As most of you know, I began my writing career in the romance genre and published dozens of romances before I realized I was writing about many things other than romance that I wanted to explore in more depth.

Slowly, without realizing it, I had moved into a broader “genre,” women’s fiction, which encompasses all the aspects of a woman’s life.  So my books no longer said “romance” on the spine.  Some of my readers followed me into my new books and some didn’t.  Some of my new readers would never have found me otherwise, because they made a point of  never picking up a romance novel.

Let’s fast forward.  Enter the ebook era.  Recently my publishing house informed me that I have the e-rights to my first twenty-nine novels and can publish them myself.

Well, isn’t that good news?

I’ve already begun the process, which will most likely take some time to complete.  The first book I plan to reissue is From Glowing Embers, seen here with its original cover.  I always loved this story, the first of a four book series I called Tales of the Pacific.  My faith in From Glowing Embers was confirmed when a German production company chose to make it into a movie for German Sunday night television a couple of years ago. (more…)

One of the best parts of being an author is making friends with other authors.  In 2008 my friend Joanna Campbell Slan began her new mystery series, the Scrap-N-Craft mysteries featuring scrapbooker Kiki Lowenstein, who manages to get herself into the most amazing predicaments.  I had the pleasure of interviewing Joanna here two years ago, and since then she’s gone on to publish more in the series, but also to write a new one, the Jane Eyre Chronicles, which will debut this summer.  Joanna whispered the plot to me at dinner one night, and it’s wonderful.

Meantime, Kiki’s getting all the attention this month, with a brand new book, Ready, Scrap, Shoot.  To whet your appetite for another in the series, Joanna has two autographed copies of her first book, Paper, Scissors, Death, to give away here.  All you have to do is comment on this post.  Tell us what you like about mysteries, about scrapbooking, about reading, or about Joanna.  Just tell us something and you’ll be entered in the giveaway.  Random.org will choose a winner on April 27th.  Only one entry per reader this time, please.  Sadly I’ll need to limit this to North American readers only.  Please understand it’s all about postage and not about you.

But wait, thanks to Joanna’s generosity, in addition one reader will win a Kiki Lowenstein short story, delivered to his/her Kindle.  You say you don’t have a Kindle?  No problem.  You can download the Kindle App right there on your computer and read it that way.

So that’s three prizes and the same rules apply for each giveaway book.  Now, here’s the scoop from Joanna on her latest book, available now.

Ready, Scrap, Shoot was inspired by events in my own life. The first spark happened years ago when I attended a May Day ceremony at a private school in St. Louis. The pageantry provided a stunning visual treat, but I had also heard the behind the scenes rumblings of the participants and knew there was more to what I was watching than met the eye. The second spark came as I was reflecting how difficult it is to be a caretaker for aging parents/family members.

Early on I decided that there was no reason that a mystery series couldn’t be topically relevant and thought provoking as well as entertaining. I didn’t want to write about stereotypical characters. Instead, I use my books as a laboratory for exploring human nature. The critics seem to have noticed, as Kirkus Reviews said, “Slan’s scrapbook mysteries are most valuable for the well-developed characters and the issues they raise, in this case the hardships of caring for elderly parents” and RT Book Reviews said, “Kiki is so darn entertaining that she’ll keep readers hooked until the explosive…end.”

Lately I’ve been concentrating on building a closer relationship with my fans. I had a “personal page” at Facebook mainly to communicate with my son while he was at college. I switched to a “fan page”  and of course, there’s a wonderful sense of community. My fans clamored for more Kiki. Then I read a small article in the New York Times about a guy who is releasing a serialized novel, like Dickens did. I thought, “Hmmm. What if I released a Kiki Lowenstein short story every month until April when Ready, Scrap, Shoot comes out?” The only way to do that was for me to do the covers. I’m really into Zentangle®, so the covers are Zentangle patterns. I also decided the short stories should be a way for more people to sample Kiki and her world.

My readers love it! They’re participating as Beta readers—and they help me with tons of great ideas. It’s been a blast. In fact, I’m having so much fun with this that I’ll be joining a dozen other writers to offer a Friday the 13th FREE Kindle offer of 13 FREE reads from 13 authors. But remember, the FREE books are available on April 13! Here’s the link.

