A Top Ten by guest blogger Mandy Williams, aka “Black”

1. NOT A BLOGGER.  This is my first blog and so if it is too long or too self-serving, my apologies.  
2. OUR APPROACH NOT REALLY “OURS”.  I co-authored the book ‘What I Learned About Life When My Husband Got Fired!’ with my sister, Tina Pennington, aka “Red”, and although we were invited to give you some philosophy and insight into our approach and plans, I must advise you that the comments presented here do not necessarily represent “our” thoughts.  You see, when it comes to the business side of our book, Red, who is first and foremost a mom, happily defers to me.
3. DO NOT JUDGE OUR BOOK BY ITS TITLE.  Red’s husband getting fired was merely the catalyst that started a three month “whirlwind” (her word, not mine) journey that started with personal finances and ultimately addressed fundamental life lessons. But this blog is not about the actual book, but rather our unusual approaches to publishing and marketing. Rather than me try to explain, I would prefer to direct you to Judith Rosen’s August article in Publishers Weekly which ran just after our Neiman Marcus launch.  (http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6678575.html)
4. NOT REALLY AUTHORS.  Although we have written a book, we do not think of ourselves as authors. In reality, given the format of the book, which is primarily emails, IMs and phone conversations, it would probably be more accurate to call us stenographers. 
5. NOT REALLY PUBLISHERS, EITHER.  And just because we self-published, it does not make us publishers. I am a retired corporate executive with significant business experience, although none in publishing. So I researched the industry and the publishing business model (which I must admit is one of the ugliest financial models I have ever seen!) before talking with several leading NY publishers and industry experts about our book idea. Without going into all the chronological details (although some of them are very amusing), the combination of our desire to get to market quickly, maintain control over the design and content, while also wanting a high quality, very professional final product, presented a challenge. So we created  a hybrid publishing model. We self-published, but used an established publisher, Bright Sky Press, as a publishing consultant. (Not only did they walk us through the publishing process, but they provided an editor, recommended a designer, bid the printing, oversaw the production, and countless other invaluable services.)  
6. BIGGER IS NOT BETTER, ONLY BIGGER.  Early in our relationship with Bright Sky Press we witnessed the devastating impact “returns” can have on small publishers when a large bookseller decides it overbought a title. I understood the logic behind the policy, especially in terms of independent booksellers, and the fact books are typically purchased based on a picture of a cover and some lines of copy. However, the policy had not changed although the places where people buy books have morphed from small social environments into big businesses driven by the bottom line. It reminded us of the movie ‘You’ve Got Mail’ with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, except the “real world” version had ‘Fox & Sons’ not only killing the competition’ but also bullying the suppliers. 
7. BUSINESS APPROACH MAY BE RISKY.  Entrepreneurs, whether booksellers, publishers, or any other small business, are becoming extinct. Unfortunately, this “evolution” is reflected across many industries, and the end result is that the entrepreneurial spirit is slowly – though some would say rapidly – disappearing. Small, niche businesses offering personal and individualized service struggle to survive in a world of instant gratification, price wars and mass marketing. (Just look at what Amazon, Wal-Mart and Target are currently doing!) We can not change Corporate America. And we do not really want to try. But when it comes to our book, we can do something. So we are supporting the entrepreneurial spirit of Indies by choosing not to have our book available in any other retail book environment, in “discounters” or on Amazon. 
8. WE BACK OUR WORDS WITH ACTIONS.  Many people have strong opinions, but at times it can be very difficult to reconcile your beliefs with your bottom line. When it came time for us to select a printer, we (really Bright Sky Press) put it out to bid, both domestically and overseas. If we had based our decision solely on the numbers, it would have been a very easy decision – the cost of printing domestically is basically TWICE the price of printing overseas. And that includes the additional shipping expense! (Hardcover books are almost a 4:1 multiple.) We asked the domestic printer to “defend” their pricing, and as expected, some of the increased cost was attributable to higher labor costs in the U.S., but the biggest difference was attributable to U.S. regulations, such as environmental laws and OSHA. (Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a division of the Department of Labor which establishes standards for workplace health and safety.) There is a price, often hidden, for maintaining high standards. And so, although a few people thought we were crazy, we took a deep breath and followed our hearts. And we are very proud to be able to say that our book is being printed in the U.S.A. by RRDonnelley. 
9. REALITY WILL INTERUPT PLANS.  I spent a good portion of my corporate career focused on financial plans and marketing strategies, so it should come as no surprise that I initially focused almost entirely on the book concept and marketing plans. (One close business friend repeatedly told me “Less Marketing. More Writing!”) I created a formal document outlining our concept overview and marketing strategy, and even identified our target demographics, including articles, statistics and competitive analysis to support our positions. And, except for the economic environment which made the title more timely, the original strategy remained basically unchanged since it was developed in 2004. But once the book was launched, less than three months ago, everything changed!  We initially thought our target market was baby boomer women, but based on responses from readers and the media (yes, they are telling us they are actually reading the book!) our book is resonating with men and women, ranging in ages from twenty-somethings to seniors. (Our ideas on “why” is a topic onto itself.) Where we initially thought the book would primarily be entertaining and secondarily would provide useful information, our readers are telling us the exact opposite. And then last week … we met with an executive director at a local charter school who had been told about our book. At first, he did not think his students could relate to Red and I, but by the time the meeting was over he had asked us to put together a curriculum for us to teach to his senior class this spring.  We are honored and never could have imagined this would be a direction we would be taking. The fact we now have to postpone our marketing efforts is a small price to pay in exchange for this amazing opportunity – to make a difference in the lives of children.     
10. WE MAY SOUND ARROGANT.  It really does not matter to us if you agree with our philosophies, think our business decisions are good or bad, or whether as first-time authors the path we are taking is right or wrong. It might make for interesting discussion, and even ended up on this blog, but it will not change anything. Our decisions are based on what we believe. And as I taught Red during her “crisis” (again, her word, not mine) regardless of the topic, there is a very simple, but effective, process to making decisions. The strength of our decisions is based on the fact we first asked questions, gathered information and then (based on our values and beliefs) were able to make smart, conscious decisions. 

