The Trials of a Chameleon

My days are often over before I am even aware they have begun.
It's so frustrating. The thing is, I am a very introverted person caught in an extrovert's life. It's tiring and my creative mind is having difficulty working properly under so much stress. No. I cannot back off. Years ago I decided my sons would not be hindered by my quirky, hermit self. We are booked most nights of the week and now that Scouting has started for this school year, we are also booked most weekends.
It's overwhelming when I want to be my writer self.
As a teenager I would go out on nice autumn days and stretch out on a large tree that had fallen across a creek and just lie there and daydream and think. After awhile I would go in and begin writing. Or, if I didn't fall asleep on the log first, I would hop down and curl up against a hollowed out tree and write in my journal.
These days are over.
I have become hyperactive. It is very difficult for me to even just sit and watch a movie and do nothing else. There are days when it finally becomes too much and I will just sit in the shower and cry. That sounds so horribly girly, but cut me some slack. I only cry for a minute or two before I realize such silliness doesn't accomplish anything, then I pull myself up by my bootstraps and trudge on.
What's the point? Who cares? The gals who have read Filter care. They want to read the second book and I am trying to write it not from my practical mind but from my creative mind. Good grief, maybe I should change my pen name to Sybil. Thing is, it takes a lot of time to slip away, for the worries of the day to melt into the background, to stop thinking about reviews and the bills I can't pay because I'm not selling enough books and how I should really just get a real job with a steady paycheck and benefits. I'm good out there in the business world, in the world of broadcast journalism....but I am also a dreamer, a drifter, a bit of a flake. I'm kind of like Madonna, only with stronger morals and more clothes and sans the personal trainer. I can redefine myself to fit the moment. But now, with writing becoming my job...I find that the practical and creative sides of my worlds have crashed together.
How to be one and the other all at once?

Advice to Newbie Indie Authors

As a blanket rule I have begun only "fanning" authors that I have read and am actually a fan of on Goodreads. The readers on this sight are savvy people and they are serious about their book reviews and who they choose to fan. As an author you can lose face with them if you try marketing ploys like fanning other authors indiscriminately. You must also NEVER outright suggest they read your book. Don't even hint at it. Some of them are nice and just ignore you. Others will unfriend you and tell their friends how annoying you are. 

I know it's a big thing to spend a lot of time engaging other authors. Don't. Some time is fine, but not the majority of it. Engage potential readers. Who do you write like? Go to that author's page and friend request their fans, those people obviously already enjoy that style of writing. DO NOT solicit to these people either. Take an interest in their posts. Be sincere. Respect their intelligence. 


Secondly, a book giveaway is the best thing you can do as a new author. List a giveaway, it can be small. Five books. Blog about it, post links to your blog on twitter with the hashtag #bgrt #bookgiveaways. In two weeks my unknown book gathered 1100 entries. Be relentless, be engaging. Drink a lot of caffeine. 

If you have $30-40 to spend create a carefully targeted and worded Facebook Ad. Do you have a Facebook Page? You should. Not a profile, a page. You can advertise your page to drive up numbers but often times people will like your Facebook page and never buy your book. That's a waste of money. I run one ad for Barnes and Noble and the other for Amazon. Make sure to include the price, that way people already know what they'll be spending and you don't waste any clicks (it's pay per click). For targeting, again, list authors similar to you, this also helps ensure that you'll have people who are a good fit for your book clicking on your ad. 

It takes time. It's frustrating, I know. Hang in there. Don't throw your energy into things that don't work. These readers don't care if you have a zillion fans, they care if you write well. I use to do the tag my book and fanning other authors...it doesn't work. Do a giveaway, run an ad on goodreads or Facebook (which is really cheap, just make sure to set your overall spending limit AND your daily budget so your ad doesn't run off with your wallet). The best advertising is free. Word of mouth. Get those first, excited readers and you'll slowly be off and running! Blog, facebook, twitter, goodreads...link everything. And somehow find time to keep writing and revising. When you don't have the big bucks to dump into big, flashy ads that are constantly running, YOU have to be the one that is constantly running. Make sure you're spending your energy wisely. 


