The Thrill Begins

During the month of March, The Writers Chatroom (TWC) is proud to host its first virtual book tour. The cyber-tour will feature debut author Jordan Dane and her back to back releases with Avon HarperCollins: NO ONE HEARD HER SCREAM (April 08), NO ONE LEFT TO TELL (May 08), and NO ONE LIVES FOREVER (June 08).

TWC’s Linda Hutchison had arranged the event after ‘virtually meeting’ Dane in MySpace. “I knew Jordan was doing everything we had ever thought of telling writers to do to market their wares. She had sold three novels to a major publishing house and three more in 2007. She also had a professional website and several very visible marketing strategies in place. She was definitely on my ‘to be watched’ list.”

Publishers Weekly calls Dane’s NO ONE HEARD HER SCREAM a “dynamite debut” and compares Dane’s intense pacing to Lisa Jackson, Lisa Gardner, and Tami Hoag—romantic suspense that “crosses over into plain thriller country”. Avon/HarperCollins bought Jordan Dane’s debut suspense series in auction and is launching this eagerly awaited trilogy in a back to back publishing event April through June 2008. “We are pursuing an aggressive release schedule,” says Avon publisher Liate Stehlik, “because we believe strongly in this author. Jordan Dane is poised to be the ‘next big thing’ in the romantic suspense genre.”

Many of TWC’s authors have reviewed advance copies of NO ONE HEARD HER SCREAM and will post their reviews and their own Q&A interviews with Jordan during March. And the event will culminate in a live moderated chat on March 30^th. See dates and hosting authors links below. For more information on The Writers Chatroom, please visit their website at www.writerschatroom.com, voted as Writer’s Digest “101 Best Websites for Writers”.

Virtual Tour Dates and LinksMarch 5 - Billie Williams http://printedwords.blogspot.comMarch 8 - Linda J. Hutchinson http://reviewhutch.blogspot.com

March 12 - Kim Richards http://kim-richards.livejournal.com/

March 15 - Lisa Haselton http://lisahaselton.tripod.com/reviewsandinterviews/

March 19 - Cricket Sawyer http://www.Cricketshearth.blogspot.com

March 22 - Diana Castilleja http://dianacastilleja.blogspot.com

March 26 - Renee’ Barnes http://msqtpi.livejournal.com/

March 29 - Glenn Walker http://www.monsura.blogspot.com

March 30 - TWC Launch PARTY – Moderated Chat (7pm EST) March Chat Guests: C. Hope Clark, Kathryn Lilley, James McMullen, Darlene Hartman/ Simon Lang, and Jordan Dane.

September 18 - 21, 2008
Meijer Book Tour 2008 - Five Cities in Michigan

Jordan Dane will be one of the featured authors for a book tour of Meijer Supercenters in Michigan hosted by Levy Entertainment. The tour will spotlight “lead title” authors for all the major publishing houses. The highly promoted event with its huge book signings will cover 9 stores and 5 cities–including Detroit, Ann Arbor, Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids and Lansing. The tour begins Thursday, September 18 and will end at the last store in Detroit on Sunday, September 21 at 6:00 pm. Stay tuned for more details, and be sure to check out Jordan’s website for an updated schedule!

Karen Dionne was interviewed recently for an article in the February issue of Writer’s Digest Magazine on environmental thrillers.

“With topics like global warming headlining the nightly news,” WD editor Jordan Rosenfeld writes, “the eco-thriller is heating up, scaring readers with a dose of ‘what if’ reality. Thriller writers draw from plausible terrors, even if these are enhanced with fantastic leaps. So it makes sense to those in the publishing industry that, just as novels about Sept. 11 began to surge into the market a few years after, the eco-thriller is on the rise because so much attention is being paid to climatic change.”

Karen’s debut novel, FREEZING POINT, is set in the Antarctic, where extremists plot to stop an energy company from melting icebergs into drinking water, neither realizing that the water is contaminated with an unknown deadly disease.

“One of the things that makes eco-thrillers so compelling,” the article quotes her as saying, “is that the earth is our home. If the environment turns on us, there’s no safe place.”

You can read the entire article online at Writer’s Digest’s website.

Aside from being authors, what do Kahled Hosseini, Neil Gaiman, Jennifer Weiner, Lisa Jackson, and Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Stanford University Irvin Yalom have in common? They’re all blogging today to boost the sales of another author’s novel.

