be of a caliber that will satisfy any spiritually developed person. Spirit sings. Also spreads its bliss.

Think about yourself. This upside-down thinking is new to me. I used to play “She with the most FB Friends wins.” “Every five-star review is a step closer to heaven.” I used to get really upset if my books didn’t sell the way I thought they should. In other words, I used to think marketing, platform, selling first, and Sandy second, or maybe fifth. What I did with that was run that racket hard enough to make myself sick.

Not too long ago, I was a mess. My hands hurt. Thumbs most, but a good writing session on the computer will cause everything, including my pinkies, to howl.  My hands are well on their way to being wrecked from spending so much time on my iMac. Not too long ago, my brain was fried. I was crabby, and exhausted. Snapping at everyone, mostly my dear husband. I thought obsessively of going to Venice, the one in Italy, not the one near Los Angeles. I wanted to escape.

About a week ago, I made the inner flip that resulted in what you’re reading here. I’m changing my behavior so that how my body feels and the joy I feel with my profession is the barometer to success. I want those chakras flaming! Spinning! Frolicking! And I want to write and sell a lot, too.

How does my brave new world work, relative to the opposite? I have no clue, other than to say that I had just made the transition to putting my soul and my physical well-being first when that stranger-to-me author contacted me about my great platform. Just a coincidence?

WHY YOU SHOULD BE INTERESTED IN SPIRIT I started making these Maxim cards when putting out the second edition of Stepping off the Edge. The book bristles with these pithy bits. I may make a picture book out of them, ir some on-line, subscription presentation. Who knows. Was this the result of building on my book's platform? Was it part of my marketing program? No. The idea just came to me. It's a good one. If people can't/don't get my book with words, they'll get it with pictures.

2. LEARN TO WRITE
Looks like this will be a series of articles. This particular article is I’m already at 2,900 words, but I can’t quit without adding this crucial bit about writing books that get read. I have more than 700 books on my Kindle. Most of them I got through BookBub, ENT, Blurb-a-minute, or Read-Me-or-I’ll-Die–the emailed, juried lists of new, cheap, or free books that fill our in-boxes every day. Those arbiters of mass taste and harbingers of our success as authors are hard to get on. You may have to beg, as my friend Consuelo illustrates here, but it’s worth it for what they can do to your sales, often for a week or more.

So, as a self-pubbed author, you devise the perfect book cover and two sentence blurb, hustle up fifty great reviews (this requires magic, black or white–whatever works) and you are accepted by one of the big book advertising sites. By some trick of fate, I see the ad and your efforts snag my attention for the approximate ten seconds needed to download your tome. I get it. And forget it. I’ve already downloaded 700 books. But say I open your book for some reason.

I read two pages. Blecch. Delete. Bad writing shows up that fast. A book has to  hook me in a page or it’s off my Kindle.

Writing fiction is not the same as professional or academic writing. I did LOTS of both. Here’s an example from a study I participated in with the RAND Corporation. (My previous married name was Tapella.) Here’s an amazing example of academic writing from my MS thesis in economics: 

“The determination of the cost of sprawl is based on the differing responses of service providers to increased demand for services from contiguous and noncontinuous new urbanization.”

That was an easy sentence compared to some in that thesis. If you’re going to have anyone read your stuff, it can’t sound like that. (However, that sentence and many more like it got a master’s degree that got me a job that earned me more than 90% of the population of female workers, including writers. So, go figure.)

Though I’m pleased with the way my work reads now (and so are my reviewers), it took me nineteen years to attain that proficiency. In 1995, I had the big YOWSER spiritual experience that I write about in my Author’s Notes that started me writing full time. From there, it was work, work, work. I was in one writing group run by a local poet for nine years. It petered out and I joined a group of traditionally-published professional writers led by a professor of literature for two years. (In the following article, when we discuss controlling your PTSD in writing groups, I’ll go into this more.)

After eleven years in writing groups–let that sink in: eleven years–I had a giant breakthrough and met my current editor. She is reputed to be a niece of Freya, the Norse Goddess of War, and does her edits with a golden machete. I love her. She’s tougher than the lit professor was and does not let an extra word slip by. It’s all: action, action, one word of dialogue, then climactic action. That’s the modern novel. She delivers the manuscripts she has dissected in such a kind way that I seldom sob for more than an hour after receiving an edit back. I’ve been working with her for eight years. I don’t claim to be the best writer in the world, but what I’ve become, I owe to her. I’ve internalized her voice, so that when I begin to write words like “price elasticity of demand,” my fingers refuse to type.

So, if you spend nineteen years working on your writing and learn to throw out everything but verbs, you may develop a writing style that guarantees success.

In future articles I will divulge my other secrets.

All the best! Don’t forget: put yourself first! If you feel lousy, your work will stink.

Sandy Nathan: Remember, You Come First

Sandy Nathan
Sandy’s Other Website, the Interactive One
Sandy’s Amazon Author Page
Sandy’s Facebook Page
Sandy’s Pinterest Page-I’m having fun with this!
Sandy’s Vimeo Page–even more fun. Check out the Chessadors!
Sandy on Twitter

WHERE’S MY TRIBE? THE SERIES YOU WISH YOU’D READ FIRST.

