I’m proud to be an active member in the Women’s Fiction Writers Association. Check out the new promotional video to grow our tribe. Yours truly is in there with one of our male members. (I’m not short; he’s just tall.) If you’re a writer of women’s fiction (any genre), published or unpublished, join us. It’s a wonderful group to lean on while you learn about the craft of writing, the dos and don’ts of marketing and have some belly laughs along the way.
I live in Austin, TX and this time each year, for the past 20 years, the Texas Book Festival has been held in downtown Austin in and around the Capitol building. It’s a fabulous event, featuring more than 300 authors, music, cooking demonstrations, lots and lots of books and throngs of book lovers. The only thing I dislike about it is that I can’t be in 3 places at once and see everyone. This year, the weather was a 10, which helped, as much of it is held outdoors. I was lucky enough to catch Margaret Atwood; actor Taye Diggs, who’s authored a children’s book, Mixed Me; literary author, Johnathan Lathem; graphic novel author and illustrator, Adrianne Tomine; author of the Lemony Snicket books, Daniel Handler, and my favorite local author, Phoebe Fox, author of the Breakup Doctor series. All smart, witty and open about their writing process and their careers. Just sad that it’s over. Will start marking off the days until next year!
It’s going to get up a downright chilly 99 degrees today in Austin, TX. The temps have plummeted from a high of 104 earlier in the week. I love hot weather, but if you’re like me, once it passes about 100, I venture outside only for necessities—like iced coffee and books. My solution for the heat—stay inside and read! Check out my What I’m Reading page along with some of my favorite reads on my website. http://www.densiewebb.com.
Hope you have a happy weekend of reading!
I’ve got some great reads on my TBR table. I just finished The Perfect Son by Barbara Claypole White. A lovely, heartwarming story of family, love, devotion and determination about a subject, Tourette’s Syndrome, which is near and dear to my heart.
I recently finished Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Maybe in Another Life. It’s a breezy read with serious undertones about how even the smallest decisions you make can have enormous ripple effects on how your life plays out. In other words, serendipity or, if you prefer, fate. Reading it feels like deja vu, since I wrote a blog post on how serendipity plays into my writing before I sat down to read her novel. Highly Recommended
Also just finished Center of Gravity by Laura McNeill. It lived up to its billing. A real page-turner. I was tense right up until The End. Antoher 5-star recommendation!
Next is is Mary Kubica’s Pretty Baby. I read her first novel, The Good Girl and adored it. I’m sure this one will hold my undivided attention as well.
What’s on your TBR table??
My kids (they’re not really kids anymore) are traveling. Not just to Seattle, San Diego or Shreveport. No they’re in Israel right now, attending a cousin’s wedding. While my son has to return for work, my daughter is off for the summer and will be wandering through Italy, Spain, Germany, France and The Netherlands. Sigh… it’s been years since I’ve been overseas and I’m itching to cross the pond. I’ll be anxious to hear their travel tales when they return, but it’s just not the same as being there and letting my writer brain soak it all in.
Sometimes, just taking the laptop into another room or dragging my butt to a coffee shop, helps kickstart my writing. But going to another country is better than downing a Red Bull, or two, or three. It’s energizing that way. Dormant neurons start firing and who knows where they will take you. That’s on my to-do list—Cross the Atlantic. For now, I’m thrilled I’ll be flying to New York in a few days to visit a friend I haven’t seen in a couple of years. Hoping that will get the creative juices flowing.
What are your creative getaway plans this summer?
“there is a difficulty in marketing something that has no physical presence.” That’s from a recent article on The Bookseller website. I’ve been mulling it over and I’m not so sure I buy that. The latest Amazon numbers would indicate the opposite—that ebooks make up a huge percentage of both dollar sales and number of books sold. One thing that’s not up for debate is the price appeal of digital, at least for books from indies and small-to-medium publishers, which typically sell for anywhere from FREE to $3.99. (“You’ll Be Thinking of Me” currently sells for $2.99.) Since Amazon stopped discounting sale prices of books from some of the big publishers (typically referred to as The Big 5) the price tag of their e-books has risen and sales seem to reflect that. In fact, in 2014, 54% of the bestselling ebooks on Amazon were from small or medium publishers like mine, indies made up 18% and only 19% were from the big publishers, like Simon & Schuster or Macmillan. When voracious readers see that a hardback book from a large publisher can cost upwards of $28 and an ebook of a lesser known publisher or author costs $2.99, guess which one many readers are willing to lay out their hard-earned money for and which one they’ll check out from the library?