Ready, Set, Comment!

Last week’s Novelists Inc. conference was fabulous. I came home with so much information, but unfortunately no suntan to go with it.  I was inside the hotel at workshops madly scribbling notes almost the entire time.  When I wasn’t, I was investigating Sarasota with friends, which might well turn out to be our Florida home someday.  The photo is my husband and I at the amazing Ringling Museum.  We only saw the outside, but inside beckons for the next trip.

So what did I learn?   And what might you find surprising?  Some teasers:

1. Tweet (which I do) between 1 and 20 (!) times a day (which I don’t.)
2. YouTube is my friend and a video a week is not too much.  (Not too much for whom?)
3. Join Linked-In (so people I don’t know can connect for reasons I don’t yet understand.)
4. Consider tweeting for a character.  (Can you imagine what Wanda might say?)
5. “Publishers are the bouncers at the pearly gates.” (Mark Coker, epublisher of Smashwords, talking about traditional publishing.)
6. “Publishers purchase today what was popular yesterday to publish in 18 months.”  (Mark again.)
7. “Amazon is eating publishers for lunch.”  (See 5 and 6)
8. Amazon sells 105 ebooks for every 100 print books. 
9. Ebook pluses: changeable fonts, portable, compact, convenient sampling and purchasing. (Plus ereaders are getting cheaper.)
10. Nothing you can do to promote yourself will help unless you write a good book.

It was fun to learn new ways to  find readers and keep my faithful ones happy, too, but everyone there agreed that the last item, writing a good book, has to be the most important.   The trick in coming years, when writers will take more and more of publishing into their own hands, will be to make certain that good books rise, like cream, to the top of the bookselling world.

And speaking of that?  Back to One Mountain Away!

Last Friday at Southern Exposure I posted the original covers of my novels Once More With Feeling and Twice Upon A Time, and showed the way the eBook cover for Twice Upon A Time grew from stock photography to finished product.

Twice Upon A Time was the easiest.  I immediately found several photographs I liked, including one of a pregnant woman holding a sunflower over her swollen belly. It might well have been a good fit, but there were two problems.  One, it didn’t suggest the hard-won “victory” of Mary Kate’s new life.  The second problem would have been harder.  We wanted two photos that were connected, at least in composition.  Finding a photo with a segment of a woman’s body (to mirror the pregnant belly) that said anything important and was also visually intriguing?  Very difficult.

After we chose the photograph for Twice, we started a search for a photo with similarities for Once.  One, we wanted a woman with her back turned, the way Mary Kate’s turned away.  Two, instead of a sunflower field, we needed a city view.  In Once More With Feeling, the heroine finds herself living the life of a sexy news anchor she has admired, even envied.  She leaves behind her mid-life crisis, and the upper-class Long Island existence that revolves around her famous architect husband, and plummets into the world of tabloid television news.  Of course, “leaves behind” isn’t quite true–but you have to read the book to see how that unfolds.

Initial Idea

After serious searching, we found this photo.  It was “on sale,” though still quite expensive, and I grabbed it so we wouldn’t lose it.  Then the problems began.  The woman isn’t dressed stylishly enough, and she’s not the seductress that Gypsy Dugan, my news anchor is.  Plus the more we looked at the photo, the less it suggested Manhattan and the more a city in Eastern Europe.  Nothing Tina could do to it gave us the feeling we wanted.

Goodbye photograph, hello lesson on not jumping at sales.

Right woman but not the right scene

Next we found this one.   The woman looks to be the right age.  Her hair’s dark and the way she’s holding it off her neck is interesting, and seductive.  But the scene?  Nothing interesting or arresting about it.   Tina promised that wasn’t a problem.  Find a Manhattan skyline scene I liked and we’d combine the two.  I showed our first take to my friend author Diane Chamberlain who thought our model was scratching her head.  Yes, indeed, the finger does look as if she’s digging it into her scalp.  Yikes!  Tina said, no problem, she could fix this, as well, and she did.