Patry’s Francis’s debut THE LIAR’S DIARY came out in hardcover from Dutton last spring. The trade paper release is today, January 29th, but a few weeks ago, Patry was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. She’s had several surgeries, and her prognosis is good, but given that she doesn’t have much energy for promoting, these five authors, along with over 380 others, have banded together to do it for her.

What’s going on? Why, in a business where only a tiny percentage of all the books written ever gets published, would total strangers help another author’s sales? What happened to cutthroat competition? Read the rest of this entry »

By Jordan Dane

I must admit, I was skeptical about blogging in general. It seemed like the most successful people blogged with such regularity and innovation that I only saw it as a potential time drain without any impact on sales. Then, I found the MySpace version of blogging and began to tinker. Here’s what I discovered:

MySpace is FREE and can be used as a business tool for authors. The site claims over 200+ million registered users. And most of these users list their book preferences with great enthusiasm. The MySpace community is an electronically linked group of customer leads. It’s not just for twenty-somethings trying to hook up or Dateline’s mechanism to identify future pedophile guests. And did I mention MySpace was FREE?

My brilliant web designer created my blog on MySpace for a minimal fee. Building a brand, I believed it was important to carry over a consistent design. I also linked my website to my blog to run contests easily, show excerpts, and allow my blog buddies to navigate between my blog and website with ease. Plus, I have a direct sign-up to my mailing list on my blog site, a definite recommendation. Once I had a MySpace blog, I began to explore. Read the rest of this entry »

By CJ Lyons

Secret One: Write the damn book!

Of course, the all important first step is to finish a manuscript. Maybe not even one, it might take several. Most people don’t realize it, but the average published author writes over half a million words before they sell.

Let me repeat that. Half a million words.

We may hear of those “overnight” successes, but they are rare.

Just be prepared that you might not hit a home run the first time out—but that’s all right, because you’ll be building contacts and learning valuable tips that will help your writing career. Read the rest of this entry »

By Laura Benedict

I swore to myself that I wouldn’t read a single review of my debut novel ISABELLA MOON when they came out.
I’ve reviewed books myself on a freelance basis for a Michigan newspaper for over ten years, I’m married to a writer, and I have many writer friends, so I’m deeply aware of how affecting reviews—both positive and negative—can be.

But any writer who says he or she doesn’t read reviews of their books is probably fibbing. It’s a sore, sore temptation to listen in on what folks are saying about your baby, even when you suspect that someone out there is going to claim it’s ugly as sin.

The early word was not great. Two out of the Big Four—Kirkus, PW, Library Journal, and Booklist—were stinkers. They weren’t just bad. They were cruel. And I mean cruel, as in, “who did I piss off to get this kind of treatment?” cruel. As a writer, that was my first, defensive reaction. They couldn’t have possibly read the same book I wrote! The other two were better, but equivocal. I knew I should’ve been grateful: not everyone gets her first book reviewed by the Big Four. I found myself saying stiff-upper-lip things like: “Well, I wanted to run with the big dogs. Guess I’m off the porch, now!” Read the rest of this entry »

By Rebecca Cantrell

My father was a teamster and I don’t have TV, so I was doubly unprepared for picketing with the WGA writers in November. I took a morning off from my vacation, googled to find the nearest studio, and headed over. I hit the jackpot, because Disney and ABC are right across the street from each other so I could walk two lines.

ME

I’m a writer. And I’m here to help.

Usually that just makes people collapse in gales of laughter, but this was a writer-friendly crowd.

Someone immediately gave me a sign and I marched back and forth in front of the Disney entrance with a group of picketers. It was weird seeing all those writers together outside, squinting at the sun. Mostly, we’re an indoor species. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jordan Dane

As a debut author, your first relationship with an agent can be like a courtship. The first blush of an offer to represent is followed by the unforgettable satiation of that first deal. You light up a cigarette and revel that nothing will ever be the same again, but in the afterglow, some authors may wonder:

• Did I make the right choice?
• What do I know about them…really?
• Was I sober when I agreed to this?

That first deal can be a heady experience. In the throes of a first-time negotiation, some authors may throw caution aside and grab that first warm bodied agent who comes along. And others may struggle with which agent is THE BEST. I think there is no “best” agent. It’s what is right for you—at the time. And one agent might work well for one author, but not so much for another—for many reasons. Read the rest of this entry »