The book! It seems obvious, right?  But you’d be amazed at how hard it is to find information about the book on some author websites.

It’s fine to have other content on your author website or blog, but make sure that it’s really easy to find a description of your book and a link directly to a place where customers can buy the book.

Recently, I visited the website of an author who had written a book on a topic that I have an interest in, but I could find no description of the book. I clicked on the link that said the book was available on Amazon and landed on Amazon’s home page. No, I did not make the effort to search out the book on Amazon.

It’s helpful to look at your site through the eyes of a visitor who has never been there before:

• What’s the first thing you see when you land on the site?
• Is there a book cover visible on the home page and other pages? If your website is a blog, it’s easy to display your book cover in the sidebar, along with a link to the book description or purchase page.
• Is there an obvious link to somewhere people can learn more about the book? From your main navigation menu, you could place a link that says something like “About the Book,” “My Books” or “Buy the Book.” On this site, the link says “Resources.”
• Is the book description compelling enough to motive buyers?
• Have you listed quotes from book reviews in the book description, to demonstrate that others find your book valuable or entertaining?
• Is there a direct link to your book’s page on Amazon or some other place the book can be purchased? Check the links and make sure they work properly.

Don’t make it difficult for visitors to your website to learn about your book and buy it. Make sure your website does a good job of selling your book.

About Dana Lynn Smith

Dana Lynn Smith, The Savvy Book Marketer, helps authors and indie publishers learn how to sell more books through her how-to guides, blog, newsletter, and private coaching. For more book promotion tips, get her free ebook at TheSavvyBookMarketer.com.

Twenty years ago, if a scientist mentioned time travel, he’d be laughed at. Today, the world is different and scientists are opening up to the real possibility of devising a way to move through time. In his new book, How to Build a Time Machine, Brian Clegg gets down to the essence of time travel, making the possibility of it feasible for the very first time. Read the review.

By now (2012) it’s common knowledge that science fiction writers came up with a fantastic idea one hundred years earlier. Today, scientists discover a way to turn it into reality. This is how H.G. Wells’ marvelous idea of time travel rematerialized. At last the curtain is ready to rise on the daunting task. Before the curtain call, however, the props had to be dragged in. That’s where Albert Einstein made his appearance and spelled out the mathematical behavior of relativity. He described how space and time are really part of the same thing and warping space would effect time. By showing that gravity was responsible for warping space proved Einstein’s theory of relativity. It was illustrated by observing light from distant stars bending around the sun during a solar eclipse earlier in the 20^th century.

The next phase would necessitate two more elements. The first was the medium necessary to warp time and the second was the enthusiasm among scientists to pool their efforts. Both of these have been established. There is now a long list of time traveling theorists to explore time travel in a meaningful way. The medium is no less than what some of the greatest minds have uncovered long ago. They include: quantum entanglement, black holes, superluminal speeds, neutron star cylinders, and wormholes.

When two atoms become entangled, a phenomenon not well understood, they behave as though they were the same—even though separated by great distances. Theoretically, entangled atoms can be in two places at the same time. This relationship may be the driving force to harness time travel.

Black holes cause the space-time continuum to warp. Travelers orbiting near the intense gravity of a black hole can experience a time differential, if the traveler lives to tell about it.

Superluminal speeds—those that approach he speed of light area can cause an interesting time distortion: time slows down for the traveler. This has been demonstrated on the Space Shuttle. While orbiting at 17,500 mph, astronauts experience a slowing down of the aging process. They age slower than those on Earth, because time for them slows down a tiny bit. Consequently, space station residents move into the future as they orbit. The more they orbit, the more into the future they go. It’s only milliseconds, but it’s still time travel.

Neutron star cylinders are among the least understood. However, it seems that anything in the universe that has vast power can distort time and space. The problems occurs when one attempts to harness this energy. So does the neutron star. Eventually, these become black holes. A puzzling idea that results from these monsters come from string theory. Perhaps learning how it works might allow us to travel inter-dimensionally, through time as well.

Finally, the science fiction favorite, enter the wormhole. They connect different parts of space and probably time as well. Harnessing one may be a gateway to another time. Even laser technology has entered the game field. Ronald Mallett lost his father as a boy. He’s been struggling ever since to uncover the mysteries of time travel so that he can travel back in time and see his father again. In his work, Mallett discovered interesting twists from his experiments with lasers. Unfortunately, his idea needs giant amounts of energy to make it work and even then only tentatively. Still, we are at the crossroads of understanding the nature of time travel in a significant way.

One of the quirks of time travel is an agreed upon, unwritten rule by scientists that traveling backward in time one cannot travel back to a point before the time machine was invented. It would be a logical contradiction. Also, time seems to want to flow from cause to effect, not from effect to cause. However, quantum entanglement appears to contradict this.

Another big name emerging in the literature and TV circuits is Michio Kaku. He makes frequent appearances on various science programs and is a self-proclaimed visionary in the world of theoretical physics, astronomy and cosmology. He believes time travel is indeed possible.

While Einstein was building his fame a strange limerick by A. H. Reginald Buller in Punch (Dec. 19, 1923): 591) put Einstein’s general theory of relativity into perspective:

There was a young lady named Bright,
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She started one day
In a relative way,
And returned on the previous night.”

I also have my own take on it: Now I lay me down to glean, I pray to make a time machine. If I should die before I time-traveled, I’ll return to my birth to undo what unraveled.

About D. Wayne Dworsky

D. Wayne Dworsky addresses the importance of being informed of Currents in Science & Nature by participating in science & nature book reviews, writing feature articles, aviation and preparing students for State examinations in mathematics and language arts. He’s been reviewing science and nature titles for Sacramento Book Review for the last two years.

In addition to his own literary career, he hosts a radio talk show on Blog Talk Radio’s Alpha Centauri & Beyond . And he writes a blog at his website, Alpha Centauri & Beyond.com. He remains active as an airman and writes articles for American Chronicle.

One moment, one morning, a photographer called Maddie, who lived by the sea in Vancouver, was drinking tea, when she noticed her tea always smelt of the sea. This set her thinking. So she fetched her teacups from her kitchen – she had some pretty vintage ones – and put them one atop the other, on a piece of drift wood she found on the beach. It was blustery and wet, and she kept getting seaweed in the cups and raindrops on the lens, but she knew this shot was special, and decided it had to be taken no matter what.

