Editor’s Note: At times, the feed below does not work, but you can always access the IndepthYOU show by clicking on the BlogTalkRadio link at the bottom of this post. If the feed is working, ENJOY!
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On this day I’m letting others do the talking. You’ve probably heard of BlogTalkRadio but are you familiar with the IndepthYOU show on BlogTalkRadio? Each segment profiles “people who have created, invented, written or developed something that could improve our lives and/or change our way of thinking.” And the show is heavy on publishing industry types.
A number of authors and others in the publishing biz have been featured–from bestselling author L.A. Banks to book marketing guru John Kremer–many of them appearing in the widget above. And they give lots of advice about getting published and promoting your books. The director of public relations at Lulu.com and the CEO of IUniverse, two of the leading self-publishing programs, discuss their services. Tee C. Royal, founder of the literary group R.A.W.Sistaz talks about the book club and how writers can promote their books. And so many more have appeared on the show talking about books and publishing.
So put your feet up, scroll on down and take a listen.
Karen Siplin is the author of His Insignificant Other, Such a Girl and Whiskey Road. She also contributed a short story (”Nice Jewish Boy”) to the anthology This Is Chick Lit, edited by Lauren Baratz-Logsted. His Insignificant Other was a 2002 Borders Original Voices selection and named one of Cosmopolitan magazine’s sexy summer reads. Such a Girl was a main selection of Black Expressions Book Club. Karen has a degree in film production from CUNY’s Hunter College.
Connie Briscoe: How do you come up with your story ideas?
Karen Siplin: I like to write about issues that are significant to me in some way, issues I want to explore. Whiskey Road, for example, is about the relationship that develops between a black female celebrity photographer and a white small town contractor when she ends up spending some time in his rural New York town. I’ve traveled through a lot of provincial towns in the United States with my husband, and we were always aware of the way white people stared at me. Sometimes, we weren’t sure if the looks were unwelcoming or just curious. With Whiskey Road, I wanted to explore this idea that black people can’t just pick up and move anywhere in the United States without this uncertainty following them.
CB:How do you come up with your characters?
Karen Siplin: My characters come from my imagination. But pieces of them (especially my secondary characters) come from people I know or strangers who catch my attention either because they have an interesting look or enormous personalities. Sometimes my main characters come to me through a line of dialogue or a thought that pops into my head while I’m walking or taking a shower. They sound a certain way in my mind, and I try to create a character around that voice.
CB:Sounds like you draw from your real life quite a bit.
Karen Siplin: I try not to write autobiographically, but some aspect of my life always makes its way into my books. Either a retelling of a single experience I’ve had, or someone I know has had, or a quirky personality trait I find endearing or maddening. The main character in my second novel, Such a Girl, is a hotel telephone operator. I was a hotel telephone operator for a while.
CB: Do you think that you are strongest in developing plots, creating characters, writing dialog or something else?
Karen Siplin: I’ve been told writing dialogue is my strength and I agree. I have a degree in film production and my main interest was in screenwriting. I think that may be how that strength was developed.
CB:Interesting, because your descriptions are very visual. As you described the plot in your first response, I actually saw it as a film in my mind’s eye. When and where do you write best?
Karen Siplin: I write best at the New York Public Library but I rarely go there! I’ve become so dependent on my computer and all of my various notes that I can’t work without them for long periods of time. After spending a few years lugging my laptop everywhere, I’ve done some damage to my shoulders, so I can no longer carry my “writing stuff” everywhere. I’m most inspired during the quietest time of the day—early morning.
CB: I think most of us women end up damaging our shoulders or coming close at some point in our lives by carrying laptops and heavy shoulder bags.
You contributed to a chick lit anthology. Do you consider your novels chick lit? Is chick lit a dying breed?
Karen Siplin: I considered my first two novels chick lit. My third novel isn’t chick lit, and I’m not sure there’s a suitable label for it. I don’t like labels anyway, even though I understand they can make life easier when trying to market books.
I don’t believe chick lit is disappearing completely. It’s been around for ages but it was just called something else and there was a lot less of it. I think the market became oversaturated and I think books that weren’t really chick lit were getting chick lit type covers just because. Now that publishers are toning down the number of chick lit books that they’re publishing and it’s being referred to as commercial women’s fiction instead, it seems as if it’s dying out.
CB:What’s your favorite thing to do when you’re not writing?
Karen Siplin: I love reading books in almost every genre and watching good TV. I’ve also rekindled a passion I’ve had much of my life for 19th century and early 20th century architecture. My husband just gave me two wonderful coffee table books on mansions in New York City and North Shore Long Island, and I spend hours perusing them. I’ve been wondering whether I’m too old to seriously consider a second career in architecture, and I daydream about buying land somewhere to build a modest Beaux Arts style mansion. I think that would be a very time-consuming (not to mention expensive) hobby, so it’s still just a daydream.
