Yesterday I posted the first of a couple blogs on what writers call “voice” and gave three very different examples of writers voices. So what IS a writer’s voice? It’s a combination of things. Christopher Mohar, a faculty member of the University of Wisconsin’s writing program, gave a really interesting presentation at their Writers’ Institute earlier this month. Along with Josie Brown’s presentation, the one I mentioned yesterday, Mr. Mohar’s talk helped me understand more about voice.

First, as I said yesterday, voice depends a lot on whether you write in first person or third person. But I’ve covered that. So let’s move on to “style.” Some people think “voice” is synonymous with “style,” but Mohar discussed style as a matter of what language you choose to use and what kind of sentences you write. Are your sentences long and full of subordinate clauses? Or are they lean and spare? Have you ever used the word “tintinnabulation” or do you go for something more easily recognized, like “chime”?

Here’s a single sentence from the first chapter of Chang-Rae Lee’s ALOFT:
“From up here, all the trees seem ideally formed and arranged, as if fretted over by a persnickety florist god, even the ones (no doubt volunteers) clumped along the fencing of the big scrap metal lot, their spindly, leggy uprush not just a pleasing garnish to the variegated piles of old hubcaps and washing machines, but then, the a stock guy like me, mere heartbeats shy of sixty (hard to even say that) the life sings of a positively priapic yearning.”

They don’t get shorter or less complex. Now compare that to a sentence from Jane Smiley’s A THOUSAND ACRES, which won the Pulitzer:
“A mile to the east, you could see three silos that marked the northwestern corner, and if you raked your gaze from the silos to the house and barn, then back again, you would take in the immensity of the piece of land my father owned, six hundred forty acres, a whole section, paid for, no encumbrances, as flat and fertile, black, friable, and exposed as any piece of land on the face of the earth.”

These two sentences are similar in length, but their structures are very different, as is the language they employ. Voice!

Another part of an author’s voice is what Mohar calls the piece’s “personality.” It can be extreme, as in Elmore Leonard’s crazy but wonderful mysteries, or factual and ordered, as in many police procedurals. The personality of a work can be thought of as its worldview. Is it funny? Is it serious? Is it light and breezy, or dark and brooding? Think about the personality of J. K. Rowling’s books – in some parts, it’s hilarious, but in others, not so much. Or Robert B. Parker’s Spenser mysteries. They’re so spare, with so little detail about setting, that the characters sometimes seem to speak and act in a vacuum.

Okay, so now we’ve covered the work’s personality and style. More on voice on Monday….

A couple of weeks ago I attended the U of Wisconsin Writers’ Institute in Madison, and came away with a wealth of new ideas for writing. I also learned a lot about different aspects of the craft of writing, and that knowledge will inform a bunch of blog posts during April and May. This would be one of those.

I went to a talk by author Josie Brown (SECRET LIVES OF HUSBANDS AND WIVES, THE BABY PLANNER) about the writer’s voice. For me, “voice” has always been one of the most elusive things about writing, so I was eager to hear what Ms. Brown said about it. She gave us a pretty decent definition: “Voice is the manner in which you, as a writer, choose to tell your story.” Okay, but what does that mean? I guess it means that voice = style. (I’m an engineer, so cut me some slack when I want to use an equation, okay?) It’s how you choose to use words, how you put them together and how the finished product sounds in your head.

For instance, here’s the first paragraph from J. K. Rowling’s HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE:
“Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.”

Now compare that with the first paragraph of James Lee Burke’s RAIN GODS:
“On the burnt-out end of a July day in Southwest Texas, in a crossroads community whose only economic importance had depended on its relationship to a roach pate factory the EPA had shut down twenty years before, a young man driving a car without window glass stopped by an abandoned blue-and-white stucco filling station that had once sold Pure gas during the Depression and was now home to bats and clusters of tumbleweed.”

And here’s one from Barbara Kingsolver’s ANIMAL DREAMS:
“I am the sister who didn’t go to war. I can only tell you my side of the story. Hallie is the one who went south, with her pickup truck and her crop-disease books and her heart dead set on a new world.”

The first example, from Harry Potter, to me, sounds very tongue in cheek. Mr. and Mrs. Dursley will CERTAINLY be involved in strange and mysterious things! The second, from RAIN GODS, is much more serious, a description of a town on its way to the bottom. The book, a mystery, will not be a light read. And the Kingsolver book will be a much more intimate portrait of a woman than could be expected from either of the other two.

