The British Are Coming, Y'all!

Marketing Mantras and Social Networking at Killer Nashville 2010

Mystery authors have mantras for the tools they use to market their books. At Killer Nashville 2010, five authors on the panel "Lightning in a Bottle: Marketing and Promotion" shared their mantras with the audience.

• Sunny Frazier: Embrace marketing. Learn to love it. Start marketing when you first write the book.
• Susan Whitfield: A professional online presence is crucial.
• Rick Robinson: Does it push people to make a purchase?
• Steven Womack: What really works?
• Matthew Funk: Reverse-engineer your career. Look at what the author you most resemble is doing. Try to replicate that.

 L – R Sunny Frazier, Susan Whitfield, Rick Robinson, Steven Womack, and Matthew Funk.

How do these authors use social networking?

• Frazier promotes her work with the help of what she calls a "posse." In addition to using her web site as a promotion tool, she markets on 35 sites such as book blogs. The site owners generate traffic and awareness for each other.
• Whitfield interviews authors by the hundreds on her blog. The authors get exposure, and she gets traffic (thus exposure).
• Robinson is partial to Facebook and suggests that authors who have at least 300 friends on a regular page switch to a Fan page. The Fan page allows authors to generate pay-per-click ads for their works. Also, many bookstores have a Facebook presence. He encourages authors to "friend" bookstores.
• Womack is skeptical that a Facebook presence really translates into sales.
• Funk advises authors to promote the work of peers far more than their own work. The concept of creating a core group of supporters who assist each other and raise awareness for each other's work appeals to him.

What's your marketing mantra? What social networking tools work for you?

Jeffrey Deaver on "Combat Writing"

Prior to Jeffrey Deaver's presentation at Killer Nashville 2010 on how he writes thrillers (check here and here for a recap of his presentation points), Clay Stafford conducted an interview with him. One question Deaver is asked often is how he finds time to write, given his traveling schedule.

He says there's a difference between writing books and living a writer's life. The life of a writer is about more than writing books. A professional writer has a partnership with his or her publisher. Therefore, the writer's life includes travel and promotion. A writer must be prepared to write in the midst of those activities.

Deaver cannot afford to wait for inspiration. He engages in what he calls "combat writing." He writes, researches, and edits wherever his circumstances take him, such as in the hotel room and on the plane.

Maybe you're thinking, "Wow, what a skill to have!" But let's consider Deaver's "combat" concept more. It shouldn't be foreign. All too often, life demands that we not wait for ideal circumstances to act. If you parent young children, you might have skills that include the following:

• Combat sleeping
• Combat cleaning
• Combat lovemaking

If you manage a marketing department, your skills might include the following:

• Combat budgeting
• Combat product design
• Combat customer relations

The curious thing about not holding back, not waiting for inspiration, is that when you trust yourself and give of yourself wholly in the moment, often what you produce is more than good enough. It's great. And that's living.

What are your combat skills?

Life Lessons from Sherrilyn Kenyon at Killer Nashville

At Killer Nashville 2010, conference founder Clay Stafford asked paranormal romance author Sherrilyn Kenyon how it felt to have sold more than 24 million copies of her books. She responded dryly, "It don't suck." Thus began Ms. Kenyon's Friday morning session "From the Bottom Up: How I Started From Nothing and Became a New York Times Bestselling Author." Although she tailored her talk to an audience comprised mostly of writers and readers, her underlying message signaled a seminal philosophy for anyone to consider.

In a roller-coaster career spanning decades, Ms. Kenyon did what she could during dark times to stay visible and connected in the publishing industry. She didn't restrict herself to prose but also wrote short stories and magazine articles. She performed copyediting and taught herself HTML. In other words, she was flexible.

The "downs" of her career include a period of time when she was homeless with an infant, and a period of mourning after her brother died at a young age. At one point, her husband's faith in her ability as a writer wavered. Yet she continued to write and send out query letters. She persevered with her career.