Today I bring you writing tips attributed to one of America’s most talented and well-known authors—Kurt Vonnegut, who penned works of satire and science fiction such as Slaughterhouse Five. I once had the pleasure of being photographed at my house by his wife Jill Krementz, for a photo book of authors called Black Writers: A Book of Postcards.
Vonnegut passed away last year but these writing tips, which I recently came across, are timeless and so worth sharing. There’s something here for every author or aspiring author, no matter how many books you’ve written or dreamed of writing.
Writing Tips—eight rules for writing fiction:
Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
Start as close to the end as possible.
Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1999).
(I can’t be 100% certain the rules are actually from Vonnegut, as my source is the Internet. But the tips are widely cited and the source mentioned. At any rate, the rules are right on the money regardless of the source.)
Gotta love these ladies. Not only are Virginia DeBerry and Donna Grant stellar storytellers, they’re good peeps–warm, funny, engaging.
Check out their video trailer, where they talk about how they met, got started and continue to thrive as one of the hottest writing duos in the business.
Check out the interview I conducted with them earlier this year here. They talk about how they met and how they pen their bestselling novels together as well as their latest novel.
Denene Millner is a columnist for Parenting magazine. She has worked as a senior editor at Honey and as an entertainment and political journalist for the New York Daily News. She is also the author of several books including the movie tie-in for the blockbuster film “Dreamgirls.” She lives in Atlanta with her husband and their two daughters.
Connie Briscoe: How did you end up writing Hotlanta with your co-author, Mitzi Miller?
Denene Millner: Mitzi and I got into the teen market by invitation. Alloy Media, the company behind the uber popular teen lit series The Gossip Girls, the A-List,The Clique, and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, among others, was looking for a writer to pen a teen series featuring African American characters, and their reps called our agent to see if Mitzi was interested. She was, but Alloy wanted the series to be set in Atlanta, and so they were anxious to have an Atlanta-based writer on the project as well. It just so happened that a month prior to the start of those conversations, my family and I had moved to a town just outside of Atlanta.
So it kind of worked out for everyone involved; Mitzi and I, who had collaborated on the humorous non-fiction book The Angry Black Woman’s Guide to Life, and the novel, The Vow (with Angela Burt-Murray), got another opportunity to team up again, and Alloy got their Atlanta-based author.
We eventually sold the proposal to Scholastic and ended up with a three-book series, entitled Hotlanta. It’s about the lives of Sydney and Lauren Duke, the popular and privileged daughters of a wealthy Buckhead, Atlanta, couple that has a dark, mysterious, dangerous history that the girls discover. And let the drama begin . . . .
CB: You’ve published in a variety of genres–fiction, nonfiction, the movie-tie in for “Dreamgirls” and now teen fiction. Why the teen market?
Denene Millner: Why the teen market? Why not? I’ve always been passionate about books; they were my best friends when I was coming of age and a welcome respite when I got grown. And when I started writing them, they became a viable way for me to help feed my family and save up for that Yale tuition.
I’m also the mother of two beautiful little brown girls, and before our first was even born, my husband, Nick Chiles, and I filled her room with as many African American children’s books as we could find because we thought it was important for her to see characters who look like her, to hear stories that reflect her experience.
And believe it or not, just about nine years ago, those stories were few and far between. While we’re doing a lot better with picture books featuring black characters, there has been a dearth of black teen fare. So I thought writing Hotlanta provided me with the perfect opportunity to put out stories that are universally appealing, but that reach an audience that has been grossly underserved.
CB: Doesn’t that require a big shift in gears mentally?
Denene Millner: It didn’t take that vast of a mental stretch to write Hotlanta. When we wrote the proposal and the first book, my then-16-year-old niece was living with Nick and I, and my 15-year-old stepson lives with us now, so I get to see the ways of teenagers up close and personal—sometimes a little too close!—and get their input as I’m writing so that the words, the voices, and the way they deal with the situations you find in the book ring true.
But really, writing for teens isn’t about lowering your level or standards or talking in any kind of different way. We write for them the same way we do adults—in a straightforward, clear way that’s smart and exciting and interesting.
The only real challenge we had was keeping up with was the pop culture obsession of it all; by the time we’d finish referencing something teens are into and move on to the next page, we’d find out that they’re just not into that one thing anymore. But I think we did a good job of keeping current without sacrificing a good, solid story.
CB: If you had to come up with a general theme for all or most of your novels (and books) what would it be?
Denene Millner: I’m extremely passionate about shining a light on the African American experience in a way that stretches beyond stereotypes, in a way that recognizes our layers and the nuanced lives we live. For too long, all anyone interested in the black experience had to go on were the stereotypes parading across the 11 o’clock news, and I think a lot of us 90s authors—you, Terry McMillan, Benilde Little, Bebe Moore Campbell-helped show the publishing world that there’s so much more to us.
