Seven Ways to Achieve Success for Your Book

1.  Write a brilliant book. Or anyway do the best you can.

2.  The week your book is released, do a blog tour. Guest post on as many blogs as will have you. (THE BRINK OF FAME came out this week. Here are the links to my blog tour.)

3.  Create a brief, interesting trailer. Don't spend a lot. Make your friends forward it to everybody they know.

4.  Get your book into the hands of a famous person, preferably the President of the United States (it worked for Walter Moseley). Make sure the photograph of your book in the president's hands is seen by as many people as possible.

5.  Make a big QR code for your book and post it in prominent places.

6.  Offer to pay some famous person whose support will lower the tone of your book a thousand dollars not to be seen reading it. If this person accepts your offer, leak the arrangement to the media.

7.  Go to the animal shelter and adopt a cute puppy. Threaten to kill the puppy if people don't buy your book.

Good luck in your publishing endeavors!

Kate Gallison

Recalled to Life

The recent summer weather, although typical for the Delaware Valley, was a fat sweaty giant with its foot on my head. To work under those circumstances was but a distant dream. This morning I woke at six to a new day that was cool and not excessively humid. I'm starting to feel like my old self again. Maybe better.

Got up, had some coffee and grits, booted the computer. Faced the day. Faced the next couple of months. Felt a stirring under my ribs that could even be called energy. Great heavens! Next Tuesday my new book comes out! The Brink of Fame by Irene Fleming.

Must buy two glass sangria pitchers for the upcoming launch party, 7 - 9 PM at the Lambertville Free Public Library. (You're invited, by the way.) What else shall I do for this book? I've done so little, scheduled no signings, prepared no readings. It was hot. My neck hurt. Last winter I made a trailer:

I was supposed to email it to everybody I knew and ask them to pass it on. But that's so pushy. Today I opened my email to find a newsletter from Jennifer Fusco called Market or Die, and another from Diana Pemberton-Sikes of The Clothing Chronicles on improving my life through wardrobe choices, a gospel I have always believed in. Ms. Fusco wants me to have a QR code. I made one of those some time ago, too, although I have no clue what to do with it. Here it is:

Point your smartphone at it, if any, to see my web site, www.kategallison.com.

The sad fact is I'm no good at marketing. I guess I'll have to die. Or not; as I was saying, I'm feeling quite energetic this morning. At any moment I may jump up and do something other than writing on my WIP, where I'm trying to advance librarian protagonist Mallory Fry's love affair with the charming janitor while saving her from the designs of a small town serial killer. I may, I don't know, clean my closet, sort my makeup, or phone a bookstore and see whether they would like me to stop in and sign.

Must think about self-presentation.

Someone might even be watching.

Kate Gallison

Perhaps you're thinking, "She's gone mad"

Those of you who have been following my personal blog (kategallison.blogspot.com) for the past couple of weeks have doubtless noticed that I have embarked on a long rant about the War of 1812, the one we fought for two years against Britain. Perhaps you're asking yourselves, "What is she thinking? Here she has a new book coming out scarcely six weeks from now under the name of Irene Fleming, The Brink of Fame. It's about early twentieth-century Hollywood, not the War of 1812."

This is true. It's also true that under the name of Kate Gallison I'm hard at work writing a suspense novel, set in the present day, which has nothing to do with the War of 1812 either.

And yet. The story of Bucker Dudley, the girl who dressed as a boy and went to sea on a merchant ship, only to find herself pressed to serve on board the British frigate HMS Macedonian, is still rattling around in my head. I think it's worth pulling together. This is the tale I was telling my friend Donna Murray some years ago as she drove us to Pittsburgh to the Festival of Mystery. At a certain point in the story she became so enthralled that she nearly ran the car off the Pennsylvania Turnpike. So it has a certain narrative force.

And I'm still fascinated with that war, the last armed conflict we had with the British.

I tuned in to BBC news the other day and saw two talking heads discussing economic conditions in California, which they said were not good and prefigured the general ruin of the United States. I thought I saw one of them smirk, like a spiteful cousin at the Thanksgiving table who hears that you've just lost your job. Yes, we fought them, two hundred years ago, a war between cousins. Some of it was glorious, most of it was kind of pathetic. I know a lot of stories about it, and I want to tell some of them, even though there are forty things I'm supposed to be doing instead, including publicizing Irene Fleming and The Brink of Fame. I just want to.

Or it may be that I've gone mad. Bwahaha.