So what makes them different? First, point of view. The first two are written in third person (which allows for several characters to have input into the story), while the Kingsolver piece is in first. The view narrows considerably with first person POV, becomes more personal, more intimate, because all the reader can see is what that single point-of-view character sees; she is only privy to thoughts of that one character, can only judge the action of the novel by what is filtered through the mind of that character.

Tomorrow, more about voice and how the voices of these three writers differ…I’ll talk phrasing, dialogue, personality and style!

Now that I’ve made the decision to publish my work for e-readers, I have a lot of work ahead of me. The first thing I should do, it seems to me, is to register the copyright to my work. While it’s true that, once you create a work of fiction/nonfiction, it is yours and is immediately recognized as “copyrighted,” (the copyright in the work of authorship immediately becomes the property of the author who created the work. – www.copyright.gov), it makes sense to me to do it officially.

What the heck does that mean? It means that I register my work as mine with the U.S. government—the United States Copyright Office, to be exact. Once the work is acknowledged as mine by copyright, if anyone tries to represent the work as somebody else’s, I can sue them for infringement of my rights. (People who do NOT hold the copyright to my work may use very small portions of it under “fair use” laws, including quotations for scholarly works and short portions for reviews. But nobody can “borrow” the entire work.)

How long does a copyright last? It will last the length of my lifetime plus 70 years, which seems plenty long enough to me. And when I die, the copyright, like other pieces of personal property, will pass to my heirs through my will. I just hope the book is successful enough that they’ll care.

The process to register a copyright is pretty simple, and I’ll do it on line. All I have to do is fill out and submit the simple application form, submit the nonrefundable filing fee of $35, and send them a copy of my completed manuscript.

Then, once the registration of copyright is complete, what do I have to put in my book? As it turns out, three things:
– the c-in-a-circle symbol that denotes copyright
– the year of publication
– the name of the holder of the copyright (that would be me).

Before I begin any of this, however, I’m going to check to find out of the original publisher of UNREASONABLE RISK filed the copyright for me as part of the publishing process. There’s a searchable database on line and, after several searches, I find that in fact my publisher did NOT register the copyright. I look at a copy of the book, and the “c-in-a-circle” symbol is not there. Sigh. While it was unlikely anybody would pirate my book, I wasn’t protected. But now I will be. I’m off to file.

If you have questions about copyright, you’ll find the Copyright Office’s website reasonably easy to navigate, and there’s a wealth of information there. Check it out at www.copyright.gov.

More next week about ISBNs.

I’ve done what I could. My second book, THROUGH DARK SPACES, is finished. It’s polished to within an inch of its life. Three separate critique groups have combed through it looking for grammatical errors and plot holes, and I’ve fixed everything they found. They all liked it, too, waited eagerly for each succeeding chapter, which made me think it would definitely be sellable.

Then I sent e-queries to nearly 20 agents. Half sent replies (the others couldn’t be bothered apparently), but nobody was interested. Though several of their emails were complimentary, none of them apparently know who to market this book to. Perhaps I thought too highly of the book. I read it yet again, and it’s good. It’s set in western South Dakota and deals with the environmental consequences of mining. Hmmm. Not the sort of subject matter New York agents usually try to sell, I suppose, though the success of such writers as Craig Johnson, Margaret Coel, C. J. Box and my friend Lori Armstrong—who all write about the west—tells me that, if I work at it, my book can be just as successful.

So. No takers. What to do? Well, these days, there are alternatives that won’t kill a career. When I first started writing, back in the late ‘90s, self-publishing was the kiss of death. It conjured up visions of trudging from library to bookstore, trying to wheedle signings for books the stores wouldn’t stock, speaking to the occasional book group and selling volumes out of the trunk of my car outside shopping centers as they close for the evening. And once that path was chosen, it was curtains for any sort of career with a “real” publisher. No thanks, not for me.

Now, however, things are different. Mainstream writers are opting for self-publishing and turning down the very contracts I had sought. Well, Barry Eisler did, anyway. And after my experience with a small, print on demand (POD) publisher, it was an easy choice: not many people will buy a hardcover book at $27.99 by an author they don’t know (that would be me), at least not in this economy. And while that publisher does print paperbacks now, they print them in a very strange format—like a magazine. Not something that will catch on, I don’t believe. The best remaining alternative is for me to publish the book for e-reader, and publish it myself. There. The decision has been made.