And do not try to hop on the coattails of other indie authors. It's rude.

Good luck.

The von Strassenberg Saga ~ Vlog 1

While studying Broadcast Journalism it was never my dream to be an anchor on the nightly news. Though I can do a cold reading from the teleprompter with the best of them, being on camera makes me shudder. Regardless, book trailers and video logs seems to be the thing, so we'll give it a try. My husband says this video is false advertising as I am way too calm and quiet. But, as I pointed out, there are a) no children present in this video (though a sword fight broke out in the background, this was edited out) and b) no husband sitting off camera making relentless comments in an effort to get my knickers in a knot. I am situationally funny and the camera built in to my HTC Inspire doesn't give me much material to work. So without further adieu, here is me telling you why I wrote The von Strassenberg Saga. And I apologize because the video geek in me took over and I was completely amused by the effect a dramatic music bed, coupled with desaturated video and slow zoom, can have. It makes me chuckle. But then, I am part tech geek.

The paperback version of Filter is cheapest ($10) at Barnes and Noble. You can also read Filter on your Kindle or Nook! http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/filter-gwenn-wright

For a Change in Pace

Joan the Rouen (it rhymes) being cheeky

There are other things I do with my life besides read and peddle my book and read and research and write. Things like laundry and weeding the garden and laundry. I am also a referee and judge, a defender of justice (or the necessity of silence within the home for certain lengths of time, it's a fine line). There are ducks to feed and water, a coop to muck out (this is also my husband's fault, we only have ducks because they were on clearance and he can never pass up a good sale). And many, many more mundane things (such as dishes and dirty bathrooms) fill my days to overflowing. O and let's not forget having two boys in Little League and two in Scouts. So, I am plodding along, trying to work on Book 2. But honestly, most nights I pass out before getting much done. And then my husband calls me four minutes after I pass out because he's on his way home and it's late and we talk throughout the entire hour-long drive because it helps keep him awake. By the time he gets home it's 1 in the morning (or later) and the ducks and chickens will need to be let out of the coop in five hours (or fewer) because leaving them in too long only irritates them and causes them to make an even bigger mess.
So I am trying, trying to write book 2 for those of you who shake your fists in the air at me and say, "Why!? Why must you leave me hanging in this way!?" But there is research and there are unruly characters who mangle my original idea for the story.
My brain is addled. I will no longer opt to weed the stoopid garden at noon. That was a moronic idea.

The von Strassenberg Saga is also available for Kindle. $2.99. Buy the paperback from Barnes and Noble, it's cheaper there!

Now In PAPERBACK!!!

It took more than a year of work...ok, not really. Writing the book, scraping the first 100+ pages and starting over, writing the 390 pages of Filter, editing the 390 pages, editing them again and again and again....unpublishing Filter for months because I decided it must be junk because only a few people bought the eBook each month and then re-publishing it because while editing I fell in love with the story again, struggling to get it to look professional in paperback and marketing the eBook almost 24/7....that has taken a year. The initial writing took about five months. There was about a month or two of research before that. Some people complain about the price of paperbacks, but it is 390 pages long, ink and paper cost money. And I'm only making $0.82 per copy. Unless you buy the $0.99 cent eBook, then I'm making $0.61. Rakin' it in. O yea. And now, with all that done (except the marketing, that's constant) you may now read Filter in paperback. A local teen I gave one of the proofs to texted me to tell me it's BEAST. Ok. I'll take that!

Who Needs Page Numbers? A poll

There is a reason people use publishers. Because publishers know how to print things in a professional manner. I’m a writer. I’m not a tech wizard, though I’m trying to be. Once again the page numbers didn’t transfer from the word–>PDF–>proof. Now, in Adobe Acrobat Professional 7.0 the page numbers are there. When I open that PDF in Preview (on a Mac) the page numbers don’t show up. How much flipping sense does that make? Other people who have had page number issues say their manuscripts were rejected because of it. Mine was never rejected, so I don’t know. Others say they didn’t have page numbers in their proofs but in the actual copies they did. Others say I need to complete ten million steps to create a clean file and then re-format everything (E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G). Still others say I must make sure my chapter changes always occur on the righthand page so I don’t look like an amateur.

