The Literary Midwife
February 20 Issue
Author Spotlight: Amber Michelle Cook
Amber Michelle Cook is a client of mine and working hard on the start of her indie publishing career with her first novel What the Fairies Left Behind. She's confident of what she wants and has put a lot of time into writing and now, marketing her book. Let's meet her and hear a bit about what she is doing! She also has one of the best one-liner sales pitches for a forthcoming book that I've ever heard!
Tell us about the book. Just how did you come up with the idea?
I'm a big advocate for adults keeping wonder and play in their lives, rather than pushing it away as kid's stuff. I believe you can have fun, by which I mean playful innocent good times, and still be a responsible, well-grounded grown-up. Why cut out the very things that add freshness and enjoyment to days filled with repetition and stress just when you need them most to combat accruing cynicism and tiredness? Fairy tales have the wonderful element of wish fulfillment you can get lost in for a time, but they're not just escapist, they allow us to play for fun and to play around with what ifs for something more than fun. That's why I write urban fairy tales for adults.
And that's what What the Faeries Left Behind is - it's the story of an unchangeling. A lot of people feel like they don't exactly fit in, and over time, as relationships and friendships lead to frustration and disappointment, pull further and further back and accept a certain amount of loneliness and disconnection as just the way it is, or the way it is for them. Daily routines and chores take over the day, and real personal expression becomes too vulnerable to display in a world of folks working so hard to be and look like everybody else. What if you were suddenly given the perfect excuse to be different, and to be yourself, to have fun and not care what other people think because really you weren't from this world, but had been switched at birth by the fey? What could you be then? How would you live your life?
How long did it take you to finish it? Why did you decide to go indie with this? Did you decide from the get-go to publish it independently or did you market it first and not find a publisher.
I've taken the process of learning to write very seriously, applying myself at it for years before looking at publishing. This story has seen many readers and several rounds of critique in the process of being rewritten and polished. It's been proofed twice. It's the first piece I considered completely done.
The more I learned about both legacy and indie publishing and really sat down and thought about it, the more I knew indie was for me. That it made a good match for me personally. Mary said something to me I've also found more and more true the more I look at it - I don't write mainstream, middle of the road, stories. I intentionally want to write tales that play with those expectations and take a different turn. And I don't want to be squeezed into boxes and have my stories molded to mass appeal so the publishing house has a better chance of making some money publishing me. The other big piece is that while some writers feel that having to market their work goes against the grain, I know for me it's the perfect push for personal growth and I'll be the better for it.
What made you decide to publish with Create Space?
One of the prizes for winning National Novel Editing Month is a free print copy of your novel from Createspace. So over the years I'd had the opportunity to design my own interior layout and covers, and then receive a trade paperback bound volume in the mail. At the time it was just a fun perk, but it turned out to be invaluable experience. I loved the process, and I was always really happy with the results. I'm a photographer and graphic artist as well, so I have strong feelings about visuals - I'm not a personal fan of many legacy publisher's book covers, and I find the lack of imagination and variety in the interiors tiresome. There's never going to be an image of an emaciated-but-otherwise-enhanced and exposed young woman on a cover of any of my stories gyrated into some impossible pose to arouse male viewers, or any of the other oppressive stereotypes. Why fight a losing battle with a publisher and their art department when I can make it just the way I want it?
How did you decide on that $4.99 price? How much do you earn per copy sold?
Being a novella I wanted to price it somewhere between the 99¢ of many short stories, and the $10-20 of most books. (Plus, any less on Amazon and my royalties would be below a quarter a book.)
Fairies is now on Smashwords and will be on Amazon.com shortly. Will it be up on Barnes and Noble and Sony as well? What about the Apple platforms?
What the Faeries Left Behind is up on Smashwords, Amazon and Amazon Kindle, and should be up on the Barnes and Noble website and the Apple iBookstore soon. Those last two are set up once B&N and Apple receive the listing of my book from Smashword's premium catalog, which takes a little time.
Are you working on anything else right now? Will you be publishing more books as an indie author? What about short stories?
I have more urban fairy tales and stories of changelings and unchangelings coming soon, as well as my other passion - speculative fiction meets classic literature. I'll be releasing a second novella in the next month or so called Defense Mechanisms (what if your déjà vu was really flashes from someone whose life is running parallel to yours - in the Faerie Realm?). That should be followed in a couple months by Sleepwaking, a modern adaptation of Through the Looking Glass for adults (where Wonderland is set in a version of the McMenamin's Edgefield). I'll also be putting up the first twelve chapters from the first novel of the Night of the Victorian Dead trilogy in serialized form on my website and out as free ebooks before releasing the first book as a whole. Victorian Dead is lit period-piece meetsGosford Park/Downton Abbey, invaded by Night of the Living Dead. And that's just the beginning!
I love Night of the Living Dead meets Downton Abby! Amber, remember that line, it's a great sales pitch!
Wrapping it up...
Well, that wraps it up for this issue of the Literary Midwife! In our first March issue, we'll look at Twitter and how to use it effectively as well a what not to do with it! You can make it work for you! We'll have a little craft talk about ‘show don't tell' and dialogue scenes, too. I'm seeing a lot of weak dialogue scenes on the editorial side of things, and they're easy to avoid, folks! We're also going to be talking about the new-author collection, 99 cent ebooks, and giving your work away for free on Wattpad!
Think spring!