This lil’ article kicked up a fire storm for me. Here are a few topics for later posts:

• TO RESONATE WITH YOUR POTENTIAL READERS, JUST RESONATE. They’ll find you.
• FORGET FOCUS GROUPS AND BETA READERS AND MOST PARTICIPATION ON LINE. Don’t forget editors, copy editors, and proofreaders.
• DON’T BE AN IDIOT. If it seems too good to be true, it is. This is a predatory industry. Lots of people want to take your money to help you with your book. They’ll promise anything to get it.
• IF YOU HATED SENDING IT OUT, OTHER PEOPLE HATE RECEIVING IT.
• GIVE UP YOUR MESSAGE. Whatever your message is–save the planet, get everyone enlightened, treat the breweries right, kill the immigrants, or a least their parents (these are real messages I’ve seen on FB)–it is wrecking your writing. Stop it. Or write your message out it full, put it in a drawer, and write something else. If you have a real message, it will come through your words without effort or thought on your part. I have a great example here using my Earth’s End sci-fi trilogy. When I dropped my message, the writing sizzled.
• DON’T PARTICIPATE IN SOCIAL MEDIA TO “FIND YOUR TRIBE.”  Finding your tribe is a good concept: connect with people similar to you who like the same stuff. Maybe you can help each other, or, if not, have a good time. How many people are currently selling seminars, running FB groups, or trying to teach you to “find your tribe”? The tribal concept is overdone, like vampires. Time has come and gone for tribes and bloodsuckers.
• DON’T PRETEND YOU’RE INTERACTING WITH PEOPLE ON-LINE BECAUSE YOU WANT TO BE FRIENDS AND YOU CARE ABOUT THEM. YOU WANT THEM TO BUY YOUR BOOK: THE FRIENDS BUSINESS IS A PLOY. ONCE YOU’RE HONEST ABOUT THAT, THE POSSIBILITY THAT THEY MIGHT REALLY BECOME FRIENDS OPENS UP. MAYBE THEY’LL EVEN BUY SOMETHING OF YOURS. Pretending to be friends to get someone to buy your book is phoney and rude.
• HOW TO HAVE A GIGANTIC TWITTER PRESENCE EASILY. I have about 6,700 Twitter followers. A famous author found out about that and wrote to me, ecstatic. “Oh, you have such an amazing Twitter presence.” She still didn’t give a blurb for my book.
• THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT: MAKE IT BEAUTIFUL! THAT’S MY PLATFORM. BEAUTIFUL WORK, BEAUTIFULLY PRESENTED AND ILLUSTRATED. WITH BEAUTIFUL VIDEOS, COVERS, BOOKMARKS, NAPKINS AND MATCHING TOOTHPICKS. Whatever is associated with the book should be beautiful. Beauty attracts.

Are you ready to step off the edge?

Stepping off the Edge: A Roadmap for the Soul  is the new edition of my spiritual classic. Why should you be interested in Stepping off the Edge? Do you have an on-line addiction that is threatening your job, relationship, and sanity? Do you feel that you don’t know who you really are–in the big sense of  what you’re doing on the planet and in the little sense of why am I here? In Podunkwalla USA? In this skin and particular life? Have you lost something important–a spouse or kids or everything you owned? Is life a pain, or even worse, dull as sawdust? Would you like to go somewhere where you could learn something worth learning with people worth knowing?

I have just outlined what’s in my book and why it’s for you. Stepping off the Edge is a roadmap for navigating the hardest, most important journey you’ll ever make: your life. I wrote Stepping because I wanted to share what I did that facilitated my life working out. The book is a memoir, a very personal series of stories and vignettes that illustrate spiritual principles. It’s not a text book, though it does contain theoretical material. It’s not a how to book, but it does contain exercises you can use to apply concepts. Above all, it’s not a 1, 2, 3 guide to how to be spiritual. I don’t sit you down and teach you how to meditate or pray. (Some things, a person has to figure out for herself.)

My life has worked out and that’s my primary credential in writing this book. I’m sixty eight years old and an happy! That may be the most important thing. I’m happy, content, and in love with my husband of forty years. I love my work–writing for you–and live a beautiful California horse ranch surrounded by animals and people I love.

These are the gates to the estate on which my family lived. We didn't own the whole thing, it had been subdivided years before. We had an acre of paradise.

My life wasn’t always like that. When I was eighteen, my father was brutally slain by a drunk driver. At that time, I had a charmed existence. My parents owned the tenth largest residential construction company in the USA. We lived in what is now the third most affluent town in the country. I showed horses and water skied on weekends.

Within months of my father’s death, I lived in a tiny apartment at below poverty income. I won’t talk about how that happened, but it did. My brain still thought I was upper class, Why aren’t you doing more charity work, Sandy?

I was seriously depressed for a decade after my father’s death. I didn’t know it and it didn’t slow my down; I earned two master’s degrees and part of a PhD. I was the Santa Clara County economic analyst. Big titles, big jobs, while my soul labored to keep me moving and darkness drifted just out of sight.

Darkness nipped at me

A huge breakthrough occurred when I attended one of the giant enlightenment seminars during the 1970s. One of the participants wore a blanket around her hunch shoulders. She shuddered and cried the entire weekend, a living plea for help. The seminar leader gave it to her, stripping her to her truth. He showed her and everyone else that she was identified with physical illness and in love with the attention she got as a sick person. He also helped her expose what her sick act had cost her: a husband had walked out on her; she’d lost her kids. She got it, at least then.

Some people really have sickness down. They may be "sick" all their lives, oh, eighty five years or so.

Someone in my life was like that. I had assumed that her “sick act” was as immutable as the fabric of the universe. A Mount Rushmore of the soul. I was also forbidden to feel/express any resentment or be anything but kind and empathetic. The seminar leader showed me that the woman’s behavior was an act, an unconscious but very powerful role that had taken over her life.  As an act and not the real her, it could be changed. I saw. Even if that person who was impacting me so much couldn’t change, I could. 

