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Tomorrow is my birthday. Click here to find out where you can send PRESENTS to! Ahem! Anyway.... I usually make a card for my twin brother. The cards are always my "Stacy and Tracy" characters which will star in their own MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR comic strip coming soon to a newspaper near you .... ahem! Again, anyway.... Happy Birthday, Tracy!

I meant to post the results of the drawing last night, but better late than never. I've drawn the names of the winners of the free books using the scientific process of asking my cubicle mate to pick a number for Sandi's novel and using the random number generated in the case of Gil's.

Can Miss Kate Wheeler (the Aussie in London) and Elsandra please email (bookseller dot chick at gmail dot com) your addresses to get your free books?

Kate, you've earned a copy of A Piece of Normal seen here in this oh-so (not) artistic shot:



And Elsandra, here's your book hanging with a chalk outline:



I've got some books to giveaway in the future, so thanks for letting me know that y'all are interested.

Remember when I interviewed Gil and Sandi and said I had books of theirs to give away to people who commented (specifically one of those people chosen at random)? Well, perhaps it was a mistake of me to ask you to comment on interviews are that are, for the most part, already over and done with. Instead let me offer you a new forum. If you're interested in receiving a copy of Sandi or Gil's book, just comment below (or email me via the handy email address in the sidebar) specifying which one (or both despite the fact they are two very different books) and I'll add you to the drawing. I need to know if y'all are interested in this type of book giveaway so I should judge how (and if) I ask for books in the future.

So, just a reminder on the two very different books up for grabs, you have a choice of:

Aftermath, Inc: Cleaning Up After CSI Goes Home by Gil Reavill:

A crime writer who thought he could handle anything confronts the worst of everything. Violent and unattended deaths...suicide...forensics...viral pathology...crime scene myths...The stories behind Aftermath, Inc. are stranger than fiction, and utterly human and compelling.

Like most people, true-crime writer Gil Reavill had never actually experienced a fresh crime scene. That is, until he met Tim Reifsteck and Chris Wilson, owners of Aftermath, Inc., a company in the new field of "bioremediation." In the mid-80s, when a sea change occurred in the way biohazard clean-up was handled, no one in traditional cleaning or janitorial services would come within ten feet of a blood-spattered crime scene. Into this void stepped lifelong friends Tim and Chris, who filled a desperate need by founding their company. For the guys of Aftermath, no crime scene is too bloody to clean.

Aftermath, Inc. traces their history, introducing their clients and employees, and the cops, coroners, and detectives they encounter in their work. Gil goes on scene and works side by side with the Aftermath technicians. He tells the stories that led up to some of Aftermath's most grisly clean-up jobs, taking us on a journey through the suburban Midwest where the company is based, home to some of the quietest, calmest, most ordinary blocks in the world, which hide much darker undercurrents beneath.

The issues that the Aftermath crew members face on a daily basis range from the mundane (What's the best way to suppress the urge to regurgitate?) to the lofty (How does being exposed to death on a daily basis alter one's personal philosophy?). Reavill approaches his task with respect and compassion, taking as his mantra a line from the Roman poet Terence-- "Nothing human is foreign to me."

At age thirty-four, Lily Brown has her life just the way she likes it. And what’s not to like? She’s got a great job as an advice columnist for the local newspaper, an adorable four-year-old son, and an ex-husband, Teddy, who still thinks she’s wonderful. She even lives in the same beach house where she grew up, with a great view of Long Island Sound and plenty of beach roses to smell.

So what if she won’t let herself date anyone until she finds a new girlfriend for Teddy, who happens to still be hung up on her? So what if she hasn’t changed a thing in her parents’ house, even twelve years after their tragic deaths? So what if it’s been ten years since she’s heard from her younger sister, Dana, who stormed out of the house in a rage when she was a teenager? Lily is fine.

But it’s funny how life has a way of upsetting even the most perfectly laid-out plans, and when one night Lily finds herself painting ghastly orange highlights into her lovely auburn hair, even she suspects that she’s been in something of a rut. And then, when her long-lost little sister shows up, bringing with her the fun and drama and hell-raising spontaneity Lily has missed, her life suddenly takes a turn for the unexpected.

To Lily’s chagrin, Dana’s energy seems to enthrall everyone, especially Teddy. As the tension between the sisters escalates, Dana reveals decades-old family secrets that she’s been burdened with all these years, and Dear Lily must heed her own advice about accepting life’s messiness and chaos.

With her trademark blend of sparkling wit and characters you can’t forget, Sandi Kahn Shelton tells a compelling and universal story of two sisters who learn what they need to let go of, and what they have to hold on to as tightly as they can.