Hope this gives you food for thought!  And if all this blog does is make you stop and think about what you believe, and what motivates you, and lets you know that what you do and what you stand for can make a difference, then great.  And if it makes you curious about our book, even better. Check out our website, www.redandblackbooks.com, and enter through “For Independent Booksellers” as we created that section specifically for you.

Mary Alice Monroe

SIBA Guest Blogger

HOW SEA TURTLES CHANGED MY LIFE.

When I moved to the Lowcountry of South Carolina, I had already published six novels.  These were character-driven novels based on archetypal themes.  Stories about relationships–wives and husbands, sisters, friends.  But when I moved to the Isle of Palms, I was fascinated with the loggerhead sea turtles and the way children and adults were so curious and engaged with these ancient mariners.  I decided to write about them and immediately began research for my next novel.

That summer I began what would become my typical approach to a new novel. First I did academic research and extensive interviews. Then, I dove into my story world. I became a Turtle Team Volunteer, affectionately called a “turtle lady.”  I must’ve been a pest as I followed the two team leaders through every step of their duties.  I patrolled the beaches at dawn on the lookout for tracks, and again during the late night hours hoping against hope to catch sight of an adult female laying her eggs.  I probed for eggs and when necessary, moved them to a safer spot, reported strandings, then sat with my new friends night after night like midwives, waiting for the sand to shift and hatchlings to emerge.  On those mosquito-ridden nights I discovered the familiar camaraderie between women that I so often wrote about in previous novels.  Little did I know my interest in turtles would become a passion. At the season’s end the team leader said, “Mary Alice, why don’t you just get your DNR license and join us?”   I did. (And I still am a turtle lady.)

After two years of volunteering, reading, interviewing, it was time to write the novel.  Rather than choose an archetypal theme, this time I let the turtles tell me what the story would be about. For example, a loggerhead turtle returns to the beach of its birth to lay its nest.  So the novel became a novel of return.  One turtle lays 80-150 eggs per nest, four or five nests per season.  That’s a lot of eggs, so I knew someone in the story would be pregnant!  The details of the nesting saga created marvelous metaphors and added depth and purpose to my setting, dialogue, characterizations. And I was determined to share my passion for these animals with my readers. There were unique challenges.  My job was to tell a story, not to proselytize.  Yet I hoped that if I succeeded in portraying this threatened species in a way that captured the reader emotionally, then perhaps he or she would act to support this species.

When I finished, I knew I’d written something different. Something special.  I believed in the book.  I held my breath and handed in the novel. The Beach House was my first NY Times novel, and more, readers rallied and donated funds to turtle hospitals and aquariums.  The number of volunteers along the SE coast grew, all specifically due to the novel. My elation at bringing about a better understanding of the endangered sea turtles gave me a new motivation for my career. I realized that my stories can serve as the song of the canary in the coal mine.

It’s hard to believe that was ten years ago. I’ve gone on to explore the endangered worlds of birds of prey, indigenous grass, and the vanishing coastal heritage of shrimping.  I worry about the disconnect so many feel with nature. The process of writing entails months, years, of hands-on research.  I immerse myself in my story world to discover the authentic details and voices.  Just as I learn something new from every writing project, I hope my readers will also gain knowledge and share in my enthusiasm through the pages of my stories. Though the Lowcountry is my landscape, the themes are universal.  We all share the same planet and resonate to the same moon.