For the next several weeks, once a week at least, here on my blog I’ll detail the process I’m following to e-publish that book. In the end, I hope it will all be worth it. I’m not hoping to make a million bucks here, just to find what all authors want: readers. The things I have to say are important to me and, I hope, will also entertain my readership. I don’t expect to become an Amanda Hocking, whose name is now synonymous with e-book mega-success, but I do expect to find, out there in cyberspace, some readers who will eagerly await my next novel, too.

So stay tuned…..

[And if you want to read an interesting conversation between Barry Eisler and Amanda Hocking, go to agent Ted Weinstein's website: http://www.twliterary.com/selfpub.html.]

Okay, for a couple of posts now I’ve been promising some information on marketing the nonfiction manuscript. Even if you don’t have an agent yet, you should be thinking about your marketing strategy. Brainstorm: what can YOU do to sell your book?

Why must you consider this question? Ted Weinstein, nonfiction agent, answered that questions succinctly: assume your publisher will do NOTHING for you. Nothing. I attended a presentation that Mr. Weinstein made at the University of Wisconsin Writers’ Institute and, although I was sobered by what he said, I recognized the truth in his presentation. It’s up to us, the writers, to make a success of our work.

So what goes into a marketing plan? I’d recommend checking out Mr. Weinstein’s website at www.twliterary.com. He lists several different types of marketing you should address in your formal marketing plan. They include:
1) Your comprehensive strategy
2) Blurbs (or, Who Do You Know?)
3) Media and Speaking Appearances
4) Serialization
5) Anything Else You Can Think Of.

There are a couple of really good books on marketing, too. Both of the ones I’ve listed here have strategies for writing a good marketing plan as well as ideas for nontraditional ways of marketing your nonfiction (and fiction) work. Check these out when you get a chance. Also please note that there are likely newer editions of these books than the ones I’ve listed:

• JUMP START YOUR BOOK SALES: A MONEY-MAKING GUIDE FOR AUTHORS, INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS AND SMALL PRESSES, Marilyn & Tom Ross, Communication Creativity: Buena Vista, Colorado, 1999.
• PUBLICIZE YOUR BOOK!, Jacqueline Deval, Perigree Books, Berkeley Publishing Group: New York, NY, 2003.

It’s intimidating to think about assuming responsibility for your book’s success. You have little or no experience (unless you graduated from college with a degree in marketing). But think of it this way: you know your subject better than anybody. You’ve dedicated a significant chunk of time to thinking about your subject, outlining it, culling the unnecessary and adding what you’d forgotten so that your chapter outline is as thorough as it can be. You’ve polished your sample chapters until they’ll blind the agent reading them. Who better than you to make the sale? You can do it. You’re the man ( or woman, so to speak)!

PS Hey, you spammers out there, stop sending porn. Pirated software I can stand, also illicit pharmaceutical sales. I don’t read steamy romance because it’s hard to get the sex right without being boring or cliched. What makes you think YOU can get it right? Most of you don’t even speak English as a first language….

It seems to me that the paradox of marketing is that the fiction writers who really don’t need marketing help—they’ve already got a huge fan base and their books are printed in runs of hundreds of thousands—are the ones who get most of the marketing dollars from the big New York publishers. Where does that leave the rest of us, the writers who struggle to get their work published by tiny publishers who have no marketing budget? The answer: it leaves us to our own devices.

When my first book, UNREASONABLE RISK, was published by ArcheBooks Publishing, they gave me a little help. They designed bookmarks and postcards for me. They intended to print a poster-sized book cover that I could use at signings, but out here in Flyover Land we don’t have a Kinkos, and I couldn’t get the ArcheBooks staff to talk to our Office Depot copy department. So. That was it. No review copies sent to anybody, either. I dutifully downloaded their suggested marketing plan for authors, and noted that they recommended I do a booksigning a week for the first six months. Hmmm. Out here in western South Dakota, it would take a radius of 600 miles to find more than a dozen bookstores. And many of them, especially those in small towns, sell predominantly paperback books—mine was a hardcover—mostly because it’s what their clientele can afford. So I sent out letters to libraries and bookstores in four states and sold some copies. I did presentations at libraries and to librarian groups, and sold some copies. I did signings at all three local bookstores and sold quite a few copies. I sent postcards to everybody I’ve ever known whose addresses I could find, and sold more copies.