Vampires fell out of favor in the industry after she had several books written about them. She renamed her vampires "daimons" and pitched them as something new, different. The Dark Hunters series became published because Ms. Kenyon demonstrated innovation and the capacity for reinvention. This series catapulted her book sales into the realm of bestsellers.

While the importance of flexibility and perseverance in attaining goals in any career seem obvious, my imagination was stimulated by discussion of the importance of innovation and reinvention. Flexibility and perseverance help you hold down a job. Add innovation and reinvention, and you might make it to the New York Times bestseller list.

How have you demonstrated innovation and reinvention lately?

Writing Thrillers: Two More Principles That Guide Jeffrey Deaver

At the 1 May SkillBuild in High Point, NC, bestselling author Jeffrey Deaver cited three principles that guide his writing. Last week, I discussed his first principle: Don't write something that readers don't want to read. Remember the liver-flavored toothpaste analogy?

That first principle of Deaver's seems simple enough and logical. But most writers, especially at the beginning, write what they want, never mind that it doesn't hit the spot with anyone else. That's the best way I know to create a product that will appeal to no one except your mother.

Deaver's other two guiding principles embody the same logic and simplicity. Beginning writers often ignore these principles, too.

Write what you enjoy reading. In genre fiction, romance accounts for the largest percentage of sales. You might be tempted by these impressive sales figures to try your hand at romance. But if you're a science fiction fan, and you've never been able to finish reading a romance because the heroes and heroines always aggravate you, what makes you believe you're going to complete the first draft of a romance?

Each genre has its own rules. The rules by which a work of science fiction is deemed acceptable by its readers differ greatly from the rules in romance. One way you learn rules of writing within a genre is by reading many books within that genre, informally studying what makes the stories work. An added benefit of writing what you enjoy reading is that it sustains you during the slump times of your career. So many factors that determine your professional success in publishing are out of your direct control. Make no mistake. This job is difficult.

Know your craft. Here Deaver refers to grammar, punctuation, and spelling, plus basic rules for plotting and characterization. Many beginning writers let these basics slide. They're under the mistaken impression that editors at New York City presses are standing by with red pens, waiting to correct errors that writers themselves could have and should have corrected. Sixty years ago, publishers' editors might have made these sorts of large-scale line edits. But in the 21st century, it's up to the writer to ensure that his or her craft is polished by the time the manuscript undergoes the submissions process.

Since this task can almost never be undertaken without assistance, Deaver recommends investing in titles like Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Woe Is I, and The Chicago Manual of Style for your personal reference library. You do have a personal reference library, don't you?

I also recommend the following aids to polishing your manuscript:

Online workshops and conference workshops that deal with craft can be enlightening. During the years that I've been blogging, here are the online craft workshops that I've taken:

• Mary Buckham: "Plotting With the Mythic Structure"
• Margie Lawson: "Empowering Characters' Emotions"
  
• Kris Neri: "Mystery & Thriller Structure"
  
• Mary Buckham: "Body Language on the Page"
  

You can derive insight into the trouble spots in your manuscript from interactions with the members of online and in-person critique groups. But when your critique group members cease to be able to spot errors in your work, it's time to move on — either to a more advanced group or to an editor that you hire.

More and more writers whose works are close to being publishable have opted to hire a professional editor like Chris Roerden. Professional editors can be pricey, but if your goal is to lock down a publishing contract, it's worth paying an editor to help you find the little things that are throwing off first readers in publishing houses.

Here are Deaver's three principles again:

• Don't write something that readers don't want to read.
• Write what you enjoy reading.
• Know your craft.

What'll it be for you? Ignore the principles and carry on with your writing as a hobby? Or adopt a professional approach to your writing and apply these principles?

The Ins and Outs of Paranormal Forensic Investigations

About fifteen years ago, I wrote three manuscripts in a mystery series with a psychic detective and a contemporary setting. The sentiment I heard from editors and agents at conferences was, "People aren't reading about psychic detectives. What publisher would buy into this idea?" Not unlike the sentiment expressed by an executive from a major technology company in the mid-1970s: "But who would want a computer in their home?"

