Connie Briscoe on Writing, Promoting Your Book, the Literary Scene and More

This week we have Dorothy Thompson and Cheryl C. Malandrinos of Pump Up Your Book Promotion, a company that sets up virtual book tours for authors. The concept of virtual book tours–or a blog tour as some call them–is relatively new and just beginning to take shape. Sometimes they mean one thing, other times something else. I think what has been developed by Dorothy and her group is one of the most interesting takes on this new way of promoting books.

For several months now I have been a member of a Yahoo e-mail group for writers started by Dorothy and I don’t think you’ll ever find anyone who is more enthusiastic about promoting authors and books. I’ve watched as she started and developed Pump Up Your Book Promotion into something quite impressive, with a client list that has included screenwriters, New York Times bestselling authors, self-published authors and others.

I had initially planned to have only Cheryl Malandrinos here today. Dorothy Thompson, the founder of Pump Up Your Book Promotion, was in the midst of moving. At the last minute I also heard from Dorothy, and the two of them are so forthcoming that I realized I’ve got a ton of information here and I decided to divide the interview into two parts.

Here for you now is Part 1 of “All About Virtual Book Tours.” I’ll run Part 2 in two to three weeks.

Connie Briscoe: When and why did you decide to start organizing virtual book tours for authors?

Dorothy Thompson: Hi Connie and thanks for having us. I started Pump Up Your Book Promotion in April 2007. We’re approaching our first anniversary in another couple of months, and I’m quite excited at how successful it has become. We started out with one tour coordinator–moi–and now there are five of us: Cheryl Malandrinos, Rebecca Camerena, Jean Lauzier, our newest addition, Jaime McDougall and myself.

Why did I start Pump Up? I had self-published an ebook called The Complete Guide to Selling and Promoting Your Self-Published eBook because I had found a formula that greatly increased web visibility. One of my past clients phoned me and asked if I could do to her book what I had discussed in the ebook. What she basically was asking was, “Could you be my publicist?” I wasn’t a publicist. I was an author who wasn’t published traditionally and if I wanted my book to sell, I had to find ways to do it. As my book wasn’t in the bookstores at that time, I had to focus on the Internet.

I agreed to do this for her and the rest is history. It was incredible and I found that virtual book tours were the perfect solution to bricks and mortar book tours, but the key is getting that high visibility during your tour which basically involves a lot of networking prior to setting up your tour, which I had already established. I stress networking to all my new clients and the time to start networking is before your book comes off the printing press.

Cheryl Malandrinos: I hosted Dorothy’s clients for months before joining the staff of Pump Up Your Book Promotion in October 2007. As for the reason, that’s easy-I love promoting good books.

CB: Tell us a little about what a virtual book tour is at Pump Up Your Book Promotion.

Cheryl Malandrinos: A virtual book tour is when an author travels around the blogosphere for a set amount of time–with our clients it’s a month. The author promotes her book by giving interviews, getting book reviews, and providing guest articles. Pump Up Your Book Promotion handles finding the blog hosts and acts as a liaison between the blog host and the author.

Dorothy Thompson: That’s the simple answer. The harder answer is that it takes an incredible amount of work on the author’s part to make it successful. You just don’t sit back and watch it in action. You become very involved as it’s progressing throughout the month or however amount of time you set one up for. I am finding that the authors who are out there plugging their virtual book tour on a daily basis are having greater results than the ones who aren’t.

CB: Can you give us more detail about what exactly the author is expected to do? Continue reading →

These days, new ways are always being devised to let authors control their own fates when it comes to book promotion and to help readers find authors and books they love. Prior to the days of the Internet, authors were at the mercy of newspapers and magazines to get the word out about their upcoming book tour dates. Sometimes they got lucky, sometimes they didn’t. Then the Internet came along and authors could list tour dates on their sites, but fans had to navigate to each author’s site if they were interested.

Now there’s something even better. At Book Tour, authors can create a page that showcases their books and upcoming tour stops. And readers can search the database by author name, book title or location and get a list of book events in their area. And it’s all free! Free to list your books and tour stops and free to search the directory.

Authors can also upload photos of themselves and a short bio as well their book titles with photos of the book jackets and then link to the books on Amazon, Barnes and Noble.com and other online bookstores. For readers, when you visit the home page, it will also automatically list authors currently on book tour near you. For example, for me today it showed that Felicia Pride, author of all things pop culture, is touring in Washington, DC, Maryland and Northern Virginia between now and April. Lisa Scottoline and other authors will also be in my area over the next several weeks.

