Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“It wasn’t until I started reading and found books they wouldn’t let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.” – John Waters
Because, they would like to be published, I’m often asked by readers is how I wrote and published 37 books. These days it helps to have many thousands of social media followers, but there are many important aspects in the process and the one I found to be the most important is: Be persistent. When talking to audiences about his early writing career, Stephen King tells about a time when he would pitch short story ideas to magazines that, more often than not, resulted in the publisher sending him a rejection slip. After receiving the slip, he would stick it on a nail he pounded into the wall. When someone asked him what happened when he filled up the nail, he replied, “I drove another nail in the wall.”
When submitting book proposals, I’ve found that if the publisher likes your idea they’ll ask for more information, photographs, and may have a whole series of hoops for you to jump through mainly of a CYA nature for them. Over the years I became increasingly suspicious about this process and if I thought the publisher was pulling a “Lucy and the football” on me, I would stop jumping. If you can meet with the publisher face-to-face, like at a trade show, it helps. When I attended an Imaging USA show, I placed several images from my proposed book —Joe Farace’s Glamour Photography—on an iPod Touch and showed them to a publisher’s representatives and closed the deal there.
What’s On My TBR
I’m looking forward to reading Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman’s The Lost Coast that’s currently sitting on my office’s guest chair just waiting to be read. Several books that Mary ordered for me are starting to arrive. That includes Michael Connelly’s The Waiting, as well as Preston & Child’s sequel to their time travel novel, Angel of Vengeance that should have arrived yesterday. On my Library List is Alan Moore’s I’m also excited about the prospect of The Mercy of Gods by
Mini Reviews
Here’s a book by two authors I was not familiar with—John Shen Yen Nee and SJ Rozon. The Murder of Mr. Ma is a mystery set in 1920’s London. The authors have created what’s appears to be the first in a series of Holmes and Watson-style mystery novels featuring two historical personages from China’s past. The concept weaves stories about interactions between Londoners and members of the Chinese community during the post-World War I period. The war features prominently in this book as does the participation of The Chinese Labour Corps that was a force of workers that was recruited by the British government during the war to free troops for front line duty by performing support work and manual labor. Yup, it’s all true and no, I never knew anything about that before reading the book. The book mixes fact—although the two protagonists were not contemporaries of one another—and fiction to produce a fascinating look at a time, place and people that, as far as I now, has never been written about, in fiction anyway, before. This book is highly recommended to fans of Holmes and Watson or maybe people who may be curious about this historical period.
I was never of big fan of John Grisham but have really enjoyed his three-book (so far) Camino Island island series. The latest is called Camino Ghosts and is really a book within a book. The inner book is a chilling tale of the slave trade that starts with the kidnapping of African people from their homes and their frightful journey into slavery in America. This is the tale of a singular woman, who is wrenched from her family and sold into slavery only to be shipwrecked off the cost of Florida, where she lands on an island that ultimately becomes a refuge for escaped slaves. The outer book tells a more contemporary story of how that island became abandoned in modern times until developers wanted to build a casino there and a descendant of the slaves tries to stop the development from happening. All of this process, including the inevitable trial is captivating Grisham-style and if the author gives us more endings than the end of the Lord of Rings film trilogy, at least he wraps up the story with a tidy bow.
If you enjoyed today’s blog post and would like to buy Joe a cup of Earl Grey tea ($2.50), click here.
My book Joe Farace’s Glamour Photography is full of tips, tools and techniques for glamour and boudoir photography with new copies available from Amazon for $34.95 as I write this. Used copies are starting at the hard-to-beat price price of less than five bucks with the Kindle version at $19.99 for those who prefer a digital format.