Obviously psychics haven't swarmed the publishing industry to offer guidance with publishers' long-term business plans. Crime fiction with a paranormal twist has been selling well for at least a decade. I have no intention of seeking publication for those three manuscripts about the psychic detective, but I've been developing the idea for another series that deals with paranormal and police investigations.

The release of the movie Ghostbusters in 1984 made parapsychologists laugh at themselves with all the gizmos used by the characters. That movie may also have stimulated the current interest in the paranormal, brought it out of the realm of nutcases and into mainstream fiction. If we fast-forward to 2010, we find that there's a lot of (non-crackpot) information to learn about paranormal investigations.

TV shows like Ghost Hunters expose viewers to scientific approaches toward understanding the paranormal. These days, if you write paranormal crime fiction, and you expect to be taken seriously by editors and agents, you must toe the line with what the "experts" say. Where do you start sorting through this overload of information? How do you sort through it?

Last year, my book Camp Follower finaled for the Daphne du Maurier Award, presented each year by the Kiss of Death chapter of the Romance Writers of America. I received a certificate for a free online class through the chapter and cashed in my certificate this past March on "Paranormal Forensic Investigation," led by Katherine Ramsland. The elevator description for the course is "Ghost Hunters Meet CSI," and it provides students with an excellent foundation in secondary research: the type of research that's already been interpreted by others when it reaches you.

Ramsland showed how the disciplines of paranormal investigation and police investigation are converging. Many paranormal investigators today believe that the spirits of murder victims may linger to see justice done. These paranormalists use technological devices like those seen on Ghost Hunters in attempt to access the "other side," shed light on cases. Of course, police detectives are skeptical of "woo-woo," but sometimes they'll reach out to the paranormal community for leads on a cold case.

Since anyone can finagle facts to "substantiate" a pet theory, Ramsland's guiding principle for paranormalists is that they must try to disprove a hypothesis, not prove it. What's left if you're unable to debunk an incident? Facts for a solid, interesting hypothesis.

Ramsland discusses different scientific disciplines that support a murder investigation, the type of equipment that paranormalists would use, phases of a "ghost" investigation, the typical procedure for a police investigation, and the various types of psychic abilities. She also recounts cases that blended a traditional police investigation with a paranormal investigation.

Due to the nature of the course, it doesn't encourage the type of interactivity between students and instructor that I've received in other online courses, like Mary Buckham's body language course. But in exchange, you receive a good summary of the background that inspired the exciting and diverse genre of paranormal crime fiction.

Obviously secondary research doesn't tell you everything. If you're ready for the kind of research that allows you hands-on experience with both paranormal and police investigations, here are my suggestions for ways to go deeper:

• Take a Citizens Police Academy course through your local law enforcement agency. A comprehensive, multi-week course will give you a good idea of all the hats that cops wear and how they do what they do, including crime scene investigation. You will get hands-on experience. Your ride-along may even turn out to be exciting if a chase for a fugitive heats up.
• Attend workshops for writers that include an FBI or CSI track, and go to those lectures. You'll learn from experts how some of the scientific disciplines that Ramsland mentioned — like entomology, handwriting analysis, and anthropology — help solve crimes.

NOTE: You can combine the above two by attending Lee Lofland's Writers Police Academy. It'll be one jam-packed but fun-filled weekend.

• Make the acquaintance of a team of established paranormal investigators in the TAPS family, such as Haunted North Carolina, and go through the stages of a ghost hunt with them.
• Attend reputable workshops or symposiums, such as the Paranormal Research Symposium, featuring paranormal specialists. Talk with the specialists who lead the sessions.

Have fun!

Writing to Sell: Chris Roerden Says Get an Attitude!

A fiction writer can improve his or her craft by studying books like Eats, Shoots & Leaves, taking courses that teach elements such as plotting and characterization, and hiring an editor. Just as important as craft is a writer's voice. Unlike craft, voice cannot be taught. It can only be found.

