You know you're a writer if...

This was written by the writing team of Marilu Mann when we were using a different pen name of Cai Stephan.

You know you're a writer if...
By Cai Stephan

1. You've ever forwarded a joke but only after correcting the spelling
2. You've ever edited your own email to a friend so that it wasn't in the passive voice
3. You've ever used a red pen while reading a book for "fun"
4. You don't know what reading a book for fun means
5. You can't watch closed caption TV because the captioners can't spell
6. You've wanted to go back on this list and correct the missing periods at the end of each sentence
7. You want to go back through this list and rewrite it so it is funnier and tighter
7. Your children won't let you read their math homework because you keep telling them the story problems would be better if the characters had clearer motivations
9. You've actually submitted better story problems to the Math book publishers because HEY being published is what it's all about
10. You didn't know that there are two number sevens on this list because that's a number problem.
11. You know the definition of TSTL and you strive to avoid it.
12. You know the meaning of GMC and can find it in any story you read.
13. Your friends and family delete anything you send them that has an attachment and the subject line of "I want your opinion".
14. You have EVER reshelved books of people you know so that they get a better shelf view.
15. You had any clue what #13 was referring to.
16. You are trying to add more sayings to this list as you read it.
17. You have ever been caught jotting down notes about people in a meeting that were character sketches.
18. You replay snippets of overheard conversations as dialog between your characters.
19. You watch people on the street, in the grocery store, at your kid's soccer games, to get an idea of what people wear when they're just out and about and use that as part of your character sketches.
20. You have EVER been falsely accused of being a stalker because you thought someone was interesting enough to follow.
21. You keep a journal by your bed for those ideas that "hit" you in the.middle of the night.
22. You've been known to tell your family NOT to interrupt your writing time - unless there's blood.
23. Your significant other knows they're going to get some serious ribbing about the love scenes in your most recent book, and they have the grace to just smile smugly when it happens.
24. You still blush when your family members read your books because you just KNOW they're going to read that love scene it took you hours to write.
25. You endure people wondering about YOUR love life when they read your love scenes. and it's YOUR turn to smile smugly.

And we know we are a writing team when we can happily announce our eighth story with Ellora's Cave. All Tied Up is part of the Merry Kinkmas story. This book is a Ménage à trois featuring Japanese rope bondage.

Blurb:

Wendy has a kinky fantasy—she wants to be tied up. Not just spread-eagle in bed, but with rope all over and around her body. She shares that with her lover Peter who arranges a session with local Kinbaku Master, James.

They learn that having sex at someone else’s direction while completely restrained is more than hot. Can they repeat their experience? Do they want to without Master Darling, who would like to make their arrangement more permanent?

You can learn more about this story here.

After all those years in Asia, I don't have to do promotion anymore. We just release a Jackie Chan movie and - Boom! - people go. ~ Jackie Chan

I do promotion when it is necessary, but I always want to get back to the music.~Enya

Oh how I wish I could be like Jackie Chan or Enya. To be able to release a book and – Boom! – people reading…it would be lovely. Sadly, that is rarely the case for most authors. You have to build your audience. You have to encourage them to read your words by promoting yourself. There are many ways to do this.

One thing published authors must take into consideration is promotional materials. I'm not talking about promo where you talk about your latest book. I mean the tangible stuff sometimes referred to as SWAG. That's a slang term for free promotional items. SWAG, aka Stuff We All Get, can be anything from bookmarks to t-shirts.

I've used pens, coffee cups, bookmarks and postcards in the past. Honestly, however, paper promo is not really SWAG per se because it is paper. Consider things like beach towels, lunch bags, jump drives, water bottles, stress balls and jar openers instead. You want something the reader will keep using so that they keep seeing your name. This is part of that old marketing adage sometimes called the Rule of Seven.

“The customer needs to see an advertisement seven times before it is effective.”

That generally means seven times but in as many different mediums as you can afford. So a book video, a bookmark, a good review—all of those are marketing in terms of being seen. If you can get something physical in the reader's hands, then you've upped the ante considerably!

Pens are one of the most common swag items. I personally like pens that work. I still have pens I got at RWA conferences three years ago.

One enterprising author put her name and book cover on water bottles. While this is a great idea, it's temporary. Raise your hand if you did NOT throw away the water bottle once it was empty.

That's what I thought. But sometimes, that's okay. I still remember that author's name (Kresley Cole for those who are curious - LOL) and even that the book cover had a ship on it so it must have worked, right?

