Category Archives: Author interviews

A few minutes with Jean Oram, author of The Wedding Plan

Audience, Author interviews, Blogging, Marketing, , , , , , , , ,

One of the many wonderful writers I have met at AgentQuery Connect is Jean Oram, who is described as the “super moderator” of that writers’ community. In the fiction realm, she tends to write romance, and in the nonfiction area, she focuses on child’s play, with sites like It’s All Kid’s Play.

Jean’s latest new release, The Wedding Plan, is about a secret marriage between ex-lovers. But with their past and being stuck in a cabin out in the small, nosy little town of Blueberry Springs you can be sure their secrets will be difficult to keep! The Wedding Plan is from her new Veils and Vows series and can be found on all major online bookstores.

She also has been an important supporter of Elephant’s Bookshelf Press since its beginning and served as copy editor of our best-selling anthology, The Fall. For this interview, we talked about marketing and her approach to building her audience.

Do you have a mailing list and newsletter?

I sure do!

How often do you send anything to your mailing list?

It depends on a lot of different things, but typically I try to reach out to my subscribers every 4-6 weeks so they don’t forget who I am. 😉 It has to be meaningful though—I never want to annoy my subscribers.

Do you have a blog?

Yes.

How often do you post on your blog?

That, like my newsletter, depends on what’s going on. My blog is a place for my readers to find updated news, items of interest, giveaway entry forms, and the like. Sometimes there will be four posts in a week, sometimes nothing for 6-8 weeks.

What else do you do to market yourself as an author?

I try everything and an answer to this question could fill an entire book.

Basically, you never know what’s going to work for you, so you’ve got to experiment. Some things that haven’t worked for others work for me. Some things that work for others don’t work for me. Things that worked two years ago no longer have the same effect now. For example, doing a basic signed paperback giveaway used to create avid fans—like a 90 percent conversion rate. Now it’s more like 25 percent which makes it less financially feasible to use those kinds of giveaways in that manner. So, now I use few signed paperback giveaways and use them for different purposes. Why has it changed? Who knows, but if you’re going to keep selling your books, you have to stay hungry, stay smart ,and keep rolling with the punches.

Do you offer services like editing, query review, etc.?

I do not.

What do you consider success for your marketing efforts?

It really depends on what the purpose/goal on a particular marketing effort was. Recently, I wanted to increase the number of people in my reader group (on Facebook), and so I gave it a push from several different angles and met my numerical goal for new members. My next goal is to get them active, make friends with those members. After that will be to find rewarding ways for them to help me share the word about my books—that’s going to be a more difficult thing to measure. Because what are my goals? Visibility? Then having a few members share a post can help. If it’s getting sales directly from posts being shared…well, that’s more difficult to measure directly.

Thanks, Jean!

Jean Oram is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling romance author who loves making opposites attract in tear-jerking, laugh-out-loud romances set in small towns. She grew up in a town of 100 (cats and dogs not included) and owns one pair of high heels, which she has worn approximately three times in the past twenty years.

Her life contains an ongoing school theme, having grown up in an old school house, then becoming a ski instructor in the Canadian Rockies, then going on to marry a teacher and becoming a high school librarian. She now runs a fundraising committee for her daughter’s school.

Jean lives in Canada with her husband and two kids. She can often be found outdoors hiking up mountains, playing with kids on the soccer field, racing her dog on her bicycle–sometimes the dog lets her win–or inside writing her next novel.

Subscribe to Jean’s newsletter and get a taste of her small-town comedies that will have you laughing while falling in love. Get your FREE ebook by signing up here: www.JeanOram.com/FREEBOOK.

The first-ever interview with Don M. Vail, author of Lost Wings

Author interviews, Debut novel, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

With just a week to go until the launch of Lost Wings by Don M. Vail, I wanted to share the first-ever interview with this mysterious debut author.

Enjoy!

And there’s still time if you want to get an advance PDF version of Lost Wings. Send me an email at matt@elephantsbookshelfpress.com and I’ll send it to you. And if you post a review to Amazon (doesn’t matter whether you liked the book or not, we’re just looking for honest reviews) by October 1, we’ll send you a signed copy of the paperback!