Meanwhile, another moment another morning, in Brighton, England, a writer called Sarah had finished a novel. It told of a man who died unexpectedly on a train, and the effect on three women – his wife, a friend, and a stranger. It explored grief, and talked of addiction and female sexuality, pulled together by the overarching theme of friendship. She’d set the book in her hometown, by the sea. She’d pushed herself too, and thought it better than anything she’d written before, and she sent her manuscript off to her agents, Vivien and Gaia. They liked it very much, and sent it to several publishers.

Imagine Sarah’s intense disappointment when, one by one, the publishers said that whilst they liked the story, they couldn’t see how to market it. It fell into no specific camp, they protested; it wasn’t chick lit, because it dealt with difficult subjects, yet the writing style was accessible, like commercial fiction. Sarah was frustrated, as she was convinced readers would connect with the book for those reasons. And as she’d worked in marketing herself, she felt she had some insight into what might be saleable.

However, one moment one morning, Sam, an editor at Picador in London, read the manuscript. She saw the potential and wanted to buy the book. But then all the people she needed to sign it off left the publishing house, and she couldn’t make an offer. For several months Sam and Sarah waited patiently (or in Sarah’s case impatiently) until a new publisher arrived, Paul. No sooner had Paul sat at his desk on his first morning than Sam rushed in clutching the manuscript, saying she wanted to publish this book. Paul liked it too, and signed it off straight away.

Picador set about releasing the novel as a Trade Paperback. Still, they were perplexed how to market it. In particular, they struggled with a cover. They didn’t want people to think it was too light, and were keen for reviews in prestigious publications, so opted for a serious interpretation – an image of a train station. Sarah expressed minor reservations to Sam, but had no better ideas. Above all she was happy her book was being published and might get reviewed by prestigious publications.

Meanwhile…

Over in Germany, thanks to agents Vivien and Gaia, another editor, Iris, was publishing Sarah’s novel, in translation. She too was pondering the cover, when one moment, one morning, a picture from a photo library landed on her desk, of teacups in the rain. And it was so beautiful and emotive that intuitively Iris knew it was perfect. So she emailed Sarah the jacket, and when Sarah saw this version, she gasped with pleasure.

Back in the UK, by now Picador were looking for an image for the Mass Market Paperback version of the book. Sam showed Sarah one idea, but Sarah didn’t feel it was right, so Sarah showed Sam the German cover, and suggested maybe they use that. And Sam talked to her colleagues, and Sarah talked to Vivien and Gaia, and they all agreed the image was perfect, so they decided to use it. By now the book had some very pleasing reviews from prestigious publications, so these were included too.

And so the novel went into bookshops across the land, and far and wide people saw it and liked the teacups as much as Iris, Sarah, Sam, Paul, Vivien, and Gaia. People picked up the book, read the pleasing reviews and decided to buy it. And when they’d finished the book, many of them told their friends about it, and their friends liked the cover and read it too. And as more people bought the book, so the displays got bigger and there were more teacups on shelves in shops across the land.

And Sarah remembered all those publishers who’d said they didn’t know how to market it, and (if truth be told) she clapped her hands in glee.

Then she remembered there was someone she should thank for helping make her novel a success. So she flipped the cover over and found, in very small letters, the name Madelyn Mulvaney, and typed the name into Google.

As if by magic, Maddie’s website came up straight away, so she sent Maddie an email saying what had happened and that her photo was on a bestseller in England…

And they have been corresponding happily ever since.

The End

About Author Sarah Rayner

Sarah Rayner was born in London. She spent her childhood in Richmond, Surrey, then became a punk, spiked her hair and went to university in Yorkshire to study English and get chilblains. She returned to London in the late ’80s, flattened her hair and worked in fashion PR for a bit, before her boss told her she was better at writing than schmoozing clients, and suggested she become an advertising copywriter. She took the hint, and after ten years in various London agencies turned freelance, got some short stories published by Woman’s Own, and for many years combined life as an author and copywriter.

She’s written four novels, The Other Half and Getting Even, which were published by Orion in the early noughties, but it was her third novel, One Moment, One Morning, that proved her ‘breakthrough’ and has now sold nearly 250,000 copies in the UK and been translated into eleven languages.

Find out more about Sarah at thecreativepumpkin.com.

For Part 1 of our interview, click HERE.

Cathy Luchetti is the author of eight books about the settling of the American West in the 18th and 19th centuries, from religion to cooking and cuisine to courtship rituals and child-rearing. She was invited by Laura Bush to come to the White House to be part of a discussion of Women in the West. She has received numerous honors, including the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for Literary Excellence for Women of the West (1982) co-authored with Carol Olwell. Her book  Home on the Range: A Culinary History of the American West received the James Beard Best Writing on American Food Award in 1994. Medicine Women: The Story of Early-American Women Doctors (1999) was short-listed for the Willa Cather Award in non-fiction. Other books include Under God’s Spell: Frontier Evangelists, 1772-1915, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (San Diego, CA), 1989; “I Do!”: Courtship, Love, and Marriage on the American Frontier: A Glimpse at America’s Romantic Past through Photographs, Diaries, and Journals, 1715-1915, Villard Books (New York, NY), 1995; The Hot Flash Cookbook: Delicious Recipes for Health and Well-Being through Menopause, Chronicle Books (San Francisco), 1997; Mama Says: Inspiration, Wit and Wisdom from the Mothers in Our Lives, Loyola Press (Chicago), 1999. Her book Children of the West: Family Life on the Frontier, Norton (New York, NY), published in 2001, was named by the Los Angeles Times one of the Best Books of 2001—The West. Men of the West (Norton) appeared in 2004.

Zara Raab: How did you select which first-hand accounts to use in a book like Women of the West? Did you get a sense of the personality of the letter-writer or diarist as you read them?

