Why is the experience of being present at a writers’ conference so compelling?  Is it because of the people we meet?  Is it the connections we make?  Is it the stuff we learn?  Or is it the inspiration we receive?

I’m not sure what it is, but for me conferences have a way of pushing me off the map just enough to discover something new.   What is it for you?

Comment with the name of your favorite writers’ conference and what it is that keeps bringing you back to it.

The Texas Institute of Letters,

which has been promoting the state’s best writers since 1936, released its list of nominees for its annual awards this past week.

Competition is limited to authors who have lived in the state for at least two years or have entries pertaining to Texas subjects. Not surprisingly. some of the best-known writers in the state, like Stephen Harrigan, C.W. Smith and Naomi Shihab Nye, are among the nominees.

The awards will be presented in San Antonio on April 14.

Tune in to this radio show this afternoon to discover the answers to below questions.  Just answering the first one can double your traffic!

The show streams live from this link at 5 PM CST this afternoon.

http://rockstarradionetwork.com/shows/yourguidetobookpublishing

What I will cover on this broadcast

- Name three things that authors, especially nonfiction authors, can do to help readers find their material.

 - What is the audience that authors most frequently overlook?

 - Independently published authors have a hard time getting into mainstream press.  I understand that you have some workarounds for that issue.  What are they?

 -  What’s your definition of a book platform?  When is the best time to write a platform?  Why is having a platform important?

 - What are some useful resources for authors seeking a publicist? What about authors wanting to do their own publicity?

 - Name an expensive mistake that you see indie authors making.

 - What is it that traditionally published authors forget to request of their publisher’s publicist?

-  Describe your concept of a live author event that’s worth doing.

If you have written a book that showcases your expertise, check out my keywording tips to boost sales at

http://bit.ly/AkOab1

Purchase a virtual tour in February, get a video conference FREE.

Virtual tours are

- 30 days

- customized to your title

- 10-15 stops

-$1500

Each stop has a minimum of 300 hits a day, affording your title exposure to at least 2,000 new readers.  Stops are a mixture of large general reading sites and genre-specific niche sites.

Value of free video conference is $250 and will be hosted by a third party vendor.  What you choose to do with the event is up to you.  You can launch a book, hold a virtual signing, do a book talk, sell books or simply use the time to bond with your readers and let them get to know you better.

To schedule your tour and video conference, email Stephanie Barko by February 29 at steffercat@austin.rr.com.

Here’s a free and easy way to pull traffic to your website or blog.

If you follow through on this, you will get in on the 22K comments that posted to Beyond Her Book’s Blogoversary last year.

Beyond Her Book is Publishers Weekly blogger Barbara Vey’s widely distributed column on female authors & women in the publishing industry.

Apply to submit content for Beyond Her Book’s 2012 Blogoversary from
http://bit.ly/zyfcT8.

See you there!

One way of picking up the cultural and economic pulse of a nation is to see which manuscripts traditional publishers are buying at the beginning of the year.

Publisher’s Lunch reported these Nonfiction & Historical Fiction deals in the last 24 hours.

Historical Fiction

Frances Devine’s WHISPERS OF THE WIND, in which love
blooms for three teachers at a school for the deaf and blind in 1800s Georgia,
was sold to Rebecca Germany at Barbour by Amanda Luedeke at MacGregor Literary.

Nonfiction / Memoir

Mike Stavlund’s FORCE OF WILL, about grief and its complicated relationship
with faith which honestly explores the reality of loss, the experience of
alienation, the feelings of suffocation at the hands of well-meaning friends,
and the sense of being abandoned by God; revealing a side of grief our culture
has grown accustomed to avoiding in lieu of safe platitudes and cultural
euphemisms – and wrestling with the possibility of embracing life – and hope -
after a devastating loss, was sold to Jon Wilcox at Baker Books, for publication in Spring 2013, by Sandra Bishop at MacGregor Literary.

Nonfiction / Science

Director of forensic and investigative sciences at West Virginia University
Suzanne Bell’s ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FORENSIC SCIENCE, was sold to Tisse Takagi at Oxford University Press by Jodie Rhodes.

Publisher’s Lunch is free and you can sign up for it here.  Happy New Year to all you writers out there!

Book Review by Stephanie Barko, Literary Publicist of The Well-Spoken Woman:  Your Guide to Looking and Sounding Your Best by Christine K. Jahnke

If you are seeking an up-to-the-minute resource that will turn you into a first rate speaker, this is your book.  Written by a top speech coach, this book leads you into claiming your power by confidently stating your ideas and opinions while looking polished and prepared.  In short, it helps you conquer public-speaking anxiety and be taken seriously.

