Most writers are familiar with the usual promotional channels, including advertising on websites, blog exchanges, social media marketing, and having your own author website. One that slides under their radar is getting interviewed on talk radio, which includes on-air, on-web, or with podcasting. Radio show hosts will always need new and interesting material to keep their listeners tuned in. If you’re comfortable having a conversation with a radio personality, you can get your name in front of a new audience.

You might be surprised at the number of available radio stations in your area. In Denver, Colorado, there are 50 FM radio stations and even more AM stations. If you’re wondering why bother with AM or you are surprised it still exists, note that it can sometimes be heard thousands of miles away by people who purchase more books on average, according to several studies. Old AM Radio can and should be on your radar when it’s time to find an interview spot. Online, check places like Wikipedia and RadioMap.US to see what’s out there in your area. RadioMap has some links to station websites and even a way to listen to what’s on the air right now.

Traditional over the airwaves radio shows are obviously still thriving, and some of them fill up their weekend programming with a few talk shows. The subjects can range from bringing in musicians to discuss their work to shows dedicated to literature. As an author, these are the shows you should focus on unless you’re already a well-known musician. Local radio stations are your best bet, since they’re more interested in promoting the neighborhood connection. Additionally, there are thousands of licensed low-power radio stations that provide limited coverage.

Sometimes you can combine two different subjects to make your appearance more appealing. I was asked to appear on a Denver radio show that focused on veterans. The host invited me to have an hour-long conversation about my service in the US Navy, which led into my ebook “Tales from the Fleet”, which was filled with essays, stories, and observations about my time in the military. The time flew by, and it gave me a good bump in sales. I already had all of the individual stories and essays written — I had previously published several of them over a ten year period. I combined all of them into an ebook specifically because of my radio appearance, and the book sold well for several months. Not much additional effort to take advantage of the marketing opportunity.

If you’re more of a Techie and prefer podcasting and Internet-based radio stations, use Google and ask around in your preferred genre. The science fiction crowd tunes in to Patrick Hester’s SFF Signal every week. I kept running into Patrick at most of the Denver conventions. We became friends, and eventually he ran out of top-tier writing talent and asked me to appear on his show. I was ecstatic, and we did an interview over Skype.

Another now-retired Internet radio host asked me to be on one of his shows, The Funky Werepig. This one focused on dark fiction and lots of irreverent humor. The hour-long discussion ranged from writing horror to how to market underwear-scented candles. The Werepig, who is secretly author and comedian Greg Hall in disguise, had a small yet very dedicated audience. I spent a lot of time muting the microphone to stop laughing out loud over the live show.

My two most recent radio/podcast interviews were the one with Patrick at SFF Signal and “What Are You Afraid Of?“, a Ghost Host show with Fox and Phil. For the latter, we discussed three true ghost vignettes I had sent in two years prior.

If you decide to give talk radio a shot, here are a few tips:

Familiarize yourself with the current news and publishing topics. Stay up to date on current events. Being knowledgeable and worldly will build your credibility.
Tie-in a local angle if at all possible. Whether you are talking to a radio show out of your town, Detroit, or London, be sure to tie the local area in to what your conversation is about, especially if one of your novels takes place in or near the city, state, or country where your listening audience resides. By localizing the message, you become someone that understands the audience and, in turn, will keep them tuned in.
Be yourself. Don’t put up a fake persona unless it’s something that is well practiced and established. If an audience perceives you to be fake, what you say won’t matter.
Be careful about political, religious, and sexual topics. No matter which way you choose, you might alienate half of your listening audience. Controversial issues can cause you some grief later, so be aware of that going in to the interview. Unless you’re talking pizza, where you can admit that Brooklyn pizza dominates all others.
Pace yourself so you keep up with the show host. Adjust and match their rhythm. The conversation will naturally keep their audience interested in your message.
Use an index card with your key talking points and a pen. Cross the points off when they’re covered. Try to remember your main focus is to introduce yourself to the audience and to talk about your books. Don’t stray too far off-topic. Additionally, make sure you let people know how to reach you (social media, blog location, conventions you’ll be attending, etc.)
Make sure you give the host your media kit, which should include a headshot for their website, a short bio, and a long bio. Note how the audience can get in touch with you after the show airs. Consider having either a contest or a special discount code for members of the audience. A 10% coupon might just convert the listeners to dedicated readers.
If you’re in a studio, turn your mobile phone off or put it in airplane mode. If you’re going to be interviewed over the phone, a stable landline or Skype tends to be better than cells. Cell phones are particularly unreliable for on-air interviews, and you may get cut off in the middle of your appearance. If that happens, the talk radio hosts have to fill the time slot without any notice. Just understand that going in, and let the host know what your primary and backup communication methods are. Decide who will call back so you don’t play phone tag for five minutes.
Limit numbers and statistics during your interview. If you have a particular statistic that you think applies very strongly to your message, use it to make your point and move on. If you throw too many numbers at the audience, their eyes will glaze over and they will lose interest and tune out. Harken back to math classes, when everyone around you was doodling instead of learning how to do word problems.
Don’t bullshyte when you don’t know an answer! A radio or podcast appearance is not a test of your intelligence, and you’re not an expert on life, the universe, and everything. If you aren’t familiar with an issue the host brings up or don’t know the answer to a question, don’t be afraid to admit it. You’ll come across as honest and credible.
Try to give your interviews an intimate feel. Remember that radio is a one-on-one communication medium, and it’s just you talking to another person. Talk to the host in a conversational manner, and if there are callers, do the same with them. Imagine you’re all sitting around a table in your kitchen sharing a cup of tea or a spaghetti dinner. This will help keep the audience interested and they’ll be more likely to relate to you.
Bring a couple of copies of your latest book to give to the host. One is theirs, so sign it and hand them a personal copy. The one or two extras should be signed so the station can give them away to their listeners. No shipping needed — the listeners can stop by and pick it up.
Follow up your interview with a thank-you note. If the interview went well, let them know you’d love to come back anytime in the future.
Make sure you thank the press person, the office personnel, the studio engineer, and everyone who works there. If the whole staff likes you, they’ll remember your name when your next book comes out.

Your goal for every interview is to enlighten the listening audience about who you are and to interest them in your book to the point where they’d like to purchase a copy. Be fun and entertaining, and through that you’ll build an audience.

About the Author:

Guy Anthony De Marco is a disabled US Navy veteran speculative fiction author; a Graphic Novel Bram Stoker Award^®nominee; winner of the HWA Silver Hammer Award; a prolific short story and flash fiction crafter; a novelist; an invisible man with superhero powers; a game writer (Sojourner Tales modules, Interface Zero 2.0 core team, D&D modules); and a coffee addict. One of these is false.

A writer since 1977, Guy is a member of the following organizations: SFWA, WWA, SFPA, IAMTW, ASCAP, RMFW, NCW, HWA. He hopes to collect the rest of the letters of the alphabet one day. Additional information can be found at Wikipedia and GuyAnthonyDeMarco.com.

How to Sit Down and Write

January 7, 2016

fictorians

Character Ideas & Plotting The Writing Life 2 Comments

Guest Post by Stant Litore

Stant Litore
As is often the case with our characters, our own greatest strengths as writers can serve double duty as our greatest weaknesses—the very things that keep us from building momentum with a novel. For example:

Maybe You’re the Perfectionist

Perhaps your quest for perfection and excellence keeps you from churning out mediocre work but also prevents you from actually finishing a draft. Your own internal criticism chimes in too loudly while you write. If this is the case, you will need to find a few tactics for disarming your own worst critic.

Maybe for you this will mean a mantra. Or maybe you simply need a way to enter and stay in “creative space” or in the creative mood. I recommend finding a trigger—such as an object that activates your imagination, or a scene from a book that gets you thinking imaginatively, or a piece of music or kind of music—something that you can return to when it’s time to “be creative.”