Part of the problem was that my book retailed for $27.99. Now really, who’s willing to buy a book by somebody they’ve never heard of and spend $27.99? Especially a book that hasn’t been reviewed by any major publications? A book that has no blurbs on the cover? Yeah, nobody. The consequences are now that, because my first sold so poorly, I can’t find an agent to take on my second book, THROUGH DARK SPACES.

But I’ve learned a lot since then. With gas nearing $4.00 per gallon, a self-financed book tour is totally unrealistic, so if your publishers aren’t sending you around the country on their dime, you’ve got to find other ways to get the word out. Do you have the money to hire a personal publicist? I didn’t, but if you get a good one, they can be well worth what you spend. They know the ropes, know how to book you on radio shows, television and other media. They can set up and advertise signings, on line interviews and interactive Q&A sessions and much more. They can help you target an audience.

The secret, of course, is that you can do all of that yourself. It takes a ton of effort, but each time you succeed, it gets easier to sell yourself the next time. You have to put yourself out there, and that means, these days, on line. Build a website. (Mine is here.) Open a Facebook account, and that means a fan page as well as a personal page. Bite the bullet and start to tweet. Join LibraryThing and GoodReads and post on line reviews. Join webloops where readers of your kind of book hang out. I belong to DorothyL, which is an on line community of mystery and thriller readers, over 3,000 of them. I’ve sent complimentary copies to several of them, and they’ve all had good things to say about the book.

If you belong to a trade association, market to them. For instance, UNREASONABLE RISK is set in an oil refinery. If I were beginning to market it now, I’d send posters and flyers to every refinery and chemical plant in the country. You can also buy a small ad in one or two trade journals or journals that might reach some of your intended audience. They’re less expensive than you might guess.

Solicit your readers to post more reviews on amazon.com (though I got five that were all enthusiastic, it would have been better to get fifty), and ask them also to post on LibraryThing and GoodReads. Ask them to tell their friends about your book (if they haven’t already); building buzz by word of mouth is a great way to built readership.

And of course, blog. Blog your little heart out. Guest blog. Go wherever people will accept your posts. The more you’re out there, the more likely people are to recognize your name, read your post, and decide that they like the way you write. Voila! They’ll search out your books.

Yes, all of it seems like work, but if you love your book—and you must, since you took the time to write, polish, revise, polish, finalize, polish, find an agent, polish, find a publisher, revise, polish—then it will be a labor of love. I’m going to publish UNREASONABLE RISK again, this time for e-reader, and you can bet I’ll be shouting its name (and mine) wherever I can. So get with it! I’ll see you out there.

More about nonfiction marketing plans on Monday….

About ten years ago I took a guided sea kayak trip to the Apostle Islands, which cluster along the south shore of Lake Superior off the coast of Wisconsin. We paddled for several days between islands, visited a lighthouse, hiked several islands and generally had a great time. Later, at home, I decided to write about the experience. Eventually I sold the resulting travel article to both Marco Polo Magazine and Minnesota Memories.

What to do, though, when you want to write a whole book instead of just an article? At the University of Wisconsin Writers’ Institute earlier this month, I went to a presentation by nonfiction agent Ted Weinstein, entitled “Book Proposal Boot Camp.” I asked about a full-length travel memoir and got the bad news: If your book is a story about your trip rather than a travel guide that lists sights, restaurants and hotels—you know the type—you must finish the entire manuscript before you submit it to an agent, just like you would a novel. Ditto for a memoir.

But, if you’re truly writing nonfiction [and you’ve already built your “platform” (see my blog post from a couple of days ago)], you must submit a “book proposal” to any agent who might take you on as a client. According to Weinstein, it must contain:
1) An overview of your book. Use a couple of paragraphs to describe your work, and make it read like the teaser on the back cover of a paperback. Market your book!
2) Give a sense of who your target audience will be, both the immediate audience and possible wider ones. For instance, if you’re writing about diabetes, your core audience would be people who suffer from the disease, but the wider audience would be people whose friends and/or family have diabetes, teachers whose students have it, etc.
3) Explain why you’re qualified to write about this subject; describe your platform, and do it in detail.
4) Who are you competing against? What titles are out there on the same subject, and why is your book different from each of them? Why is it better?
5) Add a detailed Table of Contents, and include a summary of each chapter. Be sure to give it some meat! The agent should be able to see the entire shape and scope of your book from this section.
6) Include at least two sample chapters, ones that have significant substance to them. The agent will use these to judge the quality of both your writing and your research/knowledge.