Skyline Photo used on cover

We found the perfect sunset skyline scene only to discover that it, like the rejected initial idea, was extremely expensive.  We found another that was more reasonable, and the result was just as pleasing.  Tina worked her magic with fonts and editing and the new Once More With Feeling was ready for publication.

Current eBook cover of Once More With Feeling

We’ve learned a lot in the process.  For one thing night covers are difficult to see once they’ve been “shrunk” to the size of an Amazon or Barnes and Noble thumbnail.  While the cover of Once More With Feeling perfectly captures the story, and looks wonderful full size, the smallest versions blur.  Of course, all along the way, my patient, forbearing daughter-in-law pitched in, made changes without complaining and suggestions with tact and style.  I was supremely lucky to have her talents at my disposal as well as those of Ted at Dellaster Design, who formatted the books for the Nook and the Kindle.

Who knew becoming my own publisher would turn out to be such a challenge? After all this?  Now Tina and I are in the process of redesigning the cover for Once More with Feeling because, despite being the first of the two books, it’s not selling as well. I asked my Facebook readers to give their opinion, and the majority felt a cheerier cover was in order.

Back to the “drawing” board.

But this is one of the beauties of eBooks.  I can try new things because a new cover is easy to add.  I can take your comments into consideration and watch sales dwindle or grow.  So I’ve just found a new photo I love, which works for the book but has the brighter, happier feel of the Twice Upon A Time cover. Tina loves it, too–and she hasn’t even tried to divorce me.  Can you divorce a mother-in-law?

Stay tuned. . .  I’ll post the new cover just as soon as we’re satisfied.

Meantime, you can find the Kindle Versions here and here.  The Nook versions are available here.  For all other formats, visit Smashwords.com.  All  three stores have free samples available.

Original Cover

I’ll confess of the more than sixty books I’ve written, I’ve had good covers and not-so-good covers.  I’ve had a few great ones, too.  Not surprisingly, those books sold the best.  Have I made my point succinctly?  Covers make a difference.  A very big difference.  And sometimes it’s hard to get them right.

Original Cover

When I decided to publish my two out-of-print Avon releases from the mid 1990s as eBooks, I had an ace in the hole.  My lovely and talented daughter-in-law who just happens to be a graphic designer.  Tina was excited about the chance to create new covers, and I was even more excited about letting her do them.

You might ask why I didn’t just use the originals, which, while a bit outdated are still quite lovely?  While I own the “words” and received the rights back to them once the novel went out of print, I never owned the art.  So it was up to us to create our own.

I learned immediately that “concepts” aren’t as easy to show as they are to verbalize.  The two novels have a “fantasy” twist of sorts.  I’ve always wondered what it would be like to wake up in another person’s life.  Haven’t you wished you could walk through someone else’s days, just to see what the world looks like from a different perspective?  In Once More With Feeling and Twice Upon A Time, I imagined just that.  So when it came to covers, I thought of shadows and blurred images.  Something to show the “fantasy” premise of the stories. 

Two problems cropped up immediately.  First, my idea was nearly impossible to show in a way that would make sense to a reader looking for a book to buy.  Second, although the premise is unusual, and let’s face it, impossible in real life, the stories are classic women’s fiction.  The premise is the only fantasy element.  The stories are about women discovering who they are and what they love.

Art from iStock Photo

The covers, then, needed to show the stories for what they really were.  Tina and I searched for photographs that would convey the feel of the novels.  Twice Upon A Time was the easiest by far.  In the novel, Mary Kate McKenzie, who wakes up after a near-death experience to discover a completely unfamiliar life, also discovers that she’s in charge of a community garden run by a group of nuns, a vocation she once aspired to.  The problem, of course, is that Mary Kate despises dirt and, apparently, loves men, since she finds she is mysteriously pregnant  with no father  in sight.  Mary Kate’s transformation is, I hope, poignant, romantic and humorous.  Since much of it takes place in the garden among a patch of sunflowers, the moment we stumbled on this photo at istockphoto.com, we knew we had our background.  The photo said everything about Mary Kate’s new life.