Agents and publishers agree that the presence of a distinctive voice is what compels them to accept one manuscript and reject another that's equally polished. If you ask twenty industry professionals to define voice, they probably won't agree on one definition. But they will agree on what voice is not. Literary agent Jim McCarthy comments, "There's a lot of stuff out there and much of it sounds familiar."

How do you create a manuscript that compels an industry professional to accept it for publication?

Editor Chris Roerden presented "Showing Versus Telling: When to Use, and How the Writer's Voice Affects Publication" during the SkillBuild last Saturday in High Point, NC. Roerden stressed that before the elusive voice can be found in a piece of fiction, the writer must do the time developing craft, polishing the mechanics of the manuscript. For reasons that I cited in my blog entry two days ago, this means that the odds are against your voice emerging in your first completed manuscript.

Deal with it. Move on. Write another manuscript, and another.

Harness the beasts of grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Figure out how to create page-turner plots and three-dimensional characters. Then, says Roerden, make sure that each of your characters, especially your protagonist, has an attitude. This attitude distinguishes one character from another, reveals their personalities. Finding attitude in your characters is a crucial step toward finding your voice.

Don't expect to skip the labor of developing craft and jump straight into voice. It doesn't work that way. Your voice is what you find while you're on the journey of developing your craft. This means that no one can guarantee when you'll find your voice. But unless you actually start the journey and assume the responsibility of improving your craft, you're guaranteed to not find your voice. If you're wise, you will never stop improving your craft.

To emphasize the importance of attitude, Roerden provided excerpts from published works. She contrasted them with an unpublished piece that read very much like Jim McCarthy's familiar "stuff." Attitude sprang at me from the published excerpts. I discerned no attitude from the unpublished piece. It was without flavor.

Attitude drenches publishable manuscripts. Attitude doesn't wait several chapters to manifest, often grabbing readers from the opening lines. Attitude is present in all genres. In the following examples of attitude from the opening lines of novels, notice that each conveys a unique author voice.

• "It was one hell of a night to throw away a baby." In the Bleak Midwinter by Julia Spencer-Fleming.
• "All children, except one, grow up." Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie.
• "When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton." The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien.
• "1801 — I have just returned from a visit to my landlord — the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with." Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë.
• "It's hard to be a larva." Nor Crystal Tears by Alan Dean Foster.
• "You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter." The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.

Each example of an opening line above delivers on its promise of what the reader can expect in attitude and voice for the remainder of the work. Attitude and voice require momentum. They permeate a manuscript. You cannot fake them by concocting a clever, attention-grabber first sentence. If you haven't developed your craft, you won't be able to sustain the momentum of that first sentence. Agents and publishers have seen this "bait and switch" plenty of times.

There's no shortcut to finding your voice. Take the time to polish your craft. When you're ready, attitude and voice will find you.

Share an example of a memorable attitude and voice in the opening sentence of a novel you've read.

Writing About Crime Scenes: Lee Lofland Laughs at "CSI"

Here's another installment from that marvelous SkillBuild that I attended on Saturday 1 May at the High Point Public Library in High Point, NC.

 Former police detective Lee Lofland updates his blog "The Graveyard Shift" regularly to expose errors in police procedure. He's especially fond of skewering those errors he spots on TV shows such as "CSI" and "Castle." For two hours last Saturday morning, he kept the audience entertained over glaring TV goofs, with the occasional cop escapade from  his own experience thrown in.

Writers tell Lofland, "But I saw it happen that way on TV!" This is one of his strongest motivations for educating people otherwise on his blog. Here are some of the blunders he cites as regularly showing up on cop TV:

• Positively identifying from the size of the bullet wound what caliber bullet was used
• Reading 'em their rights while they're being handcuffed
• Unauthorized arrests by CSI techsI don't watch police procedure TV.

