Read Me, Seymour!

Author Unknown

You’ve written three novels. After years of toil, most of it pleasurable (an apt definition of writing), enduring countless maybes, the quite interested and even an option from Hollywood, you ended up self-publishing. Not the happy ending you envisioned, with heady book tours and glowing reviews on myriad websites. But parking your books on the computer like an old tax return? No fucking way.

“Years of effort” is actually an understatement. You’d spent decades on these novels. High art or not you knew they were high concept. Your first, The Last Generation imagined a world bereft of children, slowly dying out. Yet, and this was the kicker, nothing else was wrong. For the remaining shrinking population, life simply went on. What does this last generation do with itself? Your marketing line: It’s not the end of the world, just the end of us.

Your second novel is a modern fable about God and advertising, The Happy Soul Industry. In it, God, frustrated by a world lacking belief, puts an angel on earth to find an ad agency in order to market spirituality. In the third act all hell breaks loose.

Your third story, Sweet By Design is a romantic comedy (!) about a disillusioned gay man and an aging female socialite, brought together on an improbable road trip.  This one you wrote to prove you could be whimsical and, being honest here, entirely commercial. Whatever your motivations and inspirations, you never worked harder in your life than on these three books. In doing so, you developed a keen appreciation for even the shoddiest novels at the airport bookstand. Readers who weren’t writers would never comprehend, couldn’t possibly, the effort required to scribe 300 pages of anything. Thinking. Rethinking. Writing. Rewriting. Losing weeks of content. Fighting demons. Overcoming doubt.  And then, when you honestly thought it was finally done, the painful discovery of a typo on the very first page, then another and another, a repeated paragraph – How did that happen?  How many more things were wrong?

To be continued…

(If interested in any of these books please click on the links right side of this blog!)

Author Unknown (Pt. 4)

Promoting yourself made you as many enemies as fans. Haters relentlessly trolled you online calling you untalented, vainglorious or worse. Colleagues wondered if you were paying more attention to your novels than your job. Your wife thought you were chasing windmills. To some extent they all were right. But the genie was out of the bottle; you simply had to keep trying. Something would click. You would have the last laugh.

One morning, you saw a complete stranger reading your novel on the “El” in Chicago. Small sample, but no less thrilling, it was all you could do to keep from introducing yourself to the reader. In terms of validation this rare sighting would have to do.

Much later, your daughter’s high school art teacher read two of your novels, one after the other. During that relatively long period of time, he had constantly told her how good they were. Your daughter respected her teacher and by him praising your work you knew she respected you. Any glimmer of awe she had towards you was significant. Especially given how you’d fallen from her pedestal. This would have to do.

The accolades you received for copywriting, the wealth it provided, ego trips. For many, that would have done quite nicely. For you it wasn’t enough. Like Icarus you’d reached sublime heights, until your wings got clipped and you fell to earth.

In the end as in the beginning, a writer writes. Writing for its own sake, without the obsession for income or outcome. A writer writes. This, too, will have to do.

(If you’re interested in any of my books please click on the links right side of this blog. Thank you!)

Author Unknown (3)

Oh, but how you want to be known for something! Even for just one book. One story. Being published is a fantasy as powerful as any opiate, more so because of your tireless effort. Each book was an obsession, like Captain Ahab’s Great White Whale, Ernest Shackleton’s quest to find the arctic passage, compelling you forward, driving you insane. You forsook everything to write –parties, movies, dinners with your wife, talking and fucking. _______ vacillated between resignation and resentment, jealous of your ardor for writing, how you cherished the craft more than her. It would pay off, you told her, you told yourself. When you became a known commodity.

You came so close…

The meetings in Hollywood were electric, with so many important people giving a shit about you and your work. Even so, the pinnacle eluded you. For your first book you settled with a dozen mostly positive reviews on Amazon and a $7,500 dollar option from Touchstone Pictures that went nowhere. Your second and third novels had equally mixed results. None were failures. But none were great successes, at least in terms of the marketplace.

Self-publishing demanded you do your own marketing and publicity. Being an ad man you took this on with gusto. For The Last Generation, you produced a teaser video, which can still be found on You Tube. You created billboards and posters for The Happy Soul Industry. For Sweet By Design you hosted an online book cover contest, giving away an iPad to the winner. Each book had its own website, Facebook and Twitter. You wrote press releases. You wrote more queries, this time looking for options, reviewers and always a legitimate publisher. Above all, you wrote checks. Lots of checks. Some days it felt like buying lottery tickets. Other times you were pissing in the wind. But you paid. You would always bet on yourself.

To be continued…

(If you’re interested in any of my books please click on the links right side of this blog!)

At long last, the winners for “Sweet by Design.”

Debbie Pahls’ inspired cover “Wallpaper” is the winner of my novel slash social media experiment, Sweet by Design. Her design will be the cover of my new novel. She also wins an iPad, the better prize! Debbie Pahls is a freelance art director in Kansas City and my new best friend. Congratulations, Debbie.

Second place, and the iPod Shuffle goes to Dana Lambert’s exceptional cover design, entitled “Frame.”

In the words of celebrity judge, M.J. Rose:

“It was close between the frame and the wallpaper – wallpaper won. So integrated and creative… Most important, the elements work together to create a whole that is compelling, unusual and provocative… Nuanced and balanced. Well done! ”

I completely agree. As did many of you. Both Pahls and Lambert received the lion’s share of write-in votes. At one point or another I regarded each of the finalists as a personal favorite. Any one of them would make fabulous covers. Thank you all -readers, designers and the just plain curious. I could not have done it without you. Literally.

Pahls, on her cover:

“This typographical solution integrates the title of the book “Sweet by Design” and the name of the author as part of a damask wallpaper pattern. The sweet, flowery vintage feel of the wallpaper would fit in well in Audrey’s Chicago Gold Coast residence, and it is a nod to Jeffrey’s profession as an interior designer. This wall covering is beautiful and elegant, however it is a layer that is beginning to pucker and peel. It is starting to reveal the not-so-pretty wall that is it hiding behind it. This visual is symbolic of Jeffrey peeling away his layers to get to the truth and revealing his reality.”

The wait is over. Presenting the finalists for the “Sweet by Design” cover contest.

What a week for yours truly…But like the man said, the show must go on! The “novel slash social media experiment,” Sweet by Design is finally over. It took a bit longer than I’d anticipated; reformatting the novel for WordPress was time-consuming. And since I was adding links and photography along with text the task grew even harder. But it was worth it.

In terms of the cover contest, it appears the added time allowed for some pretty terrific 11th hour creations, several ‘sweet’ designs submitted in the last 24 hours. Frankly, most of the covers were damn good -arguably better than my silly book! All 70 of them can be viewed on the blog and will remain there indefinitely. Thank you, each and every entrant, reader and observer for making my So-Me experiment a success. More people read at least part of SBD than the combined total readers for my previous two novels combined.

I’d also like to thank my co-judge, best-selling author and digital publishing pioneer, M.J. Rose. Her input was a key factor in helping me choose the winning entries.

This is how the judging worked. The panel was divided into three voting parts. M.J. had a third of the vote, me another third, and your voting comments represented the final third. Pretty simple. Through this process, we came up with eight finalists, one of which will be chosen for the cover of my novel, Sweet by Design as well as win the author’s unused iPad. The second place vote getter gets an iPod Shuffle. Those two winners will be announced next week. I promise!

Please visit Sweet by Design for designer credits, book chapters and other tidbits. Enough blather… Without further ado, here are the finalists:

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