Okay, I'm Embarrassed....

One of the things I harp about, both on my Marketing Musings blog and to clients, is the importance of "branding" your endeavors. Branding is important --- it helps create an identity for you and/or your business, services, products, etc. This is particularly important for small, independent and micro-publishers who are trying to establish themselves in a gigantic marketplace. One of the best examples of branding I have seen by a small publisher is Level Best Books' covers for their annual crime anthologies.
Like a lot of small publishers I started out with a web site for my small press, www.ParlezMoiPress.com. Then, on the advice of several authorities on marketing, I purchased the URL for my name, too, www.KathleenValentine.com and set up a page for that. After that I acquired the URLs for the books I was either publishing or promoting through Parlez-Moi Press. Every time I did that I set up a web page to go with it. All well and good except..... As I talked more and more to clients about establishing their "look" I became increasingly aware that I was not practicing what I was preaching. It got to the point where it was embarrassing. So right after Christmas I set myself the task of re-designing my own conglomeration of web sites.

Since the site I liked the best was www.KathleenValentine.com, I decided to use that as the model for the rest.

First I re-did www.ParlezMoiPress. I still have content to add but at least I'm not embarrassed by the look of it any more.

Then I went on to add the pages for my four current books --- two of which are published and two of which will be within the year. The first of these is my collection of romantic short stories, My Last Romance and other passions at www.MyLastRomance.com.

Then came the page for The Old Mermaid's Tale. I had a rather extensive site for that and I realized that most of the stuff I had on it was just fluff. I trimmed it down to one page and it is now at The Old Mermaid's Tale:

Since I am frantically trying to get The Mermaid Shawl ready for press (it is with an editor at the moment), I wanted to get that updated because it is getting a lot of visitors. It can be seen at www.MermaidShawl.com:

And, finally, my soon-to-be-published novel, Each Angel Burns, which is going through the final set of editorial changes, need to be added. It is now at www.EachAngelBurns.com:

So, that's my current effort to do for myself what I do for others. I discovered I am an unruly and impatient client! But I think this is a big improvement. Now to get the books out!

IPNE Member Erica Ferencik announces release of Cracks in the Foundation

CRACKS IN THE FOUNDATION

Author Erica Ferencik’s Outrageous Tale of Real Estate Hell, Spells and White Zinfandel Gives Readers Something to Laugh About in Hard Times

Just Released! August, 2008

Ginger Kanadoo of Kanadoo Real Estate NEEDS A SALE. Worn out, hard-up, and so hung over she can barely tell a property line from a panty line, she’ll do just about anything to make somebody -- anybody -- sign on the dotted line!

Alex Beam of the Boston Globe says: “It’s hard to think of real estate without crying… Well, try laughing, instead. Erica Ferencik convinces us that comic reality is more hysterical than we ever imagined.”

Tony Kahn of National Public Radio calls “Erica one of our most popular podcast contributors, a triple threat humorist and fiction writer with the heart of an angel, the wit of a first rate satirist, and the zaniness of John Cleese.”

After 39 years of digging for paydirt in Squamskootnocket, New York’s famously feeble real estate market, Ginger Kanadoo has again struck…dirt. Her newest listing? A “starter” outhouse with water views of weed-choked Squamskootnocket Lake. With no closings in a year and the wolf at the door, Ginger will stop at nothing to seal a deal – she’ll even team up with her 93-year-old aunt Maxie Kanadoo, “The World’s Oldest Living Realtor!” Meanwhile, Ginger’s own badass, newly Wiccan daughter Harvest is eager to pitch in with a naked rite or two. Then there’s Tandy Brickenhausen, the cleavage-wielding rival out to poach every listing in a hundred mile radius.

Will the outhouse find a buyer? Will Harvest’s potions conjure a sale, or wake the dead? Will Maxie retain her coveted title? Will somebody let the air out of Tandy’s bra?

Not since A Confederacy of Dunces’ Ignatius J. Reilly has a scrapper like Ginger Kanadoo afforded such a window into the ridiculous and the sublime. This dead-on send-up of the wild, wild world of real estate, small towns, white zinfandel, black magic, outhouses and the American Dream is the perfect antidote to this gloomy real estate market.

