A New Anthology

I decided to start the year by looking back and instituting an experiment in my self-publishing adventure. An anthology of personal writing with accompanying images, it weighs in at approximately 13,000 words.

Life, Dreams and Magical Landscapes is a collection of stories, poems, dreams and journal entries written between 1997 and 2007 but covering a wider space of time. 

Its sole purpose: to elevate words to mental images that defined us at different periods of our lives. 

The use of the royal we here is not a conceit but evidence that with every entry a different person can be identified, because we all grow and develop into different people as we mature. 

The volume is available now at Smashwords and Amazon, Barnes and Noble will follow in the next day or two. 

Closing Year One

2011 will be the pivotal year when I decided that I was a writer – not just someone who sometimes wrote. I embraced it and plunged into the adventure wholeheartedly!

This adventure started years ago, quite possibly when I was 1 ½ years old and pretending to be an errand reporter, a man-on-the-street reporter and photojournalist and newspaper magnate and publisher…

Perhaps, it started more properly when I was in my formative years and writing short stories in my light blue Fisher-Price typewriter; or writing plays in my teens; or writing poems and songs in my college years; or publishing my personal zine in my twenties.

It could have been cemented by my first work experience in a publishing house or by my latest college degree in electronic publishing.

Maybe it was unhappiness and an innate desire to fight back injustice mated with gallows humor, or it could have been my friend’s infectious exultation and call to play NaNoWriMo with him.

Ultimately it was losing my job that opened the door to my writing career. I finally had the time and the creative juices were flowing.

Certainly it wasn’t lack of support and encouragement! I had and continue to have plenty of that, and I am so grateful for it.

In 2012, I hope to find another day job, but I will never abandon my writing again. My plan is to continue this adventure wherever it may lead; certainly new ideas keep flowing and I will follow them.

Publishing adds another dimension to my life, one I enjoy immensely and one which expands my own horizons (sometimes in unexpected ways). It’s both a blessing and a drug I can’t give up.

New beginnings are sometimes rebirths and no less exciting. Cherish yours in whatever guise they may come! 

Happy New Year.

Things are Happening!

On Dec 20, look for a profile of my novel Justified at The Indie Spotlight. The blog features independent and self-published works and it’s a great resource for readers, I highly recommend you check it out.

Please check out Barbara Bretton’s newest installment of the Sugar Maple series. I was lucky enough to contribute an essay and recipe to the epilogue of her new title, Spells & Stitches. You can get it at Amazon in paperback or Kindle versions, and at Smashwords and several other electronic retailers.

I've just produced a new video trailer for the cookbook (includes requisite food porn, of course!) with a lovely, bluesy soundtrack.

In January, look for advertising for my titles on eFiction magazine.

One Night with B.B.

The mini-memoir is up at Smashwords now. Both Kindle and Nook stores will follow this weekend. iBookstore, Sony, Diesel and other online retailers for multiple devices will follow in the coming weeks. 

No Idle Hands...

To celebrate my second favorite holiday of all time, Festivus, I will be releasing “One Night with B.B.” in the next few days. I am working on formatting issues. Not all ebook formats accept embedded audio files, so I solved it by offering a link for a free download to all who purchase it.

Those who purchase the book for Festivus will be scratched off my list for the Airing of Grievances.

I started researching another cookbook project on the culinary influences of the Taino Indians. There are two projects in the hopper right now. The upcoming one is the Family Tree cookbook. Following that, there’s Cocina Latina, a collection of Latin American ingredients and recipes.

Family Tree requires editing and will probably come out sometime in January or in time for Valentine’s Day. Cocina Latina is on the research stage and I still need to test some of the recipes (I love my trade!). This title will probably be ready in spring 2012. The Taino cookbook is on its early research stages and will probably go online in the summer.

The steampunk series that I rewrote for NaNoWriMo is still going strong. Right now I am adding a pivotal character scene for the heroine that is a little painful to write. After that is done, I have a new book I got for my birthday: Horrible Histories: Cruel Kings and Mean Queens by Terry Deary. It is quite an awesome resource to do research for the royalty and their excessive little lifestyles… Plus, it looks like a fun read.

Special Holiday Sales

All my titles are going on sale for the holidays. For less than a buck you can have the sarcastic, vicarious thrill of a little killing of an obnoxious boss plus a road trip; or a little dysfunction and dim sum; or dozens of love letters to food and matching recipes!

Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Smashwords.

On Video Trailers

The latest rage in the last couple of years has been video trailers for books. The jury is still out on their value as a marketing tool. I suppose that if they are well produced, it becomes part of a larger plan and they can be used to announce a launch or to build anticipation.

Do they add sales? Probably not because they are likely to be seen by people who were going to purchase the title. I mean that I don't believe a book trailer will convince a reader to purchase a book. I am not sure that there is any research on it one way or the other.

My problem generally is that book trailers don't exactly work in the same way movie trailers do. You can offer some images, but people should be let to make those connections on their own, use their imaginations and make of the story whatever works for them. (Instead of forcing an image in their heads.)

My friend Barbara sent me a book regarding Movie Maker, and I happened to have had the app on my laptop from a few years back. I made the video above mostly to amuse myself. 

To test it, I showed it to my mother, who read the story years ago, reluctantly because she lived it, but I did not tell hr what she was watching. A few seconds into it, she was hollering (it took years to laugh about it).

Whether this video serves a purpose other than amuse me remains to be seen, but if you have not read it, I suggest you give it a shot. Why? Because death, dysfunction and dim sum will take a whole new meaning for you after you do.

UPDATE: The day after I posted this, the Center for Publishing at NYU posted a piece about an industry discussion regarding video in publishing.

While the discussion was not exclusively about video trailers, it touched on videos to increase the draw to content and was a huge proponent of the educational factor to enhance the experience. Samantha Cohen, of Simon & Schuster, did make the point that video in fiction “just doesn’t work because it interferes with the reader’s own version of an imaginary world.”

The book publishers are excited about the possibilities of enhanced ebooks although no business model exists for it and there are several challenges involved in video production for books. At least they acknowledged that technological progress has arrived. Beyond the trailer, what awaits us is truly interactive reading experiences that are rich and dynamic. Sounds like fun!