Seems that every time one of those shows is turned on in the house, I spot an outrageous scenario like the following:

• The CSI woman arrives at an outdoor murder scene in makeup, heels, and a silk blouse displaying generous cleavage. Her coiffure is perfect despite a brisk breeze and an air temperature near 95 degrees. She's sunk half of her latest paycheck on a manicure. And the dead body she must examine is ripe.
• The CSI lab, equipment, and computer software interfaces look like they were lifted from the set of "Star Wars." Test results are available within minutes. Someone, somewhere in the world has an exact match for the fingerprints or DNA on their database. And they're eager to share.

I have an undergraduate degree in Microbiology, and I spent seven years in science laboratories, indoors and outdoors. I'm also a graduate of the Gwinnett County Citizens Police Academy, and I've spent plenty of time interviewing cops. Here are some of the realities that I learned from those environments:

• CSI techs are trained as scientists. It's ludicrous for scientists to dress up pretty for hands-on, everyday tasks. Whether you're culturing bacteria or collecting evidence, it can be messy work that entails the use of more protective gear than gloves. And why wear nail polish? Acetone, the active ingredient of polish remover, gets used in the lab often.
• Test results take lots of time: time for enzymes to work, time for bacteria to grow, etc. My guess is that the screenwriters who award speedy test results to TV police procedural heroes derive their inspiration from those quickie hematocrit and urine tests their doctors perform at annual physical exams.
  
• The final folks to receive funding for shiny, new equipment are usually those who work in government-run laboratories (ex. CSI techs). Need a centrifuge or an incubator? Negotiate sharing one with another department. Better still, since those folks have often adopted a scarcity mentality from having their funding cut each year, unearth a centrifuge or incubator from storage. It'll likely be broken, so you'll have to fix it.

Of course, none of the above realities form the basis for glamorous cop TV.

And isn't it exciting when the TV investigator makes an arrest based on the meticulous collection of cool forensic evidence? But that isn't a reality, either. As Lofland pointed out during his presentation, most crimes are solved when investigators talk with people, witnesses. Not by analyzing collected evidence.

I found this last point interesting, reassuring. In the late 18th century, when my current series is set, there was almost no forensic evidence to evaluate. No DNA, no fingerprints or ballistics analyses. I'm often asked how I can write convincing crime fiction without the tools of modern forensics.

I do so because some things never change. Then, as now, most crimes were solved when an investigator talked with witnesses. Also, people of the 18th century were better at observation than we are now, better at supplying an investigator with details he needed to resolve a case. Centuries ago, folks had no text messaging to distract them. No automobile or railroad to speed a journey. No television or electricity to keep them occupied at night.

The challenge of creating crimes that can be solved without modern forensics liberates me to focus on human nature in my fiction. I enjoy that. I've read too many contemporary crime novels that substitute forensics techno-babble for good plotting and characterizations.

But if you're writing contemporary crime fiction, and you must have the ins and outs of forensics, I suggest that you start with your local police department. If they offer a citizens police academy program, sign up! Citizens police academies usually run for a number of weeks. (Mine lasted nine weeks.) There's a lot of material to cover. Among other things, you'll learn how many hats a uniformed police officer has to wear every day in the line of duty.

If you're unable to attend a citizens police academy, don't despair. Lee Lofland has organized the first annual Writers Police Academy, scheduled for 24-26 September 2010 at Guilford Technical Community College in Jamestown, NC. It's a crash-course citizens police academy and promises to be an action-packed, fun weekend. Find out the realities of CSI, accident reconstruction, arson investigation, fingerprinting, and a whole lot more. Experts like a medical examiner and an ATF special agent will make presentations. And so will thriller author Jeffrey Deaver. Register online.

What's your favorite TV police procedural goof?

Writing Thrillers: Jeffrey Deaver Says Quit Offering Liver-Flavored Toothpaste!

