Public Speaking & Marketing

The other night I gave a half hour talk to a small group. Some nine years ago I wrote a book that serves as a guide and introduction to an historic site where I live in Hamilton, Ontario. This is Dundurn Castle, an 1830s mansion built by a colourful character, Sir Allan MacNab. A small group called the MacNab Circle meet once a year to hear a speaker and to talk about this man and his life. I must add I was their second choice. Their preferred speaker could not do this, so I was asked on her recommendation. This recommendation highlights one aspect of marketing - word of mouth - schmoozing - getting to know as many people as possible. You never know what that will lead to. Secondly, and more importantly, I learned a hard lesson. They were all very kind that evening, but I know my talk did not go well. There are good personal reasons for this, which I won't go into, but I was not, shall we say, a shining star in their 48 years of listening to talks once a year.

I decided to make this a 'learning experience'. I think it is absolutely vital for writers to become known  not just through your work, or through a 'dust jacket' photo (whether on an eBook or a printed book), but as a living, breathing human being. Small talks to small groups do this as do large talks to large groups. I did quite a few of these several years ago when I had a number of books coming out and became proficient at this particular skill. But several years had passed before this talk and I had lost the expertise.

It is a skill I need to relearn and more importantly to hone. I didn't allow myself enough time to prepare properly. I had to spend a great deal of time re-acquainting myself with the subject matter, which is vital. But this meant I had virtually no time to prepare a talk that grabbed and held the attention of the audience. I have to retrain myself so I appear open, friendly, knowledgable and someone worth the attention of an audience.

2016 to do file

Today I listened to one of Joanna Penn's podcasts. This was a chat with Jane Friedman. Both these experts offer sensible and pragmatic advice for indie authors. Jane Friedman recently posted this:

5 Industry Issues for Authors to watch in 2016

This post contained eminently practical advice for writers.  This was also the genesis for the podcast chat with Joanna Penn.

Three points stood out for me.

1. a new self publishing advice destination:  Hotsheet

This handy item provides indie authors with quick summaries of things to watch for in the digital publishing world - so you do not have to google around the net looking. It is produced by Jane Friedman and Porter Anderson.

2. Audio books. Apparently audio books are booming (no pun intended).  This idea has been stewing in my brain for a while. As it is, I have included audio in my multimedia experimental book, The Man who fell from the Sky

3. Most importantly, mobile devices:  More and more readers of eBooks are doing so on their so-called smartphones. Rather than reading on a Kindle, or a Nook, for example, people are reading books on their phones. Myself I have these apps on my iPhone: Kobo, iBooks, Kindle, Wattpad, Indigo, Gutenberg Pro, Goodreads, Bluefire and the Internet Archive. The advice at the very end of the podcast was to revamp your web page to be sure it is easily readable on a mobile device. Already I test my experimental ebook on my iPhone rather than an iPad or laptop.

PostScript:  I say 'so-called smartphones' because in reality  a 'smartphone' is a pocket computer that has the capability of making telephone calls - but fewer and fewer people are using these devices as phones.  Most often they are used as computers.

Books

My rather ambiguous title for this post was deliberate.  I love printed books - even the cheap sort where the pages fall out when first opened.  But I love eBooks now too, a kind of sister wives' scenario with reading.  I don't love the format most eBooks use - a bland font and no 'feel' to the book. Yet the iPhone, the iPad, the laptop and desktop computers produced by Apple have a designed beauty and tactility of their own. Where I can alter the font, or change colours in what I am reading I find a new delight in the sensuality of reading. Reading is for me, even when mining histories written in the pretence of social science, sensual.  I am presently re-reading Charles Taylor's 'A Secular Age' and I noticed how I enjoyed the semi-smooth, semi-rough feel of the paper of each page under my finger tips. This got me to thinking on a tangent. Which of my hundreds (thousands?) of books would I keep if I had room only for a handful?

Well, firstly I will discount my father's books I have - they are not great literature but have an emotional resonance separate from their place in life as books. I will only consider those I, singularly, read and purchased and own currently.

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien - the hard back copies with the full maps -  I have pocket book versions but they would go.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien  - I have only two pocket book versions, so I would keep the authorized Ballantine copy.

The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris ( a pocket book because by this point in my life I could no longer afford the luxury of hardcover books, but her prose is sensual. She is a poet and this is prose as only a poet could write).

Lament for a Nation by George Grant (pocket book, 1963  - again this book opened my mind to thinking philosophically about, well, everything.)

A Political and Cultural History of Europe by Carlton J.H. Hayes (two volumes, hardcover, 1939. This is the first, or at least one of the first histories that presented not just political history, but cultural integrated into the narrative. Hayes wrote in a way all historians should be taught - clearly yet with style.)

Ways of the Christian Mystics by Thomas Merton (this one not only for the clarity of his mystical thought - now there's an oxymoron worth meditation - but because it is in a Shambhala Pocket Classic edition - a true pocket book but using red and black prints and internal borders in the text)


I will stop here.

The Lady and the Unicorn

Tonight I began listening to a CBC podcast on this series of six tapestries in the Musée de Cluny in France. There is a general introduction, then each tapestry is described and highlighted. I sat back in the wing chair in my home office and half closed my eyes to listen and to see with words. I let the producer and the experts he chats with paint the tapestries with their words onto the canvas of my mind.  The images leapt forth. This is what writing should do - take you into another place where images and events become real in your own mind.

The first tapestry - touch - the first five represent the five senses, the sixth goes beyond the senses to a place rejected by atheists, doubted by agnostics and lived in by believers in any religion.  But in this post, it is the first that prompted me to stop the podcast for a bit to write.

Touch.  My poetry and my prose always strives to make touch - texture, feel, physical pleasure, physical pain, surfaces, muscles straining, cold water on hot skin, rough tree bark, silk... live in the minds of readers and in my mind. The discussion of the first tapestry touch,  describes the mediaeval juxtaposition of gentleness and lust, of the soft gentle eyes of the unicorn and its hard, erect horn, of the lion, of the lady, of all the images as occupying two realities in one.

Poetry presents many realities in one set of words. The reader must feel the reality and not worry about the reality of the poet. Prose is much more like this than most suspect. The words that narrate a story draw characters and events in places where the reader colours them, makes them tall or short, builds the country these souls inhabit. They do live in different places for each reader.

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-lady-and-the-unicorn-1.3398613

Cold Beauty

I awoke today

I awoke today and abandoned writing. I knew in my waking state that I had no talent and no hope. I groaned and rose to meet another day. I drank my first coffee and ate a bagel.  I knew I was a writer now and would push my way through the irrelevancies and annoyances and defeats that are life. I floated now, buoyed only by the need to write and the tantalizing small respites of daily life.

-30-

I lie listening to rain on a roof at the end. Parts of my body ache and hurt. The sound of rain soothes and matches my heart. Life, as the large multitude of those wiser than I have noted, is a funny business. I am an untenable character in this, condemned to see holistically in a place where others do not. I see those walking through this forest of dark and light in all their wonderful complexity while others seem to see only narrow paths. I see dips and curves and sun and rain and warmth and cold that chills the soul. I wonder at this curse visited on me to see the whole.