How did I get from that moment to now? It’s all in Stepping off the Edge Took thirty-nine years. I did everything from getting an MA in Marriage, Family and Child Counseling to spending thirty years with a meditation school based in India, to coaching negotiations at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford, to working on myself every way I could.  Stepping contains the fruit of my spiritual pilgrimage.

I’m pulling out the stops in getting the word out about Stepping. You can buy it as a paperback and as an eBook very soon. I’m puttin’ the message out in other ways, via Facebook albums and Pinterest boards and who knows what else I’ll think of. These new social media offer terrific ways of sharing content and giving readers a very clear look at what a book is about. Like this:

Bliss accompanies spirit. If you're thinking about studying with someone don't feel blissful around him or her, you're in the wrong place.

My intent is to get  your attention. What Stepping is about is very important: you and who you really are. Want another teaching aide? Check this out. I’m having a bunch of these “Maxim Cards” made up on key points from Stepping. The three presented here deal with the basic issue: What is spirituality? What is spiritual? I’ve got cards made up in nine other areas, ranging from What is your true identity? To How to establish a personal spiritual practice? All the way to Spiritual traps and dealing with evil.

I like things presented so everyone can understand them. Take a living person. Then look at a dead one. The difference is spirit. No spirit, no life.

One of the things about being an older person is you know you don’t have forever to do whatever you came to this earth to do. That’s one reason I’m putting the new version of Stepping off the Edge. It’s behind my push to get these materials to you. They’re beautiful, impactful teaching aides giving you jewels of spiritual exploration. What do they cost? Nothing, at the moment. I am discussing selling them with a retailer. So, download while you can. Contemplate and apply always.

How to you fully experience your spiritual nature? Contemplation–attention fixed on an object–is a very good start.

Want more than pictures? How about music, color and movement? A video! Let this run through once to buffer. It’s HD so you can watch it full screen. Enjoy!

Here’s where you find these Maxims from Stepping off the Edge: A Roadmap for the Soul:

Sandy Nathan/Vilasa Press on Facebook, my professional page:   My albums from Vilasa Press. All the Maxims are in there. Please “Like” my page!

Sandy Nathan/Author on Facebook, my personal page:   My albums. Lots of them. You can look through the ones on Stepping and all the rest. If we aren’t FB friends, send me a Friend request and I’ll Friend you.

My Pinterest boards are here. The Maxims have boards of their own and you’ll find lots of other interesting stuff. Feel free to borrow and repin.

All the best,   [I'm not quite sure what the Facebook badge below does. May take you somewhere where you can get to the Maxims faster. Below the badge is some info about Stepping off the Edge. What it's won in contests and so on.]

Sandy Nathan

Promote Your Page Too

The text of the second edition of Stepping isn’t much different that the first edition. I didn’t change the book very much for a bunch of reasons. Reading it again told me that nothing has changed; in fact, spiritual life has gotten much worse for many people in the last. More on-line addiction, more seeking and striving and killing one’s dear self to attain success as a commercial writer, more of everything I talked about back in 2007 when the first Stepping came out. What’s to change?

Also, not many people read or even heard of Stepping off the Edge, even though it won the most prestigious awards of my multi-award winning books. When the first Stepping was pubished, it won:

• 2007 Benjamin Franklin Award Finalist in New Age (Spirituality/Metaphysics)
• Bronze Medal Winner in Self Help, 2007 IPPY (Independent Press) Awards
• National Indie Excellence Awards 2007: Finalist in THREE Categories: Autobiography/Memoir, New Age Non-Fiction & Spirituality.
• Best Books of 2007, USA Book News, Finalist in Autobiography/Memoir

The Benjamin Franklin Awards and IPPY Awards are probably the most prestigious, largest, and oldest contests for independently produced books. This was my first book and I didn’t realize what a big deal those wins were. Now I do.

For more about the original Stepping off the Edge, check out my website.

Leroy Watches Jr. & the Badass Bull - An Award-winning Contemporary Western

Leroy Watches, Jr., the hero of Leroy Watches Jr. & the Badass Bull, is getting to be known and loved.  He’s receiving fan mail. People mention him in emails. “He’s my favorite of all your characters,” someone said. “I’m in love with him,” someone else said. “What’s it like to be surrounded by gorgeous men?” [That referring to Wesley of Mogollon  and Leroy.]

Why shouldn’t they say stuff like that? I’m in love with Leroy, too. What’s not to love? Leroy Watches Jr., you got to know him as the polite, incredibly tall (6′ 8 1/2″) hunk with supernatural powers and great rodeo skills. He’s Grandfather’s (the shaman of Mogollon and Numenon) only blood relation. He is an enrolled member of Grandfather’s Nation, thus Native, African and European American all at once.

In Leroy Watches Jr. & the Badass Bull, Leroy emerges from a warm, loving, and full life that stunted him in many ways. He was raised on his Nation’s reservation in New Mexico, the site of the giant spiritual retreat/riot in Mogollon: A Tale of Mysticism & Mayhem. More recently, he lived on his father’s cattle ranch near Yosemite, CA. Not much call for sophistication in either place. Or formal table manners, knowledge of etiquette, or anything but shamanic practices and herding cows.

In my upcoming Christmas book, In Love by Christmas, the unfortunate man finds himself dropped into high society, not just high–royal–society, in the UK and other (undisclosed) places. Poor thing. That’s what happens when you’re a figment of my imagination.