Now here’s the bad news. One of the most important sections of your book proposal is this: The Marketing Plan. Yessir, you’re going to sell your own book, and sell it well. The agent wants to see that not only have you built and developed your platform, but that you’ve considered how best to get your book into the hands of readers.

More on the nonfiction marketing plan tomorrow….

This morning we awoke to five new inches of heavy, wet spring snow. I’m a fan of letting God take care of things like that, so rather than shovel, I’m waiting for the sun. And instead of blogging about nonfiction book proposals, which I had intended to do, I looked at the calendar and stopped short.

April 19 hasn’t been a good day for a very long time. Back on April 19, 1995, I was working at the Koch brothers’ (yes, them, the guys who funded much of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s campaign against organized labor) Rosemount, Minnesota, oil refinery as an environmental engineer. Members of the environmental group in those days got along well and spent time together away from work—especially at golf. And in 1995, it was warm enough to golf after work. We teed off at Rich Valley Golf, a course half a mile south of the plant, did our best (which was never very good, though I did get a hole in one there), and straggled back into the clubhouse at about 6:30 for water and a snack. I remember it so clearly: standing at the counter watching the televised pictures of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, its face torn away, pieces of never-to-be-read office paper floating past exposed offices and onto the pile of rubble. As I looked at those empty offices, I felt like I was watching somebody’s insides, organs blown away or shredded, private things that nobody should ever see. I had to sit, and the weakness in my legs had nothing to do with having played nine bad holes of golf.

In November of 2002, my husband Jeff and I moved from Minnesota to Rapid City, South Dakota. My mother had died in 2001, but my dad was still with us then, living in a nursing home in Moorhead, Minnesota. Of the four Hall kids, I had been logistically the closest and visited most often of any of us, so the move to South Dakota was painful. Instead of four hours away, I was now nearly ten.

Easter in 2003 fell on April 20. I was working for the South Dakota Army National Guard at the time in the Facilities Management Office, doing environmental work again, and it being a government job, we had Good Friday off. It snowed a little that Friday morning and I considered not going to Moorhead to visit my dad because of the weather. “You should go,” Jeff said. “If you don’t and something happens to your dad before you get to see him again, you’ll regret not going.” Grudgingly acknowledging that he was right, I packed, got in the car and left at about 2 p.m. for Moorhead. The weather cleared up near the middle of the state, but when I hit the eastern third, fog rolled in and it started to sleet. I pulled in at the Comfort Inn in Watertown and crashed. It was only two more hours to Fargo, but it was late, and I was too tired for more white-knuckle driving.

My dad died sometime during the night. On April 19. The aides at the nursing home found him on the floor when they knocked on his door at 6:00 a.m. They tried to reach me, but I had told Jeff, the night before, only that I was in Watertown. They called my sister Ginny, who found me by calling all the motels in Watertown. I remember little about the drive to Moorhead that morning, but I do remember that because Elton John had scheduled a concert at the Fargo Dome that evening, there were no hotel rooms at the places where I usually stayed. In fact, I think I got the last room in town. My brother John drove up from Iowa later that day, and my sisters flew in, too.

My father wasn’t perfect, for sure, but he was a warm, caring, emotional man who loved his family above all things. He adored music and always turned up the volume so the living room sounded like it contained a whole symphony. He made a celebration of life, was generous with everything he had, and worked hard. He had issues with self-confidence and wouldn’t try things unless he knew he could succeed easily at them. It didn’t take long for him to realize, though, that things you can do well the first time aren’t generally worth doing. He did play golf, though par mostly eluded him, and fished alone and with his family whenever he was able. He followed the Minnesota Vikings religiously and snoozed, kicked back in his recliner, through many innings of Minnesota Twins games. He loved my mother with his whole heart.

So for me April 19 is never an easy day. It’s one full of memories and of mourning.

I miss my father. Here’s a photograph, taken back in the 1980s sometime. He was a great man.

Howard Hall -- February 2, 1914 - April 19, 2003

Review: Bad Blood
Author: John Sandford
Audio Version Read by: Eric Conger

Somebody recently asked, “If you could have dinner with any character from fiction, who would it be?” My immediate answer: Virgil Flowers. John Sandford has written a lot of books, and I’ve read most of them. I followed Lucas Davenport religiously through the Prey books, read the standalone novels, and didn’t much care for the Kidd books. But Virgil Flowers is my guy.

