writing life

Going live!

/ Scott Nagele / 3 Comments

Book release day, or as Amazon calls it, “Going Live.” It’s exciting for sure, but it’s also leaves one with a feeling of vulnerability. How do I get this book in front of people? How do I persuade them to give it chance? For those who do give it a chance, how do I encourage them to give feedback? What will the tone of the feedback be?

Writing is hard work, but it’s safe work. It happens in your own world, the one you control, mostly. Everything that comes after writing has to happen in a much broader world. This world you can only hope to influence. It’s a wide world filled with questions you can’t answer on your own. You need help, you need to hone your beyond-writing skills, and perhaps most of all, you need to rely on the faith that you wrote a good book.

Here’s a skill I’m trying to hone: creating a sell sheet for my new novel. I welcome comments on its look and appeal.

For those interested, here are the purchase links:

Paperback

Kindle

I appreciate every single look this book gets. There are a lot of good books out there, and most people have a limited supply of money. It’s a wonderfully humbling thing when someone spends their money on your art, but I am also grateful for the people willing to share a post, or tell a friend, or just leave an encouraging word. Every little bit helps.

Writing is difficult work. For many writers, promotion, marketing, publicity (everything that falls under the heading of reaching out) is the most difficult work of all. That said, thank you for reading this post.

The first review

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Last week I introduced my new novel (out later this month). Today I am sharing a pre-publication review from BookLife. BookLife is the Indie books arm of Publisher’s Weekly.

Every author would love a review filled with phrases like, “Best book I ever read,” “Life-changing,” or “Most influential book of its time.” This review includes none of those phrases. That’s probably a good thing, because if it did contain those phrases, you’d likely wonder which of my aunts writes reviews for BookLife.

Nonetheless, I think it’s a fairly positive review. It has a couple of minor factual errors in the first paragraph, which my aunt would never have made (e.g. substitute “early twentieth century” for “late nineteenth century”), but I don’t think those types of gaffes are rare for the first paragraphs of reviews. Anyhow, I believe the assessment piece is more valuable to readers than the plot summary in any review.

Enough reviewing the review. Here it is.

This fascinating supernatural tale from Nagele (A Housefly in Autumn), told in an offhanded style that keeps readers off balance, opens with five-year-old Emma’s asking, at a family dinner, about “The Other Place.” She has recurring dreams of a mysterious being, The Gatekeeper, who takes her from present-day Pennsylvania to a late nineteenth century farm where she sees an older girl, Mary Ellen, who looks very much like Emma. For mysterious reasons, the Gatekeeper repeatedly forces Emma to get the other girl in trouble by setting fires—and he threatens to harm Emma’s parents, Rob and Marcia, if she disobeys. Rob and MarcFrontia alternate between dismissing Emma’s dreams to fearing that she might be losing her grip on reality, echoing the thinking of Alex and Janet, Mary Ellen’s parents. That couple frequently beats Mary Ellen, as punishment for the fires, and The Gatekeeper urges her to take murderous revenge.

Quick paced and unsettling, The Other Place offers readers teasing mysteries to work through along with Emma’s parents. One surprising thread: what is the connection between The Gatekeeper and the song version of William Hughes Mearns’s poem “Antigonish”? As Emma’s dreams increasingly seem like they might be real, she finds herself inside Mary Ellen’s mind, fighting to keep Mary Ellen from being driven to murder, while Rob and Marcia eventually accept that their daughter is not delusional, they struggle to save both girls from The Gatekeeper.

Nagele weaves an intriguing story about families, childhood, the supernatural, self-sacrifice, and innocence both lost and saved, though the pace and pared-down language come at the expense of fleshing out the characters, especially Emma and her family. Scenes of abuse and terrorized children will put off some readers, but Emma’s fight to save Mary Ellen from evil is admirable, her determination and kindness shining through. The Other Place is rich in detail of the places past and present, and readers of horror-tinged historical mysteries will be intrigued to learn more about Glenn Miller and William Hughes Mearns.

A book in the hand is worth four waiting for edits

/ Scott Nagele / 4 Comments

The last time I wrote a post here about my writing projects, and I’m ashamed to say how long ago that was, I wrote about a four-book series in which I was knee-deep at the time. The good news is that I finished writing that series. The bad news is all the post-writing difficulties. Professional editing alone represents a prohibitive cost to the production of the set. And that’s just one of the things that needs to happen to the adolescent manuscripts before they can grow up to be big, strong books.