I set out to interview Don M. Vail, the author of the next book from Elephant’s Bookshelf Press. It’s a very different novel for EBP, which to date has published novels written for young adult and middle grade audiences, though many of the stories in EBP’s anthologies are written with adult protagonists and with adult audiences in mind.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Tenderloin. Don came with his alter ego, Robert K. Lewis, author of the Mark Mallen crime fiction trilogy: Untold Damage, Critical Damage, and Damage. Of course, Don is the pseudonym of Robert, and he explains the genesis of not only the pen name but also the story behind Lost Wings, Don’s “debut” novel.

Elephant’s Bookshelf: What inspired the character of Richard Eastman and this story?

Don M. Vail/Robert K. Lewis: Well, it’s really about redemption. With me, it’s always about redemption. With the Damage Series, the protagonist, Mark Mallen, is on a road to redemption. He had a life that he lost. A home, a wife, and a child. All that Mallen wants to do is make it right, win back what he’s lost. That’s of course what redemption is all about for me: an attempt to make things right, to atone for past sins. This sense of redemption is what fuels Richard Eastman. He finds his chance in helping this wingless angel named Avesta. And given who Richard is, I feel sorry for anyone who wants to stop him.

When did you complete your initial draft of Lost Wings?

Jesus, I think it was about twelve years ago. Lost Wings was the third book I’d written, and it’s been said that it takes two or three books before you really get a handle on the form. From the beginning, Lost Wings felt like my first “real” book. So, yeah, I think about 2005 is accurate regarding the time I finished the first draft.

Why did it take so long?

(Laughs) Well, because nobody wanted to run with it. Like I said, Lost Wings was the first book that really felt like “a book.” I queried every agent out there, and also any publishers that dealt with Urban Fantasy, Sci Fi, or even Horror. I got close, but no cigars. So, after getting nowhere, I put it away in my desk drawer and went on to the next project, the one that would eventually get me published, Untold Damage. However, over all those long years since its inception, I would take Lost Wings out of the drawer and rewrite it again. Like so many other authors, I had “that” book; the one a writer just can’t let go of and always keeps around in the hope that at some point in time, it would see the light of day. For me, Lost Wings was that book.

What was it about the story that kept coming back to you?

(Pauses) I believe that every person has a small kernel of hero inside them, and that this kernel is just waiting to come out, given the circumstances. In Lost Wings, Richard is not a hero in the classical sense, like the paladin figure of Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings. He’s, in my opinion, closer to Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone where the hero is the reluctant hero, called by the “horn of fate.” Maybe in a more modern, non-sword iteration, Richard Eastman is more akin to John McClane from the movie Die Hard. I love a story about a person that crawls from the wreckage and keeps on moving forward. That’s Richard Eastman in a nutshell. You can’t stop him. Yes, he’s a derelict war vet. Yes, he’s drowning in his own pain, and also the pain of the Tenderloin. But even then, when that horn sounds, he stands up and starts down that road of redemption. I love pain-filled heroes, but then again… I guess all heroes are filled with pain.

Aside from your affinity for down-and-out characters living in San Francisco, there isn’t much that is similar to your crime novels. How is writing urban fantasy different from your other work and what do you see as similar?

The first thing that comes to mind is that when I’m writing crime fiction, there is an inherent reality in the world that I’m working with. It’s San Francisco. It’s the Tenderloin. Along with that reality comes a certain set of expectations. There are cars on the street, there are criminals that have to be arrested. There will be bullets and blood. However, I found writing urban fantasy to be incredibly freeing. I mean, sure, there is the Tenderloin, there is San Francisco, there are bullets and blood, but now I’m free to add a wingless angel, or Lucifer as a little girl who runs a pawnshop, or even a hero that both visually and metaphorically takes a trip through hell. In crime fiction there is no visual trip through hell, that trip only exists in a metaphorical sense. Again, it was incredibly freeing to write urban fantasy, especially after growing up on Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone series, and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman graphic novels. However, at its core, the similarity lies with the fact that both Richard Eastman and my detective Mark Mallen walk the same hero’s road, and that they both possess a moral compass that is always kept, well… pointing north.

Where did you come up with the back story of Don M. Vail?

All three Mark Mallen novels are dedicated to my best friend, life partner, and spouse, Dawn M. Vail. This time, since I took a pen name, I thought I should shake it up, and so Don M. Vail was born. She’s had to put up with so much in regard to me being a writer, and since I can’t afford to give her combat pay, I felt that this was the best homage I could come up with under the circumstances.

The book noticeably has “Book One” on the cover. What can we expect of Richard and Avesta in book two?

(Pauses) How can I say anything without giving away too much? All I can say is that the seed that is planted in book one will come home to roost in book two, x 2.