I have been researching things like correct deportment [behavior], use of silverware, and how to address nobility and royalty. Along with foxhunting rules and how to play polo. It’s been a hoot.

I have a secret: I once knew all that stuff, and not so I could write a character in a book. I was once a princess, as I spell out in my new, truthful bio on my Amazon page. Yep. I was raised in one of the hallowed neighborhoods of the San Francisco Peninsula. As a matter of fact, it was right here. My parents had been very poor during the Great Depression. They made up for it by being very successful. When I write about  Will Duane, the richest man in the world in my Bloodsong Series, his cronies, buddies, and neighbors, I know what I’m talking about.

My dad could have been the prototype corporate founder/CEO/captain of industry. I spent the best hours of my childhood/teen years riding my horse in Woodside, where the CEOs of almost every Silicon Valley corporation now live. I lived in Woodside for fourteen years, and in Atherton for more than that. I also hung out in Palo Alto. That’s where Steve Jobs lived, the garage where Hewlett and Packard “founded Silicon Valley” is, the fictitious Numenon International Headquarters is sited, and my husband and I resided for seven years.

These are the gates to the estate on which my family lived. We didn't own the whole thing, it had been subdivided years before. We had an acre of paradise. Lindenwood was formerly the Flood estate, the Floods being leaders from the robber baron era of Atherton.

Living in such neighborhoods is not all formal teas and basking by the pool. No. Rules exist. If you don’t know them, they will. The people you’re trying to get to accept you know the rules. So do their servants, their dogs, and most of the large shrubs in their gardens. Everyone indigenous to the area will know the difference between a pickle fork and a butter knife. Everyone will know that a man must wear a cummerbund with his tuxedo, that a woman who shows her bare legs under a skirt has no taste. Even worse, a woman who wears a tank top with her bra straps showing is worse than than a trollop. She’s nothing. outside the pale of civilization.

Hundreds of such rules exist, and if you came up in Atherton when I did, you had to know them if you were going to be taken seriously. Everyone I knew had had years and years of dancing lessons, cotillions, blah-dy-blahs, to prepare us to be debutantes or their escorts. Making one’s debut in society was cracked up as the highlight of a girl’s existence. Coming out in San Francisco was much more elevated than being a Peninsula deb, but, hey, who can be choosy?

Was I a debutant? No. My father was a liberal Democrat. No way he’d let me practice expensive, upper-class puberty rites. Besides, the only “coming out” ball that really mattered in the United States was in New York. What my friends were so excited about was the the minor leagues.

Several friends were debutants; I was invited to partake of the introductory festivities, formal teas, and such, that their parents sprang for in preparation of the Big Whammy Ball. Ask me about the time I was at a deb party on a yacht at the San Francsico yacht club and got locked into the ladies room. [Known as the "head" in some circles.] It was a potentially socially ruinous experience where the warped wood of the door stuck in the jam. I could not get it open. The only way I could escape was to raise my voice. [Known as "yelling" in some circles.] That would have been worse than spending the rest of my life locked in the head. That prospect gave me super powers and I yanked that door open like one of the X-men, escaping into the festivities beyond. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were also involved with this, as party guests.

With the influx of tech money, almost all standards of decency have disappeared. Everywhere. I cringe every time I see a woman with a spaghetti-strapped top with her bra straps blatantly showing. This is wrong.

Leroy Watches Jr., a man any of us could love, and would, if he was real.

I may sling the jive here, but if I walked into a mansion occupied by truly upper class people anywhere on the planet, I would toss off my carefully affected casual demeanor, tuck in my bra straps, and behave like Leroy is going to have to. Or will he? And why?

Will we lose our primitive, incredibly attractive Leroy, the one all of us wish our daughters would marry? Or that we’d like to marry ourselves? Will he change when exposed to an unrelenting barrage of proper English and cummerbunds?

 * * *

That’s why I’m researching polo and foxhunting. Some authors torture their characters with chains and hot tongs. I prefer formal teas and golf.

Searching on-line, I’ve found a series of true gems my search for deportment and proper dress.  Wonderful sources of information for the upwardly mobile, or for all those Silicon Valley geeks who are rolling in money but not culture. Or, for those who worry about suddenly finding themselves in Downton Abbey, knowing that they couldn’t qualify for the lowest housemaid position.

Here is a series of articles which will solve your problems, especially if the issues above concern you:

William Hanson, etiquette consultant, broadcaster, and social commentator, has written about the etiquette faux pas in the various episodes of Downton Abbey. I know you don’t think any exist, but they do. Mr. Hanson, I am not poking fun at your work. Readers, you may think this is unnecessary. But what if that bit of software you’re working on hits it big and you get to move to the neighborhood of your dreams?  What then? There still are people who know about white and black tie and why cummerbunds matter. They know all about what Mr. Hanson discusses and they live in the neighborhoods you aspire to invade. It’s true. So suck in those bra straps and listen up:

While you're learning about etiquette though Downton Abbey, I'll add a bit in the sidebar. Leroy Watches Jr. & the Badass Bull was a finalist in the 2014 National Indie Excellence Awards in the Western Category. I'd call it a visionary western, replete with rodeo and shamans.