Erica Ferencik is an author and realtor in the Boston area with 10+ years on comedy stages all over New England and a featured contributor to National Public Radio’s “Morning Stories.”

Review copies available upon request, full media kit available online at www.WakingDreamPress.com. Spanking new in 2008, Waking Dream Press is dedicated to publishing high quality trade paperback fiction. Check out the next wave in independent publishing!

Cracks in the Foundation by Erica Ferencik, ISBN: 978-0-9815741-0-3, 5 ½”x 8 ½”, 312 pages, $14.95 (US) Trade Paperback Edition/Publication Date: August 22, 2008, Waking Dream Press, 58 Harrington Road, Framingham, MA 01701, USA, 508-284-5254, Erica@wakingdreampress.com.

Is There Justice for the World of Publishing?

On Thursday, August 28 In Middlesex Superior Court, Woburn, MA a motion alleging fraud on the court will be presented in the case of Misha Defonseca and Vera Lee vs. Jane Daniel and Mount Ivy Press. For those who have followed my blog over the last year, you know this story all too well. For those who are new here there are plenty of places you can go to read about it --- you can start at BESTSELLER! The story is this:

1. Jane Daniel met Misha Defonseca, a Millis woman who claimed to be a Holocaust survivor. Defonseca told a remarkable tale of losing her parents to Hitler's death camps and surviving by spending four years walking across Europe. Daniel was so impressed with the story that she offered to help Defonseca write the book and Daniel would publish it through her small publishing company, Mt Ivy Press. Defonseca agreed and signed a contract verifying that the story was true and had happened to her.

2. Daniel financed the writing of the book which included hiring a French-speaking ghost writer, Vera Lee, because Defonseca's English was not good.

3. Lee and Defonseca signed a contract with Daniel and collaborated on the writing of the book. The contract stipulated that: a.) the story was true, and b.) the content of the final draft would be in a form and of content acceptable to the publisher.

4. While Defonseca worked with Lee to write the book, Daniel began marketing the book which included a.) hiring a prestigious literary agency (Palmer & Dodge), b.) getting a contract with a prestigious speakers bureau for Defonseca, c.) arranging for many appearances including one on the Oprah Winfrey Show, d.) marketing the dramatic rights to the Disney Corporation

5. Quarrels arose between the two writers. Daniel was not satisfied with the form and content of the manuscript and stepped in to expedite finishing the script in order to meet contractual deadlines.

6. Lee, unhappy with Daniel's rejection of her writing, withdrew from the project and filed suit against Daniel. Subsequently lawsuits broke out all over the place and in 2001 a court awarded Lee and Defonseca a $33 million judgment against Daniel.

7. The court also awarded the copyright of the book, which Daniel financed the writing of, to Defonseca.

8. After the lawsuit Defonseca took the book that Daniel had financed to Europe and sold it to 18 other publishers and sold the movie rights to filmmaker Vera Belmont whose movie, based on the book, premiered in December 2007

9. In February 2008 Defonseca confessed that the story was a hoax, that she was not Jewish, that she had never traveled across Europe, and that the entire story was a lie.

10. Subsequently Daniel filed a complaint alleging fraud on the court on Defonseca's part because the entire lawsuit Defonseca had brought against her was based on lies and that, because she had signed a contract verifying that the story was true, the contract was void from the beginning, thus, in absence of a contract, Daniel had no obligations to Defonseca. Furthermore, Defonseca's testimony in the trial was perjured from the beginning.

Now, it doesn't take John Houseman to see that this is a simple case of contract law. Given the above facts, what will the court do? Will it refuse to overturn the case thus legitimizing Defonseca's hoax and the subsequent fraud, contract violation, and perjury? Or will it overturn the judgment after all these years and vacate the $33 million dollar judgment against Daniel?

