Some More This and That

We’re definitely feeling the renewal that comes with spring. Just like Lynn’s “big ass rose garden” with its hundreds of tight little buds almost ready to burst forth in stunning displays of color, we’re anticipating good things as authors this season. The first of these will be the release of our third novel, The Dragon Princess. It’s all over but the shouting now. We finished the proof yesterday, so now all the publisher needs to do is to convert it to the various eBook formats and distribute it to the sales sites. This is our best book yet for reading out loud with an adventure designed to be accessible for fantasy buffs of all ages. It’s also our best book cover.

Over the last month we’ve sold 5 eBooks in Great Brittan, two in Canada, and one in Australia. It’s kind of thrilling to think that we might become known internationally.

Much closer to home, Lynn Evans has been invited to participate in a local author’s day at the Ramona Library next Saturday, April 21^st from 12:30 to 3 p.m. So far we are the only eBook authors included. We’re wondering if they’re expecting a couple of new-age techno geeks and what they’ll think when a couple of doddering grandparents show up with their Kindles. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by and pick up one of our custom bookmarks. Trust us, the irony of giving away paper bookmarks advertising our eBooks hasn’t been lost on us. 

Some of the advanced readers for the Bobbie Titan sequel, Bobbie Titan in the Alternate Way, have told us they’ve finished. We are eagerly waiting to see what they think about what we’ve done to Bobbie this time. We think parts of it are pretty daring and unexpected and we are wondering if the readers will think so too. As our loyal followers know, we take our advanced readers’ comments very seriously. We’ve even killed a novel that didn’t get good responses from our readers. There is still time if you want to have a say in what happens to Bobbie in the next book. Just email us at 2blynnevans@gmail.com or message us on Facebook. We’ll see that you get a reader’s copy in the format you prefer.

There are moments in life that, as authors, you can only hope you will be able to capture in words. One of these happened this weekend when we stopped by to visit our grandsons. The youngest, Aaron, was playing with one of those strong balloons with the rubber band on the end that let you punch it repeatedly. As he ran through the living room wildly shaking his arm, the balloon bounced in tight arcs around his head and shoulders, repeatedly hitting him in the face. Aaron couldn’t have been happier. His delight was complete. So was ours while watching him. One of the best things about being a toddler is that you don’t have to give yourself permission to be absorbed in pleasure. 

Another Fantasy?

We turned The Dragon Princess into our e-publisher and we are pretty excited about the imminent release of our third novel. It’s hard to explain the kind of satisfaction you have when you are finally through with all the writing and editing. What started out as an idea almost four years ago is now finally a finished story.

Practically the last thing that happens before we submit the manuscript is that Lynn reads the whole thing out loud while Evans follows along on the computer. Even though we each read and edit the book three or four times separately, it is amazing what we still catch when the words are spoken aloud. The “final read” is probably the most enjoyable time for the whole novel collaboration. This time was particularly memorable because many of the characters’ first names and some of their personalities were “borrowed” from friends and family. It was amusing to listen to the fantasy adventure and imagine the people we know doing the wild things described in the book. It made us a little sad when the final chapter was finished. We wanted to know what happens next to the characters who seemed particularly real this time.

We are so interested in fact, that we are thinking about changing our minds and writing a sequel. We had always planned on the Bobbie Titan books being a series and knew that there wouldn’t be any follow up to The Valentine’s Game. We thought the same thing for The Dragon Princess, but now, we’re not so sure. We started this fantasy novel when our first grandson, Ethan, was a baby and now he’s about to start kindergarten. His brother Aaron is just a final footnote in this book. We are strongly considering writing a second fantasy where the character Aaron is the same age the character Ethan is in this story (fourteen). We think there is something fun we could say about growing up in the shadows of one of the heroes of The Dragon Princess. Maybe it’s because we’re both the second kids while growing up.

We know we mentioned something about working on a “sassy mystery” next but now we’re not sure. Even though Evans has a mystery story outlined, the idea of going back to our fantasy world, Elan, has been tugging hard at us this week. Maybe the desire will lessen when The Dragon Princess is finally out and all of you start reading it. If not, however, don’t be surprised if the book after our second Bobbie Titan novel features a character named Aaron who is perhaps a little too stubborn for his own good.