Dounton Etiquette Explained – Series 3 Episode 1

Downton Etiquette Explained – Series 3 Episode 2

Downton Etiquette Explained – Series 3 Episode 3

Downton Etiquette Explained – Series 3 Episode 4

Downton Etiquette Explained – Series 3 Episode 5

Downton Etiquete Explained – Series 3 Episode 6  Tons of great info throughout, but Hanson’s commentary here is stellar, as he explains proper white tie dress. I must raise a nit. In the Chicago Manual of Style, the novelist’s bible, the very few words are upper-cased. I would rather see white tie than White Tie. But my editor may say something else.

Downton Etiquette Explained – Series 3 Episode 7

Downton Etiquette Explained – Series 3 Episode 8
 

You can find the most wonderful things by Googling. A while ago, I found Rick Mora, Native American actor, model, and activist by Googling “beautiful Native American man.” Half the image results that came up were of Rick. I shot off the famous email that started everything, and now, he’s not only on the cover of my new book, Mogollon: A Tale of Mysticism & Mayhem, I think we’re Facebook Friends. Are we Rick?

So, I found William Hanson by Googling some etiquette-related topic.  And I found the marvelous Black Tie Guide | A Gentleman’s Guide to Formal Wear, where you can get straightened out on the difference between proper black tie and white tie apparel. Alas, the author was critical of President Obama’s formal dress. I make it a point not to criticize heads of state, especially those who control drones.

Leroy Watches Jr. Will we lose our Leroy? Will he turn into this?

Which brings us to the point of all this: you can rise as high as you can, be as smart as you want, and be the first of your race of sex to achieve the ultimate, but if you don’t get your cummerbund right, someone will take pot shots at you.

I point this out time and again in my writing, and I do it in large print in In Love by Christmas. Will Leroy change from the informal, manly guy we know to something like the fellow to the left?

Suave, sophisticated, properly dressed?

Lord, help us.

My, I’ve gone on. I should sell this post as a Kindle short!

Sandy Nathan
Sandy’s Website
Sandy’s Interactive Website
Sandy’s Facebook Page

Stepping Off the Edge

Last Tuesday, Native American model and actor Rick Mora and Rev. May Leilani Schmidt were on Leilani’s radio show, Universal Spiritual Connection. I called in and chatted for a minute. We discussed spirituality and other topics. Out of that, Leilani scheduled her shown on Tuesday, June 24th 2014, as a three way discussion between Rick, herself and me, Sandy Nathan.

We’re going to talk about spirituality and our personal backgrounds: how did our lives influence the way we are? How did experience shape us? [June 24th is a highly auspicious day: my dad's birthday and that of my meditation master. What magic will play?]

I thought, We’ll be talking about spirituality. I wonder if people would be interested in my book  Stepping off the Edge: Learning & Living Spiritual Practice? That’s really about spirituality. Stepping was published in 2006. For my first book, I wanted to write something significant. Something that really mattered. I wanted to help people. I also wanted to tell my story.

And thus, Stepping off the Edge was born. It’s the first and only book in the memoir/self-help/New Age/spiritual/religious/applied psychology genre. It’s good, too. The darn thing won six national awards out of the starting gate.

Rendered me speechless, which is hard to do.

Benjamin Franklin Award Finalist - I've got bunch more stickers like this. I'll spare you a show and tell.

• 2007 Benjamin Franklin Award Finalist in New Age (Spirituality/Metaphysics) The Benjamin Franklin Award is one of the largest and most prestigious awards for independent presses.
• Bronze Medal Winner in Self Help, 2007 IPPY (Independent Publisher) Awards The IPPY Award contest is the largest and oldest for indie presses.
• National Indie Excellence Awards 2007: Finalist in THREE Categories: Autobiography/Memoir, New Age Non-Fiction & Spirituality.
• Best Books of 2007, USA Book News, Finalist in Autobiography/Memoir

After its triumphant birth, Stepping off the Edge was eclipsed by my passion for writing fiction. It’s moldered on the Amazon site since, inexplicably rising to bestseller status in Applied Psychology every once in a while. I have no idea why; I’ve never promoted it.

Is now the time for Stepping to shine? I have no idea, but  two designers are working on new a cover and interior. It’s well on it’s way to a triumphant return as Stepping off the Edge: A Roadmap for the Soul. Will the new book emerge before the June 24th show? Beats me. I’m working on it.

Here’s the new Author’s Note which will go in the new book. There’s some repetition from the above, but folks most likely won’t have read this blog post:

ANOTHER NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
Sandy Nathan 5/18/2014

The original Stepping off the Edge bears a 2006 copyright. It was my first book. I thought I should start my career with something meaningful. I wanted to create a work that was  deep and significant, expressing eternal truths. I wanted readers to see who I was and remember that when they read my future works. Stepping did that and much more: the darn thing won six national awards, quite a surprise for a first time author.

The 2014 version of Stepping off the Edge is very similar to the 2006 one. The thing about eternal truths is that they’re eternal. Reviewing the manuscript showed me that while my personal issues are different today, probably more people are struggling with the material in the original Stepping than when I wrote it.

The nasty eBay addiction I studied meticulously in the first Stepping is tamed, but millions more people have discovered the joy of spending 90% of their time in front of a computer screen, grabbing at shiny trinkets. They’re/we’re like rats in some experiment, trying to reach nirvana one pellet of food at a time. Call it gaming, participating in social media, book marketing, personal branding, or plain ol’ eBay addiction, the possibilities for destroying the meaning of your life on-line have multiplied over the years. You can still apply what I say in Stepping to dig yourself out of your hole.

Same with writing. Much of the first Stepping is about my struggle to see my work in print. I go on and on about achieving my dream of becoming a famous author, making millions, and eventually dominating the world. No. Wait—that’s what they do in gaming.