These are questions no one in the publishing/literary world can ignore. If you read the Findings and Facts and Rulings of Law handed down at the end of the trial it is utterly and completely terrifying to those of us who are independent publishers or, in fact, publishers of any sort. The Findings of Fact, etc. is filled with so-called findings that should scare us all. Mt Ivy Press, it finds, was a “sham” company. Why? Good question. How many small presses are there in this country that would fit that description according to their definition? Daniel “misrepresented” her company's ability to promote Defonseca's book. How well would any of us be able to compare our abilities as publishers to what Daniel did?

The question is this, if an author signs a contract swearing that the story they are telling is true and then, after winning hundreds of thousands of dollars, plus the rights to the book which they also sell for hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of dollars, then admits she lied, can she get away with it?

We'll find out on August 28^th.

Thanks for reading.

Upcoming Author Events for IPNE Member Jean Boggio

IPNE member Jean Boggio, author of Stolen Fields: A Story of Eminent Domain and the Death of the American Dream and Finalist for the Indie Next Generation Book Awards, will make numerous public appearances in the coming two months. If you're in the area, drop in and lend your support!

Book Talks:
Aug. 26	6:30 pm	Rockland Public Library Rockland, Maine
Sept. 6	2:00 pm	Bangor Public Library Bangor, Maine
Oct. 1	1:00 pm	Ridgewood Public Library Ridgewood, NJ
Oct. 3-5	9am-5pm	Venango County Historical Society Franklin, PA in conjunction with Apple Fest

The Book Delivery Arrives! An IPNE member shares her experience

On Wednesday, March 5th I ended up calling out from work as I received notice late Tuesday that my 2000 books would be arriving. Well, of course, it was pouring rain that later turned to ice, and the books did not arrive. But I was nervous as a cat all day waiting for them and wondering how a tractor trailer was going to turn around on my road -- a dead end. The LSI rep who took the order, knew it was a residence and I hoped they would send a smaller truck. I was in a state all day wondering how I was going to get the books into the house, and wasn't even sure they'd be packed in boxes. By dinnertime I realized they weren't coming that day, but started worrying about where they were. I had images of the truck overturned on Rt. 95 and the books scattered all over the highway. At midnight I received a message on the tracking site to call customer service!

When I did so, I found the books were safely in Bangor and would be delivered Thursday. I had the chance to explain about the road and we agreed that the driver would call me once he was in Belfast and we'd arrange to meet. I knew it would take at least 2 trips in my SUV to unload the books from the truck and get them home.

Finally, in the afternoon, I met the truck -- a huge tractor trailer. The driver very kindly helped me unload and load about 2/3 of the boxes into my SUV, then he went on another delivery in the area and agreed to meet me back at the spot in a little while.

I drove the 2 miles to my house and managed to work feverishly to get the boxes out of the car onto the patio -- all the while wondering what I would have done if they had arrived the day before in the rain and ice!

I got back to the truck and the driver was waiting patiently, and had the remaining boxes sitting on the back of the truck. He again helped me (although his instructions had been he couldn't help with the second loading) so now I at least had all the books.

I spent the rest of the evening bringing the rest of the boxes into the house and figuring out where to store them! I left one box in the car for ready sales. I was really glad I didn't order 3000 books!

Meanwhile, my boss hasn't posted the April schedule yet but it was too chaotic at work to be making any requests. So I'll just have to leave it to chance.

Jean Boggio - Colerith Press
www.colerithpress.com
www.jeanboggio.com

Promoting Books with Video

If you watch the Super Bowl you know that part of the fun of doing that is watching the commercials. Ad agencies around the country work all year to come up with the most clever and ingenious commercials for their clients to debut on Super Sunday. Those commercials cost millions of dollars and reach millions of viewers. Small independent publishers don't stand a chance of ever affording one of those commercials but there is a way to get a "commercial" about your books where millions of people can see them --- promotional videos.

The World Wide Web has given anyone with a product or service to sell a huge forum in which to do it but, as most of us know, getting attention is the big issue. Most of us have web sites and a lot of us have blogs. We can join cyber communities through Amazon and Author's Den and many more such services but getting your product out there is an ongoing challenge. One interesting and effective tool is the growing number of video sites that literally millions of people access every day. So I decided to give it a try.

