Blog Post 129

While “following” the Fredericksburg Writers Group blog to keep abreast of local writers and ideas, and similarly with the LinkedIn Book Marketing group I found that the former is not of any help, while the latter is informative, but mainly helps other authors selling their novels. I found review of marketing techniques helpful, but of limited use to this writer marketing his eBooks. A local writers group, which advertised an authors’ gathering quickly turned unproductive when the fine print revealed only authors of hard copy works were invited.

Another bit of progress on Kashan Kashmeeri has made its way into the novel. This is rough and I expect it to change over the next several days. As part of DP Tolan’s writing process the author has put together a listing of the characters major, minor and throwaway. Additionally the largest segment of the working draft, which covers the whole novel plus place holders for needed characters dialogue, action and interactions known to be needed but not yet structured in more than concept stage, will be merged with additions which give preliminary form to the missing parts.

As part of the process the needed segments are identified, in both the working draft and the additions segment by headers which are substantially larger in font size, and are bolded and highlighted. This allows a easy search for the headers, insertion of the additions, and rewrite of the combined areas into a better whole product. The progress of these two working segments stands at 74K and 145 pages as merged.

Distraction of a trip to Nova Scotia, where my wife’s maternal ancestors immigrated to.

I approached a librarian at a public library in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to offer free copies of my novels. It appears that Canada uses the same eBook franchisees to host eBooks in their libraries. I could not even give them my novels free of charge.

Lake of the Woods Authors Book Fair was held locally. Eight fellow members of the Riverside Writers Group described their books, offering tips on writing, and a local author Suzi Weinert, a new RWG member, discussed her book. She wrote Garage Sale Stalker, which was made into a Hallmark TV movie that premiered last September.

The September 2014 monthly RWG meeting was well attended and the critique session provided the following suggestions on Kashan Kashmeeri:

RWG member –

1.       Thought a bog improvement over style of previous novels – agree

2.       Suggested better identification of speakers – agree to a degree

3.       Minor sentence changes – agree

4.       Liked description of rugs and cell phones – agree

5.       Questioned validity of range of DNA analysis – disagree; fictional work

6.       Described several paragraphs as ‘good writing’ – agree

7.       Liked use of Tin Man and not being in Kansas - agree

RWG member –

1.       Loved the description of jeweled cell phones – agree

2.        Suggested changing GYN/obstetrics to pre-natal – agree

3.       Confused with who were characters – disagree; covered in previous chapters

4.       Thought the scenes were interesting – agree

5.       Suggested making ‘distant past’ more defined – disagree; part of earlier discussion

6.       Minor punctuation changes – agree

7.       7. Questioned use of very detailed DNA testing – disagree; explained in earlier chapters

RWG member –

1.       Confused with who were characters – disagree; covered in previous chapters

2.       Uncertain of sarcasm of phlebotomist’s remarks – disagree; clear to other reviewers

RWG member –

1.       Liked the color of images - agree

2.       Uncertain as to ‘prescription’ of water vs drinking by phlebotomist  - disagree; clear to other reviewers

3.       No written comments

A marketing scheme under consideration – bundle and sell all three novels of The Tessera Trilogy (Golden Gate, Sooley Base, and Kashan Kashmeeri) together for a lower price.