A WORLD TURNING UPSIDE DOWN

For all of you who see your everyday lives morphing faster than you ever dreamed possible, let me say that nothing is changing quicker, or with more uncertainty, than book publishing. Those of us on the inside can only stare and shake our heads. As authors we try to adjust, but few of us can predict which of our books will sell best—if at all--or in what format. Will old-fashioned paper even be involved?

Only a handful of years ago, nobody thought book stores would soon become obsolete. Yet while they still stand around looking formal and important, except for teens with computers under their arms—all heading for the coffee bar—adult readers have largely abandoned them.

Part of this is the fault of the chain bookstores themselves. In their zeal to rid themselves of competing independents, they also killed off the eager librarian types who once “sold” their readers the world’s best books. Today, the chains are not known for selling anything; all they do is display. Which Costco--or your best friends--do just as well.

Meanwhile, we authors are scrambling to become known in that mysterious and semi-visible world of the Net. Those of us who aren’t kids any longer soon learn we need expertise on steroids--so I’m finding computer mavins to make me and my books internet-visible. Will this help me sell some of the books in my garage?

I honestly don’t know.

I’ll be happy to share the answer in a few months.

PUBLICITY: THE WALL TOO STEEP TO CLIMB?

EACH DAY I'M learning afresh: There are writers and PR types, and they're seldom the same person. My daily wish is simple: Please, dear brain, grant me the skills to find the readers for all these words I've already written.

Writing is the part I love. I could cheerfully spend every day creating word pictures. I love the process, and everything about it: the search for rhythm, for vividness, for the exact right word. I love looking back to see what I've done, to decide whether I managed to get to where I intended to go. I love the re-writing--taking this wobbly little skeleton and propping it up, making it stand on its own feet and sing to the world.

There's nothing about writing I don't like. The moments spent in creation--surely they are a kind of life force, a renewal of the most exquisite sort. When you've written something good, you've LIVED. And nobody can take it away.

But what's this business about PR?

How hard should we work to get known? How many internet/web tricks must we learn? And how many of them work? How many people read what I've written on the web? And will any of that reading translate into sales of my books?

What about the hucksters who appear on your e-mail and glibly promise to make you famous, who swear up and down they can make your books best sellers? How often does this happen? Are any of these promotions worth the price? Can they REALLY create huge audiences for your books? Or are all these promotional types simply padding their own pockets? Of one thing I'm sure. If I send this Harrison fellow ten thousand dollars, I am definitely making HIM rich.

I haven't a clue as to whether he'll do the same for me. And frankly, at the risk of losing ten thousand dollars, I'm afraid to find out.

Meanwhile, as I ask these questions, I keep searching--I peek behind new internet doors, scramble to learn the latest tricks, ask other authors what they do. Currently I'm trying everything: Writing blogs; enhancing my author page on Amazon; calling all the groups I can think of, offering myself as a speaker. I'm giving writing workshops at libraries, applying for slots at writers conferences, calling womens' groups and book clubs.

Once in awhile, to my amazement, somebody calls me. I try to act blase, as if it happens all the time. I never tell them that they've just made my day.

If any of you have suggestions, please tell me. I'd love to hear them.

Do I yearn to be rich and famous? Well, maybe. But only because rich and famous would mean people are reading my books. But more than that, it would mean I could stop making all these phone calls, soliciting speeches.

Rich and famous would mean I could once again concentrate on writing books. Maralys












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I'm not crazy about giving away time. After twelve published books it feels like I ought to be paid for speaking and teaching. Yet more and more I'm learning that what you do for free often pays off best.

A couple of stories make the point: A writers group at Leisure World contacted me to speak at a writers day--the first big event of their new writers club. Nobody offered to pay me, but I agreed to go anyway. I was one of several speakers, and sold a few books--four or five. Not many, but I felt good about the day. I felt I'd really connected with the group.

It seems I did. Weeks later they called me again, this time to give a talk on memoirs. They asked how much I wanted to be paid--always a tough question to answer. How much is too much? But I asked for $75.00, and the club readily agreed. Expecting 20-30 people, I was flabbergasted to find a crowd of over 70. This time, to the group's excitement, I gave away some books--but I also sold about a dozen.

Now the group wants me back again, for two in-depth, all-day memoir workshops. With no fuss at all, the price has gone up to $150 each. Even so, it's not the money that's so exciting, but the fact that this group and I have made an exciting connection. We all expect the best out of each other, and my stints down there have become a lot of fun and not much work. For everything I gave away in the beginning, I've been repaid many times over.

And just today I heard a wonderful story about Landgrove Inn in Vermont--an inn I've stayed at many times and with whom I'm now engaged for my second writer's workshop. It seems Landgrove agreed to host a charity event for a worthy cause, offering not only their site, but also picking up the bar tab. In what could have been a losing event, with perhaps 50 to 100 people, the Chocolate Festival attracted 500 people and earned $30,000--giving the inn free publicity up and down the state of Vermont. For the price of some liquor, they received what will turn out to be a hundred-thousand-dollars worth of publicity. You couldn't BUY an event that attracted so many people from so many Vermont towns. Because of their generosity, little-known Landgrove Inn has suddenly become one of the premier inns in the state.

