Starry, Starry Night

Tasha Tudor, beloved children's book illustrator, recently passed into spirit. She led a life of 1830s simplicity and fans know her not only for her Corgyville art, but also for her love of dollhouses and miniatures. She, like generations before her, was fascinated by the wonder of smallness, and I confess an intrigue of dollhouses myself, though I prefer someone else's collection to enjoy, living vicariously through their intense and intricate efforts in creating these magical worlds.

When a new book for young readers recently came to my attention, it was not only the subject of miniatures but the “Starry Night” included in the title that caught my attention. As a professional artist, Van Gogh's painting immediately came to mind, and indeed the book deals with a stolen Van Gogh, but this one a professional copy created for a dollhouse collection. The mysterious plot deals with recovery of the missing miniature, and who amongst the avid gallery of miniatures afficianodos could have coveted it enough to commit theft. Best friends join up with a clever pet Dachsund to find the thief and recover the painting.

Although the book is written for youngsters age 10-15, the information about miniatures is in-depth and technical enough to hold the attention of an adult. On the flip-side, this aspect might make it too involved for just any teen, unless they were passionate about art in general, or miniatures in particular. Still the plot moved things along nicely, the descriptions are well-written, and the characters well-drawn. I wouldn't hesitate to buy the book for the right young reader... or for an adult fan of the miniatures world.

Searching for a Starry Night is my second foray into eBooks and both were Echelon Press imprints. I am impressed with the quality of the writing in each book from this publishing company. Visit their website to view more of their publications. Most of the titles are available in eBook and paperback format to suit the reader's choice, options that are becoming evermore popular in book publishing.

Be sure to hit all the blogs on this book tour - each stop will give you added and interesting information about this small but captivating art form.

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Featured Guest at Stories for Children Magazine

May 31 - Sam from Searching for a Starry Night tells her best friend's story at My Best Friend's Story

June 11 - Mayra's Secret Bookcase

June 12 - Elysabeth's Stories Blog

June 17 Margaret Grace, author of Murder in Miniature and I answer the same questions as she hosts me at the Killer Hobbies and I host her at Candid Canine

June 27 - The Stiletto Gang

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Stop by and ask some questions. Post a comment on each of the blogs, sign up for newsletters and enter to win some miniature prizes and books!

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Finally, you may purchase a copy of the book at amazon.com.

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Christine Verstraete is author of Searching For A Starry Night, A Miniature Art Mystery. The book was published in June 2008 by Quake. She also is an award-winning journalist whose stories have appeared in various newspapers and magazines. Her short fiction will appear in Cat Tales Magazine from Wildside Press and NEWN Magazine, as well as online at Mouth Full of Bullets and Futures Mysterious Anthology. Her short horror story, The Witch Tree, was a contest winner published by Echelon Press. She also is author of the e-book, In Miniature Style, with stories about collectors, photos of their miniatures, and how-to projects. Visit her at her website for all the latest news.

Nightshade wrap-up

Last November, Susan Wittig Albert graciously shared with us information and tips for a successful blog book tour after completing her very first. You can read about it here. In this conversation, she'll share with us her latest experience and insight after finishing a second tour, this one for Nightshade, the most recent release in her long-running and popular China Bayles herbal mystery series.

Welcome back, Susan.

In the most recent tour, you had a new approach to get blog hosts. Tell us how that worked (with the online questionaire). How many bloggers filled out the form and how did you choose the finalists?

For the past 7 or 8 years, I've been building an active email list. Currently, mailings go out to about 10,000 people. On my email list, I invited bloggers to visit an online information page: an outline of what I wanted to achieve with the blog tour, how hosts could participate, and what we both might gain. I also posted the URL on various lists. The page is here. 400+ bloggers visited the page; 24 applied. I visited the blogs, looking for those that seemed compatible with the spirit of the books. I was interested in traffic (of course), but also in introducing the books to a variety of audiences. I chose blogs that targeted gardeners, naturalists, mystery readers/writers, and (in one case) library patrons. I invited two bloggers (who had not responded to the questionnaire) because they are friends and have a different audience.