When Dorothy Thompson approached me about having Sandi Kahn Shelton on my blog, I didn't say yes right away. Not because I feared that Sandi was a horrible writer (she most definitely is not), but because I try to host people on this blog that I would legitimately read (or be interested in reading) even if I don't get a chance to read over their book before I give it away. So armed with a name and the power of Google, I did a bit of research on Ms. Shelton, and discovered a woman with the power to look at the trials and tribulations that families cause with the humor necessary to make it through those moments.

Dodie Smith once called families "the dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hears, ever quite wish to." They are our burdens and our loves, the sources of our deepest pain and our greatest amusement. In her books, Shelton acknowledges these lows and highs with humor and poignancy, making limoncellos out of life's lemons and offering up a perfect cool read on a hot day.

It's a pleasure to have Sandi join us today to talk about writing, families and books we love.

Bookseller Chick: Thanks for joining me, Sandi. Both A Piece of Normal and your first novel, What Comes After Crazy, revolved around families. How does Lily's relationship with Dana differ from Maz's relationship with Madame Lucille?

Sandi Shelton: Oooh, that’s such a good question. Nobody’s ever asked me that before, and it’s fun to think about. First I’d like to say that I love to write about families, because I think that’s where the real power that shapes us lies…and where we learn the essential truth that we can both love people and want to kill them at the same time.

In A Piece of Normal, Lily is the “got-it-all-together” sister whose life is sooo comfortable and sweet—she’s an advice columnist who tells everybody else how to live, and in fact, is still best friends with her ex-husband. (She won’t find a new lover until she finds somebody for Teddy, too!) When her little sister, the flaky punk-rocker Dana, blows into town after a ten-year tiff, Lily realizes that maybe there are just a few tiny little details about life she didn’t always have a handle on: like—hello? How did she miss the Huge Family Secret that was always right under her nose? The relationship between the two sisters goes from bad to awful—but in that way of families, they have to learn what’s worth saving and what can be walked away from.

Maz’s situation—oh, boy! She’s an only child raised by an itinerant, many-times-married fortune-teller, and somehow in her travels to carnivals with her mom, she learned how to make a decent gin and tonic and how to tell which of her mom’s many husbands was likely to stick around, but she didn’t get the essential skills of life, like how to make a home. When her own marriage falls apart, leaving her with two little girls to raise—and Madame Lucille comes back to town with her latest husband, Maz’s job isn’t to figure out how to continue being in her mother’s shadow, it’s to figure out how to stand her own ground and not let the past overwhelm her.

B.S. Chick: Speaking of family, how do you handle the responsibilities that come from being a mom and a full time writer?

Sandi: Well…it took me SEVENTEEN YEARS to write the first novel, if that’s any indication of that little balancing act! No, seriously—writing a novel was what I got to do when all the other things were done: the costumes sewed, the dioramas set up, and all the carpools carpooled. I was working—still am actually—as a feature reporter and columnist, doing magazine articles, as well as writing three humorous non-fiction books about parenting, but my real dream was to write this novel! I simply could not put it aside and forget about it, and—hey, I just realized that it finally got finished when my last child got her own driver’s license! My advice to Mom Writers everywhere: get driver’s licenses for your kids!

B.S. Chick: You've written for a number of magazines during your writing career. Is Lily's job as an advice columnist based anything you've written/done previously?

Sandi: Actually, no. That question makes me smile, because I first realized Lily was an advice columnist when she came to me as a character who was soooo smug about her life. I mean, this woman really knows the secrets of life—she even tells other people how to live. I thought it would be fun to write about somebody whose own life is kind of falling apart around the edges, meanwhile she’s telling everybody else what to do…and I figured her advice column would change to reflect her greater awareness of her own foibles.

My magazine writing wasn’t ever advice-driven; it was mainly humorous essays about parenting, which later became books in some kind of magical way. The “advice” in my books and magazine articles (if it could be boiled down into one sterling sentence) would have to be: Muddle through as best you can, and remember that no one else knows what they’re doing either.

B.S. Chick: On your website you have a feature set up for book groups to contact you about answering questions via email or setting up 30-minute conference calls, is this a new feature? Do you have any interesting stories about readers using either of these services?

Sandi: Oh, this has been very fun! Mainly this has been through phone calls. Book groups contact me, let me know when they are meeting, and then I call them at the appointed hour. We chat about the book, I answer their questions, and I’ve loved doing it. People ask such insightful questions. Sometimes we laugh, sometimes we get all analytical about human nature and writing—it’s such a great way to connect with readers.

B.S. Chick: Your books, both fiction and nonfiction, seem to contain a humorous tone. Do you believe that a good sense of humor is necessary to get through day to day life?

