A FREE! gift for readers

I promised to give back to readers in April and here comes your second opportunity. Today and tomorrow, April 14 and April 15, you can download the Kindle version of my memoir Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl, absolutely free. Yep, FREE.

This is a really good deal for readers and, though it may seem counter intuitive, it could be a really good deal for me, too.

Here's how it works.

• Free ebook promotions generate widespread attention and many people who don't know about my book, will see it. Many (I hope) will download it FREE.

• If enough readers download it, my book will rise in the Amazon best seller ranks, whether those who download it read the book or not. Then - after the free promotion is over - people who use those lists to guide purchase decisions may be encouraged to buy the book because so many others already have it.

• Of course, I hope people who download my book will read it it, and then that at least some of them will write reviews and post their reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, Library Thing - all the places readers look for guidance on future purchases.  

I have never done a free book promotion, so I won't have firsthand experience to report until after this weekend. But other authors have done this and achieved varying levels of success.

My boss of many years had a sign on his wall that said, "Once you give it away, it's gone."  He's the same boss I blogged about back in January.  His signs really stuck with me, but then I read them every day for 10 years (proving the power of a repeated message). Anyway, he didn't believe in giving away our product.

He may have been right about giving away public relations counsel, but giving away ebooks in promotions like this may be more like providing product free to a non-profit so that paying customers will see what you have and like it enough to pay for it.  I hope so, anyway.  When the promotion is over, I'll let you know how it went.

 In the meantime, if you have a Kindle, this is your opportunity. Go ahead, download Growing Up Country. It's FREE! My gift to you. And I'd be most grateful if you shared this news with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, email. The more free downloads, the better.

P.S. Just a reminder to you Goodreads members to sign up to win a free hard copy of my memoir. If you haven't done so yet, there's still time. The giveaway runs through April 30.

Doing the hard work - Editing

Most novels have fewer than 100,000 words. There are notable exceptions to this limit - Stieg Larsson and J.K. Rowling are two. But for most authors, fewer words are better.

So it is with trepidation that I face rewriting my novel, which stands at the moment somewhere north of 130,000 words. How do I ax a fourth of the precious words I spent the last years writing?

Kurt Vonnegut wrote some of the most memorable books I read in college, including Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle. This week I came across his Eight Tips on How to Write a Great Story and I begin to understand why his writing is so powerful.

Here are his Eight Tips

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Within this list--right there in Tip 4--I  see one way to tackle my editing task. In fact, I'm making a sign to stick on my computer screen. Does this sentence reveal character? Does it advance action?   If not, out it goes.

Thanks to Kurt Vonnegut for offering just the writing guidance I need.

Image courtesy of: http://voiceseducation.org/category/tag/kurt-vonnegut

Are you feeling lucky?

Readers have been so good to me, this month I'm giving back. Through April, I'm working with Goodreads. Members of this book lovers social networking site can sign up to win one of three signed copies of my memoir - Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl - to be given away on May 1.

For those who are not familiar with my memoir, Growing Up Country tells stories of growing up on a family dairy farm in the middle of America in the middle of the 20th Century. If you grew up in rural America, these stories will trigger your memories and your senses, releasing stories of your own. If the rural Midwest is foreign territory to you, these stories invite you into a fascinating and disappearing world.

If you love to read, but you're not a Goodreads member, you might want to consider joining. Launched in 2007, Goodreads boasts 3.5+ million members, who've listed over a million books. Members line their 'shelves' with books they've read, post reviews, and add books to 'to-be-read' lists. Like other social networking sites, friends connect, share recommendations, and chat in book club-like discussions.

My goal is to give gifts to encourage and reward reader interest and get my book in front of more readers at the same time.  A win-win.

So, if you're a Goodreads member, I hope you'll enter the giveaway for my book.  I hope you'll tell your friends about the giveaway. And when it gets to May 1, I hope you're one of the lucky three and I get to send a copy of my book to you!

Good luck!

P.S. This is the first reader-reward opportunity in April. There will be others. Stay tuned!

Keeping a diary

When I was a teenager, diaries were popular gifts. The ones I received were all the same with a few lines designated for each day of the year. Four or five lines about 1/8th of an inch apart. Similar to the pocket day planner I carry around in my purse today, except these diaries had tiny locks and tinier keys.

I knew the intent was to write the important things that happened each day, but how could I crowd my unruly handwriting into lines that were so close together or say anything of importance in only four lines? God forbid that I break the rules and use the space of two days to write what happened in one! And what if I wrote something personal and one of my sisters or my mother read it? Even then I had secrets too big to trust to paper. Or at least I thought I did.

Instead I wrote down mundane things like what the weather was like. Often the diary gathered the dust of disinterest after a week or two.

Little did I know that all these years later, I'd still be keeping a diary in the modern day form of a blog and I'd still be driven to write about the weather. Yet, it's true. The weather this spring inspires gratitude and poetry. The weather is so unbelievable I can't help but note it. Were I trying to shoehorn my words into the diary of my teen years, here's what it would say:

"April 1, 2012. 89 degrees. Sunshine. Crab apple and redbud trees in full bloom. Daffodils and hyacinths blooming BEFORE Easter. Mowed the grass. Second time this year!!!"

Not since 1910 have we had a March so warm. In fact, this year March temps blew the 1910 record out of the water. Weather like this deserves its place in my diary. And I'm glad to have a blog. My handwriting has become less tidy over the years.