Mood:  don't ask

Sometimes I think authors (myself included) can be pretty dense when it comes to marketing, at least in our efforts on social networking websites. It seems like whenever I get a friend request it's from another writer. When I get a comment, it's from a writer talking up his or her latest release. On Goodreads, when I get a book recommendation, more often than not, it was sent by the book's author.

I've never bought any of their books. I've never even gone to the library and borrowed their books. There are so many requests for my attention, it's like the junk mail I barely glance at before throwing in the recycling bin.

Why do authors seek out other authors when trying to promote themselves? We're all far more interested in selling our own books than buying someone else's. Granted, there is a benefit in networking with other authors, but sending out announcements of book signings and favorable reviews is not networking. It's little more than an annoyance.

Even though I'm doing it sporadically and ineptly, my goal is to seek out and interest readers. I'm looking for the people who were smart enough never to start that book that everyone has lurking within them, the ones who are content to read other people's stories rather than write their own.

If you're a writer who's discovered a new way to get in touch with readers, please let me know. If you're just letting me know that the latest book in your paranormal romance vampire detective series has just been released, go ahead and delete me.

Posted by judy5cents at 6:51 AM EDT

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At this moment my 12 year old daughter is sweating through the EOG tests, otherwise known as the dreaded End Of Grade tests. She's been taking them since she was in the third grade and it seems like every year the pressure increases.

I've never put much faith in standardized testing.  In another lifetime, I trained to be a teacher and one of the things I learned is that tests are only as good as the people who put them together.  Coming up with test questions that measure the required skills and knowledge of any given grade level is a difficult task. 

For example, back when she was in third grade, my daughter brought home an EOG practice test to work on. She was stumped by this question:

Where would you go to find Treasure Island in the library?

The answer was the card catalog.

Now, my daughter was born in 1995. She's never seen a card catalog as they were all replaced by computers before she was born. I pointed this out to her teacher, who thanked me and said that I shouldn't worry, this question wouldn't be on the real test. Since the test is kept secret, I have no way of knowing that there aren't more questions to which the children of the 21st century can't possibly answer.

The whole idea of holding schools "accountable" by measuring students' progress with a one-size-fits-all test is ludicrous. Treating schools like corporations where the best organizations survive and the low performers fall by the wayside is also ludicrous.

When I saw presidential candidate Barack Obama last month, he said that holding schools accountable was a good idea, but instead of punishing the low performing schools, we needed to give them whatever they needed to improve.

My daughter will be glad when the tests are over, as will I. Someday I hope we'll come up with a system for measuring progress that doesn't involve number 2 pencils and filling in grids. 

Posted by judy5cents at 8:03 AM EDT

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Have you ever bought anything simply because someone sent you a postcard?

Hardly a day goes buy that I don’t get some kind of promotional postcard in the mail, offering me everything from pizza to carpet cleaning to the services of a competent, experienced realtor. These cards go directly to the recycling bin, destined for the Mixed Paper section of the local recycling station.

But they must work, otherwise people wouldn’t send them to me.

Postcards are a favorite topic of authors. I don’t know why they’re considered such an effective marketing tool. Even using a reasonably priced service like Vistaprint, it will cost around $120 to send out two hundred postcards. If you’re lucky and you get a 2.6 % response rate, you sell four books, not nearly enough to cover the cost of the mailings. Of course, response is a relative term. Most likely, the response means that 2.6% of those people will go to your website, say "Oh, isn’t that interesting?" and not buy anything.

I’ve received a number of postcards announcing upcoming books by authors I’ve never heard of, and I’ve never bought a single one. Like most people, I will read a book because I heard something good about it. Either someone I know recommended it or I heard a review of it on the radio. Hearing or reading interviews with the author also has motivated me to buy a book.

Marketing is a pretty tricky business. I can’t begin to say what works and what’s a waste of time and money. I have heard that whatever you do,only ten percent of it pays off. The problem is, you never know which ten percent. I know that to sell my book, I need to somehow bring it to the attention of prospective readers in a way that’s interesting and not irritating. The trick is finding out what among the millions of marketing strategies out there accomplishes that feat.

Anyway, I’m prety sure it’s not the postcards.

Posted by judy5cents at 11:22 AM EDT

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A bit of background here. I belong to an online community called Goodreads which is place where readers discuss books. We have some lively conversations, especially in the group called "Books I Loathed."