Cathy Luchetti: They were all different. If it was the Colorado Historical Society or the National Archives or the Bancroft Library––one of the larger institutions––the collections are now on-line with an abstract.  And the photographs are on-line too, and that makes it much easier. But when I started writing my books, very few of them were on-line. For me, it was mostly coming up with the concept, and then coming up with a list of queries and sending it out to the archives. It was sort of like fly-fishing. Hopefully, I’d get an archivist who would think about my letter and then suggest a collection. There might be 15 boxes of materials to sort through, and in that case, it would be easier to fly there and do it myself. The librarians and archivists gave me leads and my job was reading through everything to find the best letters and diaries for my purposes. The most useful and best archivist or a curator was the one who could point me to certain archives and say, for example,  “This is someone who had a fabulous love affair.” That would be the lead, and the rest of it would be my sitting there day and day, and reading and reading.

ZR: Considering the importance of letters and diaries to your account, do you mourn the decline in both in the 21st century?

CL: During all this period when I was raising my children, in the 1970’s and 1980’s, there was no sense of journal keeping or correspondence. But the past ten years or so, people are keeping more records than they ever kept and they are storing all their correspondence. These email letters are with us, there are more of them than we want, or than we can possibly handle. No, we aren’t using a pen or heavy, beautifully made paper, but we are expressing ourselves more than ever.

It’s similar to the frontier, when people whether educated or not, kept journals. Everyone kept them. We have the same thing now. If we go on blogs, half the people are ––well, maybe educated, true, but they don’t care if they’re literate or literary, and many of them aren’t. They’re just recording things that happen to them now. But there is a difference. The people on the frontier felt they were very much in the background of an important time. Today we think we are really, really important even though we don’t have anything to say. It’s narcissistic; it’s the “Me” generation, extended by three more generations. It just is what it is.

ZR: You’re speaking here of the bloggers?

CL: Yes. There’s a difference in quality. Perhaps a hundred years from now, these blogs will be just as valuable as the journals and letters of the 19th Century pioneers.  Perhaps you’ll go to the Bancroft Library to the “Blog” section and there it’ll all be, tear stains, misspellings, popular slang, and verbal graffiti.  You’ll have it all.  . . There’s a difference in quality, however, from the old pioneer diaries. Nowadays, everybody has something to say about nothing.

Peter Hadreas, a professor of philosophy at San Jose State University, and his colleagues are beginning to debate whether blogs are truly more philosophical than philosophy papers published in academic journals. The idea of a philosophy paper is a dialogue a la Socrates, and if you do a paper it’s just your opinion on the matter. But if you write a blog, it opens up a dialogue, which is actually true philosophy. What’s that going to do to the old “Publish or Perish” idea? It’s just one more way in which culture changes. Ideas spark. They go viral. They meet and collide. If they’re bad, they metastasize.

ZR: Did you get to touch and handle the actual letters and diaries you used as sources? Or were they micro-fiched?

CL: Oh, you have to put on your white gloves and you have to get used to looking at almost transparent paper, like onionskin. Often words were written horizontally across the page and also around the edges, because they had to compress as much onto a page as they possibly could. Paper was valuable.  Words would be written crosshatched across other words to save paper. In other cases, the writing would be in a schoolbook and more orderly, Or the document might be typewritten by someone who came across it in the 20th Century and tried to transcribe it. Some letters were water-stained as with tears, and you could image that someone was crying. The paper itself really revealed a lot about them and what their lives were like. If I could read anything at all in a letter handwritten in tiny crabbed handwriting, or large, scrawling handwriting that loped across the page, I counted myself lucky. Sometimes it was a matter of getting three words, but finding the next three indecipherable, and then getting the next three, so you might be able after all to figure out what they were writing about. Some collections were also excerpted in other works, and then I would know exactly who to ask for.  So then gradually I acquired my own “favorite” archives, and I could just go over to my files and select a relevant passage to use. This is one of the reasons I stopped writing: The archival materials became too favorite, almost too old and familiar.

ZR: The letters had marks, tears or blood or dirt? 

CL: Yes, you could sometimes tell the writer or reader had been crying. No blood that I recall. Nobody wore lipstick in those days, so they didn’t blot their lips on the letters. Some letters were burned, as if they’d been read by candlelight. Many of these letters were so fragile, you could just hear them crack if you turned the page.

ZR: What was the paper like?

CL: The paper was fairly good. Everything was built better a hundred years ago. The libraries cover them in plastic and they put wedges in them, so you can only open the pages so far.

ZR: What will happen to all these documents in time?

CL: Someone will have a monstrous scanning task at some point. I don’t know how they are going to handle that.

ZR: The journals were pretty intimate?

CL: There were two or three journals I remember, in which a woman kept track of her period, and so she was worried about getting pregnant. But there wasn’t a lot of tortured soul-searching in most of the diaries, as you can see by reading my books.

ZR: Let’s talk about Under God’s Spell: Frontier Evangelists 1772-1915. What inspired you to do this book?

CL: I had the idea because I was fascinated by frontier religious conversion experiences, and the documented cases of people who had no particular interest in religion or even Christianity, having a religious experience and suddenly feeling they had no choice but to preach and minister to others. I tried to collect those stories. It’s one thing to be someone who’s always wanted to become a minister, it’s another to be roped into it by the divine. These people all had dynamic conversion experiences that completely changed their lives.

ZR: You have a distant ancestor who became a traveling minister in Oregon, and you include an excerpt from his diaries in your book. Did you know when you started your research that you had a relative—a great-great-uncle, A.J. McNemee, I believe, who had kept a diary?

CL: I had no idea.

ZR: You recognized the name in an archive?

CL: No, I came across it in a genealogical reference. My own family has an archive at the St. Helena Wine Library and in that archive the name of this great-great-uncle was mentioned, as a descendent of the Myers. And there it was, this poor bachelor loping around trying to solace grieving widows and orphaned children. He’s one of the backwoods saints. If he were Catholic, he’d be a saint, that is. But since he was a Protestant, he’s an Everyman.

I was also interested in the topic because I had a similar spiritual experience. I had just turned 28, and I had a strong experience that said you now believe in God, as opposed to the day before when I didn’t. I’m a kind of free-range Christian. I was curious; I hoped to find accounts by others who had had similar experiences. It doesn’t happen to people who don’t have their faith; it’s usually people who are wondering about it. I just had this very strong experience. I wanted to see who else had had that experience of being suddenly overwhelmed by cosmic love: It was like being in a meteor shower. Science might call this a neurological event. I call it spiritual.