This is the philosophy I carried as a journalist for The Associated Press and the New York Daily News; I carved a niche as one of the only black journalists writing about African Americans in the film, music, TV and book industries, as well as our lifestyles. It’s important to me because it reflects my world the way I was raised, the way I’m raising my children, my friends and family, our existence here on this earth.
Seldom are we heard, but we are here—these black folks who are solidly middle class, getting good educations, succeeding at work, living a good, thoughtful, authentically black life. My books always speak to this or validate it, really.
They also serve as a testament that black love, in all of its manifestations, is possible. I see it everyday in my marriage and the marriages of my friends, family, parents, and in-laws. And I show it to my children every single day, so that they’re clear of the possibilities, too. I really hope that is the takeaway for the work I’ve done.
CB: Do you do things outside of what the publisher does to promote your books? If so, what?
A question on the minds of many fiction authors these days is: how graphic can or should you get when it comes to writing sex scenes?
I’m not talking about writing novels that are considered erotica or porn–that’s a whole other discussion. I’m talking when it comes to writing mainstream, commercial, pop, chick, sister-girl and women’s lit. Even bestselling mystery authors are getting more vivid when it comes to depicting sex scenes: check out mega bestseller Nora Roberts writing as J.D. Robb for some fairly hot sex scenes as an example.
No doubt readers these days are tolerant of–and sometimes expect–more graphic and frequent sex scenes in their novels, even readers who expect rich and deep plots and characters. This is a reflection of the popular culture in general. Books are competing with cable television, music, movies and video games, and gone are the days when hinting at what goes on between a couple under the sheets or after the lights go out is enough to set a reader to blushing. Toss those sheets aside, we say! Turn on all the lights!
But how much is too much? When and where should an author draw the line to avoid being labeled as porn? I think that is entirely up to the author and depends mainly on two things: (1) the story the author is telling and (2) what the author is comfortable with.
Readers these days are sophisticated enough to welcome a variety of writing styles when it comes to the sex—from well-written and engaging tales told with little or no sex to those with a few erotic sex scenes sprinkled throughout. As long as the sex fits the plot and characters and as long as the vulgarity is kept to a minimum, an author can safely stay within the confines of what is considered “mainstream” today.
And above all, the author should be at ease with whatever he or she writes. If not, readers will sense it. I remember when I wrote my first novel, Sisters and Lovers. The sex scenes back then were generally a lot more tepid than they often are now, and I decided I wasn’t going to write anything I wouldn’t want my Mama reading ’cause I wouldn’t have been comfortable with that. I’ve evolved since then—as has society—and in the sequel to Sisters and Lovers, which I’m working on now, the love scenes will be a bit steamier. Still, there is a line I won’t cross.
As to what is considered crossing the line, try not to get vulgar or gross (which according to the American Heritage Dictionary is defined as crude, offensive, unmitigated in any way). Admittedly what is considered gross can be subjective, and the dividing line is probably constantly shifting. However, I do think that an author can reach a point at which no doubt is left in the minds of most adults that what they’re reading is pure erotica or porn.
If as an author you’re still unsure, then my advice would be to read a mainstream novel that has a few steamy sex scenes in it and then read an erotica novel that has a plot (or not) woven around the sex. There is a difference. And if you want to stay on the safe side of mainstream, focus on writing a well-crafted novel that will leave the reader thinking that Rhonda finally came to her senses and kicked that no-good man to the curb rather than leave the reader remembering how fast and wide Rhonda spread her legs.
I’m kinda taking a break from the blog with the holidays and all. I’ll be back to posting regularly tomorrow (Tuesday), starting with some thoughts on writing sex scenes in mainstream (or pop or commercial) novels—should you or shouldn’t you? What’s too much or not enough? Yeah, I’m going there.
I’ll also have a guest interview with Annette Fix, an author who has penned her memoir, called The Breakup Diet. And what a life she’s lived—this woman has endured more hair-raising turns than a heroine in a bestselling thriller. She’s done everything from exotic dancing to surviving an attempted kidnapping and staring down the barrel of a gun.
Frustrated with trying to find an agent? Or maybe you’ve gotten enough rejection letters to plaster a wall in your office? No one can wave a magic wand to make it all better, unfortunately. But there is help out there and that’s what this site is about.
This week, I promised you a fantastic website for women writers (although you guys might find help here, too). Well, here it is. WOW! Women On Writing is an ezine that encourages communication among women writers, authors, agents, publishers, readers and others in the writing biz. WOW! describes itself as “a global magazine, designed to support women’s creativity, energy, blood, sweat and tears, throughout all stages of the writing process.”