Whenever I consider the advisability of doing something "for free," I think twice about turning it down. The payoff is sometimes in doubt, and never the reason you do anything. On the other hand, often enough the good-luck gods are right there with a reward.

BLAME IT ON THE BALL

People acquire reputations for all kinds of crazy things: the number of days spent camped out in a tree; the unlikelihood of delivering eight babies in one sitting; the variety of women willing to appear naked in your magazine. I've yet to hear of a "name" acquired by the number of times you get hit by a ball.

The Wills family does have a ball reputation of sorts--trophies and medals won by hitting balls with a racket, smashing balls with a wrist, slinging balls over water, slamming balls against a wall. No medals have yet been won by offering one's body as a pelt spot. However, this is about to change; I demand that personal impact be recognized as an official event.

My unique sport began innocently enough when I stood near a railing at my grandson's ice hockey game. First time I'd ever personally witnessed this game--and to add to my uncanny luck, other family members stood beside me. But only I was singled out by the puck that ricocheted off the ice and found its target on my upper arm. It was Chris, (standing next to me), who noted, "Of course, Mom, you were the one that got hit." How he recognized this tendency so early, is difficult to imagine. But let's just say his statement was predictive of future events.

Once Dane became fully invested in volleyball, Rob and I attended most of his matches. The Anaheim Sports Arena contains some twenty volleyball courts. Unlike other spectators, I've been hit by balls flying out of at least ten of those courts. Balls from courts behind me smash against the net and find my back. Balls from warm-up smashes clunk off my head. Balls from near-empty courts find me as I head for the cafeteria--and one managed to knock off my glasses. In fact my glasses alone have been tweaked three times. Other parents noticed and began saying things like, "You do seem to have a bulls eye painted on your body." "You need to arrive wearing a helmet." "Don't sit by her--she gets hit every time."

Once a ball from a nearby court followed me down a narrow hall and nailed me as I entered the ladies room.

The gold-medal moment actually occurred in a high school gymnasium. Like other spectators, I was sitting innocently in the bleachers when it happened. A ball from the court in front of us sailed down the length of the gymnasium, hit a side wall at the end of our bleachers, and flew like a homing pigeon straight for my head. Dozens of other heads were available, of course, but obviously none of them qualified.

Aware of my propensities, this year 23 members of our family spent Christmas Eve trying to hit me with an under-inflated beach ball. They gave themselves great credit for originality and timing--howling with glee when they connected. Only at the end did I assure them they hardly qualified for "best shot of the year."

That came a few weeks earlier when, with my granddaughter, I visited a tiny tots birthday party. Like grasshoppers, some ten three-year-olds leaped and frolicked across a small living room, chasing little toys and pinata candies. Among the objects on the floor was a tiny ball. To my astonishment, a miniature boy took a mighty swing with his miniature toe, caught the ball just right, and sent it cascading into my face.

The man sitting next to me said, "Oh! Are you all right?" He probably didn't believe me when I said, "Well, that was certainly the smallest of my assailants. You wouldn't know this, of course, but I do have a national reputation--as a target."

THE PERILS OF POPCORN

My husband, Rob, has a THING about burning down the house. "Don't leave the teakettle on, Babe. You'll incinerate our place." The other night he rousted me out of bed at midnight. "What? You left the clothes dryer running? Probably oughta shut it off. By the time the smoke reaches our bedroom, the house will be gone." Once he even closed down the oven when I wasn't looking. "I turned it off. You weren't in the room."

"I was in the bathroom."

"When something's cooking, you have to be in the kitchen." Before my eyes he turned deaf when I tried to explain that ovens are DESIGNED to function when you're not physically present. For Rob, the most logical man I know, the logic has to arrive when he asks for it--from a source that's more exotic than a wife. As to the house burning down . . . apparently he wants me right there, watching, when flames start licking out of the oven.

This same Rob has few problems with stenching up the house. One evening, two weeks ago, he stuck a bag of popcorn in the microwave and set the timer in the dark. Exempt from the watch-the-oven rule, he hobbled back to his chair, using a cane because his knee hadn't quite recovered from its eighth surgery.

I began smelling a smell. Not a good smell. Tentatively, I peeked into the microwave, and quickly slammed it shut. Smoke had already collected into a black, stampeding ball, just waiting for some fool to let it out. "The popcorn's burned!" I shouted toward his chair. "The microwave is full of smoke. I don't dare open the door!"

"Just wait, Babe," he said calmly. "It'll go away." Well, he was right. Some of the smoke escaped without anyone's help. Out through seams and cracks that only a demon could find. Our kitchen took on an overlay of evil. This wasn't your ordinary smoke--it was the kind of chemical effluvium that seeps out of dangerous labs, forcing people to grab gas masks.