When people say religion, I usually balk. Religion seems different from faith.  Those involved in organized religion so often lose their faith and have to claw their way back to some kind of place where they can believe again. From doubt to faith, and back again.

ZR: I am intrigued by the comparison you make in your introduction to Under God’s Spell between revival meetings in the 19th century and the 20th century political rally. Is there some of the same “brash assurance” as you call it, in the current American style of political oratory as there was in the revival meetings? Newt Ginghrich as a kind of revivalist?

CL: Yes, absolutely. Actually, religion in the U.S. has played an enormous part in the enfranchisement of women. The only reason women got the vote was that all the men went off to the Civil War, so women got active in the churches. They learned how to organize—how to fundraise, how to take petitions, and so on. They got savvy politically, because they had positions of power in the churches—but, oops, they couldn’t vote! And meanwhile they were all working on suffrage for the blacks. So women began to organize themselves for more powerful roles in society under the aegis of the church they belonged to—so long as the churches were Protestant, but not Lutheran, high church Anglican or Catholic, because these institutions took a dim view of Populism.

People were terrified of these large camp meetings, when the evangelist comes into town to “slay” the townspeople, “slay them in the spirit.” The evangelists came with big energy. The towns actually installed hitching posts for the express purpose of holding people up while they were under the evangelist’s power. These religious leaders were psychically extremely powerful. From a religious point of view, it’s easy to explain, but from a secular point of view, it seemed like mass hysteria.

Yes, women became involved in the churches, and in Chautauqua in New England. And you have the two Great Awakenings, the periods of intense religious revival in the United States. It was logical that if you could get thousands of people gathered together in a meadow for a camp meeting, you could take political advantage of that: It was a perfect place for politicians to campaign and make political points. People became accustomed to the bombast of the preachers. The political rally cum religious camp meeting really didn’t happen anywhere else in the world.  It’s purely, uniquely American, this connection between politics and religion.

ZR: And the personalities of the itinerant preachers, do you think we find them today on the streets of our cities? What you call, and I quote, “Restless and idiosyncratic by nature, the itinerants were as footloose as any mountain men, proclaiming [. . .] their version of [. . . ][Christian] doctrine: ‘free will, free grace, and individual responsibility”?

CL: Berkeley reminds me a lot of a camp meeting. [We laugh.] They are decrying slightly different things, but they are all true believers. What can I say? I’m from Oakland.

ZR: How is American life, or at least life on the West Coast today, shaped by what happened one hundred to two hundred years ago?

CL: What happened 200 years ago would come under the rubric of Can Do. What’s happening now is mostly Can’t Do. And that’s really unfortunate. The Silicone Valley still manifests the pioneer spirit. A lot of the green energy manifests that same spirit–– except it’s government mandated—that’s the difference. The pioneers were individually mandated. I’m a little bit of a libertarian. Nowadays, it’s mostly what you can’t do, because there’s a regulation against it. Anybody trying to get a permit for anything will understand that. It’s the way it has to be. Life is different. The pioneer spirit is pretty much squashed.

Wait. I take it back. The spirit’s not squashed. There are thousand of ideas. The ideas are flowing; it’s just that it’s harder to get institutional and infrastructural support for them. A fabulous new book called Abundance–-I recommend it–– makes this point. As a people, we still question and resist authority. And now there’s an idealization of people who don’t graduate from college. You see all the green farmers, the plantation industry—growing marijuana. Not everything is squelched. Even among the thousands of bloggers, people who can’t achieve anything, but at least they can put down their point of view. And there are so many fabulous ideas that our society comes up with. We have so much great genius that it’s hard to be discouraged. I can’t wait to see what’s next.

ZR: Let’s turn to your book I Do! Courtship, Love and Marriage on the American Frontier. Your account vividly portrays the child and teen brides, and the numberless deaths in childbirth that left so many orphans. Only in the late 20th century did social scientists document the legacy that broken family bonds creates for a generation. Do you think the scarcity of civilized institutions and extended families to care for orphans, not to mention the paucity of other types of civilizing institutions—fraternal societies, clubs, social registers—led to the creation of an underclass of people who were—pardon my saying so—ill-mannered unkempt, undisciplined, incapable of making strong social bonds, in short an underclass of renegades?

CL: I think you are absolutely right. Anywhere else in the world, an underclass would be created by a top down decision. Here in this country, it’s a self-selecting decision, and the ones who make it to the urban centers have the best chance to survive and make it in American terms, to get out of the underclass. But it’s not just a question of staying or leaving the rural areas. There’s a strong cultural component. For example, I just finished a three-day trip with a woman friend from Cambodia who was in Pol Pot concentration camp. She came here, and she was responsible for raising her five siblings, while her parents had a sweatshop. She went to college and got a degree and began making money as a professional. But of her five siblings, not one of them went to college, yet they all look down on her, because although she is successful in American terms, she has no family, no children. It has nothing to do with  being rural; it has to do with being in an ethnic ghetto. The siblings couldn’t boost themselves out.

They think they are better off because they have families and work as manicurists. . . Every population has its way of separating out a certain segment of the population, of ghettoizing its population, of dividing the culture into elite and non-elite. Separating out the strands. It’s just fascinating.

ZR: You describe at one point how the soldiers at one of the forts planned to have the wives and white women killed if it looked like they would be taken hostage by “redskins” and possibly raped. What do you make of the concept of personhood in this attitude toward women’s virtue? As if a woman ceased to exist if she was not longer ‘pure’—at least virtuous white women who were as yet unsullied. Yet this attitude may still exist in some parts of our culture as a kind of tribal attitude that fixes human relationship and identities, and that still exists.

CL: We’re seeing this right now in the Middle East, this over-emphasis on a woman ‘s virtue. Virtue was prized more than the woman; you saw a lot of this in Victorian times. That would make sense. Much of the Middle East is about 150 years behind the West in that respect.

ZR: It is no wonder everyone in the West was a writer, as writing—letters, diaries, expressive poems, and songs—is a way of establishing a self from the inside rather than the outside.