Welcome guest author blogger Malcolm Jones, author of Little Boy Blues: A Crash Course in Growing Up coming from Random House in Jan 2010.  Malcolm will join 20 writers at The Moveable Feast of Authors at the SIBA Trade Show.

Admiring Chuck Berry

by Malcolm Jones

One of the many reasons to admire Chuck Berry is the way he smuggles the names of towns and cities into his songs. “In the heat of the day, down in Mobile, Alabama …” “Long distance information, get me Memphis, Tennessee …” “They bought a souped-up jitney, ’twas a cherry red ’53. Drove it down to New Orleans to celebrate their anniversary …” And then, of course, there’s “Promised Land,” a song that’s mostly a roadmap in rhyme:

I left my home in Norfolk, Virginia,

California on my mind.

Straddled that Greyhound, rode him past Raleigh,

On across Caroline.

After that, he stops in Charlotte, bypasses Rock Hill, goes through Atlanta, and then, halfway across Alabama, “that hound broke down and left us all stranded/In downtown Birmingham,” whereupon he buys a train ticket for New Orleans, then on to Houston, where he hops a plane that takes him “high over Albuquerque” and on to the Golden State.

I have always assumed that one of the secrets of Berry’s success was his insistence on using place names. Surely the folks in Rock Hill and Charlotte and Albuquerque loved him just a little bit more for mentioning them in his songs.

Other singers do this, too, of course. James Brown calls off the stops on “Night Train.” Johnny Cash had that “I’ve Been Everywhere” song that’s a virtual atlas. It’s such an endearing trick, not enough to make you a star, maybe, but it can’t have hurt on the charts.

I thought a lot about those songs while I wrote “Little Boy Blues,” my memoir about growing up in the South in the fifties and sixties.  More than once, I wished my family had been a little more footloose, that we had covered more territory. Instead, my past trapped me in the couple of hundred miles between Winston-Salem, N.C. and Kershaw, S.C., a town I described as being so small that you could walk from one end of the business district to the other in the time it took to drink a Coca-Cola, and “business district” is the grossest sort of word inflation. I would have dearly loved to name check a few more towns and cities. Instead, I found myself writing about a handful of towns so small and so little known that in the end I insisted the book include a map, just so a reader might feel a little more at home in the landscape.

Every genre has its limitations, and too often you don’t discover what they are until you begin to write. Memoir, to anyone who hasn’t tried to write one, looks like it might be more flexible than, say, a novel or a sonnet, since it’s so ill-defined. Ex-presidents write one kind. Ex-strippers write something else. But in memoir, if you’re honest, you’re stuck with the hand your past has dealt. If you grew up in the sticks, that’s what you write about. You may envy the Army brat who gets to write about Germany and Ft. Sill and El Paso, but all you can do with that is curse your luck. And frankly, a lack of family mobility was the least of my troubles.

The bigger problems with memoir have been talked to death. Tell a story, but stick to the facts and resist the temptation to embellish. (I’m ignoring those who choose to simply make it up as they go along—that’s a sin of a different order.) Don’t let the imperatives of narrative distort the shape of the truth. But those are problems that you know going in. It’s the stuff that blindsides you as a writer that’s more interesting. My story is set 40 or more years in the past,  just long enough to force me to explain customs that no longer exist, little things usually, such as the fact that in my youth, you could sit through a movie more than once in a theater and no one cared. You could come in late and leave when you liked. I had to stop and explain that and a lot else that I hadn’t counted on. I found myself detailing the likes of surprise balls, Turkish taffy, Victrola needles—a host of things I figured no one under 30 would understand. It wasn’t a problem talking about civil rights because the ground there has been amply covered, but even religion posed dilemmas: the South of my childhood was no less religious than the South today, but at the same time it was completely different—for starters, it wasn’t nearly so politicized. But I wasn’t writing a book about that, so I had to sketch and hope I suggested enough.

The biggest problem to overcome was a matter of perspective—how to convey to a modern audience how distanced one felt 50 years ago if one did not live in, say, New York City. Movies, for example, took not weeks but months to arrive in my hometown of Winston-Salem, a city of around 130,000 people. If you wanted to see dance or art or decent theater or a foreign film, you went to New York or Washington. As for bookstores, there were two, and both were primarily stationery stores that put a few books in the front of the store (I know, I know, at least it was the front.) And this is in a city with a college and two universities (Wake Forest had a decent campus bookstore, but it cared nothing about catering to the public, stocking its books not by genre but according to publisher, which explains why I can still reel off the backlist of just about every major house up through 1970—this is my version of walking five miles to school in the snow). When we said we lived in the sticks, we meant it. The sense that things were happening elsewhere but not where we lived was intense in the early sixties. Today, if you want to see a foreign or indy film, you put it on your Netflix wish list. You want a book or an out of town paper, no problem. No matter where you live, there is no longer the nagging sense that to be where things are happening, you have to move somewhere else.

