Fortune's Daughters is on pre-sale on Amazon

For the past twelve months I've been writing a new historical novel set in the first third of the twentieth century.  The book will be published by Lake Union, an imprint of the Amazon Group that also bought and published Three Daughters. The publication date is May 9, 2017 however the book is available for pre-order on Amazon.  

For all of the writers who read my blog, I will soon devote a new post recounting the unique personal experiences that came with my Amazon association.  

Here is the link to Fortune's Daughters and below is the prologue.

http://tinyurl.com/gsg5uj5

Prologue

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Hempstead Plains, fertile and halcyon, bordered by the great Atlantic, blessed by God with every source of outdoor pleasure, broke off from Queens and became Nassau, the sixty-first county of New York State.

America’s bankers and industrial tycoons built castles along the rolling North Coast and manicured the rough virgin woods from Great Neck to Lloyd Harbor. J. P. Morgan, Frank Woolworth, Marshall 3Field, Harry Guggenheim, Frank Doubleday, and Asa Simpson. The names told the history of America’s stunning growth. The unblemished county was only twenty-nine miles from the squalor of glutted lower Manhattan, where the millions were made  on the corner of Broad and Wall.

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I feel crass and filthy offering this title for you to purchase but I feel crass and filthy for lesser behavior.  Also, I will be posting regularly again.    X

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One of these things is not like the others

This post is for all my sisters and brothers who self-publish and get "customer reviews" and receive some quizzical reviews that make them scratch their heads.

First, I am not complaining or whining.  Really. I have had some scathing reviews that should have sent me to bed in a dark room.  I picked myself up and kept going.   I've had reader reviews that said my writing was disjointed, confusing, too long, too short, too sexual, too boring, jumped around, couldn't be followed, had pages missing,  punctuated by an imbecile, punctuated by less than an imbecile, had a horrible ending, etc.  I've had readers say they wanted to throw the book across the room.  Did throw the book across the room. Wanted to throw the book at me. I've had many readers say in their review that they gave fewer stars because the book should have been longer.  The book in question was 720 pages.

The reviewing system at Amazon is like the wild, wild west: thrilling, rough, scary and seductive.

In the screenshot below, a frustrated customer who didn't get her book and couldn't get satisfaction, put her complaint where she thought it would do the most good.  If I had her e-mail, I would gladly send her a book.  BTW, Amazon is always diligent about customer satisfaction and I'm certain they will make this right.

Newborn whippoorwills were calling from the hills.

Ever since Amazon recorded my novel, Three Daughters (btw, on sale all of Feb for $1.99) for Audiobook and MP3 I've had it in my head to record all my stuff and put it up on the Audible site.  In my manic "discovery" stage I'm certain that I can

            make acceptable podcasts

            including book serials

            blog post entries

            talk incessantly and begin a whole new creative life

            make money and please the world with my great ideas

The cursing angels of good ideas and delusional ideas are to blame.

The good angel said, " I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind."

The other angel said, "F**k, yes.  Jump right in and do it. Who cares if it's amateurish.  Life is antic.  They keep saying crazy Kanye is a genius.  Maybe you are, too.  Besides, talking is easier than writing.

Guess who Audible belongs to?  It belongs to my celebrity crush, Jeff Bezos, who made Amazon.  The gang at Audible or ACX which is what they call the production entity, is super friendly and the staff there urges you to phone them anytime and ask anything.  You get the idea that the audio engineers are sitting around in Timberland boots and jeans and taking a spin on their Segways every few minutes to let off steam.  When a business is too welcoming, you get suspicious. I'm pulled along BECAUSE they are encouraging diy.  Most time you are urged not to do things yourself but to call a professional.

ACX does something else that's dangerous.  They especially ENCOURAGE authors to do the recording of their own work.  They say, "Nobody knows your work better than you."  That's not necessarily true.  Some of my readers have better insight into my writing and explain the books to me. Some readers say, "This book went on and on.  It put me to sleep."  One reader was so comatose she called me Consumer Star Beer. Or maybe it was AutoFill.

My first thought about recording was:  "Uh. No."  My voice is kind of childish and uneven. According to Dr. Weil, I don't know how to breathe. (He says breathing correctly is the most important health practice.) But then: VANITY.  And because: GRAMMY FOR THE SPOKEN WORD.  If there is an opportunity to do something that might (will) come out poorly and needs (demands) some innate technical know-how, prior training and SHOULD NOT (but will) be cobbled together - I'm in.

ACX knows authors are crazy and delusional so they suggest that we send a five- minute demo for their critique to see if we are capable of making the team or should hire one of their voiceover pros.

I borrowed my son in law's digital recorder.  He showed me the on/off buttons, the replay button, the volume wheel, the usb port.  I ignored the gazillion other buttons and started up.  What else could it take? Right?

For reasons unknown - really, I don't know where this idea came from - I put a Ralph Lauren king-sized pillow on either side of the recorder for acoustical excellence.  I brought up my Kindle Single, "Thinner Thighs In Thirty Years" on the Kindle screen and began to read the first scene.  This work was meant to be delivered as a one-woman show and it was produced (strange things happen to me) by a company in Sanibel, Florida at the Periwinkle Playhouse.