CL: That’s exactly right, and it’s extremely important to the Western experience, where you were removed from all your social bulwarks. A frontiersman in the West didn’t know if someone he met was honest or dishonest. They knew very, very little about the people around them. If someone carried a volume of Shakespeare’s plays in his saddle bag, you figured he was at least educated, but otherwise trust had to be established somehow. People tried to compensate for this lack of social structure by carrying letters of recommendation that said, “I know so and so.” They did this whenever possible. If they couldn’t do this, they would have to prove themselves through valor, hard work, or extreme honesty–– whatever trial and test might work to prove themselves to others. Everybody was on trial. You didn’t know who anybody was, but people were much more open and trusting. They gave you a chance to demonstrate who you were. But later things changed. After the Civil War, there was an influx of Southerners to the Far West. Everybody wanted to be around a Southerner, because of their gentile manners. They said, “Yes, Ma’am,” and “No, Ma’am.” They introduced manners ordinarily expected of a European.

Nowadays, too, people are fashioning themselves to become whomever they wish. Maybe the whole on-line world is a little like the old American frontier. You’re presented with material but you try to read between the lines, and find a way to survive and thrive. You can create yourself and defeat yourself. On the frontier, you had to actually be a physical presence. In the new frontier of cyberspace, you don’t even have to do that to become to become an avatar.

About the Interviewer,  Zara Raab

Zara lives in Berkeley and is one of the first women to graduate in architecture from UC Berkeley. She grew up along California’s North Coast, attending school in Portland when she was fourteen, and later Mills College and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) for college and graduate school. In her twenties, she traveled, living in Paris, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., where she made a living as a freelance editor and writer, participating for a time in the Capitol Hill Poetry Group, before returning to the West Coast to raise her children.

Early California is a subject of her book Swimming the Eel, just as the drama of family life is the subject of  The Book of Gretel. In leaving behind the rural counties, she became a part of the human potential movement of the 1960′s, and that movement perhaps more than anything, shapes her life and her work. Since she was a teenager, she kept journals, and sometimes returns to those early notebooks for ideas. Her poems appear in many literary reviews and magazines, including The Dark Horse, The Evansville Review, River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, Nimrod, Dos Passos Review, Arts & Letters, and others. She also review books and writes essays on literature for various publications, including the Redwood Coast Review, Poetry Flash, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Colorado Review, San Francisco/Sacramento Book Reviews, and The Boxcar Poetry Review.

The internet and the democratization of the publishing industry have made it easier than ever today to publish a book. With so many people publishing material in so many different formats, the competition to sell one’s writing has never been keener. The wisest and most savvy authors and indie publishers are investigating what a book publicist can do for them.

The book publicist sits at the back end of the publishing chain and is the team member who pushes the finished book into the marketplace. Book publicity begins six to twelve months prior to release date, when the marketing plan and book platform are written, and typically ends about four months after launch.

Book publicists specialize in specific genres, just like literary agents do. These specialties are nonfiction and fiction subgenres like how-to, history, career, business, biography, autobiography, self-help, and historical fiction. Some book publicists are employed directly by publishing houses and some freelance for publishers and authors.

A critical function of the book publicist is to submit galleys and finished books for book reviews. The publicist may also attempt to get the title on a prominent books list or nominate it for a book award. Also within the publicist’s purview is the pitching of features to journalists either written by, about or mentioning the author.

Publicists can both directly and indirectly affect book sales through their book marketing efforts, including promoting a virtual tour, securing author interviews, leveraging the author’s book blog and social networking profiles, and utilizing the author’s media kit. If funds are available, publicists will also schedule an author’s book talk or ground tour. Publicists will sometimes promote free books and conduct book giveaways to generate interest for a title.

Here is a list of services that some publicists offer:

• Devise and execute the book platform
• Acquire endorsements
• Oversee editing of the book’s back cover text
• Edit the author’s biography and the book’s synopsis
• Create a strategy for the author’s book blog
• Initialize the author’s social networking profiles
• Request book reviews
• Assemble a media kit and disseminate its elements
• Pitch interviews and features
• Plan the book’s launch event and book talk
• Schedule, host and promote the book’s virtual tour
• Encourage nomination of the title for book awards
• Position the title for addition to a books list
• Formulate the author’s talking points
• Syndicate the author’s articles
• Recommend venues with high traffic author events
• Leverage the interest of special audiences and book groups

Publicists joke among themselves that no two of them are alike, and in many respects, this is true. Each specializes in a particular type of client or book and each publicist has a track record that illustrates a unique variety of experience. However, one thing is certain–the book with the extra marketing push will always do better, even if a similar title is as good.

About Stephanie Barko

Stephanie Barko, Literary Publicist, was voted Best Book Promotion Service by Preditors & Editors’ Readers Poll in 2011. Her nonfiction successes include anIndieReader Best Book of 2011, a 2011 IPPY and a 2011 International Book Award Winner. Read what clients are saying about her on LinkedIn, and follow her on Facebook.

Basically, there are two kinds of cooks in the kitchen: the free-form cooks, who may look at recipes for ingredient ideas, but create their own dishes by the way they feel, and the systematic cooks ,who follow recipes and ingredients to the dot. The major problem for free-form cooks is that they can rarely duplicate a dish that turns out particularly good. Professionals and better cooks are in the second category; they need to be able to reproduce a recipe exactly every time with only slight modification according to their own taste.

If you are a committed free-form cook, you may never need a thermometer, but if you want your dishes cooked to perfection, you are not likely to be without one. In fact, you’ll likely have two or three. Many professionals consider thermometers as their second most important kitchen tool, right after their knives, and will carry one around at all times.

To ensure that your oven is set at exactly the heat the dial reads, add a simple and inexpensive oven thermometer to your collection. It is easy to reset most ovens, particularly one with a digital dial. The adjustment for most non-digital models is inside the knob that dials the oven temperature. Carefully remove the knob and look for a tiny screw inside that adjusts the thermostat setting.

A candy thermometer is useful when dealing with high-temperature liquids: usually oil or melted sugar.

But the primary, and most critical, thermometer is a small, thin-stemmed digital unit. This helps in many, many different kinds of cooking tasks: having the meat, poultry, and fish cooked to perfection, not overcooked but totally safe; scalding milk without boiling; deep-frying without soaking up oil; cooking with gelatin; proofing yeast goodies; testing baking breads or potatoes for doneness; checking if the freezer and refrigerator are maintaining the correct temperatures, and so on.