But all this explaining raised the issue of how much is too much. Maybe the uninitiated would grasp more than I thought. Maybe they would be insulted if I beat them over the head with the facts. Maybe my contemporaries would think I had lost my mind going on about the obvious. But the author of a memoir has no idea who his audience is or how knowledgeable or how ignorant they may be. Writing this book was an education, but the one being educated was the writer: I confronted—for the first time with any seriousness–how much the world has changed in my lifetime.

I never resolved the problem of explaining. Some things I probably went on about too long, and other things will sound more mysterious than they should. I had to settle in the end for working my little postage stamp of soil and hoping that someday my story would add itself to the mosaic of history, that by delving into my story, I amplified a larger one. Anything else was, as Chuck Berry says, just too much monkey business for me.

J T Ellison is today’s guest author blogger and will be signing at the All STARS Autograph Area at the SIBA Trade Show.

Why Crime Fiction Matters To Me

by J T Ellison

I know that sounds a bit like “What I Did On My Summer Vacation,” but bear with me.

I have always loved crime stories – real or imagined. I don’t think I’m alone, either. Some of the most successful series on television now are crime oriented. My favorites are the original CSI, Criminal Minds and the gloriously creepy Dexter. I watch Forensic Files, all the true crime shows, eat up the drama and fear and terrible truths that exist in our world. So what is the fascination? Why am I drawn to murder and mayhem?

In a word – heroes. But let me come back to that.

I’ve tried to pinpoint the reason I decided to write crime fiction, and honestly can’t put my finger on a single impetus. Was it because of my childhood friend who was being abused and committed suicide when we were fourteen? Was it the disappearance of a friend from college – Dail Dinwidde – who went missing in 1992, quite literally without a trace? Was it an influence from the books I gobbled up – Patterson, at the beginning, Tami Hoag, Patricia Cornwell?

Or did I always have a mysterious bent? I’ve always been a writer – especially the terrible, should be burned pieces I did in college. I went back and looked at some of them, and was surprised to see a note from my thesis advisor. I’d written what I thought was a masterpiece of a story, and her comment was, “Reads too much like B-grade detective fiction.” Hmm. And what, exactly, is wrong with B-grade detective fiction?

But a budding writer who is writing for academia needs to be literary. You must plan your world around where you’ll be getting your MFA, and fifteen years ago, when I graduated, crime fiction was most certainly not on the menu for a writer hoping for a distinguished career in literature.

I’ve always found that amusing, because all of the best literary stories swirl around the commission of a crime. Crimes of the heart, crimes against nature, crimes against a woman or child, a brother or sister, a mother or father, a neighbor. Look at Alice Sebold’s THE LOVELY BONES. It’s a perfect example of a literary novel that centers around a crime.

I think the big difference between literary and crime fiction lies in the treatment. In literary books, you don’t have the pulsing pace, a race against the clock to save humanity, a killer to get off the streets. Lit fic has a more sedate pace. It’s often an examination of how a crime affects the characters rather than how to stop the crime from happening, or happening again. And sometimes, there is no conclusion. And that’s just fine.

But in crime fiction, the battles of good and evil play themselves out on the page, ripe for the reader’s imagination to overflow. There is an innate understanding that the white hats will stop the black hats. You know what you’re getting – a breathless journey with a cast of characters who would lay down their life to save the innocent. The story drives the characters actions, and we see every foible, every flaw, and cheer when the character stands up for what’s right.

In other words, crime fiction gives you a hero. A man or a woman who won’t stop fighting until the bad guys are taken out. There’s an element of justice meted out – the criminals are caught, the hero triumphs, the innocents are protected. It’s heady stuff, I tell you.

Whatever my original influences, this is the real reason I choose to write crime fiction. I want to right the wrongs, give closure to a grieving family, make sure the victims are not forgotten. In my little make believe world, I can make sure justice is well and truly served. We don’t always have that luxury in real life. Too often, trials are lost on technicalities, juries are forced to follow arcane laws, plea bargains are made, and criminals go free. In crime fiction, the hero gets to save the day, and the criminals get punished.

Taylor Jackson is a hero to me. She is a strong woman who commands the respect of her peers through her actions. She’d lay down her life to protect those she loves, and those she doesn’t even know. She is the best of all of us, the one who runs into the burning building to save a child, who never asks for thanks, who protects and defends the city of Nashville even when it doesn’t protect or defend her.

That’s what a hero should be, and that’s why crime fiction is such a joy for me to write.