FACEBOOK SEARCH – MICROSOFT LAUNCHES

LATEST PROMO FOR ITS LIVE SEARCH PROGRAM 

Microsoft’s first foray into Facebook’s world was its $240 million purchase last year. Apparently pleased with its exclusive right to sell Facebook’s domestic and global display inventory, the company has announced it will add its Live Search program to the package. 

Although no decision has been made on whether and what prizes will be awarded to Facebook searchers, the likelihood that members of the social network will benefit seems highly likely since Microsoft has promoted its program with customer rewards. 

Among its other promotional programs, The “Live Search Club” rewards people who use the search engine to play games. This year it rewarded American users under the new “Cashback Program” and Aussie users with its “Secret Search” incentive program. 

I suspect you can look forward to more new benefits to social networking participants in the future as the battle for members heats up between the biggies. 

GAS PRICES AND THE SINKING DOLLAR COMBINE

TO REDUCE TRAVEL AND HURT TRAVEL BOOK SALES 

Members of the American Booksellers Association recently told “Book Selling This Week” (BTW), the group’s newsletter, that they are moving fewer travel books as a result of soaring gas prices and the dwindling value of the U.S. dollar. 

More and more Americans have chosen either to remain at home or limit their travel to local adventures. As an example right in my own home, we eliminated European travel and headed up to Banff, Canada for a summer vacation week.  

BTW reported another interesting happening in book retailing. The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression  and the MLRC Institute (a media law resource center) are co-sponsoring  a program to bring reporters to bookstores around the country to discuss how the Internet is changing the practice of journalism.  

The speakers will be asking and answering some very crucial questions. Are bloggers really journalists? Has the Internet improved journalism or just provided a forum for disinformation? Should the same legal protections that newspapers and broadcast media enjoy be extended to journalists on the Internet? 

These are sessions well worth attending. Watch for them when they are scheduled at bookstores in your area. 

Charlie’s Choice 

Weekly Tips to Help You Write,

Publish & Promote Your Work 
 

A PLANNING GUIDE FOR

WRITING YOUR MEMOIR 
 

      In this last of a series of columns on writing a memoir, I’d like to go back to our discussions of last week, and reinforce the process of creating worthy vignettes and fleshing them out. Space did not allow me to discuss all that I had wanted to in that column.   

      If you recall, in step one in the process of creating your story you brainstormed all of the events and characters that you were able to recall. You followed that by writing simple vignettes to describe each. You then weeded out those that didn’t contribute to the essence of the story you planned to tell. What we didn’t discuss was the next step: fleshing out your remaining vignettes with greater detail and an improved quality of writing.  

      Each vignettes represents a portion of the brick and mortar with which you are going to structure your memoir. Just as brick work requires great care aligning each score and meticulous pointing to create a first class result, so your vignettes demand editing and polishing. The verbal mortar that holds them together must be smooth. Each transition must flow.  

Capturing Every Nuance 

      Composing your vignettes certainly helped you to gain a finer grasp of each event and each character you wrote about. I am sure your memory was refreshed over and over again as you assembled all of this information. Now that your recall has been stimulated and you have a much better grasp on the content, it is time to expand your vignette by exploring every aspect of the events and of each character just as you would if you were writing a novel. That will allow you to enrich your vignettes before you incorporate them into the book. To help you with your analysis, I am including two questionnaires, one for events and the other for characters. 

      As you develop the answers, you will be able to pinpoint the areas in which you must pursue further research, whether that means talking to others who are familiar with the people and/or events, researching newspapers that served the locale during that period, reviewing a genealogical chart, whatever.  

      Faced with blank spaces on a questionnaire, you will feel compelled to investigate further and to think harder as you try to recapture elusive memories. This is a step that will give you the detailed information that represents the difference between a skimpy, superficial book and a rich and meaningful memoir. Time and effort spent at this stage will ensure the book you produce will be of real worth for all who read it. 
 
 
 

EVENT QUESTIONNAIRE 

What seems at first to be a relatively minor event may have major impact. What seems to be a minor detail associated with the event can have the greatest consequence. So think your answers out carefully and thoroughly. The effort you expend on these answers will likely make or break your  memoir.. 
 
 

Place of the Occurrence  
 

Weather & Time of Year 
 

People Who Were Present 
 

Significance of the Event to You 
 

Significance of the Event to Others (Who?) 
 

Was the Event of a  Personal Nature 
 

Was It Local, National, International 
 

What Led Up to the Event 
 

Describe the Event as You Witnessed It 
 

Describe the Event the Way Any Other Person You Interviewed Witnessed It 
 

What Were the Consequences of the Event 
 

Were They Long Lasting (How Long?) 
 

