Twelve Days and Counting…
Twelve days till Open Wounds hits its publication. It’s going to be a close run thing. I say this knowing my publisher at WestSide is busting her bum to reach that day so we can have copies for the BEA Bloggers Convention on the 26th. I may end up picking up the books for the event myself. WestSide is out in Lodi, New Jersey – not too far from New York City.
Also, I’m hoping that my son, my wife and I can see the first books roll off the press. Evelyn Fazio, the publisher, said it’s about the coolest thing to see and because WestSide is a subsidiary of EverBind (a binding company) they bind their own books right there in Lodi. I can’t wait. But I’m nervous about timelines.
I did the MAGPI workshop in Phili on Wednesday for three Ohio high schools but more about that later. My friend Dave and I fenced a little. I talked a bit. And the students wrote a bit. An hour goes fast when the lighting is on.
Back to the timeline.
- Kids Reach Out skype interview is on Monday evening the 16th.
- Sunday Big Blend radio interview sometime in the afternoon on the 22nd (2.5 million listeners!).
- Book Expo of American at the Javitts Center in NYC on the 24 and 25 (with a trip to Lodi on the 25th?).
- BEA Bloggers convention on the 26th and 27th – yours truly at the reception on Thursday and speed dating on Friday (after my son’s 3rd grade play!).
- Book launch party in the planning for early June – more details to come…
- ALA national conference in New Orleans at the WestSide booth – I’m there!
En Garde
This is one of the reasons why people fence.
Coming on to the strip, you bring much imagination with you (including hundreds of movie images) in addition to a calculating, contact-chess like mind, and the instincts to survive (even with a blunt tip there is something, well… dangerous about the whole thing).
This is such a cool video. I found it on the New Orleans Fencer’s Club website homepage and it deserves to be seen. It is more hollywood than real foil but it is cool – especially the part where one fencer uses his weapon to slide down the side of a building – an image first used by Douglas Fairbanks in the 1926 movie, The Black Pirate only he slides down a billowing sail with his knife ripping the center as he holds on. This scene gets a mention in Open Wounds and is one of the main character’s (Cid Wymann’s) favorite movies.
What was I doing looking at the New Orleans Fencer’s Club website? Going to New Orleans in June for the ALA (American Library Association’s national conference). More on that later. 
MAGPI in Phili
MAGPI (the Mid-Atlantic Gigapop in Philadelphia for Internet2) is on the calendar for May 11 in Philadelphia.
May is heating up with pre-publication day gigs. I’m looking forward to each of them, even if I’m a bit nervous. Events are performances and performances carry their own load of anxiety – some more than others. In my day job as a trainer I teach people, amongst other courses, how to do public speaking and deal with their anxiety (it’s the number one fear people have – even more than death or marriage or child-birth). So you’d think it would be easy for me, right? Well… public performance (radio, face to face, even blogging) has its weight of anxiety for everyone – me included.
I have things in place to deal with anxiety – specifically yoga practices I’ve cultivated and studied over the last twenty years (they do work if you use them – especially breathing practices or pranayama), preparation (I never go in cold), being in touch with and knowing my process for being anxious (if I know my process I can deal with it better at each stage before I hit PANIC.), self-talk (hey… it works, I talk to myself – don’t you?), and practice. There are others but those are my go-tos.
Back to MAGPI.
My most excellent publicist, Marissa DeCuir at JKScommunications has set me up with this wonderful gig teaching an hour long workshop on writing action-scenes for 10-12th graders. There’s a lot of fight scenes in Open Wounds so I have something to say about how I like to write them and what kinds I like to read.
Digression: Favorite fight scene from when I was younger – The Fellowship of the Ring, by JRR Tolkien, the chamber of Balin’s tomb in the mines of Moria right through to the balrog on the bridge. Wow. It captured my imagination at 12-years old like no other book at the time.
Okay, MAGPI. Here’s the link. The workshop is called, “They Fight!” It’s not open to the public. It’s a distance learning gig from University of Penn out of Phili with up to ten classes involved remotely from ten different schools. But I wanted you to know about it.
I’m really excited – and anxious – the best combo to have because one without the other would either be impossible (just excited?) or miserable (just anxious?).