Virgil knows how to get to the bottom of things, and in Bad Blood, the bottom is not only complicated, it’s a long way down. A southwest Minnesota farmer is brutally murdered at the elevator as he delivers his soybeans. The murderer, a decent young man from a good local family, confesses to the sheriff, and the next day is found hanging in his cell. When the deputy on duty during the apparent suicide is also found dead, the sheriff realizes she needs help. Though both deaths appear to be suicides, the forensic evidence suggests otherwise. Enter Virgil Flowers.

Flowers loves women. Married and divorced three times, Virgil has realized he falls in love too easily and has sworn off the taking of vows. That doesn’t mean he’s given up the fairer sex, though. In this book, he finds the sheriff herself, recently abandoned by her husband for another woman, to be not only an excellent investigator, but excellent in other ways as well.

Virgil’s investigative technique is as unusual as he is. Raised nearby, the son of a Lutheran minister, Virgil knows how things go in small towns. He takes the sheriff to the local café, speaks clearly enough that the locals can overhear, and garners several important leads through the resulting firestorm of rumor and innuendo. He sets traps, calls in favors, interviews locals, and uncovers a crime so old and so massive that even he has trouble believing its scope.

While I’ve always enjoyed Mr. Sandford’s Lucas Davenport novels, I can understand why he’s working on this series as well. Virgil Flowers is very different from Davenport, and must be tremendously fun to write. He’s both a cerebral and a spiritual guy, a BCA agent who wears his hair long and his cowboy boots scuffed. If you haven’t tried these books, please do. You won’t be disappointed.

Yesterday I wrote a little bit about the nonfiction writer’s platform courtesy a presentation at the University of Wisconsin Writers’ Institute. “I will get famous BEFORE I write my book.” That’s the mantra you should repeat to yourself every day if you write nonfiction. Become the sought-after expert in your subject area. Start locally, build to regional recognition and, if you’re dogged enough, take on the nation. Make yourself the go-to guy. Then sit down to write.

What if you, like me, write fiction? Your platform is altogether different. You have no specific expertise—other than the way you construct your stories, the words you choose, the phrasing, dialogue and tone that naturally works its way into your writing. Yes, ma’am. That’s your writer’s VOICE. It’s what sets you apart from every other writer on the planet.

And what you suspected was coming is, in fact, here: you must get your writing out there, and every day. Blog. Join webloops and other on line groups. Start a fan page for your books on Facebook. (That’s on my list for later today. I’ll let you know how it goes.) Link your blog to your Facebook page or post your daily blogs there, too. Twitter? Sure. LinkedIn? Why not? Try with every fiber of your being (except those reserved for the writing of your books themselves) to reach the broadest possible audience. The more readers find of your work and the more they like it, the more likely they are to buy and read the writing you have for sale. Simple, right?

“Oh, man,” you say. “That’s so much WORK.” Well, yeah. It is. Here I am, beginning a weekday blog, and it IS work. But I’m doing my best to show all of you out there what my writing is like. As this blog grows and I’m a little more accustomed to doing it every day, I’ll include a few posts that showcase my writing itself. Perhaps I’ll toss out a daily writing prompt, too, that we can all use to jumpstart our own prose. See? That might help generate a following.

And how about guest blogs? Today I’m guest blogging on Lois Winston’s site, “Killer Crafts and Crafty Killers.” At that site I talk about how I got the idea for my first novel, UNREASONABLE RISK. It’s a thriller about sabotage in an oil refinery. You can check it out at: http://www.anastasiapollack.blogspot.com/. While my first book is definitely not a traditional cozy mystery, complete with crafts like knitting or scrapbooking, it also isn’t dark and nasty and full of serial murderers. It might appeal to some of Lois’ regular readers. And I’m giving away a copy of the book to somebody who leaves a comment at the blog site. It’s another way to build readership. Next month I’ll be a guest at Sylvia Ramsey’s new author interview blogsite, and that one will be a longer post. Sylvia asks interesting questions. I’ll let you know when I’m over there and hopefully you’ll check it out.

On Monday, here at my own blog I’ll discuss the nonfiction book proposal and who needs one. In addition, I’ll spend some words on memoir and travel memoir, which require different types of agent submission. Curious? Come back Monday. 