How Did the Event Influence Your Life 
 

Beyond Its Influence on You, What was the Overall Significance of the Event  
 

Other Comments 
 
 
 

CHARACTER QUESTIONNAIRE 

Preparing your answers with great care will allow you to understand your characters more thoroughly, their psyche, physical appearance, habits, quirks and more. This will help you make them come alive. You must avoid placing “cardboard,” one dimensional people in your story if it is to become real and interesting to the reader.   
 
 

Name 
 

Address (Street & Community) 
 

Age 
 

Height & Weight 
 

Body Type & Physical Condition 
 

Color  (Skin, Eyes, Hair) 
 

Clothing Style 
 

Speaking Style (Accent, pace, volume, etc) 
 

Distinguishing Physical Features (Include scars, etc) 
 

Mental or Physical Illnesses 
 

Religion & Family Background 
 

Marital Status 
 

Children 
 

Military Service (Any Significant Occurrences, injuries or Medals) 
 
 

Special Skills 
 

Occupation 
 

Hobbies, Sports and/or Interests 
 

Positive and Negative Characteristics 
 

Significance - Impact This Person Had on You 
 

Significance – Impact This Person Had on Your Family or Friends 
 
 

      Use these charts to enliven your vignettes with details, but be certain they are accurate. When you are satisfied that each segment has the strength to stand on its own, it is time to begin writing. Carefully build each transition, as you segue from one vignette to the next. When you have reviewed and edited the total package to ensure it flows freely and there are no contradictions between the segments, you are ready publish.  

      For the next several weeks, we will look at various means and methods of publishing your masterpieces. We’ll first take an overview of the industry to help you determine the best approach for your specific work. That will be followed by separate columns on individual methodologies so you can understand the finer details of the approach you select. Till next week. 

      Keep writing! 
 

TOP SELLING CHILDRENS BOOKS

CHART THE GENRE’S PATH FOR A PRODUCTIVE YEAR 

With sales of 32 million (Breaking Dawn by Stephanie Meyer) and 2.5 million (Brisingr by Christopher Paolini) leading the way, sales for children’s titles will hopefully take off this year. Year-to-date figures for paper backs are up almost 4%, but unfortunately hardcover hasn’t kept pace, posting a drop of more than 10% for the year. 

According to Publishers Weekly, there’s been active pre-publication buzz surrounding “The 39 Clues” series, the trilogy “The Hunger Games” and the novel “The Graveyard Book.”  New sequels by some top writers will launch in the fall, and a number of exciting new picture books are ready for release. 

PW just posted a comprehensive list of fall arrivals, as well as a sneak preview of spring, 2009, releases. Combined with PW’s story that 24 children’s-only retail bookstores have survived for more than 20 years, the impressive list offers reassurance for the future of children’s titles despite the modest 2008 sales thus far.  

BUDGET CUTBACKS CONTINUE TO DESTROY

NEWSPAPER BOOK REVIEW SECTIONS 

The budget steamroller keeps on rolling across newspapers, crushing sections like book reviews that produce little or no revenue. Tribune Company’s Los Angeles Times, at one time the home of one of the nation’s finest book review sections, has confirmed that it is reducing its five person staff to three and its book review section will soon have to compete with other features for space when it is shifted to the Calendar pages. The paper does insist it is still committed to book review coverage” without specifying what that means. 

On the East Coast, the news from Tribune newspapers is no better. Carole Goldberg, since 2002 the highly respected books editor of the Hartford Courant has been terminated. The section is being moved to the control of the features staff.  

As this column has reported several times before, the life expectancy of self-standing book review section is becoming shorter and shorter. It’s a sad day for our industry.   

LIBRARIES REPORT INCREASED ACTIVITY

AS BOOK SALES SLOW DOWN 
 

As I have recommended time and again, concentrating on selling your books to libraries can increase your sales volume substantially. Nothing better demonstrates the importance of library sales than the current economic downturn that has budget-struggling consumers reaching out for every avenue that represents saved pennies. 

In his monthly newsletter, Jim Cox of Midwest Book Review, points out that while “Book sales are experiencing a recession era slump (especially in online sales), community libraries are reporting steady increases in the number of people they are serving and the number of books being checked out.” 

But all is not peaches and cream for authors. Libraries too are feeling the pinch, and municipal budgets have been slashed. That means acquisition librarians are challenged to stretch their dollars by carefully selecting the limited number of new books they can buy.  