Here’s another piece. My friend, David Brown, actor, fight choreographer, teacher of stage combat, and all around excellent human being, will be helping me out with some swordplay demos and readings. He’s the best and I love to work with him so it’s a real bonus for the students and of course, him and I get to hang out all day on the drive down and back. I’ve promised him lunch. It’s great what friends will do for you.
Anyway… MAGPI. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Advice for Visiting Bookstores
I talked to my wonderful and excellent publicist, Julie Schoerke from JKScommunications, and she gave me the following advice about visiting bookstores. I thought others might benefit from her experience. Although it’s specific to my book, the six areas to talk about should be relevant to all.
First, remember 5 Things I learned from Denver. Use those lessons as a frame for these.
Onward.
- Introduce yourself and be nice.
- Start with a short (one or two sentence) synopsis of your book. Here’s mine: “Open Wounds is the story of Cid Wymann, a tough kid from Queens who fights to survives a harsh upbringing in 1930s/1940s New York City. Cid succeeds and comes of age through the help of two father figures, both cripples – one emotionally and one physically – who teach him about the discipline, art, and science of fighting with the sword.” Okay… it’s a work in progress. But it needs to be something you feel comfortable saying out loud and it’s probably best if you just memorize it. As they say in acting school, say it like you just thought of it at that moment.
- Give them an idea of how to market your book – especially if it appeals to a specific niche or target population. But remember… your book can appeal to everybody, just some folks might be more likely to pick it up than others. For Open Wounds I need to point out that it is a book for boys and young men in order to let YA booksellers and buyers know that it is not a girl targeted book. Boy books are out there but few and far between so that’s a way to get the attention of the bookseller and differentiate my book from the deluge of others coming through the door alongside it.
- Differentiate further if you have comparisons to other books from blurbs or reviews. For Open Wounds I have two. “It’s a cross between The Book Thief and Gangs of New York.” And… “It’s part Oliver Twist and part Captain Blood.” The first I’ll use for the younger generation of booksellers and the other for more “experienced” (read my age) booksellers who might actually have seen the movie Captain Blood or read the Sabatini book from which it came – which, by the way, if you haven’t you should. It a great story.
- Let them know you want to help them part 1: Say you’d love to do book fairs, books clubs, and school night special events. Remember you’re doing it for the exposure.
- Let them know you want to help them part 2: Say you’d love to sign any books they have on the shelf (remember a signed book is a sold book – or so they tell me) and that you’d be happy to put the stickers that say “author autographed” on the cover for them. Also let them know that you’d be happy to do any requests for signed books that will be mailed out – if they get them – it’s a great advertising point for gifts.
5 things I learned in Denver
- It’s hard to describe your book to someone without a physical copy of the book there for them to hold on to. Holding your book also gives them something to do (ie: look at it). Solution: bring a book everywhere with you – which means next book I need to order a lot more ARCs – live and learn.
- Booksellers are busy people and just because you make an appointment doesn’t mean they’ll be ready for you, or even remember that you’re coming. Solution: be prepared to make it a cold call and sell your stuff!
- Blurbs are important. One of the first things people looked at were the cover and the blurbs listed there. A blurb by Robert Lipsyte on the cover made at least one buyer stop what she was doing and really listen to me. “You got a blurb from Robert Lipsyte?” was my entre to ten minutes of talk rather than two minutes and the door. Solution: get good blurbs. Thankfully I worked my butt off, wrote a lot of emails/letters to writers and got eight good ones from very gifted and known writers. I did this because my brilliant publisher E. Fazio told me to. Thank you, E. Fazio.
- Some booksellers don’t know anything about the publisher. Solution: bring catalogs and know the other books on the list. Fortunately I’ve read three other novels by my publisher. (Scars, by Cheryl Rainfield, Orphans, by John R. Weber, and Something Terrible Happened on Kenmore, by Marci Stillerman)
- Booksellers like to have a hook by which they can place and sell your book on their shelves. Solution: practice your pitch/have a pitch. For example some people liked “it’s a cross between Book Thief and Gangs of New York,” and others liked “it’s part Oliver Twist and part Captain Blood.” By the way I hate this part. Which means I have to practice it even more in order to be good at it. Can you describe you book in two sentences or less?
Colfax store.
Lunievicz 