Today, millions more share my literary agony. I know: they’re self-pubbing like crazy, flooding the market with books that compete with mine. No need to change the bits in the old Stepping that concerned the Author’s Path.

Stepping off the Edge is awash with Native Americans. Its design has a Native theme and chapters and chapters take place at a spiritual retreat held by this country’s First People. Bill Miller (Mohican/German), my all time favorite musician, artist, and speaker, was the spiritual leader of that retreat. He gifted me with an interview and testimonial.

Want to know why a San Francisco-born, Silicon Valley-raised woman is so obsessed with Native Americans? I’d suggest reading my bio, which is somewhere in this book. It talks about my fall from American royalty into the desperate condition of being a regular person. Recovering from that fall has formed most of my life and turned me into a writer. I wrote this book and then a few dozen other books and manuscripts from my angst.

I dubbed my first fiction series the Bloodsong Series. Why? It’s written in my blood. After I’d drafted a few thousand pages of the Bloodsong books, I had this giant Ahah!

At least half of the characters were Native Americans. Why? I lived on the San Francisco peninsula. I don’t think I’d ever seen an Indian.

I realized that I had lived the lite version of what happened to Native Americans. They had the kingdom — the entire continent — and lost it. I know how that feels. They were treated abominably for centuries, and had the worst abuse hurled at them. Then they were asked, “What’s the matter with you? Why aren’t you doing better, you lazy bums?” I know all about that, too.

One more thing: I do not sit you down in this book and teach you how to meditate, pray, or figure out what’s sacred to you and what you should do with your life. Some things you have to do for yourself. This book is a roadmap containing everything that actually helped me heal and move forward. Some of it is from my years in school, while other portions may be highly personal spiritual experiences. That’s what I offer you. You have to apply your mind and heart to what’s in this book and transform it to fit your circumstances.

Having set the stage, here’s the Author’s Note to the original Stepping of the Edge. It’s as valid now as it was on the first go round.

 * * *

I want this book to touch you and heal you. I’d like my writing to open your heart so that the love inside flows out and transforms your life. I want my words to make you laugh and cry and feel and become the person you were meant to be. I want to move so many people that the world of hopes and prayers becomes real and we live together in paradise.

Negotiation coaches tell you to set your aspirations high. That way, you’ll have a better chance of achieving them, or at least you’ll get closer than you thought you could. My goals are set out above: You can tell me if I attain them when you’ve read this book. Right now, I want to tell you about it.

At first, I wanted to write a book about a Native American spiritual retreat called the Gathering. As I wrote, I realized that what I was writing about was bigger. I was writing not just about a particular retreat or spiritual activity, but also about how we can become mature, spiritual beings.  What must we humans do to grow up?

If that is too big a question, how did I grow up? I’ve grown up over thirty years of spiritual seeking. I can tap into my inner well of bliss. I’ve got a great life. My husband and I have been together for forty years and are still in love. My family’s wonderful. And I still experience my old crud now and again, but that’s not the norm.

How did I achieve this?

By what I do and how I live. Spiritual practice made me the woman I am. So I wrote a book about spiritual practice. This is a real “show me, don’t tell me” volume, because you don’t learn spiritual practice from reading a book. A book can tell you about spiritual practice, but doesn’t give you its fruit. Trying to learn spiritual practice from a book is like trying to train a dog without having one. Spiritual practice is alive and requires a living body committed to learning. Given this, I used my favorite demonstration tools, my soul, body and life, to illustrate the road to spiritual maturity. (A few of my friends chip in their stories, as you’ll see.)

This book is a trip. I cover the bases of prayer, meditation, worship, spiritual retreat, dedication of one’s life to experiencing the divine, taming the mind … I write about many things, using stories and examples that anyone can comprehend. I hate books that are so highfaluting that the average person can’t understand them. Life is hard enough without me making it worse with intellectual pretension.

I suggest that we get going. Who knows how much time we have for our journey? None of us will come out of this earthly voyage alive: We’d better start now.

Sandy Nathan
My website
My new interactive website
My Facebook author page (Please like!)
My Amazon author page

Mogollon: A Tale of Mysticism & Mayhem (Bloodsong 2)

It’s amazing how the Universe reaches out shows you what really matters. I was getting all anxious about whether or not I’d win anything in the 2014 IPPY (Independent Publisher) Awards. I put my new book Mogollon: A Tale of Mysticism & Mayhem in maybe four categories, doing a shotgun approach and entering it in any category that it might conceivably win. I thought I’d win something. In the past, I’ve won Gold, Silver, and Bronze Medals in the IPPYs with other books. I know my stuff is pretty good, and I think Mogollon is the best I’ve written. The cover is amazing.

These concerns were swept aside when my hands began REALLY HURTING in the days before the 2014 IPPY winners were announced. Do not make the mistake of thinking that itty-bitty joints will only have itty-bitty pain. They can have REALLY BIG PAIN.

I have been blissfully abusing my shoulders, arms and hands for almost twenty years, since I began writing full time in 1995. I wrote in eight-hour marathons, producing torrents of words, book upon book, with no physical problems.  Yes, my shoulders would occasionally refuse to move after a writing session, but nothing prepared me for the full scale physical rebellion that occurred as the 2014 IPPY Award contest approached its close.

When your hands REALLY HURT and you’re wondering how you’re going to produce the ten or so books you’ve got as drafts on your hard drive, or if you’re going to be able to keep doing what you love most in life, how you did in a friggin’ contest pales to insignificance.