If you believe your book, fiction or nonfiction, can be an asset, either contact libraries directly or retain the services of distributors who specialize in sales to libraries. Try Quality Books, Inc at

www.writers-publish.com/book-distributors.html or Brodart Co at www.brodart.com.  You’ll find  even more on your favorite search engine. 

IS FACEBOOK SET TO SURPASS MYSPACE

AS THE NUMBER ONE SOCIAL NETWORK? 

While Facebook has had phenomenal success on a global basis—123.9 million unique visitors to 114.6 for MySpace last month alone—it has never been able to overtake leader MySpace here in the USA.   

Launched more than a year before its major competitor, MySpace is well ahead of the  competition in this country with more than 70 million unique visitors each month. But Facebook is mounting a fierce challenge. It is growing domestically at the rate of 34% compared to 5% for MySpace, according to reports in the Los Angeles Times. 

For book authors here in America, this distinction in volume really isn’t all that significant. Reaching the millions of viewers who visit either of these great sites can hype sales to an amazing level. But fror the sites themselves, the difference represents a lot of dollars coming from the advertising industry both here and abroad. 

Charlie’s choice

Weekly Tips to Help You Write,

Publish & Promote Your Work 

WRITING YOUR MEMOIR IS NOT DAUNTING

ONCE YOU’VE COMPLETED THE PREPARATION 

      The problem most beginning authors face is that wanting to write your memoir, even just thinking about it, is easy. But when the proverbial “push comes to shove” and you face a blank computer screen, the task can become daunting. It won’t, if you followed the preparatory steps I listed in last week’s Charlie’s Choice column. 

      That means you devoted an undistracted hour a day for one week to jostle your memories of people and events you experienced in past years. You also determined your target audience and completed the appropriate initial research. (Undoubtedly more will be necessary as you compose the chapters of your book.) So now you are well prepared to begin. 

Starting Out 

      I trust that you have already decided how you are going to frame your story. Will it be an autobiography, recounting events that begin with your birth—certainly a momentous occasion—and continue on through childhood, adolescence and into your adult years? Or you may have chosen to highlight a significant event and show how it has colored your life ever since it occurred. Possibly you have selected a specific theme that seems to dominate your life, popping up again and again as you review your history while completing the initial preparatory exercises I have urged to do. 

      Now it is up to you to sort out all of the flashes of the past that have crossed your mind. Review any notes you have taken following each of those daily sessions. Juggle them until they make sense, and then place them into a logical sequence. 

      Try this excellent way to organize your memoir and at the same time create an easy transition to writing the final book. Take the first incident that comes to mind from your memory session. Sit down at the computer and begin writing about it. When finished, determine what additional information you need or whether it is necessary to fact check what you have written. 

      Don’t be overly concerned about style; concentrate on content for somewhere between six or a dozen or more pages. The length depends on what you require to enrich your vignette. Try, however, to write it as you would a story by giving it a sensible starting point and an ending. Do the same for every event or person who has had an impact on your life.   

      Place each vignette in a master folder. (Hint - make sure you place both a one-word name for the short piece and a page number on every page. You would be amazed at how quickly they can become jumbled.) When you have exhausted every memory and completed any supplemental research or interview to make the vignettes meaningful and accurate, lay them all out and begin to assemble them into a logical sequence so that they hang together to tell the full story you hoped to relate. 

Time to Polish 

      Think of those individual pieces as the raw material of your story. They will have to be locked together by bridges from one to another. You will also fine tune your writing at this point. However, by following this routine, you are long past the point of starting to write the book. It is substantially written when you have completed the vignettes.  

      You have side-stepped the trauma of embarking on a full-length book that often terrorizes a beginning author. Now your challenge is to determine how best to paste these individual chunks of your tale into one longer story that flows smoothly. That task is a good deal easier than beginning with nothing more than a basic outline. So whether you required several months or a year or more to craft those vignettes, the time was very well spent.     

      To begin your book, write a few lines or paragraphs that capture the flavor of what it is you would like your readers to take home with them. You should know that well, now that you have reviewed and assembled all of your vignettes. In essence you are now setting the tone of the memoir with your opening before you move into the first vignette. Let me give you some examples of what I mean: 

•  
  • You are a Vietnam veteran describing your battlefield experiences. You want to impress your children with an understanding of just how horrible war can be. Use that generalization to open your book, and then move right into the first vignette you have written.

•  
  • Perhaps you have done something extremely significant in your life. Maybe you became a highly successful and respected lawyer after growing up in a poor family that had been abused by a developer who was closely wired into the city administration. You lost your home because your family couldn’t afford legal protection. Present that information in your opening since it is the primary influence in your life, impacting your education and your career choice. Follow that with the first vignette and continue telling the story through the pieces you have already written..