I knew I wanted to promote my novel The Old Mermaid's Tale and I wanted to get the video live before Valentine's Day in the hopes of taking advantage of the holiday named after me (or the reverse --- I've never been sure which). Since my business, Valentine-Design.com, specializes in web sites and promotional materials for small businesses I figured I should be my own customer. This is how I went about it:
1. Write a script. I knew I wanted to keep my video under a minute and I wanted to create a mood of romance and adventure. I figured each slide in my video would require about 3 seconds of time so I decided on 20 slides (I actually wound up with 24 when I added credits). I wrote a script that consisted of 17 lines of text --- one for each slide.

2. Create a storyboard. On a big yellow legal pad and in my favorite coffee shop with a huge mug of turbo-charged caffeine I drew out a series of squares and began filling them in. The first slide would be an intro, 17 slides for the script, 3 slides featuring the title of the book with a picture of the cover, a blurb, and where to get it. Another slide was added to promote my previous book of romantic love stories (remember this is for Valentine's Day), a slide for the credits, and a final slide with URLS for my press and my blog.

3. Assembling the images. I searched through my own photographs, art work, and collection of scanned art and then went on-line and took images from free photo sites including government sites like the Hubble Telescope. By Googling "free stock photography" I found a wealth of sites where people posted photos that are available for anyone to use.

4. Designing the slides. In Photoshop I created a frame that was the size I wanted all my slides to conform to. One by one I assembled the images using layers, lighting effects, and a variety of filters to give each slide the mood I wanted it to have. I knew that I wanted to keep to a particular color palate of mysterious, deep colors so the white text would really stand out when layered over them. Once the slides were ready I added the text.

5. Selecting the music. I knew I wanted music for the background. In the past I've purchased stock music from sites like MusicBakery.com but for this video I decided to use a snippet of music from a CD. I put the CD in my disc drive and copied it to the hard drive and used Windows Media Player to convert it to MP3 format. Then I downloaded a small freeware program called InAudio to edit the piece down to one minute.

6. Putting it all together. I used Flash MX to assemble the slides and add the music adjusting transitions and timing as I went along. There are many freeware or shareware programs that you can find on Tucows.com that do the same thing. When the video looked the way I wanted it to I clicked Publish and my computer created my video.

7. Here it is!

As soon as I was satisfied I uploaded my file to my various web sites. The next step is to convert the SWF (Flash) file to an MPEG or WMV file to post to Google Video, YouTube, etc. If your computer has Movie Maker on it (mine doesn't) you may be able to skip this step by assembling your movie in that instead of Flash.

And there you have it, a commercial that the entire cyber-world has access to. It might not be the Super Bowl but it's pretty super for us little guys.

- Visit Parlez-Moi Blog for more information on book promotion and marketing.

A Publisher's Dream Turned to Nightmare

The court found for the authors and against the publisher. The judgement: $33 MILLION. Just seven years ago it was the largest award of its kind. The complaint was a contract dispute — the author claimed her book had failed in the United States because it was not properly marketed.

At this point many of the authors out there are laughing and saying, “How can I get in on this? My publisher hasn’t done a thing to market my book!” These days authors know that, if their book is going to sell, it is they who are going to do all the work. A few years ago things were, it seems, different.

The case in question was brought by two women, co-authors Misha Defonseca and Vera Lee, against their publisher Mt. Ivy Press and its owner Jane Daniel. It was tried in Suffolk Superior Court and the ruling was handed down in 2000. The book that began the entire controversy was titled Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years and was about Defonseca’s experiences as a Jewish child in Europe during that period. Defonseca was living with her parents in Brussels and they were in hiding. She was seven years old when her parents were captured and she was placed in a foster home from which she escaped. She spent the next several years traveling on foot around Europe trying to find them. She lived with a pack of wolves who took care of her. It was quite an adventure and a book that looked like it had potential.

Jane Daniel had a small independent press that published a book titled Gigolos (which you can still buy on Amazon) and a few other titles. Through her friend, attorney Jan Schlictman, she met Defonseca and they agreed to do the book together. Jane’s best friend and next-door neighbor Vera Lee, a retired French professor, agreed to help because Misha’s native tongue was French and she needed translation support telling her story. While Misha and Vera began the long, arduous task of writing the book, Jane began to market it.

