Book Signings are NOT about Authors

Book signing are about the readers. Author are successful at book signings if: they excite readers about their book and they make readers think they purchased something important (interesting or exciting).

So, what can you do to improve your books signings.

•         Don’t wait for people come to you. Greet people near the door and ask “what they like to read.” Fiction writers doing their spiels to customers who say ”they never read fiction” are probably wasting their and the customers’ time. Similarly, customers who growl probably don’t want to be bothered. Everyone else is fair game. I never do as well at book signings where the store owner puts me in a “special” room for book signings.
•         Keep your spiel short. The classic 1 or 2 sentence “elevator” talk is good. Try to encourage questions.
•         Study the customers in the store. If possible, visit the store prior to the book signing and analyze the crowd. Develop two-sentence spiels to fit different types. If everyone entering the bookstore is over fifty and you write children’s books, perhaps you should focus on how books make great gifts for grandchildren. My protagonist is a woman. I don’t mention that to men.
•         Be enthusiastic. Don’t read or do other activities as you wait for customers.
•         Don’t panic or get angry if the crowd is sparse or if a customer insults your book. I know some authors leave after a half-hour if the crowd is sparse. I find I usually make the most sales in the first ten minutes and the last twenty minutes of a well-advertised signing. Remember, my first comment and forget your ego.
•         Advertise your signing. Any means is fair game—newspapers, posters, newsletters, your website and Amazon author page, word-of-mouth. Work with the bookstore owner for best results.
•         Give customers something extra—a talk or reading at a specified time, bookmarks, cookies, gift wrapping, or a discount. I do talks on science in fiction with slides, but the talks are more successful at special events or libraries than in bookstores or at book fairs. I find tying books up with a bright ribbon bow helps sales just before Mother’s Day with male customers.
•         Try to please the customer and meet their requests.

You’re probably wondering if my book signing are big successes? No, but they’re more successful when I follow this advice, than when I don’t. I bet you can add to and improve my advice on book signings. Please, add comments.

Books you might like by JL Greger:

Discover who killed the set doctor in Murder… A Way to Lose Weight (winner of 2016 Public Safety Writers Assoc. [PSWA] contest and finalist for New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards. http://amzn.com/1610092392

           Learn the truth about childhoods in the 1950s and 1960s in The Good Old Days? A Collection of Stories. http://amzn.com/1537743813

 Follow a woman as she uses clues from her past to extract a nuclear 

scientist from Iran in I Saw You in Beirut. 

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1610092201 

Website: http://www.jlgreger.com

Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B008IFZSC4

Eat! Next Diet and Exercise! Then eat some more!

Do you, like most Americans, have a love—hate relationship with food? You love sizzling steaks and pizzas dripping with gooey cheese, but occasionally you’re filled with remorse. Then you avoid everything but salads and exercise. After you lose a couple of pounds, you return to your old routine and regain the weight. This is sometimes called yo-yo dieting.

Funny? Sad and pathetic? Annoying, especially to me, a former professor of nutrition. Maybe, that’s why I wrote Murder…A New Way to Lose Weight.

Let me tell you a little about my new medical mystery.

Dieting is hard. So is fitting into a new job where you aren’t wanted. Linda Almquist is trying to do both as she investigates allegations against two diet doctors that they are taking shortcuts in their current clinical trail and endangering their patients. When she discovers one of them dead, the police suspect the other diet doctor. Maybe they’re wrong. The murders might be related to something in the past – something involving her boss the Dean.

One subplot in this novel is Linda’s efforts to lose weight. There are many insidious threats to her weight loss plans (i.e. tempting high-fat foods typical of New Mexican cuisine, vending machines with junk food, and humongous servings in most restaurants).

As a nutritionist, I also wanted to tell readers about a hot new area of research—gut bacteria. Scientists have found the microflora (bacteria) in the gut change with weight loss. Researchers hypothesize they may be able to help patients increase weight loss and keep weight off by altering their gut bacteria. That’s why my diet doctors are studying the gut bacteria of their obese patients in a clinical trail. However, I was careful to not make false promises. (I guess I wouldn’t be good on TV infomercials.)