One of the books that came up was a children's book by Shel Silverstein called The Giving Tree.  Depending on your point of view, it's a poignant parable of unconditional love, or the toxic relationship between a narcissistic male and a pathetic self-destructive female.

Here's the story. Once there was a tree who loved a little boy. He would come and play in her branches and sleep under her shade. Then he began taking. He wants to buy a car and she gives him her apples to sell. He wants a house and she gives him her trunk and branches for wood. At the end of the book, he's an old man, she's a stump. All he wants to do is sit and rest and she offers herself to sit on. And she's happy.

The first time I heard it, I thought "My God, the tree dies! She's reduced to nothing but a stump and she's happy that the boy is sitting on her!" I've always seen it as the relationship between a selfish man and a compulsively giving woman, but one member of the group saw it as a mother and child relationship.

Now Shel Silverstein has written some wonderful stuff for children, like his poetry books Where The Sidewalk Ends and A Light In The Attic. I love the poem "Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout" about the disatrous results of not taking the garbage out. A far more practical moral than giving so much that you're not even you any more.

I never read this book to my daughter. I much preferred Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are where Max escapes his time-out by going to the land of the Wild Things where he's made King of The Wild Things and stays until he gets hungry and decides to go back where someone loved him best of all.

And his supper was still hot.

Posted by judy5cents at 10:55 AM EST

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Not exactly.

But I am in the position of being able to exploit a current news story to sell a book that was written five years ago. (Yes, the wheels of publication do run slowly.)

Yesterday, an eco-terrorist group called the Earth Liberation Front (using the adorable acronym ELF) set fire to three multi-million dollar mansions in a Seattle suburb. Fortunately, the houses were unoccupied and no one was hurt or killed. Of course, ELF prides itself on never harming a living being, only property.

In my book Tree Huggers, a house very much like the luxury homes in Seattle is burned to the ground, supposedly by an ecoterrorist group very much like ELF. However, there are people in this house, and they die.

Those of us who write murder mysteries occasionally find ourselves having written books that parallel real-life cases purely by coincidence. Yes, we like having the publicity, but there's a downside. Every murder victim leaves a family and they deserve to be treated with respect and sympathy, not to have their pain used to sell more books.

I know those developers must be feeling a great deal of pain at the loss of their houses, but they also have insurance. They'll get over it.

No, I am not condoning eco-terrorism (although I don't mourn the loss of another humoungous house built for people with more money than sense.) And I don't expect this story to make Tree Huggers a best-seller. But I am hoping that anyone who's interested in this story might enjoy reading a fictionalized account of this group.

Posted by judy5cents at 4:32 PM EST

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Not exactly.

But I am in the position of being able to exploit a current news story to sell a book that was written five years ago. (Yes, the wheels of publication do run slowly.)

Yesterday, an eco-terrorist group called the Earth Liberation Front (using the adorable acronym ELF) set fire to three multi-million dollar mansions in a Seattle suburb. Fortunately, the houses were unoccupied and no one was hurt or killed. Of course, ELF prides itself on never harming a living being, only property.

In my book Tree Huggers, a house very much like the luxury homes in Seattle is burned to the ground, supposedly by an ecoterrorist group very much like ELF. However, there are people in this house, and they die.

Those of us who write murder mysteries occasionally find ourselves having written books that parallel real-life cases purely by coincidence. Yes, we like having the publicity, but there's a downside. Every murder victim leaves a family and they deserve to be treated with respect and sympathy, not to have their pain used to sell more books.

I know those developers must be feeling a great deal of pain at the loss of their houses, but they also have insurance. They'll get over it.

No, I am not condoning eco-terrorism (although I don't mourn the loss of another humoungous house built for people with more money than sense.) And I don't expect this story to make Tree Huggers a best-seller. But I am hoping that anyone who's interested in this story might enjoy reading a fictionalized account of this group.

Posted by judy5cents at 4:32 PM EST

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The Academy Awards show is a lot like Christmas. The anticipation always excedes the actual event and you never get what you really want. Just ask Peter O'Toole. Or Kevin Connolly, who just lost his 20th nomination for Achievement in Sound Mixing. Of course no one in the Academy is going to vote for "Transformers," a re-make of a 1980s  kids' television show that was, in reality, a blatant attempt to sell toys.