A Wonderful Surprise

Most of the time you need to plan, work, and rework to get anything worthwhile as an author. Sometimes, you just get lucky.

We were contacted this week by Lucy Schneider to do an eBook reading later this month. Lucy is the owner of All Readers Ebooks (www.allreadersebooks.com). Her husband, Charles, has invented a universal eBook format that will work natively on any tablet, reader, smart phone, or PC. While he’s busy trying to convince the world that everyone needs to use .efont, she’s decided to open up a virtual bookstore featuring eBooks published in this format.

Needless to say, this adventurous pair has given themselves quite a challenge. Not only has Charles the unenviable task of trying to convince behemoths like Amazon, Apple, and Google that they made mistakes choosing different native eBook formats, Lucy has chosen to compete against these same companies and an e-world of other online eBook outlets. Luckily they do have one thing going for them; .efont is cool! Not only does it offer all the features as any other eBook software, it can integrate completely with a word processor like MS Word. Using the .efont add-in, you are able to easily write, convert, or format your eBook on your PC and know exactly how it is going to look on a Kindle, Nook, iPad, or any other eBook reader. As I’m sure all our loyal readers know, eBooks today are formatted into the different formats using conversion software, which isn’t perfect. Even professionals will turn out eBooks with weird gaps or the occasional blank page.

You can also write in an .efont eBook after it’s been converted. By designating parts of your eBook as “interactive,” you can have sections of the eBook available after it’s been published. The Schneiders envision incorporating electronic pictures and video post-production so that eBook readers can personalize their copies. It also provides a neat way for eBook authors to do book signings. We’ve already downloaded an app from Lucy that lets us use our smart phone to sign copies of The Valentine’s Game that she converted for us. It’s wild!

Lucy has a sister who lives in Poway and she saw our article in 92064 Magazine (www.92064magazine.com/2012/03/poway-high-student-services-director-and-husband-make-quite-a-writing-team/). Now we’re going to do a premier release of The Dragon Princess at All Readers EBooks and are committed to doing a web-reading and eBook signing as soon as we finish our final proof edit. Since we plan to be finished in the next two days, we’re currently scheduled to release on the morning of Friday, April 20^th with our reading that evening. We will be sure to post the details once they’ve been firmed up.

We are a little overwhelmed but completely ecstatic by this unexpected event. We love the idea of being quixotic partners with Lucy and Charles as they tilt at the eBook windmills festooned across the Internet landscape. While we still intend to independently publish The Dragon Princess through our normal e-publisher, we are happy to release the .efont version first and are sure most of you will want to download your signed copy from All Readers EBooks as soon as it is available. Since it will still be the same price at Lucy’s place as it will anywhere else, we think most people will want all of our eBooks in this amazing new format.

Oh, one more thing… April Fools!

Leveling Out

There is one part of being independent that we don’t like - marketing. We would really just prefer to write novels and have them magically get noticed and read. Unfortunately the world doesn’t work that way. We think our inability to promote our work well means that we are not attracting as many readers as we could and, at least for our fundraising efforts with Bobbie Titan in the Mark of Kain, this means we aren’t generating the kind of support for Poway High Student Services as we would like.

 

The way we see it, there are four levels to “getting out there.” First, some of your close friends and family buy the book just because they think they should. When it turns out that what they read is worth the effort, they talk among themselves and some more of the level-1 books get sold. Level-2 starts when people in the local area begin to hear about the book and start to buy it. In our case, it was people like the dentist, hairdresser, the kids that come into the Student Services Office and a few of their parents who read the book. If you’re lucky, you also get recognized by some local media. It happened for us when we just released Bobbie Titan and the Poway Chieftain carried a story about us. Unfortunately they only included the article about us in the print addition, so we weren’t able to share a link and the impact stayed local to Poway.

Luckily, we’re getting another chance to shine a little bit in the area around PHS. This week an article came out about us in the 92064 magazine. It’s a nice publication and their web presence is well laid out. They also distribute a paper magazine to everyone in the Poway zip code. So, all of our loyal followers might want to check out the whole periodical by jumping to  http://www.92064magazine.com/ . Don’t forget to check out the “Faces in the Crowd” column to read about us (http://www.92064magazine.com/category/faces-in-the-crowd/). We are really pleased by the article.