She had worked with the prestigious literary agency Palmer and Dodge (now Edwards, Angell, Palmer and Dodge) and literary marketing gurus, Ike Williams and Elaine Rogers (now with Fish and Richardson), before. They agreed to work with her on the Misha book. Before the book was even written Mt. Ivy had acquired a movie option from Disney who agreed to pay Misha as a consultant on the film. The Oprah show had flown a film crew to Massachusetts to shoot footage of Misha with the wolves at Wolf Hollow in Ipswich. Translation rights abroad were sold. A schedule of speaking engagement through a reputable speakers bureau was set up. This is the kind of promotion that most of us humble authors can only dream of! Disney! Oprah! Foreign translation sales!!! Who gets that kind of marketing? Misha is reported to have received over $200,000 in royalties just from the French edition alone! All the authors I know are salivating over that little fact.

But somewhere along the line the controversy began. Misha and Vera squabbled and Vera claimed she was being damaged by the project. She filed a lawsuit. Misha’s story was being questioned by Holocaust story experts and the Boston Globe’s David Mehegan wrote an article questioning its authenticity. More lawsuits were filed. Disney backed off and so did Oprah. Everything went awry and soon everyone was lawyered up. The chaos that ensued left Jane Daniel’s publishing company and life in tatters. For seven years she has battled to find some equity around this situation. Her family spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to help. She lost everything. She spent time in jail. Now they want her house. The nightmare seems endless. But Jane persists. Now that the legal cases are settled and she has nothing to lose she is writing about the case in a blog: BESTSELLER! which will become a book.

If you are an independent publisher — or a publisher of any sort — you need to read this blog. If you are an author you need to read it too. It is the story of a project that went awry and has created devastation. There are currently seven chapters on the blog. More are being added as the author completes them. It is gripping reading. Take a look at: BESTSELLERtheBook.blogspot.com

Thanks for reading.

Bookstore Tourism: Is There Anything To This Idea?

About two years ago I started following the work of Larry Portzline, author of the book "Bookstore Tourism". The guy was convincing booklovers to get on tourbuses -- he'd escort them to great bookstores for a day of recreational bookhunting. Not only was he dragging customers to bookstores; he was doing his best to convince the movers and shakers in the bookselling, publishing and library fields that they ought to be getting with his program. He created a complex website, www.bookstoretourism.com, and put together a killer Board for a nascent organization called The National Council For Bookstore Tourism.

What a guy! I had a couple of email exchanges with him -- but of course I was busy and couldn't really think too hard about what he was up to.

But about a month ago I got caught up in a conversation on Jessica Stockton's blog, Written Nerd -- here on Blogger (http://writtennerd.blogspot.com) -- and I said the only really exciting new way for bookstores to be roped into working together was Larry's idea of busing customers along on a tour of a group of stores. And Jessica called me on it, in public, asking when Larry and I were going to stop talking and start doing something more serious.

Well Larry seems to be all about his National Council -- he wants to get other people running Bookstore Tourism companies. So -- I'm going to try to lauch what I'm calling The First real for-profit such. It will be called BiblioExpeditions (thanks to Heidi Stemple for helping develop this name). I'm going to start with a product that exactly copies the Greenwich Village Bookstore Tours which Larry developed in 2003 for bringing booklovers from Harrisburg, PA into NYC for the day. I'm going to aim to run 100 of these per year, from sites in a three-hour driving radius of New York. I must be crazy. Yes.

Here (below) is the business overview I cooked up last week. As you'll see I've built in my favorite themes of corporate sponsorship and financial kickbacks and incentives for all. Please feel free to lob jeers and insults (or constructive comments!) my way -- and, if you feel like investing in the business, I'll accept cash, credit cards, gold -- it's all good.