Kate Gallison

The Charming Appearance of the Surface of Things

Adam Weiss
(played by John Gilbert)

Those of you who have read The Edge of Ruin may have noticed that Emily Weiss's husband, Adam, is something of a rotter. I got an argument over that from Dr. Art, my chiropractor, who felt that Adam's consistent neglect of his wife was the sort of thing most men engaged in back then, one, and two, he was a hard-charging entrepreneur, and could hardly be faulted for putting all his energies into his nascent moving picture business. Don't you love it when one of your characters comes so completely to life that people feel compelled to gossip about him?

I, too, feel that Adam is a real person, although I hasten to add he is no person that I've ever known in life. Rather he is the personification of selfishness, or of the Selfish Man, a character well known to many women of my acquaintance. A whole book club full of women accepted Adam as a typical man the other day. "Yes," one of them said, "They're all like that."

I wouldn't go that far. I know lots of good men. Harold, for example, is a perfect sweetie. Dr. Art is the nicest fella you ever want to meet, even though he comes to Adam's defense. And I know many more excellent men, just in Lambertville alone. But you do have to wonder, or the women in the book club had to wonder, why Emily stayed with this man who treated her so inconsiderately.

Emily Daggett Weiss
(played by Billie Burke)

And stay with him she did, for another five years, until the opening of the next book in the series (The Brink of Fame, available in August of this year). Well, as I explained to the book club women, those were busy years. The couple were building their business, both of them working very hard. And it was, as I mentioned, the moving picture business. Physical beauty, the glossy surface of things, is what the movie industry concerns itself with, and being a movie person Emily loved physical beauty. She loved Adam for his beauty, not looking too deeply into his character or examining too closely the way he treated her.

This is what young women do. Women who are older, like the book club women, develop intelligence, or at least a sense of self-preservation, so that they will take a kind man with plain looks over a handsome rotter. So there you have it, children, my sermon of the week. Remain alert and marry late. And if you want to know what Emily did when the scales finally fell from her eyes, read The Brink of Fame. You can pre-order it from Amazon if you like.

Kate Gallison

Cats

You will recall that last week I put a trailer together for The Brink of Fame, the second book in the Emily Daggett Weiss mystery series, the one where our intrepid heroine is forced to go to pre-WWI Hollywood and search for a missing silent film star. To my eye, the trailer is charming and totally deserves to go viral. So far, however, the trailer has been viewed only twenty-four times, probably twenty of those times by me.

I went to a party last Saturday — a Burns Night party, awash with single-malt Scotch — and began to complain about my lack of exposure to anyone who would listen. "Does your trailer have cats in it?" someone said. "People like to look at cats on YouTube. You should put cats in your trailer."

"Cats! Brilliant! I'll take a pound of catnip and a video camera to Tabby's Place (a nearby shelter for sick and unwanted cats), get all the cats stoned, and take videos of them frolicking and romping!"

"Great. You can tell them you came to adopt a cat, but your husband is very choosy, and you have to photograph them so that he can look at them."

That would explain the camera. But the catnip — Wait. Would that be ethical, to take catnip to the animal shelter? Or would it be like taking a pound of marijuana to a juvenile home? Should people even give catnip to their own cats? Doesn't that make junkies out of them? Surely that would be wrong.

As I was pondering these issues, another of the party guests pointed out that some cats react badly to catnip, turn into mean drunks, as it were, and that many cats at Tabby's Place were on medications that might cause dangerous interactions.

"Oh, go ahead," my husband said. "Only make sure you take your cell phone, so that you can call me from jail."

Upon sober reflection I gave up the Tabby's Place idea. I'm still looking for goofy footage of cats, however. I have six months to get this book into the public eye. The Cat Trailer may well be my next step.

— Kate Gallison

The Brink of Fame

Here's the trailer I worked up for The Brink of Fame, second book in the Emily Daggett Weiss silent movie series, the one where she goes west to Hollywood.

Last time I made a trailer I started with the pitch, carefully crafted in a pitch workshop in New York City (Algonkian Pitch and Shop). This time I didn't have a straightforward pitch like that. Since Emily's confusion about her husband is part of the story, it kind of muddies what's going on. So I started with a piece of music that captured my fancy. I bought the rights to use the music from an online site (Fresh Music). It wasn't very expensive.


Then, from my collection of old movie clips and stills, I selected the pictures to display while the music played.

Then I wrote the pitch, far simpler than the actual story, to be displayed over the pictures. I still don't feel like doing voice-overs. Well, the books are about silent movies, after all.

I don't know whether trailers sell books, although it's fun for me to make them. I tell you what. It's an excellent book. It will be out in August. You want it. Mention it to your librarian. Ask about it at your independent bookstore. Pre-order it from Amazon as soon as it comes up. Talk about it at your book club. The Brink of Fame, by Irene Fleming, from Minotaur Books. Let's get this sucker off the ground.

--Kate Gallison