Everyone loves to trash the Academy Awards show. Yesterday morning on NPR I heard snarky comments about the poor quality of the writing, seeing as how it was thrown together in five days. But be fair, was it that great last year when a professionally written Ellen Degeneres hosted the show? Or when Letterman hosted it?  A great deal of the words spoken are not written by writers at all, they are the hastily scribbled acceptance speeches penned by the lucky winners. Or, even worse, the stream of consciousness of the totally befuddled but nonetheless lucky winner, for whom English is a second lanuage.

Anyway, I still make a point to watch the show. It is a remnant of my single days when I saw movies in theaters. (I always assumed that once I got married, I'd always have a date for the movies. Wrong!) I always root for the films I've seen, few as they are.

This year, again as always, the films I saw did not win any major awards. However, last weekend my husband and I watched the "Bourne Ultimatum," which won three awards for Sound Mixing, Sound Editing and Film Editing.

The film itself was a disappointment, not much of a plot. Matt Damon tracks down and confronts Albert Finney, the creator of the program that robbed David Webb of his humanity and turned him into killing machine Jason Bourne. But there are plenty of shoot outs and car chases. It did have a lot of sound in it. Amazingly, the guns sounded just like guns and the car crashes sounded just like car crashes. They were loud too. So those two Oscars were well deserved. I suppose the film editing award was also well deserved, I remember there were a fair number of camera angles all seamlessly strung together in the car chases and gun fights.

Too bad those guys didn't have a better movie to work on.

Last year, I made a point of renting DVDs for all the winners and lived to regret it. "The Departed" was laboriously long. "The Last King of Scotland" was depressing beyond words. This year, I won't be renting "No Country For Old Men," or "There Will Be Blood." However, I think I'd like to see "Juno." It sounds kind of cheerry and there's no greed, no murder, and no Conflict with a Capital C that spans across decades until it explodes in a bloody final scene that takes ages to get to.

And since "Juno" is outgrossing "No Country For Old Men" at the box office,  it looks like most of the movie going public is with me here.

Posted by judy5cents at 8:54 AM EST

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Anyone catch Frontline on PBS Tuesday night? The program was called "Growing Up Online" and investigated the internet experience of teenagers and their clueless parents.

The good news is that the Cyber Predator out to kidnap your 14 year old daughter is an urban myth. Not that there aren't plenty of dirty old men online looking to hook up with hot teen aged girls. As I've always suspected, the kids recognize the forty-somethings masquerading as teens and delete their messages. The only response these guys get are from the producers of "Datline--To Catch A Predator."

But the bad news is that this is the greatest generation gap since rock and roll. Which is odd for me, because although I'm old enough to be a grandmother, I'm online more than my daughter. I know my way around the internet. I have a website, I belong to a number of  writers' networks and forums, I did most of my Christmas shopping online and I download MP3s.  If this is the gap, it would be the same as if my 82 year old mother went to Woodstock or a was Dead Head for the summer of 1967.

I see the internet as an amazingly huge shopping mall that goes on forever. There are great big stores (like amazon.com) and weird little boutiques and lots of places for people to talk and hang out. It's a fun place to visit and you can be whoever you want to be online.  There's a dark side too, like the porn and the hate mongers and the people who want to show you how to do things you really shouldn't be doing. You don't want your kid going through this place without guidance.

I think a lot of teens forget that this wonderful shopping mall is a public place. Far more public than the brick and mortar mall down the road. Because hundreds of millions of people go there. People from all over the world can view your myspace page. So can your high school principal, your parents, your girlfriend, the recruiter at your first choice college and prospective employers.

I have explained to my daughter that she should have no expectation of privacy when she goes online. I have the right to look over her shoulder and read whatever it is she's writing or viewing. (And I know what POS means). I've also explained to her that when she does get a myspace page, even though it will be private, she should keep in mind that all the people I mentioned earlier--the parents, the prinicpal, the college recruiters--could eventually see it.

But it was Cyber-bullying that was the biggest problem for teens. Instant messages and myspace postings, kids saying things to each online that they would never do face to face. I talked to my daughter about that, and we have a strategy for how to handle it. If she becomes the victim of cyber bullying, she says she'll delete the messages, turn off the computer and go read a book.

Or even talk to her aged, though moderately tech-savvy mom.

Posted by judy5cents at 8:13 AM EST

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