Please note the diet doctors in Murder…A Way to Lose Weight do not resemble any researchers in the field, but they do have the characteristics of several overly ambitious researchers, who have had ethical lapses.  

Murder… A Way to Lose Weight (paperback & Kindle) is available from Amazon (http://amzn.com/1610092392).

Writing Advice from Oscar Wilde

 What can you learn about writing from Oscar Wilde - the famous Irish author and wit?

Humor is important.

Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.

Know your audience.

The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.

Experiment with new ideas and approaches.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

The best fiction has the ring of truth.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. 

I think writing fiction is a type of mask. Often the “truth” is more apparent in fiction than nonfiction.

Advertise your writing.

The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

Now I’m taking Oscar’s advice and am promoting my newest medical mystery,

MURDER…A WAY TO LOSE WEIGHT, by participating in a GoodReads Giveaway. You can win a FREE copy by signing up by June 4 at: https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/188425-murder-a-way-to-lose-weight.

One more piece of advice from Oscar.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

I think you’ll find Murder… A Way to Lose Weight can be read on several levels (and hence several times). It’s a mystery. It’s got lots weird science tidbits (and references at the end), which will make you think and spark your conversation at boring parties. It addresses real problems in medical schools—scientific misconduct and hazing of junior staff and women. These problems can affect the safety of drugs you depend on. 

Here’s the blurb: Dieting is hard. So is fitting into a new job where you aren’t wanted. In MURDER…A WAY TO LOSE WEIGHT, Dr. Linda Almquist is trying to do both as she investigates two diet doctors who are endangering the lives of obese participants in their current clinical trail. When she finds one diet doctor dead, the police suspect the other diet doctor. Then the threats against Linda begin.

Also available at Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01ENPSPR2

Garage Sale Your Writing

I’m not talking about selling your books at ridiculously low prices. I’m talking about editing your writing.

1. Get rid of what isn’t useful. The first step to a garage sale is recognizing you don’t need and will never use many of the treasures you’ve stashed in your house, garage, and/or storage unit. They’re just clutter and prevent your enjoyment of useful items.

Similarly, an author needs to read a draft of his/her writing and think. Does this sentence or section advance the plot, develop characters, or establish the location? If not, perhaps the sentence/section should be deleted.

If you really love a section of writing but know it adds nothing to your current story or novel, create a file of deleted sections, which you hope will be useful in the future. These are the items I put a high price tag on at a garage sale and don’t mind if they don’t sell because I can put them out at the next garage sale.

2. Organize your material. I find shoppers are more apt to buy items in a garage sale if the objects are arranged logically and attractively. For example, at my last garage sale I was trying to sell necklaces. (My mother had a fetish for beads of all colors and “heart” necklaces and had bought hundred of them over fifty years. None were of much value individually.) I hung the necklaces from an old wooden clothes dryer rack so that shoppers could examine the wares without tangling or breaking the chains. I sold about a hundred.

Creativity is the key to good writing, BUT many readers today prefer organized material that is easy to read. Paragraphs with more than ten sentences and sentences with three or more commas generally slow the reading process. This is one reason why many readers report they like dialog. The paragraphs and sentences tend to be short. Readers can peruse pages of dialog quickly. 

3. Never call your material junk. A positive attitude is important in any activity. If you don’t value what you’re selling or writing, why should anyone else?

4. Work hard. Successful garage sales and editing are hard work. You may enjoy the work (or maybe not), but you’ll be proud of the final result—a neater house or an improved novel.

5. Laugh at yourself and learn from your mistakes.

So are you ready to garage sale your writing and step up your editing efforts?

Maybe you’d like to examine tow of my editing efforts in the last year.

In Murder...A Way to Lose Weight, two ambitious diet doctors are testing a new way to lose weight. One doctor is killed after she develops a conscious and admits they took “short cuts,” which are endangering the lives of their obese patients. As the police turn up clues, the readers learn a bit about weird poisons and the social mores of a medical school. 

In I Saw You in Beirut, a woman uses memories of her student days at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and of her career as a globetrotting epidemiologist to provide clues for the identification and extraction of a nuclear scientist, known only as F, from Iran. But memories are often biased or incomplete, and she travels to the sites of her memories to gather new evidence.