* * *

A realization threaded through the tenderness of my painful pinkies: if I pulled a big zero, so did approximately 4,900 other entrants! We are the majority! Even though my focus at the moment is on my digital woes, I realized that many of those 4,900 people might like  a pick me up about the whole thing.  Fortunately, I have an article about losing in contests prepared and ready for you. [I've lost before! ]

If you feel badly about spending a bunch of money and getting nothing back but heartburn, read and enjoy:

While winning is fun, you can learn a lot from losing. Maybe even more than from winning. The last time I lost big in the IPPYs, I wrote a lengthy true story about what I’d learned from losing in horse shows. I’m linking it here and above.  I’m gonna do a short recap below. I think I’ve got about ten minutes more typing in me for the day. (No, my hands haven’t stopped hurting.)

* * *

What you can win from losing: I’ve ridden horses most of my life. My family operated a  ranch where we bred, birthed, raised, trained and showed horses for twenty years. We still have five, even though we’re in retirement mode.

To show horses and win, you have to be a killer.  Getting a horse trained and in shape for showing, getting yourself in the same shape, learning to ride well enough to perform in the show ring, and handling everything that goes on at a show [your nerves and the horse's] is a HUGE job. Huge. You have to really want to win to master all that. You need to develop “one-pointed consciousness” like meditation masters and martial artists. A horse show championship is the black belt of riding.

The Monterrey Trails Classic Peruvian Paso Horse Show was one of the most prestigious shows in the Peruvian Paso breed. One balmy day, I found myself in the arena mounted on Vistoso, one of the best horses we’d bred in twenty years. A gorgeous bright chestnut (think the brightest red Revlon hair color ), Vistoso was an amazing horse. Beautiful head carriage, collection. Gait up the wazoo. Plus I had a jacket that exactly matched his coat. We were on as we cruised around the ring. That horse did not take a false step the entire class.

AZTECA DE ORO BSN & I AT MONTEREY This isn't me on Vistoso, this is me on his full brother, Azteca. Don't have a pic of Vistoso.

I figured we had it made in the shade. The class was ours.

The announcer began calling out the winners. The way Peruvian shows go, everyone who didn’t win is dismissed first, then the awards are announced lowest place to highest: fifth, fourth, third. Second.

For some reason, they called my number. I got second. What!? Impossible. We were perfect. More than perfect. Way better than the winner. She was a petite woman I knew from hanging out at shows. Her horse was a small liver chestnut. Liver? Yes.

She won. I got royally pi**ed. And stayed that way.

Later that evening, the dinner dance that the show hosted was rockin’. Food, drink, everything. And everyone. Threading my way through the crowds, I ran smack into the judge. She beamed at me and said, “Boy, you really rode that horse this afternoon.”

I’m not a  wimp. I’m a liberated woman. I’ve taught assertiveness trainings. I fired back, “If you thought I rode so well, why didn’t you give me first instead of second?” My eyes were not shooting daggers, they were machetes.

She rocked back and said without pause, “This is a really good show. A second here is the same as a championship somewhere else.”

I left, glad I’d asserted myself. I felt righteous.

* * *

Fast forward to the end of the show season. I was at Griffith Park in Los Angeles, the mega-horse park where our National Championships were held that year. That competition was too tough for me; I didn’t make the first cuts in my classes. With nothing else to do, I watched the show from the stadium. My back went up when that woman, the one  who stole the class from me in Monterrey, rode in on that rotten little liver horse.

I leaned forward, a growl turning over in my throat. She was a petite, slender woman with rich brown hair. Her spine was erect, perfectly balanced as she sat the horse. She held her hands low, almost touching the front of the saddle. Her equitation was plu-perfect.

Her horse, the grubby little thing I’d dismissed, wasn’t so grubby when I looked at him carefully. Liver chestnut is actually a rich medium brown, very correct and conservative. The horse was small and fine, elegant, like its rider. They were a brilliant match of type and style. The animal moved along, relaxed, but alert, and precisely gaited.

Riding is one sport where the better you are, the less you do. You can see dressage riders in the Olympics whose horses are doing unbelievable things, but you can’t see the rider doing anything. The pair before me were like that. Exquisite. There’s good riding, and then excellent riding. This was riding touched by angels.

My mouth fell open. My hands went cold. I didn’t win that class in Monterrey because I wasn’t good enough. I couldn’t see my competition because I was busy riding my own horse. Seeing that woman in that arena told me that she and that little gelding were world class. (In fact, they would win the National Champion of Champions Performance Gelding title later in the show.)

I remembered what I had said to that judge. My cheeks flamed.  I had been so rude to that nice woman. I am still embarrassed about what I said.

* * *

So there it is: I didn’t win because I didn’t deserve to. I didn’t know I wasn’t the best because I was busy riding my own horse and couldn’t see the others.

Addressing my fellow 4,900 “losers”, am I saying that our books didn’t win in the IPPYs because they weren’t good enough? Well . . .

Let’s take a look at that. When you enter your book in a contest, it’s like entering the arena on Vistoso that day in Monterrey. You can’t see the competition. You don’t know how good the other entrants’ books were. And you’ll never know. Remember me mouthing off to that judge when you feel like screaming over your placement. Don’t do something similar and embarrass yourself.

Let’s look at book contests. You’ve zeroed out at the IPPYs this year. What should you do? Here are some options:

1. Never enter a book contest again. This is a pretty good option. Book contests are expensive. Aside from the cost of editing, proofreading, having my book designed and printed, along with the nineteen (yes, nineteen) years of my life I spent writing my book, Mogollon: A Tale of Mysticism & Mayhem, I forked out perhaps $300 for the categories I entered.