Sandi: Absolutely! My first book was called You Might As Well Laugh and it’s a collection of columns I wrote for my local newspaper (for ten years), many of which appeared in Working Mother magazine’s Wits’ End column. When I started writing this column for my paper, I was a single mother of two kids working in an office in which NO ONE had any kids whatsoever. Many had never heard of children. They would come in to work after having played tennis, for heaven’s sake, or just having had great sex. I, meanwhile, wandered in after just having fought with a 3-year old about why she couldn’t drink her milk out of the soy sauce bottle! The thing was, when I started my column, I just wrote about all the tragic and annoying things going on in my house, and I swear I did not know it was a humor column until people started telling me it was funny. That’s when I realized that daily life, in all its awfulness, can only be handled by laughing about it—hopefully with other people laughing with you.

B.S. Chick: Since at one time I was a bookseller and this a bookselling blog, what books do recommend my readers check out?

Wow! That’s a hard question. I love so many writers. I love Jennifer Crusie and Anne Tyler and Alice Munro and Lolly Winston and Elinor Lipman. Recently I’ve discovered the writer, Haven Kimmel, who writes the funniest and most breathtaking memoirs about growing up in Mooreland, Indiana. (Her latest is called She Got Up Off the Couch.) For those who like essays, there’s a wonderful anthology about what parenthood does to a romance, called Blindsided by a Diaper, that has essays that will make you laugh and some that will make you almost want to cry. (Full disclosure: I have one of the essays. But I’m simply in awe of the ones in that book that are not mine.)

Thank you so much, Linsey, for letting me come on your site and answer your very thought-provoking and insightful questions!

B.S. Chick: No, Sandi, thank you. If you want to hear more about Sandi you can read her blog, or catch her at any of the following stops on her virtual tour:

May 1, 2007 - The Writer's Life
May 2, 2007 - Trashionista
May 3, 2007 - Julie Kenner's Writes and Wrongs
May 4, 2007 - Night Owl Romance
May 7, 2007 - Alison Kent's Blah Blog
May 8, 2007 - Kathy Holmes' Fiction With Attitude
May 10, 2007 - Over the Hill Chick
May 14, 2007 - Diana Holquist's Blog About Romance
May 15, 2007 - Bookseller Chick
May 21, 2007 - Alyssa Goodnight's On the Writers' Road Less Traveled
May 22, 2007 - The Book Pedler
May 24, 2007 - Susan Wiggs' The View from Here
May 25, 2007 - Fiction Scribe
May 29, 2007 - Pump Up Your Online Book Promotion

I've recently rediscovered something amazing about myself: that I can be productive when I'm trapped upright in front of a computer for eight hours a day. My "enforced" captivity has led me to do a great deal of research in the last couple of weeks as well as interview a number of authors and industry people who work with the internet. Questions, I've found, are much easier to think up and type between phone calls than actual columns and I've gotten a chance to chat with a number of interesting people.

And Dorothy Thompson is one of those interesting people.

Ms. Thompson approached me about hosting interviews with three authors she's been working with: Shel Horowitz, whom you've already read about; and Sandi Kahn Shelton, who you'll read about on May 15th when she stops by to talk about her book, A Piece of Normal. I'd done a virtual tour before as part of the Dirty Sugar Cookies blog extravaganza, but I'd just filed the whole concept away in the back of my mind. It was in between email exchanges it occurred to me that Dorothy was capitalizing on the ever expanding power of the internet for writers, and it would be interesting to find out how she got into the field of virtual tours and how she goes about setting one up.

Bookseller Chick: Thanks for joining me here today. I want to know more about your company. How did you get started in the business of helping others market their books and how long have you been doing it?

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Dorothy Thompson: Thank you for having me! I’ve been learning how to promote books over the Internet for about six or seven years now, partly because I was interested in finding out ways to use the Internet to market my books, but also because I knew that online marketing was going to be the new age of promoting. Being a small press author, I was a little frustrated with how I was supposed to get my books into book stores, using consignment and practically begging to stock me. So, I took to the Internet and, so far, I’ve found out that you can market your book right from the comfort of your home and virtual book tours is only one way of doing it.

In my ebook, A Complete Guide to Promoting & Selling Your Self-Published eBook, I show authors what I’ve found out to be the ultimate experience in online marketing and ways to get your book into top placements in the search engines. Don’t let the title fool you. This works for any kind of published author. For your marketing plan to work, it’s a combination of things you must do and virtual book tours are one of them.

I had heard about virtual book tours and wanted to try it out with my ebook, sort of as a guinea pig, and because I used the methods outlined in the ebook to promote the ebook, my virtual book tour was a success. It’s a lot of work, but it’ll pay off. The main thing you want to do before you even begin a virtual book tour is to zero in on your key search words and use them in every bit of promotional literature you send out. That’s the secret to getting your book into the first page of the search engines for your key search words. For instance, one of my set of key search words (and you should do this with as many groups of key search words as you can) was "promote your self-published ebook". Even today, it’s #1 out of 90,700 without the quotes and #1 out of 985 with the quotes. And anyone can do it.