Amazon sells both the paperback and Kindle versions of Murder…A Way to Lose Weight (http://www.amazon.com/dp/1610092392) and I Saw You in Beirut (http://www.amazon.com/dp/1610092201).

Promote Your Books as if They’re Fad Diets

My latest murder mystery Murder...A Way to Lose Weight is about dieting. So I‘ve thought a lot

about fad diets in the last year. Many fad diets were first promulgated in the 1950’s. Countless nutritionists have denounced them but they keep  reappearing. What gives them such tenacity? Why are they so popular? Do fad diets provide insights into publicizing books?

What are fad diets?

I’m defining fad diets as those that basically allow you to eat all you want of one special food but restrict your intake of other foods. Famous people have endorsed these diets, but I’m leaving their names off to avoid controversy. Examples of fad diets are: the Banana Diet, the Hollywood Diet (sometime called the Grapefruit Diet), and the Baby Food Diet.

Many users of these diets have reported weight loss. Why? The dieters developed an aversion (Perhaps that’s an overstatement, but I doubt it.) to bananas, grapefruit, and baby food and ate much less. Accordingly they lost weight.

So what did you learn?

Basic science holds true. If you consume less calories and exercise more, you lose weight. Fad diets add a little advertising pizazz to the bland basic advice. In some cases, this pizazz caused people stick to their intentions long enough to lose weight.

How does this relate to promoting books?

Strong writing is like your basic balanced 1200-calorie diet with plenty of exercise. It works and produces the desired results – a good, maybe even great novel. However, it usually takes a well-known name, a dynamic platform (which mean lots of hard work doing promotional activities), and/or catchy advertising gimmicks to turn it into a best seller. 

Have you found the fad diet (advertising gimmick) to sell your books? I’d like to hear about it. I’m sure other writers would too. Leave a comment.

In Murder...A Wayto Lose Weight, two ambitious diet doctors are testing a new way to lose weight. The two, eager to become rich and famous diet gurus, take “short cuts” and endanger their patients’ lives. One doctor is killed after she develops a conscious and admits their “short cuts.” As the police turn up clues, the readers learn a bit about weird poisons and the social mores of a medical school. 

Do You Want to Write a Medical Mystery?

Lead in the water of Flint, Michigan and the Ebola and Zika viruses have made science newsworthy. Maybe, you’re toying with the idea of writing a medical mystery. Where do you begin?

The first step in writing a medical mystery is research. This means perusing newspaper stories, items on the WEB, and articles in Science, Scientific American, and medical journals for hot topics.

I decided a topic that interested almost everyone was dieting. Hence the title of my new mystery, Murder…A Way to Lose Weight. I noticed many researchers were studying the effect of the gut microbiome on the human body.

You’re thinking, “Who cares? What’s a microbiome?”

Let me reword the sentence: Scientists think they can help you lose weight by altering the bacteria in your gut. It could be a relatively easy way to lose weight.

Now I have your attention. This also illustrates my second point. A novelist must transmit complex science accurately, simply, and in a lively manner. In essence, (s)he must make the science exciting and not slow the plot with too many details.

In Murder...A Way to Lose Weight, two ambitious diet doctors alter the bacteria in the guts of obese subjects in a clinical trail. The two are so eager to become rich and famous diet gurus that they take “short cuts” and endanger their patients’ lives. One doctor is killed after she develops a conscious and admits the “short cuts” to Linda Almquist, the acting associate dean in a medical school.

As the police, with Linda’s help, turn up clues, the readers learn a bit about weird poisons and the social mores of a medical school. 

Good medical mysteries (like Robin Cook’s Coma) are realistic. Readers are more apt to be scared if they believe the situation could happen.

That’s why I use poison, which was the cause of a rash of real accidental poisonings in New Mexico in the 1980s. I wove the information from two scientific articles into my tale of an intentional poisoning and set the novel in Albuquerque as an oblique clue.

To add further authenticity, I referenced key articles in the “The Science Behind the Story” at the end of the novel.

Are you ready to start writing a medical mystery? Maybe, you should read Murder…A Way to Lose Weight first.