One difficulty is finding the right source for your promotional items. I want the most bang for my buck just like everyone else. So I find 500 jar openers at one site for .50 each. What about this other site where I can get 650 jar openers for .35? Get your calculators out, darlings. This is where that high school math comes in handy. 500 jar openers at $.50 each is a grand total of $250.00 whereas 650 for $.35 is $227.00. Houston, we have a winner!

But do we, really?

Let's say the second site has an art set up charge of $90 plus shipping and handling BUT the first one is only $40 and if you order by Friday you get free shipping. Well that just bounced the 650 up to $317.00 which brought them up to $.48 a piece. So they are still cheaper than the first site per item but it may be a win for your pocketbook to stick to the $250.00. Or you can team up with another author and cut your cost even more!

For the Romantic Times Booklovers Conference in 2009, I joined forces with Ashlyn Chase to purchase 1000 coffee mugs.

By splitting all the production and shipping costs we were able to get a nicer swag item. It was popular for sure!

Other authors have also combined their money to come up with bigger items for that conference. C.T. Adams & Cathy Clamp offered the cutest lunch bags that were handed out at the 2009 RT Awards that were just stuffed with books. I use mine on a daily basis - good advertising for them, right?

Some good sites to look for promotional items are:

1. http://www.4imprint.com/
2. http://www.motivators.com/
3. http://www.gopromos.com/

You can also ask your fellow authors who they use. Pay attention if they tell you that the customer service was not good. Bad customer service is never worth the money you save.

For my publisher's convention, RomantiCon 2010 this October in Ohio, I will be offering mini bottles of Tabasco with my name, website and tagline.



Here is the actual size.



My plan is to put these out with my business cards and some postcards featuring my latest book, Needing Harte, with the tagline "Add a little Spice to your Life." This story is my first novella-length M/M set in a BDSM world and will release on October 6. You can find that here.

Needing Harte

Harte Donovan has a problem. A murder leads him to wanting a sexy stripper bound and naked in front of him. He can’t let his secret desires ruin his career as a detective. When he’s given a mysterious business card, Harte discovers a side of himself he intends to fully embrace.

Ramey Nichols strips for a living and he’s not willing to pretend to be something he’s not. When this sexy submissive meets the closeted cop and unwitting Dom, something has got to give. That something might just be Ramey. Ramey knows what he wants, and more than that, finds himself Needing Harte.

This is part of a brand-new series called 1-800-DOM-help

So what kind of swag do you like to get? Do you still have anything from conventions past? If you have a great promo place, please share it with us.

A Fan of Fans

A couple of weeks ago I had the fun of going to the Romantic Times convention in Columbus Ohio. For those who haven’t been to this convention, it is a great place for authors to promote their books in a setting of parties, cover models, and general goofiness. I always have a great time at this convention, which is one of the reasons I go.

Many of the people who go to the convention are readers and booksellers, both of which are good people for an author to get to know. For the readers it is can be an opportunity to meet their favorite authors. For me it is a great place to meet my fans.

And yes, that’s right, in spite of my being a small press author who sells far fewer books than some of my contemporaries, I have fans. And I mean fans in the sense of people who almost know my books better than I do and love talking about them.

At the last convention I had an extended conversation about one of my Gaian science fiction romance books with a delightful young woman who was intently curious as to why in my short story “The Girl In The Box” my hero’s father was acting as a trader in the Outer Colonies. You see in the novel “Promises To Keep” I describe General Garran Doranth as an engineer and inventor, and surely he would have gone back to doing that once the war was over.

And she was right. I’d made Garran a trader so he and his son would be out in space where Ganth could meet the heroine Ami. Otherwise I didn’t have a story. But was that the only reason? Was there a better one for why Garran be  acting as a trader twenty or so years in the future?

Actually I had layered into the story a hint that Garran and Ganth were actively engaged in espionage activities, a follow-on to Garran having led the Gaian military during their revolutionary war against Earth. Keeping an eye on Earth’s activities in the Outer Colonies would be an obvious thing for Garran to do I had thought, and that had provided the reason behind the attempt against his and his son’s life that was also part of the story. I couldn’t go into too much detail on Garran being a spy because the story was only five thousand words, but the hints were there.

I absolutely loved having this conversation with this reader. First of all, even if only a few people are reading my books, knowing they are getting more out of the story than I expected makes me happy. Also I work hard at putting in the subtle hints that there might be more to a story than is just what is on the page. When a reader tells me she often reads one of my books twice, first to get the story, then to see where I’d hinted at what was going to happen, then that work is justified. The reader “got” my story.

That’s why I’m a fan of fans.