Digital instant-read thin-stemmed thermometers are inexpensive, but it’s best not to buy the bottom of the line. Here are some features you should look for:

• A range from freezing to 400⁰F. With this wide range, you can dispense with candy and deep-fry thermometers.
• On/off button to extend battery life.
• Waterproof cover for keeping clean and saving it should you drop it into the dishwater.
• A clamp that attaches to sides of pots, as well as to your apron pocket.

Some cooks like a programmable thermometer with a probe that remains in the baking item while in the oven (I don’t; to me, simplest is best). You can check the progress without opening the oven door. Or if pre-programmed, it warns you when that roasting item is ready.

Totally different types are the costly infrared and laser thermometers, and many cooks consider them as unnecessary toys (myself included). They do read quickly and conveniently, but are no better than their cheaper cousins. They instantly measure the surface of a sauté pan heating up on the stove, if that’s important to you. Professionals stick to simple digitals and attach them to their apron pockets like engineers with their set of pens and pencils.

An inexpensive analog thermometer is also useful; digitals tend to lose their battery power at the most critical time. A simple analog thermometer is a nice backup on such occasions.

Your cooking can only improve when you acquire the habit of using a thermometer in the kitchen all the time, even if you are a total free-form cook.

About Columnist George Erdosh

George Erdosh is a culinary scientist, food writer and certified cooking teacher (and now a cookbook reviewer) with a strong science and research background (Ph.D., McGill University, Montreal). Originally an exploration geologist for some 35 years, he switched career to be a high-end caterer, a business he ran for over 10 years, before switching to food writing and running cooking classes.

He is the author of 10 published food-related books: a six-book series for young readers Cooking throughout American History and The African-American Kitchen; Start and Run a Catering Business (in its 4th edition, translated into five languages), Tried and True Recipes from a Caterer’s Kitchen, and What Recipes Don’t Tell You, as well as numerous articles in magazines and newspapers.

Contact George with questions or problems at howfoodswork@volcano.net.

Writing hot sex is. . .hard.

I wrote a romance novel when I was sixteen. I’d hardly even been kissed— all my education on the subject was from dog-eared, coverless bodice rippers procured at garage sales. To my adolescent mind, these provided all the “education” I needed. I scribbled The Pirate’s Treasure at camp as a series of installments I read aloud each night to my giggling cabinmates. Fabulously tawdry, it featured many of the following words, which should be avoided in any actually hot sex scenes:

Turgid
Hairy
Throbbing
Slippery
Veined
Twitching
Swarthy
Rosebuds (of either the upper or lower kind)
Pulsating
Moist

While I’m not a romance writer per se, writing a good sex scene is indispensable in any writer’s arsenal, and will usually come up at least once in every novel. (Right now I’m “doing” a romantic suspense, and it’s come up more than usual.) As important and commonplace as writing sex is, it’s actually not that easy.

Over the years I’ve come to believe in a state called “reader’s brain”—a semi-hypnotized trance in which the reader seamlessly enters the writer’s world, and voluntarily—as in a good movie—suspends disbelief and embarks upon a journey filled with sounds, smells and experiences they will probably never come across in their own messy, annoying, boring real lives.

This is the joy of reading sex. And since we’re being honest, the joy of writing it too.

And those words listed above, those mood-killing words, are the sand in the vagina of the reader at a critical moment.

The best sex scenes are anchored in details that bring the reader into the bedroom with the characters—but are never tacky or clichéd.

The tender spiral of an ear.

The elegant turn of a shoulder, the shadow of a pulse in the neck.

“Please. Have mercy.” A husky voice, vibrating with need like prayer.

The slow, meticulous act of removing a high heeled shoe. (And leaving the other one on.)

The sucking of a finger, drawing patterns on a naked body. (What are the patterns, wonders the reader—and where will they end?)

Sometimes, it’s rough and desperate, just as we are—a gasping clutch of slamming fulfillment, a rushing together, clothed, against a wall. Sometimes, it’s the clash of warring bodies that turns to hunger, to melting in the hot pour of a shower. Careful details, combined with a glossing-over of the mechanics of the actual act—combine to make scenes that fairly leap off the page.

Overall, whatever “explicit level” is chosen, the scenes in a piece should be kept consistent. If crude words and anatomical details are used, then they should be consistent with the overall tone of the piece, not a delicate flowering suddenly gone rogue with cries of “F—ck me!” (That could be fun, if done believably. If you find a book like this, email me, I want to read it.)

If the usual situation is to bring the reader to the door, then draw the curtain (as I do most of the time in the Lei books) then when the characters actually have sex with us watching, it’s something built up to and handled tactfully. In a more gritty book, it’s fine to use street jargon and such, as long as usage is consistent throughout the scenes, and with the overall tone of the book.

A book with a PG-13 overall rating for violence and tone that suddenly goes Rated X on the reader is discombobulating. In a critique I did of a friend’s sci-fi romantic suspense, we went from intergalactic intrigue to a bedroom scene in zero-gravity with cocks and pussies abounding—which just didn’t fit with the overall language of the book. (Of course, if the book is erotica, forget all the above tips—in that genre, plot is just a device to link the sex scenes. I’m talking about general fiction in this article.)

What I find jarring—other than Forbidden Tacky Words—is when the author suddenly veers away and pulls the curtain on a built-up-to moment and you know they just chickened out on writing the scene. This is a form of playing coy that annoys readers.

Or, a writer flubs it with crudities, overly explaining what goes where, or too many uses of key words, as if saying them over and over imitates the act. One of the challenges of writing hot sex is not overusing the basic words you’ve chosen to describe the parts involved—good writing means avoiding repetition, inside or outside the bedroom. And only one use of the word “penis” per book, please. “Penis” is just not a hot word, sorry guys. If it’s any consolation, “vagina” isn’t very hot either. Must be all those sex ed classes we all had in junior high. But then, over-use of euphemisms doesn’t work either.

Did I mention writing a good sex scene is…hard?

Overall tone consistency, carefully-crafted action that enhances characterization, and creativity in word choice combined with anchoring physical details are what this writer finds make a memorable, believable sex scene.