You decided to promote the entire series, and not just the new book, in this three-week tour. How do you think that worked? Could you tell if you got sales boosts on all the titles in the series? Would you do this again? Do you feel it diverted attention from Nightshade or did it help?

I promoted all the books because new readers to the series don't want to start with the new hardcover. I'd like to acquaint readers with the series, not with just one book. Does that help Nightshade sales? Eventually, sure. One of my jobs as a writer is to write a book--any book--that makes the reader want to read more. A reader who starts with Book 5, might go back to Book 1 and read the whole series, eventually reaching Nightshade (probably about the time it comes out in paperback).



Sales? No, I can't tell a thing. The only way you can ever tie sales to a specific marketing strategy is to direct buyers to one sales point and I don't do that. The books are sold in chain bookstores and big box stores, independent bookstores, online, and on my website. There's no way to judge the effect of my blog tour, as I designed it, on the book sales. I do this on faith, and because I enjoy it. And yes, I will once again promote the whole series, if I do this again. (That said, it was gratifying to see Spanish Dagger hit the New York Times extended bestseller list, the Booksense list, and two Barnes & Noble bestseller lists.)

How did you prep your blog hosts this time? Did you have any new tricks developed since the first tour? Cheat sheets? Reminder schedule? Kick in the pants? Threats from Guido??

I sent everyone a welcome email, a how-to email, an email about promoting the visit, another how-to email along with my guest post, and a post asking for traffic counts. The posts all went up on time. One blogger had trouble posting photos. Another just didn't get it (poor choice on my part—this was one of the invited bloggers) and two bloggers had no traffic stats.

How did you promote the tour? What forums, communities, listservs? How did you use your own blog to promote tour stops? Any new insights since the first tour?

I promoted the tour in my eletters, my blog, on my website, on related listservs, on MySpace, on GoodReads. I did more coaxing/directing from my own blog than I did on my previous tour (with The Tale of Hawthorn House, in the Cottage Tales series), and I posted a "preview" of each host blog. Readers commented that they enjoyed the previews--I'll do that again.

How are you gauging results of the tour? What numbers are important to you? Hits on the book drawing page, your own blog traffic, reports from other bloggers, titlez.com, what else?

All the above. The blog hosts collected the unique visits for the three days of my visit (the three days readers could enter the drawing for that blog) and reported the numbers to me. I have no way of verifying their accuracy, but they all seem more or less in line. In addition, I have the number of entries in the 15 book drawings, which stayed high throughout the blog tour. Traffic to my blog is up by about 20%, to the website, about 15%.

You had an overlapping live tour with the blog tour? How did that work? Would you do that again?

Most of the people I meet on the live tour aren't Internet-oriented. They belong to garden clubs, library Friends groups, and so on. It's not the same market, so there's not really an overlap. The time element is an issue, yes. I usually plan to devote April to book promotion, though (the books are published in April), so in that sense, it doesn't matter whether I'm blogging or live-touring.

Time commitment from me. This was a biggie. Estimated times, probably conservative:

Obtaining a pool of potential blog hosts and choosing the hosts, 8 hours.
Calendaring and confirming with blog hosts, 4 hours.
Mailing ARCs, 2 hours.
Writing blog posts, 20 hours.
"Previewing" host blogs on my blog, 4 hours.
Communicating with blog hosts, 4 hours.
Promoting tour, 4 hours.
Checking guests posts and commenting 15 hours.
Sending thank-you books to host, 2 hours

Total: 63 hours, a bit more than 4 hours per blog

Maybe I overdid it? Should I have cut back to 10 blogs and saved 20 hours? Should I have cut back on the complexity of the blog posts, or the previewing, or comments on the blogs? Maybe. I was stretched for time, certainly.

Length of tour. When the posts were written and I saw what I'd done, I thought it was too long. But some people didn't find out about it until halfway through, and were glad it was still going on. Also, now I have all that material, and am thinking about ways I can recycle it.

Thanks, Susan. I already have a few more questions, but will wait until you're back from your live tour! Anybody else? Leave a comment for Susan or me if you have anything you'd like to add or ask.