Simply illustrated by Kersti Frigell with real life examples from speakers such as Ann Richards, Pat Summitt, Maya Angelou, and Melinda Gates, the material is engagingly displayed and clearly laid out.

The book’s opening premise is that a woman’s power persona evolves from bringing her whole self and signature style to the podium.  “Expression and engagement are hot…dialogue, listening, and showing empathy are now valued and respected.”  It seems the time has finally come to express our uniquely feminine leadership from the front of the room.

Research reveals that 58% of a speaker’s impact comes from body language and appearance, 38% from voice quality, and 7% from the message.  Now that we have the science behind it, it’s easier for a woman to identify which elements of her presentation really matter and what makes sense to spend the most time improving.  This is the part of the book I learned the most from—it changed my focus from the message to how my voice carries the message, and from what I wear to how I move.

After learning what makes for an impactful live performance, Jahnke moves on to something she calls the “the five C’s of message development”–clarity, connection, compelling, concise and continual.  The neat thing about her “message map” technology is that it applies to all different kinds of topics.  We then examine which tools work best for each “C” and how to practice a speech and whether to write it out first.

If you’ve ever thought of videotaping yourself, you’ll welcome the chapter with tips on how to become camera ready.  There’s even a chapter on how to deal with the media.

At the end of the book are three appendices.  The first one profiles famous speakers, where I learned that Bill Gates is married to a Texan, that Madeleine Albright was born in Czechoslovakia, and that Suze Orman is gay.  Did you know all that?  The second appendix is a chronological history, beginning in 1637, of female speakers and their claims to fame.  The third appendix is a handy FAQ that includes a checklist on which your presentation can be rated.

In my work, I examine a lot of new nonfiction and I must say that I was hard-pressed to find much wrong with this book or its approach to public speaking.  The specialty publisher Jahnke worked through did an excellent job of producing the paperback, including acquiring a back cover endorsement by Gloria Steinem.  If this book sells, it will further validate that
as women, our time to be standard bearers has come.

note:  A similar version of this review can be found at Story Circle Book Reviews and Amazon.  A paperback of this title was provided to me by SCBR in exchange for my unbiased remarks.

GoodReads readers’ Choice Awards were announced this morning at  http://www.goodreads.com/award/choice/2011.

Which titles are going on your to-read list?

Which titles will you be giving away as holiday gifts?

Are you a member of GoodReads?

 I asked Lori to talk to us about what she looks for when editing historical fiction.  Here’s what she said.

Writers of historical fiction have a mighty task on their hands. They must make a world come vividly alive in sensory detail. Places, especially if they’re well-known, must be depicted accurately (unless the writer’s point is to turn that world on its head). Details of clothing have to be presented correctly. Of course, internet research makes this job much easier; you can do a Google image search for the specific type of clothing, or for photographs of a place at a particular time, and you’re likely to get at least a few hits.

As important as these details are, a critical and more difficult task is to get the characters’ words and minds right. Some verbal anachronisms are easy to spot; people who lived in the late 1800s, in Deadwood, SD, wouldn’t have said awesome, for example. A frequent topic of conversation about the HBO series Deadwood was whether people who lived at that time really used the particular curse words that salted the dialogue. They probably didn’t speak with the Shakespearean streams of words that the writers gave their characters, but the ‘what’ of their conversations felt right to viewers nonetheless.

Aside from specific word choice, getting the characters’ voices right is importantly a function of understanding the zeitgeist – the spirit of the times. Different periods are characterized by different sets of concerns, different worries, different ways of understanding why things happen, different ways of explaining how and why people do what they do, different fears, different hopes, different possibilities. On top of this complexity, these aspects may be quite different between cultures, and authors who fail to differentiate their characters’ voices with these unique perspectives will end up with flat cookie-cutter characters.

As an editor, I keep my ear tuned to the characters’ voices and minds. In some cases, I will offer specific information – for instance, a note that wristwatches weren’t commonly worn at the time – but often my best contribution to a work is to identify the psychological anachronisms, the ways in which characters’ concerns and perspectives are too modern, and the ways in which characters are not true to their time, place, and culture. Also, I make sure that the writer’s characters have distinctly different ways of speaking, so a reader knows who’s talking, and knows what to expect from them. In my experience, authors are often so focused on the story, the plot, and getting the historical details just so, that tending to these more subtle qualities can slip past them.

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Please comment on the challenges you have found in writing historicals or perhaps leave a question for Lori below.