Each of the fifteen or so short scenes begins with a snippet of a poignant vintage song. Yes, I sang the snippet before beginning the reading. Remember, I had been encouraged by ACX to be my own narrator.  Scene one was framed with this lyric:  "If I had to choose just one day to last my whole life through.  It would surely be that Sunday, the day that I met you."

This song is a Nat King Cole classic, That Sunday, That Summer, that also contains this lyric. "Newborn whippoorwills were calling from the hills. Summer was a-coming in but fast."  What the heck is a newborn whippoorwill?  It is a baby bird named onomatopoetically for its song.  This was the lead-in song I had chosen for a comedic monologue about divorce and new beginnings. I read the rest of the scene (about five minutes) and sent it off to ACX for appraisal.

A month later I received this response:

"I have reviewed your recently submitted sample and have a few notes.  First, I have to say, your performance was great! Very warm and friendly." At the end there was a smiley face. (WAIT! WHAT?)

There was more stuff in the e-mail about the noise floor and the QC check and mastering but he finished with:  "Again, you have done a great read." Even a person who is adept at lying to herself found this hard to accept.  How could my squeaky, sloppy speaking voice do a "great read"? The other thing he said that I paid attention to was: "your noise floor is quite low." Ralph Lauren's pillows absorbed all the noise.  Yay, I was a natural, no?  So there you have it.   I will get up early one day soon, read through all of the tech stuff, learn to edit out mistakes on a free program called Audacity.  Learn Audacity. Learn to master.  Learn to encode.  I will do all of this after the eternal snow and ice melt and the dog days of winter evaporate. 

Anticipation abounds!

As I reported last April, one of Amazon's imprints, Lake Union, bought my novel, Daughters.  On the brink of a re-launch, here are the details of what's been going on in the last seven months.  Daughters was originally published by Delacorte Press and had professional editing and proofreading but there were still many glitches in the 720-page manuscript.

1.  The first step was the long process of re-editing.. The re-editing was not for narrative content but for inconsistencies within the narrative of historical references, dates, inconsistencies in the story lines of each character, etc.

2.  The second step was proofreading.  This step included English usage, grammar, awkward phrasing, etc.  I had mis-used or omitted about a gazillion commas.  (By the way, the rules of comma use are so long, complicated and open to interpretation they are useless for normal writing.  No.  Really.  They.  Are.)  I had paid particular attention to the use of which/that but the proofreader shut down all my "thats" and changed them to "whichs."  

3.  The third step was selecting and approving a cover.  I have to applaud Lake Union for including the writer in this process.  In traditional publishing they can put Hitler's Baby on the cover and you have nothing to say about it.  You see the cover when it's done.  Lake Union allowed me to reject designs, images and typeface during several rounds.

4.  The fourth step was jacket copy.  Again Lake Union allowed me to approve, re-write and suggest material for the jacket copy.   We also decided on a title change because the publisher didn't feel that the original title conveyed the depth and reach of the novel.  "Three Daughters" is the new title.

5.  One day in September I heard from a man in Michigan who was going to direct the audio version of the novel. (Amazon has its audio book studios, Brilliance, in Michigan.)  The novel is set in Palestine and there are many foreign phrases and accents in the book.  This dedicated man had researched every non-English phrase and wanted me to confirm the pronunciation. The actress selected to read all 19 discs (23 hours of listening) was excellent.

6.  One evening two weeks ago, the UPS man left several big packages in my vestibule.   My son, who was visiting, opened one box and found copies of the first printing of "Three Daughters."  It was nice to have him there to show all the proper emotion because I'm a dud at showing proper emotion.  Besides the paper edition, there is a digital edition, MP3 edition and an audio book.

7.  After a conference call with the head of marketing and my author coordinator, I am awaiting the official publication day next Tuesday, November 25. 

Anticipation abounds.

My day with big brother/sister

This morning I was innocently eating breakfast. There in the glossy white of my eggs over easy was a picture of a pair of Dansko Pro XP Clogs I had just look at on Amazon.  It was refreshing to see those clogs at the edge of the yolk.  For about a week, I had been seeing the Little Pete Multi-Catch Mouse Trap in the pancakes, the panini, even the bathroom mirror.  Little Pete was all over the house.  

It was like the apostles finding the imprint of Jesus' face on Veronica's Veil.  Uh, well, no, it wasn't like that at all.  Sorry.

While I could tolerate the shoes and Little Pete, I rebelled at taking my grandchild to the playground and seeing that bellyfat lady squeezing her stomach right on the side of the slide.  And then when I tried to rub her out finding her stamped every few feet on the sidewalk all the way home.

That night,  I plumped my pillow hoping for a pleasant sleep only to catch sight of the Vita-Mix 7500 framed by the hemstitching on my heirloom pillowcase.  I had clearly only looked at the Vita-Mix 5200.  Geez, Amazon, get it right.  It’s enough to make you want to take out a restraining order.