What are some of your pet peeves with sex scenes, and how do you approach this difficult writing task?

About Toby Neal

Toby Neal was raised on Kauai in Hawaii. She wrote and illustrated her first story at age 5 and has been published in magazines and won several writing contests. After initially majoring in Journalism, she eventually settled on mental health as a career and loves her work, saying, “I’m endlessly fascinated with people’s stories.”

She enjoys many outdoor sports including bodyboarding, scuba diving, beach walking, gardening and hiking. She lives in Hawaii with her family and dogs. Toby credits her counseling background in adding depth to her characters–from the villains to Lei Texeira, the courageous and vulnerable heroine in the Lei Crime Series.

Toby’s website

Links to Blood Orchids:

Book publicists do a number of things to help authors prepare for their interviews, but sometimes—and especially when there are big national media interviews, like NPR and the morning tv shows, at stake—-we hire media coaches.

These coaches are usually people who have worked extensively in broadcast media, often as television, or radio hosts. As such, they understand the time constraints, end goals, and thought processes behind broadcast media better than anyone else.

Publishing houses hire media coaches to work with authors for blocks of time, anywhere from 3 hours to a full 8 hour day, several weeks before the interviews are set to take place. They have read the book in question and have access to the full press kit the publicist has created. With this background knowledge, coaches sit down with the author and discuss the “Why?” of the book, fleshing out the most important talking points and making the case for why readers should pick it up. In a sense, coaches help authors refamiliarize themselves with the text and examine it as if they had never read the book before.

After establishing the talking points, and these are a list of concise, easy-to-remember ideas, coaches help the author get comfortable talking about them. It’s one thing to be used to talking about your book with your editor or publicist or significant other; it’s a completely different ballgame to discuss your book and its merits with a stranger, let alone before a large audience, whether it’s in-studio or at home.

Coaches have all kinds of tips and tricks to help authors make the most of their interviews, from the importance of repetition (it’s NOT a bad thing to repeat your core ideas and phrases…that’s how you make your message hit home!) to techniques for taking difficult, controversial, or nonsensical questions and answering them in such a way that gets your own point across, regardless of the answer a host may be seeking. One of the ways coaches do this is by having an author take part in multiple mock interviews, answering sample question after sample question in varying formats. Often times, coaches will tape the interviews so that they can watch and critique it with the author afterwards.

While the methods may vary, the end result of media coaching is the same: Authors feel more prepared and more comfortable for their interviews. They have the confidence and the practice to handle curveballs because they know exactly how to talk about their book no matter how the questions may be phrased.

About Christina Mamangakis

Christina Mamangakis is a publicity manager at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.  Prior to that, she worked for Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, and W. W. Norton & Company.

After completing my first novel, I didn’t mind when people came up to me after a reading and talked to me as if I had personally experienced the wars between Palestine and Israel in the 1960s. I must admit it was flattering after so many years of being a mere shadow on a landscape upon which my mother, great-grandmother, and great-great grandmother were born. My mother’s family were native Jewish Palestinians, dating far back to the beginning of the nineteenth century when my great-grandmother and great-grandfather settled in ancient Jerusalem, beginning our family. My grandfather founded and ran the very first department store in old Jerusalem, my uncles, aunts, and mother all fought in the Jewish underground from the 1930s through the creation of the State of Israel. Some branches of the family even dated as far back to Palestine as the 1600s. Though I had never personally experienced the causalities and sorrows of the constant war in Jerusalem, I felt a rightful heir to its history, current and past. So I did not bother to correct the many people who assumed that, like my main character, I had absconded behind the borders as a young girl of only fourteen, running off with an American diplomat’s son. I didn’t of course do any of those things and was usually safe inside my grandmother’s home when I visited Israel as a child, the fighting far away.

During my many visits to my mother’s family house in Jerusalem from my home in America, I wasn’t even permitted to go into the streets if there was news of another skirmish. Still, I relished the new self-definition my first novel gave me. Though I lived in America, my mother took me every three years to spend summers in Jerusalem since I was a very young child. When I published, Edges. I was suddenly recognized as a person who had a “voice” in a history where, before I had felt an outsider, only a child in a vastly fascinating, though violent and foreign, land. I had finally laid claim to my heritage by writing a fiction convincing enough for people to think I had lived its history myself.

I had no idea where this new presumptuousness would lead until I wrote and published my second novel, Hysteria. This time, Hysteria, I wrote about a psychotic woman incarcerated inside a mental institution in 1974.  Set in the turbulent 1970s, HYSTERA is a story of a young woman who retreats from the outside world into a world of delusion and the private terrors of a New York City Psychiatric Hospital.  Suffering from a sexual delusion and just plain “crazy,” I had hoped my character would be affecting and moving to readers. I took great pains trying to describe her inner life as authentically and convincingly as I could.  I wanted to make her feel “real” to the reader, the issues of mental illness were so pressing for me, I had witnessed too many people suffer under society’s stigma.

What I didn’t bank on was that readers, as with Edges, would immediately assume I was writing pure autobiography. That the mentally ill character was really me.  I was introduced as a “memoirist” many times (thought the novel is written as a narrative in third person) and everywhere I read, people looked at me with great consternation and concern. Many said things like “I am so sorry you went into a mental hospital when you were young. I do hope this writing was therapeutic for you.” What? I wanted to scream. It’s not me, I’m not her. No I was NEVER crazy like that. But the more I protested, the more people thought I was only being defensive, nodding but not believing me, “Sure, I understand,” they would retort.

I don’t have a clear answer for the contradictory pleasures in creating a fiction narrative that convinces readers that you, the writer, are, indeed, the main character. It is both a fine compliment and a curse that people believe your fiction is so “real” and you can congratulate yourself for achieving such convincing, authentic-sounding prose. Perhaps this confusion on the reader’s part reflects a more profound problem in our story-telling world that now includes reality TV shows, and a myriad of confessional tell-all memoirs, rarely separating truth from fiction.

But it is a given these days as a published writer, that although you’ve published your work as “a novel,” the first question in nearly every interview and book club visit is whether the book is based on a true story. How one answers that has proven to me to be a lot more complicated than I once imagined. Where does truth end and fiction begin when, often, if a book is good, it will tell a deeper truth through inventing a fiction to contain it, or as Picasso once said, “Art is the lie that tells the truth.” In such a blurring of boundaries, there are a lot of spaces the reader will fill in. How an author will suffer or delight in the mix-up seems a new challenge.