Your Crazed Colleague,

Andy



BIBLIOEXPEDITIONS

OVERVIEW AND MISSION BiblioExpeditions is the nation's first “Bookstore Tourism” company. A Massachusetts-based for-profit corporation, BiblioExpeditions aims to mobilize readers to channel funds to libraries and community bookstores by gathering public, corporate, and non-profit organization support to achieve the National Endowment for the Arts' (NEA) “Big Read” mission: “To restore reading to the center of American culture.”

DEMAND AND OPPORTUNITY The landmark NEA report "Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America" (2004) documented a dramatic decline in literary reading among all age groups, ethnic groups, and education levels. BiblioExpeditions, noting that these findings correlate with a sharp decline in the number of bookstores, implements cause-related marketing campaigns that leverage booklovers' tales of journeying to great bookstores in order to create an image-enhancing value proposition for corporate sponsors. Sponsors invest in Calvert Social Investment Foundation “Community Investment Notes” (CINs) that underwrite rotating credit facilities to strengthen our partner bookstores.

STIMULATING INDUSTRY INVOLVEMENT The American Booksellers Association’s stated commitment to promoting bookstore tourism, coupled with BiblioExpeditions’ library fundraising services and publisher product-marketing opportunities, are the tools BiblioExpeditions uses to educate and incent community booksellers and publishers to work together to raise the public profile of recreational bookhunting at independent bookstores, opening new avenues of access to readers, while capturing market share from chainstores and online booksellers.

MOBILIZING SUPPLY Utilizing the Key Initiators Network Strategy of our partner Capital Missions Company, BiblioExpeditions is developing a Community Bookselling Financial Linkage Network composed of corporate executives personally committed to overcoming economic and financial barriers to the growth of community bookselling. These Thought Leaders’ companies will act as BiblioExpeditions’ major sponsors.

PUBLIC SERVICES BiblioExpeditions produces fundraising package tours that escort library patrons to shop at bookstores located within a three-hour driving radius of the host libraries.

MARKETING APPROACH Library outreach campaigns encourage librarians and library volunteers to contemplate roles for themselves in the future resurgence of community bookselling. The National Council on Bookstore Tourism's white-paper publications and seminars at regional and national library conventions will introduce BiblioExpeditions and bookstore tourism to thousands of librarians and Friends of Libraries volunteers each year.

BOOKSTORE PARTNERS BiblioExpeditions will fund the bookstores that serve as our tour destinations. Current partners are New York City's The Strand, McNally Robinson, Books Of Wonder, Housing Works Used Book Cafe, Bluestockings, Vox Pop, Skyline Books, Macondo Books, East-West Books, Lectorum Books, 12th Street Books, Alabaster Bookshop, Partners & Crime, Biography Bookshop, Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks, Three Lives & Company, Oscar Wilde Bookshop, St. Mark's Bookshop, East Village Books, Shakespeare & Company, Mercer Street Books, New York University Book Center and Booksleaves. We will add as many as 30 more bookstores by late 2008, in Boston, Philadelphia and Washington D.C.

The Triple Tulip Press

The Triple Tulip Press came to life through a convergence of circumstances. Typically, it is a self-publishing venture, its name derived from the three tulips who support it and whose background is Dutch: Titia Bozuwa, the author: Gijs, her physician/husband; and Paul, their son, who is in the printing business.

When, in 1990, I (Titia), needed to undergo a hip replacement requiring one month of rest, Gijs and Paul gave me a computer. A free-lance photographer by trade, I wondered what I would do with a computer. But the donors insisted that I had always been a prolific letter-writer and maybe I should go into this period of non-activity with the intent of writing about it.

I did. But what came out was not a story about my drug-addicted, hard-luck roommate, although that would have made a good story. Instead the hospital experience brought back the still raw memories of our daughter Joan, who died at 29 from breast cancer.

My husband was dismayed that I re-entered this painful territory, but Paul realized I was serious about writing and sent me a Mother’s Day card that was good for “taking a course in creative writing at a university of you own choice.”

I was on my way to the closest one, the University of New Hampshire, in no time. There, I was told it takes seven years before you can write in a somewhat objective way about a loss. I took their word for it and practiced writing meanwhile.