Unfortunately, we seem to be stuck at marketing level-2. Level-3 happens when people greater than two degrees of separation start reading your book. We just don’t have a real good feel on how to get “strangers” interested in what we’ve written. We have a sense it comes from “discovering” us at the place where people buy books and, for us, this equates to the big e-book distributors like Amazon. So now our big push is to get as many of the level-1 and level-2 people who read and liked our work to go to Amazon, B&N, Apple, or all three, and tell others what they thought. We think Amazon is the most important. Even when we buy a book somewhere else, we often go to Amazon first to see what other readers thought. We are also always more comfortable choosing an unknown author when they have 20 or more positive reviews. So that’s what we’re trying to do for Bobbie. Right now we have six: four five star and two four star ratings.

  

Level-4 is a dream. That’s the kind of marketing that happens when you have a runaway best seller and people want the movie rights. If we ever get to level-4, we will be sure to get professionals to help. It might mean less independence, but it would also mean we would have people begging to help us. Now wouldn’t that be sweet!

It's Like Baseball...

We watched our 4 ½-year-old grandson play t-ball yesterday. It was the best kind of heart-warming comic relief. While a few of the youngsters seemed to grasp the idea behind baseball, the vast majority of the children were just happy to put on their uniform and run around, usually in the wrong direction. This morning, when we recalled the light-hearted events we’d witnessed, it made us think there could be a baseball analogy to writing novels.

 Like baseball, writing an engaging novel-length story requires understanding a set of non-intuitive rules. Not only must you develop writing skills, but you must employ them in ways that make the story you are trying to tell understandable and engaging. Of course, there is some latitude. That’s why we like different kinds of stories and storytellers. An analogy to baseball might be that radically different stances can still be successful when hitting, but you still must have a talent to put a round bat on a round ball. And you can’t football tackle a base runner because that would no longer be baseball, just like you can’t just slap 75,000 words down and expect it to be understandable, let alone a pleasure to read.

And, like baseball, to be good, novel writing takes practice. We’re on our way to a million words that no one but us and a few advanced readers will ever see. And we’re sure we are not alone. Most novelists must hone their craft before they are any good at it just like most ball players must scoop up thousands of ground balls before they’re proficient fielders.  Luckily, in both baseball and novel writing, there are people around that will help you get better, much of the time out of the goodness in their hearts.

It used to be that the baseball analogy would hold true to novel publishing, but not anymore. While there is still only one MLB where the very best players can showcase their talents in the USA, the publishing oligarchs, thanks to eBooks, are now in decline. Before major league baseball could face the kind of difficulties major publishers are, virtual reality would need to be sophisticated enough so that watching an internet baseball game would be more entertaining than watching it on TV. It would have to offer at least some of the experience of going to the ballpark. If that could occur, individual players could then be free to associate outside of baseball’s monopoly and form teams among themselves while their fans, incased in their own virtual enclaves all over the world, could cheer them on. If this were to happen, no doubt heated debates would flair over the purity of the game, but, we’re sure, the ease, comfort, and cost for enjoying virtual baseball would soon put the kind of pressures on the MLB that Amazon is putting on Random House. While we grew up loving bookstores, it is a simple fact that eBooks and the internet provide a greater wealth of stories than we would have ever discovered wandering the aisles of the bookstore. And if you love reading stories like we do and can get over the need to hold bound paper, it is so much easier to get lost in the words when they are delivered electronically. We know this is sacrilege to some and we still have hundreds of paper books at our house, but the writing is on the virtual-wall. EBooks will one day soon be the norm and paper books a luxury. Whether this ever happens to baseball, we can’t predict. In the meantime, we’ll drive over to the ball fields and watch our grandson put the glove on the wrong hand and wave to us in the stands with the other one.

More This and That

We’ve finished the cover for The Dragon Princess and we really like it! We still have a lot of fondness for the butterfly butt that went with Bobbie Titan and the Mark of Kain, partly for the prurient sensation it caused, but we think the new cover is a lot more dramatic. What do you guys think?