Unprotected, I ran around the family room and front hall, opening outside doors, propping them open. The cats were bewildered. She's letting us come and go--at willl? I turned on the attic fan in the hall, which sucks in air from outside. I switched on the fan over the stove. Nothing helped. The foul air grew worse, crept over to Rob's chair.

He said, "You'd better remove the popcorn. Grab it quick and throw it outside." He made it sound easy, but the job actually required preparation. First I ran to the back door, grabbed a lungful of clean air, and holding my breath, I darted to the microwave, grabbed the popcorn, and flung it out toward the garage. Eventually I allowed myself another real breath. But not in the kitchen.

For the rest of the night, our kitchen and family room remained toxic. Unless you stood in an outside doorway, breathing seemed a dangerous option. Inevitably, a question ocurred to me: WHAT did they put in the popcorn? I said to Rob, "Surely you'll never eat THAT again!" And Rob, who would abandon a wheelchair for a penny in the gutter, said, "Well, there's only one more bag." Implying that even one bag of poison was worth saving.

We could only escape the fumes by going to bed.

The next day the two rooms were still alive with odor. A rag dipped in Pinesol and swabbed around the microwave's interior removed a horrible, yellowish layer of scum, but in no way interrupted the smell. A second swabbing was equally useless. Some odors simply can't be overcome. We'd have done as well with the residue from a skunk.

At last, one week later, the kitchen was once again breathable. But not near the microwave. Our appliance survived a bad encounter with popcorn, but now it has putrid pores and bad breath, and so do parts of the family room. You don't have to burn down a house to destroy it. You can actually accomplish the same thing by stinking it to death.



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Running Through the UCLA/SC Game in my Underwear

I just re-read a funny article on author book tours by the L.A. Times writer, Al Martinez. It was a comforting article, actually. Makes me feel like I'm not alone. He talks about accompanying the famous writer, Irving Wallace, to a signing in San Francisco --a disaster in which Wallace sat in a San Francisco book store for a full hour gazing at fifty white plastic chairs--with not one person sitting in them. As Martinez says, "Absolutely no one came to buy a book." Wallace was so incensed he never did another signing.

Then Martinez talks about his own signing--where he only faced 25 white plastic chairs . . . with the same dismal results. Nobody ever sat down in any of them. He claims he did sell five books, however--three of which he bought himself. He thought he'd sold another one to a man in overalls who stood for some time thumbing through the book--then made a sour face and put it down. Martinez says, "It's just as well. I don't sell to men in overalls." He admits he stays for the whole hour, "amusing myself by humming and scratching and reading what I wrote and trying to figure out why I wrote it."

The last chapter in my book, "A Clown in the Trunk" is called, "The White Plastic Chairs." And it's all about all those chairs nobody ever sits in, and how, unlike Wallace and Martinez, I'm willing to pursue people around the book store, striking up conversations designed to entice them into opening their wallets. My husband says, "I suppose you put them in a choke hold." Well, not quite. But I thought of it.

But now that a certain blonde bimbo and her husband have attracted worldwide fame by breaking into a White House dinner, they'll probably get a book deal--and sell loads of books. As for me, I've considered running through the UCLA/SC football game in my underwear. Has any grandmother ever done that? Would it give me a big enough name to sell books? I'd love to consider it. But first I'll have to lose a few pounds.

Anyone out there have a better idea??

Everyone Wants Your Money

I've just published a new book: Damn the Rejections, Full Speed Ahead: The Bumpy Road to Getting Published." Lots of writers love it. I've gotten wonderful reviews on Amazon.

The book is written--there's nothing else I need do. Except sell it. Well, hey, that should be easy? Right?

Wrong. And here's where it gets interesting. Somehow, all the promoters in the world know I've written a book, and now all of them want to help me sell it. And I'm not exaggerating. I get new offers almost every day. Let us take your book to the libraries. Let us take your book to the media. Let us take your book to New York. Let us teach you how to sell on the internet. Let us sign you up for a class. Let us introduce you to TV producers. To your neighbors. To all the other writers in the world. We'll do it all. You'll soon be famous. Even more, you'll be rich.

Well, hey, I do need help.

But then I patiently scroll through the testimonials, and FINALLY, FINALLY reach the bottom line. This will cost me only $500. $700. A thousand dollars. Five thousand dollars. Enough money so I'd have to sell thousands of books just to come out even. Somehow, no one offers a money-back guarantee that this will happen.

What they DO offer is a guarantee that THEY will get rich. It only takes a few of us, at five thousand dollars each, to make the promoters famous. No, wait . . . they don't care about famous. They care about RICH.

By now, my five thousand dollars is gone. And yes, I've probably sold a few books.

But my husband is reminding me it might be another few years before I've sold enough books to pay myself back all that promotion money. I've finally seen the promoter's catalogues and realize my book is one of hundreds--or thousands. NO ONE will single me out to purchase my book.

A writer friend recently bought a $2000, full-page ad in a catalogue. She has yet to see a single sale.

If any of you out there know some way to promote yourself the slow, old-fashioned, inexpensive way, please let me know. I'm all ears. But for now, my wallet is closed