Tucson Festival of Books

This is the third time I've attended the annual book festival, a completely free weekend of events designed for readers and writers. There are book signing and talks on publishing and presentations by the Desert Museum and yummy food vendors. It's held at the University of Arizona and it's huge.

This year was especially fun because my Authonomy pal Mary Vensel White came in from California and stayed in my guest room! Mary attended as a presenter, talking about her journey to publication with The Qualities of Wood. It was particularly fun to get to talk about writing and publishing with someone about as obsessed with those things as I am. (My boyfriend was probably relieved as well.)

What stood out most for me about the authors talking about how they got published was that they each had a different experience. The MFA community, standard query process or crowd sourcing - all of these were presented as valid paths to take.

We ended the weekend by attending the conversation with Noam Chomsky, another free event that makes me so appreciative of this resource for Tucsonans.

Relaunching A Long Thaw

Well the book is up and I'm already noticing a great new perk to self publishing: I can access the sales information immediately. With traditional publishing, it can take a year before they tell you how it went, which doesn't give you much of an opportunity to make marketing changes.

So far, I'm enjoying the process. I'll keep you posted!

A Long Thaw is $2.99! 
http://www.amazon.com/A-Long-Thaw-Katie-ORourke-ebook/dp/B00UDI9JRO/ref=tmm_kin_title_0

My book cover

Here's a sneak peak of my new book cover. One difference in going the self-publishing route is that this time, I had 100% control in choosing my cover.

I found the image I wanted on The Cover Collection. Sixty bucks and 24 hours later, I had eight versions emailed to me with different fonts and text arrangement. The designer promises unlimited revisions until you're happy.

I was happy with #6.

The book goes live on Amazon tomorrow.

Self-publishing A Long Thaw

A few years ago, I had two books traditionally published and the results were mixed. The sales for my debut were great, which is why I was confused when my publisher did nothing to promote my second book. Writers tend not to discuss their experience once they get published, which can make it even more mysterious to those who are trying to make it. It's hard to pass along what you've learned if you're worried about pissing off those in power.

I'll do my best to walk the line.

I did things backwards- finding a publisher before I had an agent. I paid an agent to look over my contract, but going forward I didn't have an advocate to make sure the contract was enforced. In the future, I will not work with a publisher unagented. It isn't that the publisher is evil, but it isn't their job to look out for your best interests.

Getting that agent to help negotiate the contract may have been the best $100 I ever spent. Instead of allowing my publisher to hold the rights for my book for ten years, I get them back in two. This means I can rerelease A Long Thaw, the book my publisher didn't promote, and see if I can do a better job.

The book has already been professionally edited and the interior Kindle files were already formatted, so putting it up on Amazon has been a cinch. Tomorrow, I'll share more about the process of getting a new cover. And I'll have a link to the book!

Book Review: The Forever Marriage

Ann Bauer's novel, The Forever Marriage, opens with the death of the main character's husband. But as we read on, Carmen manages to avoid our sympathy. It turns out that she experiences his death as a relief, and not just because it ends his suffering.

The mother of three, including a son with Down's Syndrome, Carmen managed to find time to cheat on the dying husband she never loved in spite of his being a pretty swell guy. In flashbacks to the 80s, she explains how she was manipulated into marrying him because he was wealthy and nice to her and she had no idea what to do after college.

I enjoy a flawed main character and thought Carmen was ripe for a pretty intense story of redemption. But I was disappointed to find her not much changed by the book's end. The story was well-written but I found most of the dilemmas difficult to relate to or car about.

Book Review: Wild

I don't usually read memoir and I was sort of pleasantly surprised to find that this reads like fiction: in that the story seems more focused than many memoirs I have read. It flows and has a plot-line that real life often seems to be missing.

In Cheryl Strayed's Wild, she recounts her journey hiking the Pacific Coast Trail back in the nineties- before everything could be googled and everyone had a cellphone with GPS. She decides to make this hike alone, despite having very little training, after a particularly difficult time in her life.

After the death of her mother and the failure of her marriage, Cheryl is in her twenties and doesn't know who she is or wants to be. She isn't sure how, but she thinks this hike will help her figure things out. I was really impressed with the way she blends the practical details of daily hiking with the ruminations on her screwed up personal life. The transitions were seamless.

If this had been a simple travelogue, I might have been bored. Similarly, if it had been exclusively about her personal drama, it might have overwhelmed. But I thought it worked really well together and felt very well-balanced.

I am looking forward to seeing the movie, but I'll probably wait for it to hit Netflix!

Book Review: The Invisible Circus

I loved Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, so I had high hopes for The Invisible Circus, but I found it really hard to get through. I did not connect to the main character who is so consumed by the death of her older sister - a decade earlier - that she has not developed any identity beyond that. This is hard to believe as ten years is a long time, but Pheobe does not have her own friends or interests and when she turns eighteen, she has a fight with her mother and runs off to Europe to retrace her sister's footsteps, hoping to discover something by reliving Faith's last days.

It's a bit unclear what secret Pheobe believes there is since it seems clear to the reader that Faith killed herself. Something about this rings untrue so Pheobe goes off in search of her sister's ghost. Egan is a great writer, so the info-dump of the first part of the book is extremely well-written and Pheobe's meandering journey through Europe is also well-written but neither move the plot forward or make me have a better understanding of what Pheobe is doing. When she runs into her sister's old boyfriend in Germany, we begin to get more of Faith's story from Wolf. But I never get an idea why any of it is important.

Again, this is very well-written in a microscopic sense. The sentences are beautiful. But the larger story fell apart for me.

Read Goon Squad.