On Saturday 1 May, I attended a SkillBuild in High Point, NC. This event, co-sponsored by the High Point Public Library and the Murder We Write chapter of Sisters in Crime, showcased excellent workshops by Lee Lofland, Chris Roerden, and headliner Jeffrey Deaver. To do justice to the power of these workshops, I won't attempt to squeeze accounts of them into a single blog entry. So stay tuned to my blog for scoop on this SkillBuild.

 "People Don't Read to Get to the Middle: Writing a Page-Turning Thriller" was the title of the workshop by Jeffrey Deaver. This bestselling, award-winning author discussed the principles that guide him when he writes, and he shed light on the process by which he produces his thrillers.

"Who brushed their teeth this morning?" Deaver asked the audience. Following a show of hands, he produced a series of questions. "Who used mint-flavored toothpaste? Who used cinnamon-flavored toothpaste?" He drilled down to make his point about Guiding Principle One by asking a final question: "Who used liver-flavored toothpaste?"

Of course, no one uses liver-flavored toothpaste. The manufacturers of major toothpaste brands are smart enough to not produce a product that no customer wants to use.

Writers are also manufacturers of a product. They should be smart enough to not write stories that readers don’t want to read.

Writers should continually perform market research and ask themselves, "What do my readers want?" then write clear, coherent stories for their readers. Easy for Jeffrey Deaver to say. He isn’t caught up in the angst of finding an agent or publisher.

Here's what Deaver means with his first guiding principle. If you're a writer, and you want to create fiction that's saleable, throw your ego out the door. This business isn't about you. It's about writing to your audience. Deaver counts himself very lucky to be making a living off his writing. He achieves that by understanding what his readers want, then giving it to them. He cannot afford to cave to his ego.

Literary agents and publishers often cite the fact that few first manuscripts are saleable. There's a reason why they aren't. Most of the time, that first novel isn't for readers. It's for the writer. It's autobiographical and strokes his or her ego by bringing out all the personal baggage.

What is this baggage? Misery over being unpopular in high school, misery over being raised by parents who failed to meet your expectations, and so on. To deliver a story about baggage, your first novel becomes a plotting and characterization debacle that undermines delivery of a story with appeal to a broader audience.

In other words, your personal baggage on the page is liver-flavored toothpaste. Nobody wants to buy your liver-flavored toothpaste. Deal with it.

Understand that there's nothing wrong with writing an autobiographical first novel. You've heard the saying that there's a novel in everyone? That's the autobiographical manuscript, and it's great therapy to write it. Furthermore, actually completing a first draft is a major achievement! Most writers never get that far. Congratulations if you've finished a first draft.

However, if you've completed that first manuscript, and you have your cap set on this writing business, your next step toward making a living as a professional author of fiction will almost always be to put that first manuscript away on a shelf or in a drawer and start writing your next manuscript. With each successive manuscript, you leave more autobiographical baggage behind, and you acquire more of the craft of writing.

Almost every published author has a bunch of unpublished manuscripts stashed away. I shoved away two unpublished partial manuscripts and nine unpublished completed manuscripts prior to finishing my tenth manuscript, my award-winning first novel, Paper Woman. I ditched the autobiographical baggage in my partials and first finished manuscript. The subsequent completed, unpublished manuscripts are where I developed my craft, learned the business of understanding my audience, and became publishable.

Heck, yes, this takes time. Decades in my case. Maybe you won't take decades to create a publishable manuscript. But you must still invest in that time-consuming learning process if you want to be published. Painters and sculptors don't expect their first creations to sell.

People often ask me whether I plan to return to my unpublished manuscripts and fix them, make them saleable. No. Like many authors, I've cannibalized pieces of some of them. But each one is, as a whole, a tube of liver-flavored toothpaste. They're bombs that I wouldn't inflict upon my readers, kind people who have so many options for how they spend their leisure time, and they choose to spend it in my fictional universe. Grasshopper is grateful to them.

How many tubes of liver-flavored toothpaste do you have shoved away in a drawer?