About Author Leora Skolkin-Smith

Leora Skolkin-Smith was born in Manhattan in 1952, and spent her childhood between Pound Ridge, New York, and Israel, traveling with her family to her mother’s birthplace in Jerusalem every three years. She earned her BA and MFA and was awarded a teaching fellowship for graduate work, all at Sarah Lawrence.

Her first published novel, Edges was edited and published by the late Grace Paley for Ms. Paley’s own imprint at Glad Day books.

Edges was nominated for the 2006 PEN/ Faulkner Award and The PEN/ Ernest Hemingway Award by Grace Paley; a National Women Studies Association Conference Selection; a Bloomsbury Review Pick, 2006: “Favorite Books of the Last 25 Years”; a Jewish Book Council Selection, 2005; and won the 2008 Earphones Award for an original audio production narrated by Tovah Feldshuh. In addition, it is currently in development as a feature film, produced by Triboro Pictures.

Leora was recently a panelist, on “Israel in Fiction” at the The Miami International Book Fair, 2006, and a panelist, on “War in Writing”, at the Virginia Festival of the Book, 2006. She is currently a contributing editor to readysteadybook.com. and her critical essays have been published in The Washington Post, The National Book Critic’s Circle’s Critical Mass, and other places.

Her latest novel, Hystera, will be published by Fiction Studio Books this November.

I recently attended IBPA’S Publishing University, where I consulted authors in various stages of publishing. Some had several books under their belt, while other’s books were still seedling ideas. No matter the story, there was one recurring theme among the crowd: “I’m overwhelmed!”

In one of the sessions, a speaker turned the discussion to a new Google tool and people began heading for the door. For many authors, the thought of learning and managing yet another social media platform is daunting. Check, please!

The Internet has brought about unlimited ways to build a following (good news, right?), but all the options have many authors bewildered (not so good news). Marketing and publicity to-do lists are growing daily for authors, thanks to the web, but stick around because getting started is often only a temporary hurdle.

Before you start looking for the nearest exit, clarify your strategy. Come up with a written road map, tailored to your specific goals. This clearly defined plan will make your book promotion more manageable. Here’s a sample strategy, broken down into six main areas.

One:

Hone your online brand:

• Step one in book publicity and marketing is branding, and yet so many authors miss it. Do not proceed to the steps below until you have established your online platform.
• A publicist is essential in helping you develop and streamline your message and brand. Work together to come up with the best plan for how you will be positioned online and in the media.
• Both consumers and media will visit your website before making a commitment. So make sure your online persona is ready-to-go prior to launch time. It should reflect you and your book accurately and look professional. You’ll be judged on design quality and content, so invest in professional help.
• Your website should have these key pages: Blog, Press, About the Author, About the Book, Appearances, Contact. It should also be integrated with your social media platforms.
• Build your social media network early. Start blogging at least 3-5 months before your pub date. Same goes for Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter: don’t wait for your book to launch to be active on social media.

Two:

Employ NetGalley:

• Work with your publisher or publicist to get your book on NetGalley 3-5 months before pub date, in order to meet editorial guidelines. Your publicist can help you manage and track downloads and other activity.
• By posting your manuscript on NetGalley, you allow librarians, media, bloggers and other publishing industry pros to have early access to your book, in lieu of galleys and extensive mailouts.
• A great benefit of NetGalley is the built-in community of reviewers and other book industry professionals.

Three:

Organize an online book launch:

• Rally your personal contacts for a special one-day push that can help push your sales and up your web presence. Entice your friends and family to participate by hosting a contest.
• Ask them to post an Amazon review, blog review, and share it on Facebook and Twitter. For each post or purchase, they get another entry for prizes.
• Give away a Kindle, iPad, free consult, or something relates to your book.
• A publicist can manage this process and help you engage your network creatively and effectively.

Four:

Connect with bloggers:

• Online book reviews are a great way to boost your book’s visibility.
• There are dozens of online articles about Virtual Book Tours, so if you’re going the DIY route, start early and allow significant time for research, shipping, and follow through.
• If a blogger reviews your book, return the favor by promoting their review through your social media channels.
• The reasons to hire a publicist for your blog outreach or Virtual Book Tour are many:
• Because publicists work hard to build networks of bloggers for all kinds of book tours, you’re more likely to get better results (in quality and quantity).
• Blog tours are labor-intensive and require close attention to detail and full-time follow up.
• Publicists know how to package a book review pitch with all the right elements to secure quality reviews. They’ll work creatively to get you the best possible exposure.

Five:

Reach out to online media:

Although it hasn’t always been the case, online media is treated with the same respect and guidelines as traditional media. That’s why it makes sense to hire a publicist to handle online media outreach. Keep in mind, an editor is more likely to act on a pitch from a publicist he or she trusts. And unfortunately, your unsolicited emails may go unread.

A good publicist knows the in-roads to your target media. He/she has established relationships and knows which outlets are hungry for content.

But if you haven’t hired a publicist, don’t be afraid to make connections at your favorite blogs and local outlets. Ask if you can contribute a guest post, op-ed or excerpt. Think about what you can do to make an editor’s job easier. Forging a relationship could be mutually beneficial.

Six:

Measure your results:

• Find out the best online publicity recipe for your book by looking closely at sales and visibility indicators: Amazon rankings, website analytics, social media connections, Google Alerts, etc.
• If you hire a publicist, ask about their reporting process. You’ll want to have regular updates and easy access to current activity and results – both positive and negative. A publicist can also help you get the most mileage out of each media hit.

About Stephanie Ridge

Stephanie Ridge is a publicist at PR by the Book (Austin, Texas). In 10 years of literary publicity, she has represented all kinds of authors—from chef to mafia expert, first-timer to bestseller. She loves crafting headlines and isn’t afraid to pinch-hit for clients when duty calls. (Ask her about the time she moonlighted as Mama Bear on a Berenstain Bears book tour.) She was also a publicist at WaterBrook Press, a division of Random House, and at Phenix & Phenix Literary Publicists.