From that point on, Tina worked her magic.  Mary Kate is a redhead with curly hair.  Tina touched up the photo so the woman’s longer blonde hair doesn’t show under the hat, and created more sky for the title.  Next the font for my name.  We settled on one similar to the one used by Mira Books, to provide some continuity.  She chose an italic for the title and tag line that was similar to title fonts of my other books, but not identical.  The idea was for readers to recognize this as an Emilie Richards cover, without mimicking. 

eBook Cover

 The result was exactly what I’d hoped for.

Once More With Feeling, the first book of the two connected stories, was much harder.  For the most part, Once More is an urban novel taking place on Long Island and Manhattan.  I wanted contrast between the two books, but the same basic feel.   Easier said than done.

Next Friday I’ll show you our journey and the magic Tina worked to make those ideas spring to life.  Can you tell this has been a learning experience?  I have a new respect  for the cover art department at my publisher.  Now I know just how hard they work.  One thing’s for certain, though, I couldn’t have been luckier.  Working with my daughter-in-law was a dream come true.  I’m looking forward to more collaborative ventures in our future.

So there I was last October, in a packed room with treasured colleagues, authors I love, authors I’ve admired, and newish authors with infectious enthusiasm for this crazy career of ours.  And in the front on the panels?  Some of the most powerful people in publishing. 

Novelists, Inc., an international group of multi-published authors, is the only writer’s group I belong to since the computer snafu that ate my Romance Writers of America dues payment–a fact I didn’t discover for five months of non-membership.  The fact that I hadn’t missed RWA was something of a clue.  The fact they insisted I pay a reinstatement fee was another clue I’m just not an organization kinda gal.  RWA’s a great one, but sometimes vacations are nice.

But NINC?  Between information on the eloop and NINC’s fabulous conferences, I couldn’t be without it, even temporarily.  So there I was in that crowded room expecting the same-old, same-old advice.  “Write the best book you can.”  (Umm. . . does anyone in NY really believe we’d submit schlock on purpose?)  “Write the book of your heart.”  (And if it happens to be a novel about the Little-Engine-Who-Could locked in a torrid love affair with Dracula’s daughter, I should submit this to you?)

No one was more surprised than I was, when the panels turned to epublishing, the fabulous opportunities out there for ebooks, and the way that some of my most esteemed colleagues were putting their backlist up on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other places, too.  Unashamedly.  Greedily.  Joyfully.

Fast forward to February 2011.  No one can say I don’t listen.  I had all the rights back to two novels I published for Avon in the mid-nineties.  Despite the daunting task of developing covers, getting a clean, edited copy of the text, and putting the books up in three different formats so they could be read on different styles of ereaders, I decided to give this a try. 

Once More With Feeling and Twice Upon A Time were “special” to me.  A case could be made that all books are special to their authors, but there was always something about these two that set them apart.  The premise was “different,” “unusual,” but the stories were about two women examining their lives in intimate detail, figuring out who they were (!) and who they wanted to be.  They were romantic, funny, thoughtful, poignant.  Quite simply (and remember the source) I adored them both.

Sometimes the books I’ve loved when writing them have not stood the test of time.  Quite honestly I wish some of them were not only out of print, but out of existence.  I was young.  The market was different.  I was learning.  But the moment I began to re-read Once More and Twice Upon, I was hooked.  I laughed.  I got appropriately teary-eyed.  I felt for these two women.  Yes, indeed, they deserved a new life.  No, the books aren’t exactly what I write today.  But yes, they are clearly my novels.  A bit more profane.  A bit more sensual and romantic.  And yes, the premise has a fantasy twist.  But they are mine, with the same issues that continue to fascinate me.  The same kinds of characters I still want to write about.  The same belief that happy endings are possible.

In future blogs I’ll be sharing the complex process of turning novels in print into ebooks.  Covers, edits, formats, pricing, decisions.  For now, though,  let me introduce my newest babies, reborn and likely to be around for a very long time.

Although I’ve linked both to Amazon and B&N in this blog, look for copies everywhere ebooks are sold.