Mary Rosenblum, the literary midwife
http://www.newwritersinterface.com/
Author Spotlight: Amber Michelle Cook
Amber Michelle Cook is a client of mine and working hard on the start of her indie publishing career with her first novel What the Fairies Left Behind. She's confident of what she wants and has put a lot of time into writing and now, marketing her book. Let's meet her and hear a bit about what she is doing! She also has one of the best one-liner sales pitches for a forthcoming book that I've ever heard!
Tell us about the book. Just how did you come up with the idea?
I'm a big advocate for adults keeping wonder and play in their lives, rather than pushing it away as kid's stuff. I believe you can have fun, by which I mean playful innocent good times, and still be a responsible, well-grounded grown-up. Why cut out the very things that add freshness and enjoyment to days filled with repetition and stress just when you need them most to combat accruing cynicism and tiredness? Fairy tales have the wonderful element of wish fulfillment you can get lost in for a time, but they're not just escapist, they allow us to play for fun and to play around with what ifs for something more than fun. That's why I write urban fairy tales for adults.
And that's what What the Faeries Left Behind is - it's the story of an unchangeling. A lot of people feel like they don't exactly fit in, and over time, as relationships and friendships lead to frustration and disappointment, pull further and further back and accept a certain amount of loneliness and disconnection as just the way it is, or the way it is for them. Daily routines and chores take over the day, and real personal expression becomes too vulnerable to display in a world of folks working so hard to be and look like everybody else. What if you were suddenly given the perfect excuse to be different, and to be yourself, to have fun and not care what other people think because really you weren't from this world, but had been switched at birth by the fey? What could you be then? How would you live your life?
How long did it take you to finish it? Why did you decide to go indie with this? Did you decide from the get-go to publish it independently or did you market it first and not find a publisher.
I've taken the process of learning to write very seriously, applying myself at it for years before looking at publishing. This story has seen many readers and several rounds of critique in the process of being rewritten and polished. It's been proofed twice. It's the first piece I considered completely done.
The more I learned about both legacy and indie publishing and really sat down and thought about it, the more I knew indie was for me. That it made a good match for me personally. Mary said something to me I've also found more and more true the more I look at it - I don't write mainstream, middle of the road, stories. I intentionally want to write tales that play with those expectations and take a different turn. And I don't want to be squeezed into boxes and have my stories molded to mass appeal so the publishing house has a better chance of making some money publishing me. The other big piece is that while some writers feel that having to market their work goes against the grain, I know for me it's the perfect push for personal growth and I'll be the better for it.
What made you decide to publish with Create Space?
One of the prizes for winning National Novel Editing Month is a free print copy of your novel from Createspace. So over the years I'd had the opportunity to design my own interior layout and covers, and then receive a trade paperback bound volume in the mail. At the time it was just a fun perk, but it turned out to be invaluable experience. I loved the process, and I was always really happy with the results. I'm a photographer and graphic artist as well, so I have strong feelings about visuals - I'm not a personal fan of many legacy publisher's book covers, and I find the lack of imagination and variety in the interiors tiresome. There's never going to be an image of an emaciated-but-otherwise-enhanced and exposed young woman on a cover of any of my stories gyrated into some impossible pose to arouse male viewers, or any of the other oppressive stereotypes. Why fight a losing battle with a publisher and their art department when I can make it just the way I want it?
How did you decide on that $4.99 price? How much do you earn per copy sold?
Being a novella I wanted to price it somewhere between the 99¢ of many short stories, and the $10-20 of most books. (Plus, any less on Amazon and my royalties would be below a quarter a book.)
Fairies is now on Smashwords and will be on Amazon.com shortly. Will it be up on Barnes and Noble and Sony as well? What about the Apple platforms?
What the Faeries Left Behind is up on Smashwords, Amazon and Amazon Kindle, and should be up on the Barnes and Noble website and the Apple iBookstore soon. Those last two are set up once B&N and Apple receive the listing of my book from Smashword's premium catalog, which takes a little time.
Are you working on anything else right now? Will you be publishing more books as an indie author? What about short stories?
I have more urban fairy tales and stories of changelings and unchangelings coming soon, as well as my other passion - speculative fiction meets classic literature. I'll be releasing a second novella in the next month or so called Defense Mechanisms (what if your déjà vu was really flashes from someone whose life is running parallel to yours - in the Faerie Realm?). That should be followed in a couple months by Sleepwaking, a modern adaptation of Through the Looking Glass for adults (where Wonderland is set in a version of the McMenamin's Edgefield). I'll also be putting up the first twelve chapters from the first novel of the Night of the Victorian Dead trilogy in serialized form on my website and out as free ebooks before releasing the first book as a whole. Victorian Dead is lit period-piece meetsGosford Park/Downton Abbey, invaded by Night of the Living Dead. And that's just the beginning!
I love Night of the Living Dead meets Downton Abby! Amber, remember that line, it's a great sales pitch!
Wrapping it up...
Well, that wraps it up for this issue of the Literary Midwife! In our first March issue, we'll look at Twitter and how to use it effectively as well a what not to do with it! You can make it work for you! We'll have a little craft talk about ‘show don't tell' and dialogue scenes, too. I'm seeing a lot of weak dialogue scenes on the editorial side of things, and they're easy to avoid, folks! We're also going to be talking about the new-author collection, 99 cent ebooks, and giving your work away for free on Wattpad!
Think spring!
Mary Rosenblum, the literary midwife
http://www.newwritersinterface.com/