•  
  • Maybe you accomplished something that benefited society. As a pediatrician you treated several cases in which young patients were badly injured in school bus accidents. You led a successful crusade to install safety belts in every school vehicle. Your opening might well be a description of one of the cases you treated and how it affected you emotionally. You then can follow the opening with the first of your many vignettes that relate the obstacles and achievements that you have already crafted to tell the story of your success.

Make Certain Your Story Rings True 

      Realize that each of your vignettes took place at a different time. Be certain that the facts surrounding the event are reflective of that time period. Be aware of what was happening in the town, state, nation and even the world at the time you are writing about. Be aware of the simple things that reflect each time period you write about. For example, the changing styles of clothing. Vocabulary changes. There are trends in words. Adults don’t use many of the same words a child or a teenager employs.  

      As you move forward, you must strive to keep your work as objective as you possibly can. You’ll find one of most trying challenges is understanding limits. Discard the old warning, “If you can’t say something nice about someone, don’t say anything.” That was fine while you were a child and still does generally make good sense. But it does not pertain when writing a memoir. 

      What does matter is your internal courage. Your confidence to say what is on your mind and when it is necessary to admit your own shortcomings. Only by being absolutely honest and forthright can you offer others a memoir that will be of value to them. Never use disparaging or sexual prose just to titillate your reader. Be courageous enough to say what has to be said, but only if it is directly pertinent and adds value to the story.  

      When you have included the last vignette, your memoir ends. You’ll probably want to close with a paragraph or so that pulls together all of these events and highlights the theme of your book. But don’t allow yourself to be preachy or pedantic.  

      For example, the war story may end with your homecoming and your family’s relief that you were fortunate enough to escape unharmed. The lawyer’s tale may be wrapped up with the success of a similar case in which he helped a needy family salvage its home. The pediatrician’s piece probably would end with the improved statistics once the belts were installed. 

      Next week, we’ll wrap up our discussion of memoirs with some additional advice plus a sample questionnaire that will hopefully help you organize your original thoughts and memories of events and characters about whom you plan to write. Remember always, anything you write in any genre requires substantial effort and a good deal of time. Don’t skimp on either. Quality writing can’t be rushed.  

      Ernest Hemingway, one my idols, said it all, “I take great pains with my work, pruning and revising with a tireless hand…I polish them into a tiny gem.” 
 

      See you next week. Keep writing! 
 

BOOK PUBLISHERS TAKING ACTION TO REDUCE

THE LOSS OF 30 MILLION TREES PER YEAR 

While large numbers of books and articles on protecting our environment have been produced in recent years, book publishers have only recently begun to think of the impact of the loss of 30 million trees a year to meet their paper needs. The magazine industry uses 35 million trees to produce the paper it needs, and newspapers require 95 million. 

Amy Goetzman, a well recognized freelancer, has written a compelling article in the Minnesota Post. In addition to citing the figures above released by the Green Press Institute, Amy reports that on average each book leave a carbon footprint of 8.85 pounds and the book publishing industry “as a whole emits a net 12.4 million pounds of carbon dioxide each year.”  

Fortunately, the Initiative states that 160 publishers are revising their operations in an effort to limit their impact on the environment. But that represents only about  40% of the industry. Amy does make a very interesting point when she observes that magazines and newspapers are usually read by only one or two people before they are discarded, while books are normally read by many more and certainly are kept a great deal longer. Sadly that still doesn’t reduce  the numbers of trees that are lost every year. 

THE GROWTH OF CANADIAN ONLINE USERS OFFERS

AUTHORS AN EXPANDED MARKET TO PROMOTE THEIR BOOKS 

When planning the online promotion program for your new book, don’t overlook the huge potential of our neighbor to the North. eMarketer, an outstanding source of information on the digital world, estimates that over the next four years, online use by Canadians will increase by about 1.5 million a year, passing the 25 million mark in 2012 when  penetration will reach 73%.  

Universal McCann reports that today 7.8 million Canadians go online every day. Karin von Abrams, an eMarketer senior analyst states that broadband is already more prevalent in Canada than in many other countries, including the US.  

In an in depth report that she has produced on the Canadian Internet, von Abrams writes that about two-thirds of Canadian households now have broadband, and predicts that three-quarters will be connected by 2012. The report is available  through www.emarketer.com.  

And don’t forget that there is a network of active libraries across Canada. Even most of those located in Quebec, the French speaking province, include books written in English. The distributors I spoke of in today’s first post have Canadian affiliates. Contact them