In 2000, I was ready to publish Joan, A Mother’s Memoir. It sold, saw a second printing, and the profits went to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

Because of the personal nature of the subject matter, I had wanted to retain control over the appearance and layout of the book. Thus, we started the Triple Tulip Press. Seeing that it was actually a lot of fun to publish, and since Paul could do the printing and help me through that whole process, I wrote a second book, In the Shadow of the Cathedral - Growing up During WW II. It came out in the fall of 2004 and is still selling. A Dutch publisher picked it up for translation and brought it out in 2005 during an impressive ceremony inside the very cathedral I had been writing about. Back in my hometown, I went through a whirlwind experience of TV, radio and newspaper reviews and talks to students in the schools I had attended during the war.

Meanwhile, I had started the Twin Farms Writers Workshops in 1996 where various UNH creative writing teachers come and give two five-day workshops in the summer.

On February 1st, 2007, my third book will be launched: Wings of Change - A Dutch Immigrant’s Journey.

My Last Romance and other passions

It’s here! I’m.... I don’t know... I opened the box yesterday and there were all these beautiful books with... with... with my name on them! It’s kind of intimidating. I birthed this baby and now that it’s in the world, I have to do something with it.

Of course the big issue now is marketing and promotion but I’ll worry about that tomorrow. The book is on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble and, within weeks, it will be on a lot of other book sales sites. I’ll have to handle local distribution and the press releases but I can do that but, of course, that’s not what this is about. This is about the fact that the world now has a book in it with my name on it.

This book is actually a bit of a canary that I am sending down into the coal mine to see how I feel about being an author. After all I have been through with the submission-acceptance-rejection cycle of The Old Mermaid’s Tale I had to rethink whether I wanted to continue to go through that or whether I wanted to do something less emotionally chaotic and go the independent press route. I know I am too emotionally attached to Mermaid to plunge right in with it. I really admire Mark for the way he has approached this. But, being less brave, I decided to gather up these eight stories, polish them up, and send them down the mine to see how frightening the whole thing really is. Less than 24 hours into the process, things are good.

But I want to talk a little bit about the eight stories in the book.

The title story, My Last Romance, is the story of Ruby and Silvio, two characters I genuinely love. I think, in my “other” life, I am Ruby, a torch singer with a big band, led by Silvio. They’ve had a tempestuous life — and a tempestuous romance and now, in their senior years the past has stirred things up for them. I think it is my best story.

There are three short-short stories, Asa, Damian and Danse Avec Moi. Asa was previously published in Level Best Books’ 2004 anthology, Riptide: Crime Stories by New England Writers. All three of them are steamy little vignettes about passionate women who love interesting men. I have to say I am moderately intimidated by their steaminess just because I don’t think people who know me would think I would write that way — but we shall see.

Flynnie and Babe is a sweet little love story about two people who have been through a lot in love and have not noticed the most obvious thing in the world — each other. It’s an old theme and yet one that is so ubiquitous that it bears re-interpretation.

Waiting for Lindy is the only story in the book written from a man’s point of view. It was fun to write. Guy, the hero of the story, lost his wife a few years back and has now fallen under the spell of a “younger” woman in her thirties. He is crazy about her but too uncertain to believe it will last. I love both Guy and his son Hugh in the story. They are both men I know well.

Treat Yourself to the Best was the hardest one to write because it is the one that is closest to my own life. I am nothing like Fifi, the main character, but my world and her world are very much alike. The ending of that story was a profound revelation for me!

The longest story in the book is also the one I am most attached to. The Haven is the story of a married woman, Chrissy, who feels unworthy of both her husband and of the life he has given her. Stash, her husband's much older cousin, is a hard-bitten, tattooed, scrappy mariner who was once the terror of the waterfront. But in Stash, Chrissy finds someone who sees her — sees her completely. I have a feeling it will be a challenging story for some people — I’ll be interested to hear reactions to it.

So this is my book. It is available now through Amazon and Barnes and Noble online and will soon be available from my My Last Romance web site. Or just call me or send me an email (inquiry at parlezmoipress dot com). I’ll send you one. If you like it, please leave feedback on Amazon — or B&N. I hope you do like it. These characters are dear to my heart.

Thanks for reading!