And there are people who scoff at the idea that writing books for a living is work. Oh buddy….

So I'm conducting a poll on my Facebook page...come help a mommy out!

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Filter-The-Von-Strassenberg-Saga/150889648309305

Paperback!

Hoping the next shipment comes tomorrow! Complete with page numbers. Sigh. A million thanks to Zach Ruble Productions for my wicked awesome cover art! https://www.facebook.com/pages/Zach-Ruble-Productions/147894218571929

Laundry Impedes Paperback Progress

Okay, the chickens and ducks and children who have to play baseball and go to scouts (only the children are playing baseball and going to scouts, the chickens and ducks aren’t old enough yet) are seriously impeding my progress. My husband’s new work schedule isn’t helping either…or my sinus infection. Sigh. My desk and desk chair have been overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of laundry we generate each day. Typically I keep laundry in a basket, and not for very long. I fold it, hang it up, put it away. Not this past week. I took to dumping it on the bed (except for the things that need to be hanged, they have gotten an unfair amount of attention considering the neglect shown to socks and skivvies and undershirts and such). The only problem was, by the time I actually got back to my room I was exhausted. So I tossed the laundry on the chair. Back to the bed the next day. Back to the chair. Back to the bed. Back to the chair AND the desk. But now I am tired of sifting through the pile to find matching socks for the children each morning. So. Today, after editing and football and finishing the articles for my internship, I will fold the blasted laundry. Even the socks. I HATE the socks.

Gearing up for Paperback!

Soon Filter will be available in paperback. It's exciting but I am so nervous! I wanted to share the new cover with you (temporary cover, my cousin is supposed to be helping me with something much more awesome than this, but it will do for a beginning).

Mind you, this is just a picture of my computer screen that I took with my phone!

Katherine Searches for Viktor

Filter: Book One of the Von Strassenberg Saga

Katherine was considering becoming a suffragette. She would wear split-skirts and burn her corset and get a job as a clark in a bank. She would smoke those little cigars and shove her pretty white gloves down the throat of whoever had come up with the blasted idea in the first place.

“A man, most likely,” she snarled in cursing tones. The wood behind the mansion was thick with under-growth, most of which sported tangles of thorns. She imagined he also had a moat with hungry reptiles lurking in its depth. “And he feeds them,” she huffed. “In a pool in his dungeon where he has locked Viktor away. Because he knows,” a mosquito dived toward her face and she swatted at it. “Viktor wishes to marry me, so he locked him up and threatened to feed me to the beasts if he escaped.”

Her ramblings continued as she fought the thorns and briers and blood-sucking parasites. Was there no end to this stone wall? Her strength, she knew, would soon give way.

(C) Gwenn Wright 2010

Waiting for Spring ~ An Author's Review

It’s one of those things you do as an independent writer. You offer to read other people’s self-published books and write a review because you need to support each other. Added to that, the author is a friend of a friend of a friend and you kind of virtually know each other, so you want to do the right thing.

So, groaning inside, I offered to read a virtual friend’s eBook. The cover art looked dull and not promising and then I remember, my cover art isn’t so hot either. Good cover art is difficult to come by when you’re an Indie. The story didn’t seem to be my normal reading…not that I have narrow tastes but this didn’t seem to be a fit.

But I’d made a promise. So I started reading.

Waiting for Spring is indeed outside my usual genres but Keller’s characters got their claws into me. They slipped off the page and burrowed into my brain as people I knew and cared about. The story itself is gritty and raw and so real I swear that Keller followed me around and implanted a recording device in my head, capturing my own thoughts and experiences as I dealt with my ex-husband and my own childhood issues.

I kept thinking, how much longer can this story go on, because it’s so real? What else could possibly happen? And it was obvious. Nothing good could happen. So, one day I avoided the book, because I didn’t want to know what bad things would happen to Tess. She had become more than a two-dimensional character. She was me. She was my best-friend in high school, the one who popped a bunch of niacin to get the crank out of her system before the impending drug test she faced. But at the end of the day Tess called to me and I had to know what happened to her. It was a story I couldn’t stay away from.