There are a few quirky things about Book Tour. Like when I entered Baltimore under “places,” 61 venues were found, such as the Baltimore Book Festival, but for most of them it indicated that there were “no upcoming events.” Since only five venues are listed per page, you end up scrolling through a lot of pages to find random events in your area and it can get tiresome. Visitors searching for random events in their areas would be better served if Book Tour removed the venues with no upcoming events from the resulting list or listed more venues per page so you don’t have to do so much scrolling.

Other than that little peeve–and it’s minor compared to the good stuff–it’s a great website. It appears to be a little newish and right now seems devoid of ads, but I wonder how long that will hold true as more authors list their books.

Hopefully Book Tour will get better with time. I’m always in favor of anything that gives authors more control when it comes to promoting their work and gives the fans more information and options, and Book Tour does that. I’ll definitely be using it to list my stops next time I go out on book tour.

Book Tour

Connie Briscoe Presents–
Whether you call them virtual book tours or blog tours or something else, there’s no doubt they’re having a big impact on the book selling market and that the impact will likely continue to grow in the future.

This week I talk to Cheryl Malandrinos, who runs the Pump Up Your Book Promotion blog tours for authors along with her partner Dorothy Thompson. Malandrinos’ clients have included award-winning science fiction authors, screenwriters, and young adult and romance authors among others. She will tell us all about virtual book tours and how they work.

Eisa Nefertari Ulen, author and journalist, teaches English at a college in New York City and runs a fascinating blog with some at-times heavy discussions about the state of black book publishing.

Ulen just announced a fiction writing competition for unpublished writers being sponsored by the Go On Girl! Book Club on her blog. The prize is a hefty $500 and the postmark deadline is March 15, 2008.

The Go On Girl! Book Club was founded in 1990 and now has several chapters around the country. The group awarded me with the New Author of the Year award for my first novel Sisters and Lovers.

For details and guidelines, check out Eisa Ulen’s blog.

And go here for more details about the award and the Go On Girl! Book Club.

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You all know I love bookstores, right? No? OK, then I looooove bookstores. I can just hang out in one for a couple of hours, easy.

One of my biggest concerns has been that mortar and brick bookstores are going the way of the dinosaur once devices like the Amazon Kindle come down in price to around $50 - $100 or so, and the creators decide to make their money selling books rather than on the device. Remember record stores? Yeah, that’s what I thought was going to happen to bookstores. Not tomorrow or the next day, mind you. But within another 10 or so years.

Now there’s hope that I was entirely wrong. And this is one of those times when I’m glad to be wrong. But not for the reasons you may think. The reason is the new Borders concept stores due to debut during grand opening festivities on February 22 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the company’s hometown. According to Borders, it’s a 28,900-square-foot concept store–the first of 14 the company expects to open nationwide this year–and represents a big enhancement over existing Borders stores inside and out.

“This is a completely new shopping experience that sets Borders apart from every other store,” said Borders Group Chief Executive Officer George Jones. “We’ve stayed true to what our customers have always loved about Borders-deep and intelligent selection, knowledgeable staff, and a comfortable, welcoming atmosphere. Yet, we’ve brought a fresh new look and an exciting interactive dimension to the store with a Digital Center where customers can do everything from mix and make their own custom CDs, download books and music, publish their own books, explore their family history, and create photo books-all without being computer experts because we have trained people there to help every step of the way.”

The Digital Center sounds mad cool. Self-publish your own books? Create photo books? Sounds to me like Borders is saying, hey, don’t write us off so fast. We get it! You want digital. You want interactivity. You want control. Well, we got it!

Check out the video of what’s happening inside the new Borders bookstore. It’s so unlike anything you’ve ever seen in a bookstore. All I can say is, Borders please hurry and open one near me.

Borders Unveils First Concept Store

In Sin No More the Reverend Curtis Black tries to mend his wicked ways, and Kimberla Lawson Roby has penned another hot one.

I enjoyed this book trailer. I liked the voice of the actor who plays Reverend Black. It’s smooth and has a nice tone. You can feel the conflict building up in his voice and in the video.

But tell me, what do you all think? Did it hold your attention? Does it make you think about picking up a copy of Sin No More? Is it well done? Why or why not?

Want to see more? Featured book trailers.