A New amazon.com Mandate?

I'm not very happy about amazon.com's new "buy button" fiasco. If they don't end this curious bid at POD publishing monopoly, my amazon.com links will soon be removed from this page. I would encourage everyone using these sales links to switch over to Barnes & Noble for they have a similar affiliate program. You can read more at Writers Weekly where Angela Hoy tells the break-out story. Sign petitions! Spread the word! Don't settle for anything less than fair!

Kitty Knits

I love cats. I knit with passion. I like Donna Druchunas. It doesn't take a stretch of imagination to figure out why I'm hosting a tour stop here for her new book, Kitty Knits. I received it in the mail yesterday, a few weeks before my hosting date, so that'll give me plenty of time to knit a few dozen of those cool felted mice, a doorknob dangle toy, and maybe a felted bed. Although the bed may have to wait until I make the lace shawl for myself. So many great projects! Read more at the Queen of Socks blog by clicking here.

That's Donna with DeeDee. Aren't they cute?

Tagged!

I got this marvelous award from Helen Ginger who tagged me at Straight From Hel! I'm giving this meme a good deal of thought, so watch here for my comments and a list of who's next.

The Van Gogh Blues by Eric Maisel

Early last year, I was honored to host Eric Maisel during his blog book tour for Ten Zen Seconds. I received the added benefit of surviving a dreadful cataract surgery thanks to the tips and inspiration in the book! Today, our tour spotlights the softcover reprint of Eric's highly popular book, The Van Gogh Blues. And again, I find myself with a tool to navigate changes in my life, this time dealing with the stresses of switching careers and life meaning from painter and gallery owner to writer, a shift that has proven much more challenging and distressing than anything I might have imagined. Read on for some comments from the author:

HBP: Eric, can you tell us what The Van Gogh Blues is about?

E: For more than 25 years I’ve been looking at the realities of the creative life and the make-up of the creative person in books like Fearless Creating, Creativity for Life, Coaching the Artist Within, and lots of others. A certain theme or idea began to emerge: that creative people are people who stand in relation to life in a certain way—they see themselves as active meaning-makers rather than as passive folks with no stake in the world and no inner potential to realize. This orientation makes meaning a certain kind of problem for them—if, in their own estimation, they aren’t making sufficient meaning, they get down. I began to see that this “simple” dynamic helped explain why so many creative people—I would say all of us at one time or another time—get the blues.

To say this more crisply, it seemed to me that the depression that we see in creative people was best conceptualized as existential depression, rather than as biological, psychological, or social depression. This meant that the treatment had to be existential in nature. You could medicate a depressed artist but you probably weren’t really getting at what was bothering him, namely that the meaning had leaked out of his life and that, as a result, he was just going through the motions, paralyzed by his meaning crisis.

HPB: Are you saying that whenever a creative person is depressed, we are looking at existential depression? Or might that person be depressed in “some other way”?

E: When you’re depressed, especially if you are severely depressed, if the depression won’t go away, or if it comes back regularly, you owe it to yourself to get a medical work-up, because the cause might be biological and antidepressants might prove valuable. You also owe it to yourself to do some psychological work (hopefully with a sensible, talented, and effective therapist), as there may be psychological issues at play. But you ALSO owe it to yourself to explore whether the depression might be existential in nature and to see if your “treatment plan” should revolve around some key existential actions like reaffirming that your efforts matter and reinvesting meaning in your art and your life.

HBP: So you’re saying that a person who decides, for whatever reason, that she is going to be a “meaning maker,” is more likely to get depressed by virtue of that very decision. In addition to telling herself that she matters and that her creative work matters, what else should she do to “keep meaning afloat” in her life? What else helps?