Here’s a big question: do indie authors need awards from book contests to sell their books? Let’s look at some of the most successful authors––indie or traditional––of our time. Take John Locke, the first indie published author to sell one million ebooks. What did that get him? A lot of money and a contract with Simon & Schuster, one that he designed that meets his needs.  And then we’ve got Amanda Hocking, who parlayed her young adult series into millions of book sales and dollars, and a contract with St. Martin’s Press. Darcie Chan, who published her book as an eBook after being rejected my the major publishers. She’s probably getting close to a million eBook sales by now and is a NYT Bestselling author, not to mention having a lot more loose change. What list of successful indies could leave out JA Konrath, the father of the “you can do better publishing it yourself” movement.

Did any of these people use awards from book contests for independent presses as their springboards to success? No. Did any of them enter such contests? Not that I know of. (I don’t think they do blog tours, either.)

From these success stories, it looks like not entering book contests may increase your chances of success. Figuring out how to effectively sell your book is way to go.

2. Say you want to win prizes and enter more contests. What then? I’m like that. A compulsive competitor. I like to say, “Hi, I’m Sandy Nathan, award-winning author. I’ve won . . .” I like stickers and medals and certificates. I like to increase the number of wins I’ve got and post the new totals all over. Look at my website, for Pete’s sake. If that isn’t ever conspicuous flashing of glitz I don’t know what is.

You’re like me, you didn’t win the IPPYs this year, but you want to try again. Read the linked article and do what it says. This is my famous “What I do to win book contests” article. Do all that and enter your new book next year. [Caveat: you don't need to include press kits anymore, so putting together a winning entry isn't as awful.]

Or–change contests. The IPPYs are a huge, prestigious contest, like the National Championships I described above. Are you up to that competition? If you don’t think you you can make it in the rarefied atmosphere of the IPPYs, pick a different contest. My article on how to win book contests has links to some very nice smaller contests. Maybe one is just perfect for your book.

3. If my recitation of what you actually get out of book contests tells you there’s no sense at all in entering, try picking a contest with really good prizes. Good prizes are a reason to compete even if you see no reason to enter anything after my little pep talk above.  The National Indie Excellence Contest has killer prizes for the top books in the competition. Check ‘em out on their web site. They have regular winner and finalist prizes for the various categories, but the overall winners get stuff like thousands of dollars of services from top publicists.

The Angel & the Brown-eyed Boy (Earth’s End 1) This is The Angel's original cover, which won the Gold.

4. What does winning  mean?

A winner! In 2011, I was thrilled and delighted when my book The Angel & the Brown-eyed Boy won the Gold Medal in Visionary Fiction at the 2011 IPPYs. I’d won in previous IPPYs, but never a Gold.

The Angel & the Brown-eyed Boy is the first book of the Earth’s End series. The series is a fantasy/sci-fi/visionary fiction tale about people pushed to the literal ends of the earth. In The Angel, nuclear holocaust looms as the characters work to mend their past “business” and figure out how to survive the destruction of the planet.

The Angel is a good book. It’s an important book treating the possibility of nuclear weapons destroying our world, as well as what can come from an economic disaster which is not successfully resolved. It’s beautifully produced and has a killer cover. I like this book very much.

Lady Grace & the War for a New World

A loser! Lady Grace & the War for a New World is the second book in the Earth’s End series. I entered it in the 2012 IPPY Awards. Lady Grace sets out what happens to a small group of survivors of the nuclear war as they begin to create a new world. Every book professional who has touched Lady Grace has told me that it’s not just better than The Angel, it’s way better.

“Your pacing, the plotting, the characters––all are terrific. This is the best writing you’ve done.” That was my editor, who is one tough cookie. Others have said the same sort of thing: I’ve hit my stride with Lady Grace. I knew it, too.

A woman who told me she’d hated everything I’ve written called me babbling in rapture after reading Lady Grace “It’s fantastic, Sandy. It’s the best book I’ve ever read. How did you do that? Where did you come up with all that?” And more, she went on and on. I loved it.

However,  Lady Grace’s original cover sucked. It was a case of me directing my designer too much and in the wrong direction. We changed the cover and title. Voila! A repackaged book that’s way better that the Winner! But it’s still a Loser!

Mogollon: A Tale of Mysticism & Mayhem (Bloodsong 2)

Another loser! Mogollon: A Tale of Mysticism & Mayhem is the best book I’ve written, in my opinion.  My little band of fans also says it’s the best book I’ve written. It’s got a killer cover with Rick Mora, a famous Native American actor, model, and philanthropist on the front.

So what about judging? I’m not doing the snotty thing that I did to that poor judge in Monterey.  I don’t know what the competition was in 2012 or 2014, or what the competition was in 2011 when The Angel won the Gold.

It’s just really weird to me that a lesser book should win the competition and a superior ones not even place. Did the judges read it? Maybe totally different judges were working in 2012, and they had different preferences. A lot of things could have happened, and some of them must have.

What does the judging mean? What do you win when you win? Are the winners really the best books? What does an award mean?

The more I think on these things, the more I tend to agree with my husband. Maybe twenty-four awards is enough.

So, to the 4,900 friends and fellow campers who did nothing in the  2o14 IPPYs, we’ve finished our romp through Book Contest Land. I don’t know if I made you feel any better after your non-award, but maybe I made  you more thoughtful.

Sandy Nathan
My New, Interactive Website