Two books from AMP won Honorable Mentions in the Love Romances Cafe Best of 2007 Poll.

Snowball in Hell by Josh Lanyan.

Babes in Toyland II by Maura Anderson, Jeanne Barrack, Raine Delight, Melissa Glisan, Wayne Greenough, Michelle Hasker, Dawn Montgomery and Skylar Sinclair.

Congratulations to our wonderful authors!

Every author wants to sell books.  Loads of them.

Every publisher wants every author to sell books.  Loads of them. 

The competition is fierce.  Thousands of books are released every month.  How can anyone possibly “stick out” from all the rest?  There is no easy way to get noticed, but there are seven simple things you can do to help the process.

Have a media page on your website.  You DO have a website, right?

On your media page include a brief bio (500 words or so).  Your bio should include a photo and any special credentials you have.

Next, include information about your product…for authors that would be your book(s).

A third thing to include is to share ideas that the media could use to base a story around you.  Were you almost kidnapped in a foreign country?  Did you overcome a handicap of some sort?  Did you participate in an unusual activity or do something special at an unusual age (like Grandma Moses starting to paint late in life)?

The media also likes it when you lessen their work, so a fourth thing to include are interview questions and upcoming personal appearences if you have them.  You can use these questions to guide the media in getting the information you want covered out to the public.

Fast facts about you is yet another item to include on your media page.

Testimonials are another thing the media is interested in.  Has your novel given someone encouragement? Did a reader write in to say how much they were touched by your story?  Those are testimonials.  Gather them, ask for them, post them on your media page.

Have you had other media coverage? Blog talk radio, newspaper articles, interviews?  Other media release information is item number seven to include on your media page.  Have this information available in a number of formats…something that can be downloaded in a PDF version, stored digitally on your computer so you can send the info electronically, and on-line so someone researching you can access vital information including upcoming appearances.

No one thing can guarantee success especially in the publicity realm.  Being prepared through having information readily available to a producer looking for that special “human interest” or “local angle” for a story will put you ahead of others; those who think a writer isn’t supposed to do anything to get noticed. 

This is the first in an intermittent series of posts I hope will be useful to the authors and prospective authors out there but also an interesting insight into the things editors (or at least THIS editor) notices in manuscripts and submissions.

Today I’d like to talk about the order in which events happen. The main mantra of any series of events is Action THEN Reaction.

In order to jump away from a threat, the threat has to exist. It doesn’t make much sense for a person to leap backward first, then for the speeding car to turn the corner and veer toward where they had been. (Well, not for anything other than a paranormal story, perhaps).

Readers notice these issues. Sometimes consciously but sometimes all they will be able to tell you is the scene seemed odd or mixed up.

But there’s a deeper sequence within reaction. Some reactions normally happen faster than others. Sub-conscious or instinctive reactions will always take precedence over conscious reactions.

Think about what happens when:

Action:
- Put your hand down on a hot stove.

Reactions:
- Snatch hand back
- Clutch or wave hand to try to stop the pain
- Yell “OUCH” (or bad words of choice)
- Put hand under cold water

So if you look at what the reactions are, you can see the most instinctive reaction is first — the reaction to a pain stimulus. Then an only slightly less deep-seated reaction to ease the pain. Then comes the more conscious ones, ending with the most conscious one which is to remember what to do about the pain as far as first aid.

A trick to figuring out if you have events in the correct order is to sort of picture the scene in your mind and walk through what would happen, sort the reactions in order of instinct, then write it that way.

If a character hits the wall hard enough to lose his breath, you shouldn’t have the character impact the wall, then the character say something (other than “oof”), then say he has his breath knocked out of him and grunts. If you impact the wall, the first instinctive reaction and one that is out of the character’s control is to lose his breath. A conscious thought to say something wouldn’t be able to happen in there.

It’s also important to remember that readers like to have discrete actions in sequence rather than many actions happening at once. I’ll talk more about that later, though.

Action THEN Reaction in the correct order will help readers to follow your story the way you intended.

Feedback is welcome and feel free to suggest things you’d like to see in this blog series.