E: I think it is a great help just to have a “vocabulary of meaning” and to have language to use so that you know what is going on in your life. If you can’t accurately name a thing, it is very hard to think about that thing. That’s why I present a whole vocabulary of meaning in The Van Gogh Blues and introduce ideas and phrases like “meaning effort,” “meaning drain,” “meaning container,” and many others. When we get a rejection letter, we want to be able to say, “Oh, this is a meaning threat to my life as a novelist” and instantly reinvest meaning in our decision to write novels, because if we don’t think that way and speak that way, it is terribly easy to let that rejection letter precipitate a meaning crisis and get us seriously blue. By reminding ourselves that is our job not only to make meaning but also to maintain meaning when it is threatened, we get in the habit of remembering that we and we alone are in charge of keeping meaning afloat—no one else will do that for us. Having a vocabulary of meaning available to talk about these matters is a crucial part of the process.

HBP: This is the paperback version of The Van Gogh Blues, How was the hardback version received?

E: Very well! The reviewer for the Midwest Book Review called The Van Gogh Blues “a mind-blowingly wonderful book.” The reviewer for Library Journal wrote, "Maisel persuasively argues that creative individuals measure their happiness and success by how much meaning they create in their work.” I’ve received countless emails from artists all over the world thanking me for identifying their “brand” of depression and for providing them with a clear and complete program for dealing with that depression. I hope that the paperback version will reach even more creative folks—and the people who care about them.

HBP: How does The Van Gogh Blues tie in with other books that you’ve written?

E: I’m interested in everything that makes a creative person creative and I’m also interested in every challenge that we creative people face. I believe that we have special anxiety issues and I spelled those out in Fearless Creating. I believe that we have a special relationship to addiction (and addictive tendencies) and with Dr. Susan Raeburn, an addiction professional, I’ve just finished a book called Creative Recovery, which spells out the first complete recovery program for creative people. That’ll appear from Shambhala late in 2008. I’m fascinated by our special relationship to obsessions and compulsions and am currently working on a book about that. Everything that we are and do interests me—that’s my “meaning agenda”!

HBP: What might a person interested in these issues do to keep abreast of your work?

E: They might subscribe to my two podcast shows, The Joy of Living Creatively and Your Purpose-Centered Life, both on the Personal Life Media Network. You can find a show list for The Joy of Living Creatively here and one for Your Purpose-Centered Life here. They might also follow this tour, since each host on the tour will be asking his or her own special questions. Here is the complete tour schedule. If they are writers, they might be interested in my new book, A Writer’s Space, which appears this spring and in which I look at many existential issues in the lives of writers. They might also want to subscribe to my free newsletter, in which I preview a lot of the material that ends up in my books (and also keep folks abreast of my workshops and trainings). But of the course the most important thing is that they get their hands on The Van Gogh Blues!—since it is really likely to help them.

A visit with Dana Fredsti

Hotbuttonpress: Meet Dana Fredsti, author of The Peruvian Pigeon, the first almost-cozy mystery in her Murder For Hire series. Set in modern-day California, the book parodies 1940’s pulp detective fiction through the theatrics of a local acting troupe. They hire out their talents as fundraising entertainment for business and area high society, and along the way find a few dead bodies to complicate the plot. It’s clear the author knows her stuff when it comes to the acting world. Dana, how far back does your acting interest go? Elementary school? High school?

Dana: I would have to say my acting interests go back as far as elementary school, at least to the best of my recollection. My fifth and six grade teachers were very ambitious and put on Antigone and Hamlet, respectively, as the class plays. Oh yeah, and Julius Caesar. I played Antigone, Queen Gertrude and an extra in the crowd for Marc Anthony. The “we come to bury Caesar, not to praise him” speech. My cousin Sandy made my costumes and I loved my blue flowery pseudo-Grecian Antigone costume. I had really long hair back in those days and remember using my pony tail quite dramatically, flipping my hair this way and that as I gave my speech, before being dragged away to be entombed alive.

I also have very fond memories of the scene in Hamlet when Hamlet confronts his mother in her dressing room as Polonius hides behind a curtain to spy and is subsequently killed by the twitchy Prince of the Danes. When Polonius uttered his dying words, “Oh, I am slain!”, they came out as wooden as only an elementary student with no acting ability could deliver them. “Hamlet” and I looked at each other and got the giggles, which quickly spread to the audience and eliminated any possible drama in the rest of the scene.