Waiting for Spring made me laugh. It made me angry. More than once it made me blush and then concede, “Yea, that’s how it is.” And more than once I cried, though I tried desperately not to. As soon as it was over I wondered what the second book would bring and nearly decided not to read it whenever it comes out because I don’t want to know when anything else bad happens to Tess.

But I will buy it because I know Tess, she is so strikingly solid, as are all of Keller’s characters, that she cannot be ignored.

Keller’s powers of observation and her ability to communicate that to the written page are stunning and unsettling. If you have lived a life of any kind of hardship you will feel as though Keller was there, hiding in the bushes, taking notes. I told my husband, “What Gabaldon does with minute, physical detail Keller does with emotional detail. And sometimes it feels a little too personal, as though she’s airing my own dirty laundry.”

But dirt and grit and all, you can’t help but love Tess.
**If peppers were indicators of how explicit a book is....1-5, 5 being the hottest...this one might have six! For Language and ....sexual encounters. 

A Snippet

From Filter: The Von Strassenberg Saga

My hand shoots up, palm flat and smacks Kevin’s flushed and sagging face square in the nose. Stunned, he releases me and reels back, profanities hurling from him with his blood and mucus. Not bothering to wipe the gore away, he spins on me, trying to catch me as I dart passed the immobile rhino and head for my room. My room with its flimsy door and busted window. For a jacked up drunk man Kevin is fast, too fast. He’s at my back grabbing my hair as I try to leap the last few feet into my room, slamming the door behind me. White lightening slices into my brain and a scream rips its way out of me as those wide-awake five senses tell me everything I already know. My hair is caught in the door. The other end is still in Kevin’s all too strong carpenter’s hands. Strong, unforgiving hands. He yanks and yanks again, expletives flying without pause for breath. With back pressed tightly to the door, out of necessity, he has me painfully pinned, I turn the lock. My tiny room is sparsely furnished. The twin bed will only fit against the wall with the busted window. And my desk, my beautiful, white knight desk, is here beside me, crammed into the small space between bedroom and closet doors. Two nights ago I had started working on that stupid project for history. A battle scene, complete with corn syrup blood and cardboard trees. And there beside the last fallen soldier, still waiting silently for his place on the battlefield, are my scissors. New and sharp.

Copyright Gwenn Wright 2010

70,989 to Go!

Maybe it’s desperate, but my heart soars every time someone actually pays to read my YA novel. The idea that anyone would give of their time and money to read something that I poured eight months of my chaotic life into is simply thrilling. Well, including the marketing and editing it’s been almost a year. I actually sat on the idea of Filter several months before even beginning the research. All the girls on campus were going gaga over Twilight and it seemed like every time I picked up a new release at the bookstore it had some plot line very similar to Twilight’s…or the Vampire Diaries because really, how can you not see the similarities between those two? So I decided that for the first time in nearly a decade I would begin writing again. It would be a story filled with teen angst and the wicked darkness of the human heart, but no fur and no fangs. There was actual research involved. My husband bought, “Genetics for Dummies” for me (he’s a brave man..but genetics isn’t exactly my forte, so it was appreciated) and I scoured the internet for my historical research and supplements to my scientific research. The beginning of the story formed itself in my mind as I was reading Austrian history but I began at the end and in the middle of the story. The roots you will have to wait for. And it will not be what you expect. It’s fun and difficult not to let on, to not give you too much, but it will make you gasp in the end and you will say, “Take that, stupid vampires!” Because what I write is actually real and could actually have happened. And that is more unsettling than any paranormal tale you could ever spin. Reality is more unsettling than many of us want to realize.

….The title refers to the number of books remaining to sell before I can pay off my student loans, mind you, I don’t get the full cut of the $2.99 it costs! Payments begin in two months…ug. And keep in mind, reviews are Indie Author’s bread and butter!

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