Each month WOW! focuses on a different topic. For March they’re featuring Small Presses and Independent Publishers. In addition, WOW! is always full of information, advice and inspiration for authors–too much to list it all here. You’ll find articles on writing and promoting your work–such as creating characters, dealing with agents, and tips for beginning romance writers–and a whole lot more.
WOW! also features quarterly writing contests. Deadline for the Spring 2008 contest is May 31. The contest includes cash prizes, goodie bags and more. Plus your entry is published on the WOW! website.
Bestselling authorKimberla Lawson Roby has written 10 novels. Her latest, Sin No More, was published earlier this year and has already hit #16 on the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover fiction and #4 on the Wal*Mart bestseller list for hardcover titles.
Kimberla has been so successful that few people realize that her debut novel, Behind Closed Doors, was originally self-published. Here she shares marketing tips for authors and much more.
Connie Briscoe: You’re on book tour for your latest novel Sin No More. What do you like about touring? What could you do without?
Kimberla Lawson Roby: The best thing about touring is meeting all of my loyal and very dedicated readers, people I never would have had the amazing opportunity to meet had I not written any books. It’s wonderful because when I hear positive and enthusiastic comments about my work during discussions, it encourages me to keep doing what I do.
The one thing, however, I could sometimes do without is very early morning wake-ups! This isn’t always the case, but there are many times when I do need to take early morning flights to get to the next city.
CB: I know all about the 5 a.m. wake-ups when you’ve been up until late the night before at a book signing. A lot of people don’t realize how tough book tours can be.
Your novels always do so well, hitting the New York Times and Essence bestseller lists consistently. Do you think touring actually helps sell books?
Kimberla Lawson Roby: I really do. I always say that whenever you meet readers in person and they also enjoy your work, they are your readers for life.
CB: What else do you do to promote your novels besides touring?
Kimberla Lawson Roby: In addition to what my publisher does for each book, I also do lots of pre-publication promotion on my own. To name a few items, I send newsletters out to my mailing lists, hold contests for general readers as well as a separate contest for book clubs nationwide.
And I get a lot of traffic on my web site, which I keep updated with my current book signings, events, speaking engagements, and other information. I now also have a MySpace page, and this has proven to be a wonderful marketing tool as well.
CB: Yes, MySpace is a wonderful marketing and networking tool for authors. How do you come up with your story ideas?
Kimberla Lawson Roby: I always try to write about real-life social issues, so I am inspired by all sorts of topics. I never base my stories on any real situation, but I am inspired by much of what I see and hear.
CB: How do you come up with your characters?
Kimberla Lawson Roby: Once I know what topic I’m going to be focusing on, I spend days mentally creating my characters. I do this for weeks and eventually they become very real people for me.
CB: Do you outline or write character sketches? If so, tell us how you do it. If not, how do you organize your writing?
Kimberla Lawson Roby: Yes, I do outline each book I write. Basically, what I do is write a synopsis of each chapter, which can range anywhere from one to two pages and sometimes even three, depending on how in-depth I want it to be. Then, when I finish the outline, I write the actual chapters.
CB: Do you feel pressure to write more frequent or more detailed sex scenes in your novels these days?
Kimberla Lawson Roby: No, actually, as of Sin No More, I stopped writing detailed sex scenes of any kind. Even in my past novels, I never wrote erotica and worked hard not to write anything offensive, but I finally realized it just wasn’t necessary to include all the details unless the story is somehow centered on sex.
CB: How much do you draw from your real life for your novels?
Kimberla Lawson Roby: The only time I based a character on myself was in my fourth novel, It’s a Thin Line. I based the Sydney character on me and the Delores character on my mom, who really did have a benign brain tumor. It was very therapeutic for me, and the other reason I wrote it was because I wanted to show what it was like losing the most important person in my life, my best friend, and how it took a lot of prayer and every bit of faith I had to get through a loss of that magnitude.
Also, I wanted to show how even though my mom was the one dying, she never stopped lifting up me or the rest of our family. She kept her faith strong until the very end.
Connie Briscoe Presents
This week New York Times bestselling author Kimberla Lawson Roby, author of ten novels, takes time out from touring for her latest novel–Sin No More–to chat with me about writing and book touring. Kimberla has been hugely successful for so long–hitting many major bestseller lists–that you may find it hard to believe that her first novel was self-published.
That’s probably why she’s so savvy when it comes to self-promotion. And in our chat later this week Kimberla reveals several little gems that she uses prior to publication of her novels to help promote them.
Writing Tips Also this week, I’ll point you to a nice little website that’s chock full of resources and advice for women authors and aspiring women authors, although to my way of seeing things it’s got handy tips for guy writers too.
I've written both fiction and nonfiction and hit most of the major bestseller lists including the New York Times and Essence magazine. And I'm still trying to figure it all out.
Nevertheless, this blog is where I’ll share what I know about writing and promoting books. For more detail on what's here, check the
about page.