It was then that I decided to start my own virtual book tours business and I call it Pump Up Your Book Promotion Virtual Tours after my blog, Pump Up Your Online Book Promotion because I wanted to help others do what I did so that they can sell their books, too.

B.S. Chick: I hear you (or in this case, I read you), I’m a huge fan of notes and learning from experience. So tell me, what goes in to putting together a virtual book tour?

Dorothy: The first thing I do when someone is interested in becoming a part of my tours is to send them an application which will have all their vital information so that I can get familiar with their platform and determine where I can place them. For example, there’s the basic stuff like the name of their book, etc., but what I also look for are things like do they have a print book to send to these hosts because in order to get on the high profile blogs, it’s a must. Another thing I do is ask them if there are any particular literary blogs they’d like to appear just in case one of them comes back at me and says, “Well, so-and-so appeared on such-and-such blog; why didn’t I?” There are a lot of factors involved in why some books appear on more high profile blogs and the key factor is whether they have a supply of books to send to these high profile blog hosts. However, I do try to give them the best service I can. Some of my clients have ebooks only, and that’s fine, so we start finding blogs that will take them, but concentrate on ones that are active and ones in which would give my clients some exposure.

The next thing I do is set up a tour page for them here. This is not only for them to see where their tour is taking them, but also as a guide for the blog hosts to refer to in case they want to grab the cover or the author’s picture, or just to find out more of what their books are about.

And, then we get to work.

As each contact is made, I cc the author so that the author, blog host and I stay on the same page. Some of these are interviews, some are guest blogs and some are reviews. It all depends on what the blog host wants. We’re all very flexible.

When a client signs up with me, I go beyond just the tour. I help them set up their blog so that it’s SEO-friendly, teach them about tags and get them to learn about google alerts so that they’ll see how well they are doing as their tour evolves. It’s more of a science to see what happens…we do this, then this happens. It’s fun, though. The authors are real excited and are such a pleasure to work with. I try to answer whatever questions they might have so that it’s a pleasurable experience for everyone.

B.S. Chick: Do you specialize each one to the book involved?

Dorothy: Yes, I do specialize each tour. Someone asked me that the other day. If an author writes inspirational, for example, I aim for bloggers who write the same thing. I like diversity and try not to use the same blogger in a month's time. I have four authors going out next month, and have tried not to double up on any of my bloggers, but sometimes it can't be helped. But, I do try for diversity.

B.S. Chick: You've approached me about working with a self published title and a big house title, does this represent your spread of clients?

Dorothy: Yes, I work with any author who has a published book. That's the difference between me and those other guys. I used to hate it when a high-trafficked blog would turn me down because I wasn't with a big house. I guess it's my pet peeve. It doesn't matter who you are published with. An author is an author.

B.S. Chick: Why do a virtual tour? How can this affect the success of an author's book?

Dorothy: Why do a virtual book tour? Many reasons, actually. When you do a tour in a bricks and mortar house, how many books do you sell? Let's say you've sold maybe ten. Well, that's not bad, but look at what you have to go through? There's gas, there's getting ready, there's tension. Over the Internet, you can do the same thing and the only one going through all the tension is me, lol. There's a lot involved when you have four authors going out in one month, especially since this is really the first real month that's going to test me as to whether I can do it or not. I've had blog hosts turn me down; I've had blog hosts think it's the neatest thing since Cheez Whiz.

The successes, though, are the things that really keep me going. I am so excited when I get to email an author and tell her/him that I've got them on so-and-so blog. And, the strange truth of the matter is, most of these authors wouldn't have been able to do it themselves for one reason or another. It's really strange that if you go through a third party like myself, people respond faster. But, wouldn't you? If an author emailed you, you might do it, but if a publicist emailed you, your subconscious figures that this author must be really serious if they've hired outside help, you know? And I love playing publicist. I've worn the author's shoes and I know what they feel like, so this really helps me to help other authors. I know their frustrations. I know their fears of losing a publisher if the sales aren't there. If I can make a difference, then that's all that matters to me anyway.

I do want to mention another reason for going on a virtual book tour. If you are touring bookstores, you're there maybe a couple of hours. When you do tours online, what happens is that whatever blog you are on, it doesn't matter where or with who, your tour will be archived indefinitely in the search engines as long as the blog host keeps it in their archives. This builds up your online presence which is going to work in your favor. Let's say you appear on 20 blogs for this. Well, that's 20 more links you'll have in the search engines, which raises your presence there. I've done studies on SEO and I tested it out with a couple of free ebooks that my writing group and I wrote and I managed to get the last two we did in the number one spot in the search engines in one day for our particular key search words. It's actually fun watching it happen. It doesn't happen miraculously. It takes a lot of hard work, but the end result is what is going to sell books. ;o)