Virginia DeBerry and Donna Grant met as plus-size models competing for the same modeling gigs, and now they’re the award-winning authors of six novels–all written together. Here the two tell us how they work so well together and so much more.

Connie Briscoe: When was your first novel published and how many have you written?

DeBerry and Grant: We’ve written six novels all together. Gotta Keep on Tryin’, which is the sequel to Tryin’ to Sleep in the Bed You Made, is just out. And right before we left on book tour we finished our sixth book. What Doesn’t Kill You will be out in January ‘09.

The very first novel we wrote together was called Exposures. We wrote it under the name Marie Joyce–a combination of both our names–Donna Marie and Virginia Joyce. It was published as a Warner paperback original in 1990.

The book is somewhat different from our others. It is centered in the fashion business, which is where we met. It is a romance, which is not what we currently write, and the characters are white. The book was an experiment to see if we could write together and get our work published. Despite the obvious differences from our more well-known titles, the themes of friendship, family and dealing with the consequences of our choices were present even back then.

CB: That’s certainly an unusual beginning. Why did you decide to write a novel together in the first place?

DeBerry and Grant: After working on a newsletter and a magazine together, we realized we had a unique ability to work together. Neither of us remember whose idea it was to try writing a novel, but we found it creatively fulfilling and fun too–who can beat that? Somehow the sum of our talents makes for a greater whole. Our backgrounds and perspectives are enough alike to provide common ground but different enough to give us the basis for conflict in our stories. And even after all these years we still have a great time working together.

CB: Who comes up with the story ideas or themes for the novels?

DeBerry and Grant: We both do. We talk all the time about what’s in the news, situations we’ve encountered, pieces of our pasts. When we’re plotting a novel all of that goes in the pot and we spend a lot of time “what if-ing,” until we have cooked up a story.

CB: How do you come up with your characters?

DeBerry and Grant: They are often composites of physical and emotional characteristics we have borrowed from a variety of sources in both of our lives. We do work to make them fully rounded and unique, so that they remind readers of people they know or even themselves. We give our characters complete biographies, often with details that don’t make it into the story, but it’s a way for us to know why they behave the way they do and it allows us to stay true to them.

CB: How do you pull it all together? Do you each take a turn writing chapters or do you each pick your characters and write for those characters?

DeBerry and Grant: It’s really a completely collaborative process. We have spoken to other teams and it seems nobody does it the way we do. We work side by side–literally–in front of the computer. One of us may start a sentence that the other finishes. The keyboard passes back and forth between us. The words are all fair game, so much so that it’s nearly impossible to remember who wrote what by the time we’re done.

Our aim is to have one voice telling the story. If readers can feel the shift between us, it takes them out of the storytelling and we never want to do that. We don’t know why it works, but at this point we don’t question it. It’s a great gift and we’re grateful for it.

CB: It really is a special gift. I’m not sure I could ever pull it off. How much do you draw from your real lives for your novels?

Continue reading →

I call them the pocket-size paperback. And You Only Get Better, which was first issued as a trade paperback (the bigger size paperback) a year ago, is now available in the smaller pocket size.

You Only Get Better has three novellas, one penned by me and the other two by Lolita Files and Anita Bunkley. That means you get three bestselling authors for the price of one. What could be better than that? To read all about You Only Get Better go here and scroll down.

Pocket-size (or mass market) paperbacks are cheaper than trade paperbacks, and You Only Get Better is generally available wherever books are sold. So if you haven’t picked up a copy, you have absolutely no more excuses!

You Only Get Better, by Connie Briscoe, Lolita Files and Anita Bunkley

Nelson Mandela walked out of prison on this day, February 11, in 1990. He had been in prison for 27 years.

I went to see him speak when he came to Washington, DC, and it was a very memorable and exciting day.

Nelson Mandela Foundation

I enjoyed this book trailer for the novel Sweet Georgia Brown. It’s simple and gets to the point of the novel–which is about two dueling radio personalities who are married to each other–without hitting you over the head. In other words, it’s smooth. It also leaves you wondering what might happen next.

Sweet Georgia Brown, is by Cheryl Robinson, and by the way, we have an interview with the author coming up here in a couple of weeks on “Connie Briscoe Presents.”

If you have a book video trailer that you think I’ll find interesting enough to display here on Page One, send me a link and I’ll check it out. I can make no promises, and you have to realize that my selections are somewhat subjective–in other words they are based on what I like. If I decide not to feature a book trailer here, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad trailer.

Want to see more? Featured book trailers.