While considering how to embark upon that transition (i.e. banging my head against a wall), I have not been completely idle in other areas, except for blogging, in which pursuit I have been near completely idle. While I have not been blogging, or producing a marketable series, I have been working on this:

Granted, it’s not a series. It’s just a solitary novel. But on the plus side, it has been professionally edited. More to its credit, it has a cover, front and back. It’s even formatted in an easily-readable fashion. It may be a little thing (compared to a multi-book saga), but it’s very nearly done. That is to say, it’s almost an actual book, the kind people could buy and read if the fancy so struck them. And as Hans Christian Andersen was wont to say, “That is certainly something.” (Disclaimer: I don’t really know what Hans said in Danish; but the English translations usually amount to the quote above.)

If I click all the right buttons on the right web pages, this book will be released in May, 2023. If I don’t, it’s off to remedial button-clicking class for me. Anyway, enough about my technology issues, here’s the marketing blurb.

Emma and her parents share recurring dreams, in which they are a different family, living 100 years ago in an unfamiliar place, and heading toward tragedy. When Emma’s parents discover their dream family actually existed, it becomes clear that these visits to the past are more than mere dreams—they are playing an unseen role in this historical family’s lives. As the century-old history of this troubled family materializes, it reveals the truth that the impending tragedy spells doom for both families. Only five-year-old Emma has the power to avert disaster, but it will require extraordinary courage against overwhelming evil for Emma to save both families from destruction in The Other Place.

I will post more updates about this book through its publication. In theory, this will serve the dual purposes of building awareness about the book and making me back into the sort of active blogger I used to be. It may also give me something better to do than bang my head against the wall trying to discover a way to manage the production of four hefty novels in succession. That would be the icing on the cake, but a good cake without any icing would be enough for me right now.

The many voices of Eileen

/ Scott Nagele / 4 Comments

I keep getting phone calls and emails from people raving about my books. Part of the problem with this is I think they’re all the same three people. The bigger part of the problem is they are all telemarketers.

I rarely answer the phone if I don’t know the caller. My persistent fans always leave voicemails. The familiar message starts along these lines:

“Hello. This is Eileen Smith at [some company you’ve never heard of]. We got a very good recommendation on your book, and we wanted to see if we could help you get the word out about it.”

The message goes on to list some vague connections Eileen’s people have in the publishing industry and mention some unspecified opportunities for me, the talented author, to make the most of effective book marketing.

Eileen thanks me kindly and ends by telling me how excited she is to receive a call back from me.

Eileen never gets a call back from me.

I do Google her though. Well, not Eileen herself, but whatever company she claims to represent. I do this if I can hear the name she said. You see Eileen has a pronounced accent. She really doesn’t sound like your typical Smith at all. What makes Eileen even more mysterious is that her accent changes from call to call. It’s almost as if there are several Eileen Smiths with different first languages, who all studied English so they could speak to me about my unnamed, highly recommended book.

“Eileen Smith and Eileen Smith, meet your new colleague, Eileen Smith. This highly recommended book is such a big deal, I need to throw a third Eileen Smith at it.”

When I can Google Eileen’s outfit, it’s always an unknown marketing company, or an equally obscure Print-on-Demand publisher with a typical menu of paid POD marketing services. It turns out Eileen works for several different companies. Or maybe each of the several Eileens works for a similar company. Or maybe each of the several Eileens works for the same company that offers its helpful services under different names as time goes by.

I’m not sure which Eileen Smith works where, and I’m okay with that. The true burning question is who so highly recommend my book to her. I have this image in my head of some discriminating reader turning the last page of a book and saying aloud, “Wow, that was a highly recommendable book! I should let Eileen Smith know about it right away! And while I’m at it, I’ll also highly recommend it to Eileen Smith. And also Eileen Smith. The Eileen Smiths will know what to do about this!”

Once, Eileen Smith actually mentioned the name of one of my books. This impressed me. It showed that somebody was sparing no expense in buying the call list that also had titles on it. That Eileen Smith’s branch of the company went above and beyond.

It made me proud that I, and my highly recommended book, were on her sales sheet that day. I hope the extra effort gets Eileen Smith noticed by the recruiters at Random House. If she worked there, I’d call her back.