Cheers,

Janet Miller/Cricket Starr
Interested in more? See my website

Highway to Hell...or Cai & Arwen's Very Unexcellent Adventure

Ain't nothing I would rather do
Going down, party time
My friends are gonna be there too
I'm on the Highway to Hell...
Lyrics by ACDC

The hero of my latest story is a big fan of ACDC, so I felt it appropriate to start my blog off with those lyrics. In Sex and Trouble, Rosier escapes his boredom with captivity by blasting heavy metal. I knew when I set off to Romantic Times Book Lovers Convention 2010 in Columbus, Ohio, that I wouldn't be playing a lot of heavy metal, though. You see, I am two people - Cai Smith and Arwen Lynch. One of us, Cai, loves the headbangin' stuff while the other, Arwen, is more of a folkie. We compromise on music and both adore audio books.

When we left Fort Worth, Texas at 5:30 AM Monday morning, we fully expected to arrive at the convention hotel by midnight at the latest since both the GPS and Google Maps told us it was a 15.5 hour drive. Little did we know that the Universe had other things in mind for our journey...

We cruised up the highway to Arkansas--pleased with the time we were making and the journey itself--then on through Tennessee and into Kentucky. And that's where the wheels started to fall off. We stopped regularly for gas, potty breaks and to walk around a bit, stretching those traveling kinks out. On one of those stops at some very nice but nameless roadside rest stop, Cai decided to take her contacts out. Her eyes were tired so it was time for glasses.

Unfortunately, one contact decided not to cooperate. Cai scratched her cornea trying to get the darned thing out. Arwen took over the wheel, but drove only until we reached Elizabethtown, KY. We hit the local ER so Cai's eye could be checked out. Sure enough, she'd injured her eye badly enough to need an antibiotic cream. Two and a half hours later, we were back on the road with Cai behind the wheel once again.

We have a great friendship that goes back many years. One of the things we knwow is that Cai is the driver and Arwen is the passenger. Some day we'll tell you the story of how Arwen nearly drove into a mountain when she saw some unusual animals on the side of the road. "Look! Buffalo," is how that story starts. Cai prefers to arrive alive so she drives the bulk when we go on long trips.

If we ever go on a long trip after this highway to hell excursion, that is! So, there we are in the car, plotting our next book and laughing about the ER being the worst part of the trip. OOPS! Never say that where "They" can hear you. In the darkest part of the night, on one of Kentucky's (and possibly the USA's) most dangerous stretches of highway, we hit a pothole the size of a Newfoundland...I kid you not.

BOOM!

The car shakes and shudders like a bronco on speed as Cai curses and guides the car to the narrowest piece of shoulder we've ever seen. She's so close to the guardrail that Arwen can barely squeeze out of the passenger-side door. Eighteen-wheelers are zooming past so fast and so close that the car vibrates violently. We have blown a tire on a hill about 31 miles south of Cincinnati. This is on Highway 41N and we're also on a bridge. Can you say, "perfect horror movie setup?"

We could.

Once Cai managed to stop shaking, we called AAA. This is when we received the worst customer service EVER! The operator manages to make us feel like the worst idiots in the world because we're on a stretch of highway neither of us has ever traveled before and we don't know what exit we passed last or what the next exit coming up might be. I know it's hard to believe that we didn't mark each exit on the highway that neither of us has ever been on before as we passed it, right? This woman expressed nothing but contempt and irritation while by-passing even the smallest bit of sympathy for our nightmarish situation. The fact that we were calling her with this "emergency roadside issue" at nearly 2AM seemed to have escaped her notice entirely.

She even told us she could not send someone out if she didn't know where we were. Luckily, Arwen and Cai both have GPS phones. We were able to give her the nearest coordinates. AAA will be receiving a very irate letter about that woman's lack of empathy! But she did manage to send us our knight in a shiny roll-back wrecker, Gene! He was our senior by many years.

Gene towed us down the mountain scolding us about our tires and where we were on the road. You felt like your granddad has just told you off! He was a real sweetheart and our hero. After he put the spare (one of those blasted doughnut tires!) on, he assured us we could make it to Columbus if we only went 60MPH. So we did...

When we reached the convention hotel in Columbus, it was 6:30AM EST Tuesday. We collapsed in our hotel room thanking our personal Higher Powers for seeing us safely there - albeit with a tad more excitement than we might have liked.

Have you ever had a "Highway to Hell" road trip? We'd love to hear YOUR adventures!

And, if you like steamy paranormal romantica, check out our hero Rosier in Sex and Trouble, available digitally from Jasmine Jade Publishing--http://www.jasminejade.com/pm-8274-444-sex-and-trouble.aspx His adventure involves being released from captivity by a very nice, albeit newbie witch!