That said, from an author’s standpoint, there are advantages to having a physical book that you can hold in your hand, show-off, sign; Goodreads doesn’t allow giveaways of ebooks; several book reviewers are sticking to “real books”; and you can’t go to booksellers or book festivals and show everyone the fabulous book you’ve written. Unless you want to carry around your e-reader.
And I know for a fact there still are plenty of tree-book fans who don’t have an e-reader and have no plans to buy one. I’m a huge fan of real books myself. And it’s not a generational thing. My daughter has a disdain for e-readers (even though Mom’s book is an e-book).
You’ll Be Thinking of Me will be out in paperback later this year and I’ll join the ranks of authors with “real” books, but my publisher has already warned me that physical books don’t sell well. It’s the e-books, they say, that fly off the virtual shelves. Still, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I’m looking forward to holding it my hands, showing it off, waving it at people at the mall, flashing it at those lucky passengers sitting next to me on the plane, hawking it to the receptionist at the doctor’s office and offering (begging) to leave a copy in the waiting room, tucking it under my pillow at night.
Reading is reading, you may say, but you can’t do any of those things with an e-book. And I’m looking forward to having the option of making a spectacle of myself (and my book).
So, my debut novel, “You’ll Be Thinking of Me” has been out in the world as an ebook since January. It’s been great. But it’s time to think about the next one. Now I’m working on two very different stories—very different from my debut and very different from each other. Don’t think I’m so good at juggling two novels at once, so trying to decide which one to focus on. One is a paranormal romance—no kings of the underworld and no perpetually teenage sparkling vegetarian vampires. It has a bit of a different twist (I hope). The second is a family drama about the joy and pain of motherhood—who chooses it, what motivates women to become mothers and what do you do when motherhood chooses you?
I go back and forth, depending on my mood. They each are puling me in (and spitting me out). Right now, I’m focused on the paranormal romance. But that could change. Hoping to have a rough draft of one by the end of the summer, but I know that could change as well, (and probably will).
Any opinions out there??
As soon as my ebook came out in January I started working on creating an audiobook. I went with ACX.com, an Amazon company. I have to be honest—before this, I’d never listened to an audiobook before, so when I listened to potential narrators’ voices, I wasn’t sure what I was listening for. But, after going through several auditions on the website, I discovered that just like a writer’s voice can make or break a story (and what appeals to me, might not appeal to you), the same holds true for a narrator’s voice. Within a sentence or two, I was “nope, not for me or my story.” I listened to samples from a long list of narrators (called producers) and finally found a young actress (Marissa Pistone), whose voice I found appealing and I felt like she sounded like my character. Then I recruited a friend who listens to a lot of audiobooks on a long commute to and from work. I sent her the audition and she agreed with me—I had found my “Rachael,” the MC in my story. Everything with ACX is done online. I’ve never met Marissa, never spoken to her on the phone. We communicate via emails on the website. She submitted each chapter as it was completed, I listened, and if something was mispronounced (the names of places or even difficult names—like mine!) I would send her a phonetic spellings via email and she would rerecord it and edit the existing chapter.
The verdict? I think it sounds fabulous! I found myself getting interested in my own story as if I didn’t know what was going happen next. Audiobooks are a completely different experience than reading and I think I’m a convert!
Stay tuned for the announcement to come soon that the audiobook of You’ll Be Thinking of Me, narrated by Marissa Pistone is available!
I watched “Enough Said,” with Julia Louis-Dreyfuss and the late James Gandolfini, last night for the second time. Much like love, it was even better the second time around. One of my favorite lines, is when the two of them are standing in his kitchen and he says to her “It may sound corny, but—you broke my heart. And I’m too old for that shit.” It’s not particularly original or eloquent, but it was delivered with perfect timing. It broke my heart. If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s awesome. I highly recommend it, especially If you’re a mom, have a husband or are a divorcee, or a woman in middle-age or beyond. It’ll make you think.
Okay, so I got a very nice 4/5 star rating on Goodreads for “You’ll Be Thinking of Me.” Unfortunately, the review was written in Hungarian! I turned to Google for a translation and this was the result:
“The story was completely surprised. Simple Romantic expected horrors rather small indentation, but fortunately not, “read it, then do not dare to go out in the dark bathroom” deep.”
I’m still smiling. 🙂
Densie Webb 