What do you do for marketing?
I have a trailer I did myself and am very proud of I designed a beautiful website, and try to blog fairly regularly. I do Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Goodreads—most of the things you’re supposed to do. And BearCat did some traditional publisher’s promo. I’ve done guest blog giveaways of my book, and am just finishing one on Goodreads. I do think that the promotion market, like the book market itself, is overwhelmed. It’s very difficult to become visible. But you still have to make an effort or you really look unprofessional. But how much of an effort is up to the individual author.
For somewhat more unique ideas, I’ve got several perfumes finished and will be do ongoing giveaway from my website during this blog tour. And in addition to the trailer, I did lovely poem videos with my main French translator, Jon McKenney. They’re in French and English with wonderful art of the period, and I did some with other public domain translations of the French, with music instead of Jon’s voice.
Have you always enjoyed writing?
Writing can be very painful. I’ve had lucky times when it flowed, when I was lost in the world and that was joyous. I enjoy plotting and thinking about my books. The first draft is usually agony. I love rewriting, just making it better and better.
Do you have any upcoming appearances that you would like to share with us?
Nothing upcoming, but this last summer I did several appearances on a panel called From Brush Strokes to Key Strokes: Novels about Art and Artists. There were four of us, all writing about artists and architects. Mary Burns, who wrote about Sargent in Portraits of an Artist, queried the local chapter of the Historical Novel Society, if any one else was writing about artists. It was pure chance that we were all writing about artists from roughly the same era, all of worked or studied in Paris. Michael Llewellyn wrote Creole Son, about the time Degas spent in New Orleans, and Ciji Ware wrote about the famous California architect, Julia Morgan, the first woman to graduate from the architectural school of the École des Beaux Arts. Her book is A Race to Splendor, set in San Francisco after the earthquake. What was really fun was that my fictional character could reference all of them, one way or another. Theo paints more like Degas than anyone else, though her father wants her to do portraits like Sargent, and she actually meets Julia Morgan in a scene in Floats the Dark Shadow. Small bits, but it helped unify the panel even more. Mary is working on a YouTube version, with our pictures and enough text to give the watcher an idea of the talk.
Do you find the time to read?
Nowhere near as much as I’d like to.
Did you learn anything from writing this book and what was it?
Eudora Welty said that every book teaches you how to write that book. Of course you learn with each book, but each new one is terrifying as well as exciting. In Shadow, I learned my characters, who’ll be with me for the series. I learned about controlling backstory, or continued to learn, since I really like backstory, and flashbacks, that a lot of modern readers are impatient with, and have to avoid over-indugence. My romances often had mystery elements, so I’d worked with planting clues. Ending a series mystery was different, and was difficult.
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Genre – Historical Mystery
Rating – R
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