Speaking of The Mark of Kain – we are trying to get as many reviews as possible for our first book out to where other people read them. Right now we’re concentrating on Amazon. A lot of you sent us your comments and, if it’s not too much to ask, we would love for you to add your insights to our novel on our Amazon Page ( Click Here!)

We would love new comments too! We’ve found that it’s a tale of the “rich getting richer” at Amazon. More reviews mean more sales and we are still donating all the proceeds from The Mark of Kain to Poway High Student Services.

Thanks Debbie Thomas for your recent Bobbie Titan review – we’re blushing!

We had a great response to our February promotion for our second novel – The Valentine’s Game.  We gave away a lot of books. Surprisingly the greatest one-day downloads happened after Armin from the PHS Peer Counselors told the boys to “man up” and get a copy. We can’t wait to hear what the PC boys think of the story – the PC girls too for that matter.

Last week was the two-year anniversary of the Chelsea King tragedy. Frankly,  we still hate February 25^th.  However, a much more pleasant experience occurred yesterday when over 6,000 people showed up to remember Chelsea at the fun run/walk that bears her name. Lynn got to see a lot of old friends and former students. She didn’t get much walking in, however, because she was too busy talking and hugging – her favorite kind of exercise! We try to make the characters in our stories have that special joie de vivre that exuded from Chelsea and we always try to live up to one of her favorite sayings – “They can because they think they can.”

  

Comfort Zone Contemplation

In writing, like in life, sometimes there is something to gain by getting out of your comfort zone. At least we hope so.

Our next book is still with the editor and we’re looking for advanced readers for the one after that. (Let us know if you want to read the Bobbie Titan sequel and we’ll get you a copy.) So now it is time to start writing a new novel and, up until two days ago, we were having problems deciding what it should be about. The ideas we were tossing around sounded a lot like the books we’ve already or have just about completed. Frankly, there’s comfort in knowing we can generate these kinds of novels and the great reviews we’ve received so far offer compelling rationale for not straying too far from our strengths. Still, we want to keep it fresh and original and we worry about treading over an already well worn path.

This past week we were visiting our second daughter, Sarah, and her intended, Terence. While on our own one day, we came upon Canopy Tours, an adventure company that specializes in setting up zip lines in out of the way places. The one that is near our daughter’s house in Marin County rockets tourists through Redwood and Douglas Fir branches a hundred feet off the ground. Those of you who know our real personas will attest that neither Lynn nor Evans will be mistaken for a daredevil. In fact, the thought of perching on the side of a tree waiting for a turn to whiz on a line that looks too thin to support anything larger than the grey squirrels that scamper through the branches is the stuff that can wake Evans up at night with cold sweats. Lynn believed Evans would chicken out right up until his feet lifted from the first of seven breathtakingly wild and beautiful sails over the California coastal redwoods.

While driving back and chattering like magpies over how exciting the adventure was and how brave we’d been, we decided to take a chance and strike out in a new direction with our next novel. So now we’re going to see if we can craft a “sassy mystery.” We’re not really worried about the characters, but trying to figure out a realistic plot that offers the kind of interconnected but unexpected twists and turns that experienced mystery readers demand is a little scary. This is not unlike standing next to a swaying redwood trunk 90 feet in the air wondering if you have what it takes to step off into the sky. We only hope that the result is as fun and as thrilling as our time spent racing between the trees in Northern California.

On a personal note: We’d like to offer our sincere condolences to Mr. Chuck Wolf. He lost his wife of forty-one years, Nola, when a speeding car left the Bohemian Highway and crashed through the gazebo where people were waiting to be taken up the mountain to begin zipping through the trees. We had left this exact spot two hours before after completing our own adventure and remained blissfully unaware of the tragedy until our future son-in-law sent us a text the next day. We would also like to offer our heartfelt sympathies to our adventure guides, James and Sarah. We know you must be devastated by events you could not have foreseen. You took such good care of us and we know you would have done the same for the Wolfs had you been given the chance. Our thoughts and prayers are with you and with Nola’s family whose tragic loss is as devastating as it is unexpected.