I pretty much decided I liked acting from that point on. It was definitely my main interest in high school and the only class I didn’t want to ditch. Yes, I ditched classes occasionally to go get donuts at Winchell’s down on Clairemont Drive or to see dollar matinees at the Clairemont Theater with my friend, Maureen. The same Maureen who later became my partner in crime with Murder For Hire, by the way. At any rate, I was in every play except one during my three years of high school (our drama teacher, Mrs. Curran, believed every actor should work tech on at least one play), did community theater, and later went on to act in some really bad movies when I moved to Los Angeles.

Hotbutton Press: So acting was really a career path for you?

Dana: Back when I was younger and more naive, I thought acting was going to be my career. I rapidly discovered I did not have the drive to put up with the bullsnit you have to go through even to start to make it. I have always been easily distracted. I’d go through phases of sending out headshots and resumes, went through a couple of agents without any real results, watched as the required dress size for an actress shrunk while her boobs grew disproportionately, and found I got more satisfaction from writing and eating what I wanted. I did come very close to getting a boob job, but didn’t follow through on it. It’s funny ‘cause when I first moved to Los Angeles, my size was considered normal for an actress. In a world where Brittany Spears was termed “obese” by some fans when she made her ill-advised wardrobe choice for the 2007 MTV Awards, I’d be Jabba the Hut. Okay, not that bad, but I was never a size 2 or 4. Except possibly when I was a toddler.

Hotbutton Press: What do you do now for a living? I mean besides write novels.

Dana: I’m currently working at a Venture Capital company (sustainable, green, health and wellness type investments) as their office goddess (i.e. manager). My co-worker recently told me writing was my real job and my day-job was my steady side-gig. Heh. I like the way she thinks. I actually really like the company, my co-workers and our office. All in all, it’s a great job and I’m very happy there. It’s like the anti-VC firm, with a really eclectic and creative group of people and they’ve all been extremely supportive of my writing. That, I’ve found through past experience, is a rarity in the workplace. Plus we have a really cool Nespresso maker and I make killer Belgian chocolate mochas every morning.

Hotbutton Press: Speaking of chocolate, your characters are seriously into it! Where can we find a recipe to tide us over until the next book?

Dana: This is an easy one! For the best hot chocolate ever, take two squares of Belgian chocolate and click here.

Hotbutton Press: I can see this mystery series adapted for TV. Would you ever consider that?

Dana: Oh, yeah! As long as it didn’t affect my writing more books in the series or any funky legal mess with the rights.

Hotbutton Press: What next?

Dana: Let’s see. I have both my sequel to MFH (working title Murder for Hire: The Big Snooze) and a supernatural thriller/romance/mystery started. That is to say, I’ve done basic plot and character notes, the barest skeleton of outlines, and some research for the latter. Also, another edit of a screenplay and I’ve made a solemn vow to post on my blog at least twice a week, preferably three! None of this is counting bookstore signings and other promotional appearances for MFH. 2008 will be a very busy year!

Hotbutton Press: Getting that sequel written for your impatient fans is the most important job. We’re dying to know what happens next, especially with the dangling romances you wickedly set up. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and have to say I didn’t suspect who the villain was right up until the conclusion. It was a definite cliffhanger for me.

Don't miss out! There will be a drawing at the end of the tour for three free copies of The Peruvian Pigeon… but only if you leave a comment here or at the other blog book tour stops listed below:

Sunday, January 20th Elysabeth’s Emerald City

Monday, January 21st Blogbooktours

Tuesday, January 22nd Kat's Random Thoughts

Wednesday, January 23rd Chrysalis Stage

Thursday, January 24th Kitty Litter: A Mystery Writer's Rants & Raves

Friday, January 25th Pointless Drivel

Saturday, January 26th Redzilla Attacks!

And the winners are:

Zoggirl

Shelli

Diesel

Steven Prosapio

Email our author at zhadi at aol dot com to make arrangements for your winning copy of The Peruvian Pigeon. Congratulations all!

And you can buy the book by clicking here. Enjoy the rest of the tour.