"Body Language on the Page"

In February, I participated in Mary Buckham's online course and discussion, "Body Language on the Page," with the Guppies. The last online class I'd taken with Mary was "Plotting with the Mythic Structure: Creating Surefire Plots that Sell", in January 2007. She now offers this fabulous course through a lecture packet from her web site. I've been fortunate to meet Mary twice in person: when she came to Raleigh in October 2008, and last summer at the RWA National Conference.

The goal of "Body Language on the Page" is to help writers discover ways to clue readers in on a character's emotional state through movements of the character's body (ie. nonverbal communications) — without "telling" or interpreting. Mary's lectures make extensive use of well-documented cues that humans present in their faces, torsos, arms, legs, etc. when they're feeling emotions such as attraction, revulsion, fear, anger, and curiosity. Mary also covers clusters of cues that inform readers by structuring a more rounded picture than individual signals might accomplish.

Probably the most difficult concept to grasp in this course is recognizing the difference between choreography and body language. Body language shows evidence of deep emotion, the kind of emotion that slips out involuntarily, despite our efforts to conceal it. In that respect, Mary's definition of body language is akin to the "visceral" response that Margie Lawson teaches students to recognize in her online course "Empowering Characters' Emotions." In contrast, choreography is a more conscious, controlled response, even though it may carry some emotion.

Regardless of whether you label the deep emotional responses "body language" or "visceral," they're involuntary, unconscious. Use of this level of response with characters leads to more powerful writing. That's what we're after here: knock-your-socks-off writing.

I highly recommend "Body Language on the Page" for craft building. Thanks, Mary, for an excellent course!

This month, I'm taking another online course, "Paranormal Forensic Investigation," with Katherine Ramsland as instructor. I'll report on it in April.

Poisoned Pen's WebCon 2009

Much will undoubtedly be written in the coming weeks of PPWebCon, the first entirely virtual conference for mystery readers and writers, held in cyberspace 24 October 2009. Poisoned Pen Press took advantage of the full range of existing technologies available for the Internet (okay, a few times it overextended those technologies) to produce a ten-hour conference that included live and prerecorded interviews, panel discussions, and presentations.

Registrants received goody bags, pitched ideas for novels to editors, and chatted in the Coffee Shop. Overall, it was an amazing experience. I cannot wait to see what Poisoned Pen does with this medium in 2010.

I participated in a text panel called "Historical Mysteries — Do They Have Something to Say About Our Times?" with Beverle Graves Myers moderating. Since content for my panel as well as content for most of the rest of the conference is now available online for anyone who didn't register, I'm not going to spend a lot of time telling you what I saw and heard in individual sessions. But I do encourage you to explore the PPWebCon site thoroughly.

Make sure you check out Peter May's kick-off presentation about his research in China for his thrillers. He includes some visually stunning footage of Chinese culture, including the making of a Chinese crepe called a jian bing, as well as the trailer for his upcoming release, a standalone that's set in the virtual world. Chinese on cell phones, bicycling in the snow, practicing qigong and tai chi. Chinese propaganda delivered like "CSI." Chinese banquet with deep-fried scorpions. Oh, my. Talk about world building. Don't miss it.

Here are some themes I heard reiterated during my real-time participation in PPWebCon:

• A web site is a must for every author. But authors must use caution with blogs and social media. The first priority of authors is to write and sell their next well-written book. Don't let various forms of promotion get in the way of that.
• Go to conferences to make friends with booksellers and other authors. Build a network at conferences. But don't go to gab about you, you, you.
• Hand selling is what sells books. Indy bookstores are particularly good at hand selling. But authors must realize that this process takes a great deal of time. So-called overnight successes have usually been around for a number of years.
• Don't self-publish a book unless you're an established author with credibility. It's almost impossible for self-published books to get reviews. Furthermore, most self-published books don't go through the rugged internal review process enforced by a publisher. This process is crucial for growing the author's craft.
• The ability to buy e-books from bookstores will develop as a competitive trend.

Later today, I'm in an author panel at the Author Showcase, co-sponsored by Falls River Books and the North Carolina Writers Network. I hope to see you there!