To stay in that space, try headphones. I write with symphonic music playing. I have done that for so many years that now, like Pavlov’s dogs, I lock into creative space as soon as I’m alone with that music. You may need silence—in which case, consider the not insignificant investment of noise-cancelling headphones.

Give some thought also to where you write. While you can write anywhere—I have been known to scribble a scene on the back of a receipt on my car dashboard while stuck in traffic—you might also be well served by establishing a routine place that you make into a creative space, a sacred space. Just as a monk goes to a cell and stares at an image of the Virgin Mary in order to enter and remain in a state of contemplation, you might create your own space and ritual to enter and stay in a state of creativity.

It doesn’t have to be extravagant. If you have a room of your own that you can convert into a study for writing, that’s great, but for years I did all my writing on a tiny, round dining room table in a cramped dining room in a small apartment. I put the kids to bed, popped on my headphones, and had at it. Not an ideal writing space, but I did what I could to make it mine, for those few brief evening hours. A small owl statuette served for a symbolic reminder of past travels and past creative moments. The symphonic music turned on my imagination. And I took a moment to clear from my space whatever made it not right: dirty dishes, stray paperwork, etc.

Do the same with whatever space you have available: find a way to make it sacred to your writing, even if only for brief periods.

Or Maybe You’re the Artist

Maybe daily perfectionism isn’t your particular curse. Maybe for you, your love of imagination and beauty makes you hesitate at some point mid-process, because the first draft looks like a pale betrayal of your original vision for your story.

Other writing instructors have called this phenomenon “Tolstoy Syndrome,” the unspoken, subconscious belief that if your first draft doesn’t look like a masterpiece (like War and Peace), then you have failed and you should stop. Of course, Tolstoy’s own first drafts were a mess, too. A first draft is just that: a first draft. A place to start. For most writers, the real work is in revision. Accept that first drafts are awful, and do them anyway. If you never start, you’ll never finish. That sounds like a platitude, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

When you get that feeling that your work is but a pale imitation of your vision, and that feeling starts to get in your way, do this: Take out a sheet of paper. Close your eyes a moment (unless you are driving, in which case go home first, and then try this; we are mad storytellers, you and I, but we needn’t be lunatics) and imagine your character mid-scene in some moment of your book that is closely connected to what you love about your story. Then open your eyes and write. “Free-write”—write without permitting your pen to leave the paper or your fingers to leave the keyboard. Free-write for ten minutes without stopping. It doesn’t matter if what you’re writing in those ten minutes is good, or even if it belongs in the story. Just write the middle of that scene that so appeals to you. I wrote an Inuit character once—twenty years ago, as a very young writer—and as I worked on his story, at intervals I would look at what I’d done and feel defeated. I suffer from Tolstoy Syndrome. To deal with that syndrome, I kept returning to a scene where my character was out on the tundra, his breath visible on the air, his face greased against the bite of the wind, his spear heavy and reassuring and solid in his hand, and the air full of the reek of caribou. I must have written that hunt twenty times. And each time I wrote it, I recovered the magic of my story, the wonder of it, the appeal that drew me to this character and his story in the first place. When you feel yourself failing your vision—because first drafts generally do exactly that, and that’s okay—find a way to step back into your vision. When you are standing in the midst of your vision, you are strongest; you are happiest. So go there for a while before you return to your actual manuscript, and write and revise from that place in your heart, from that country in your imagination. That can give you a restorative burst of energy.

This is also how you break “writer’s block”; if you’re in a place where no ideas are coming, step aside from that place for a few minutes and free-write a scene that is close to your heart. If the engine of your imagination is running cold, this is one way to heat it up!

The point is: with perseverance and discipline, you can do this. As Koach learns in The Zombie Bible, the only lasting impediments are those we shore up in our own hearts. You may have shored up some of your own. Have courage and knock them down.

This post is an excerpt from Write Characters Your Readers Won’t Forget.

About the Author:

Stant Litore is the author of the series The Zombie Bible, which retells history (and the Bible) as a series of encounters with the restless dead, as well as The Ansible Stories, in which twenty-fifth century Islamic explorers become trapped in alien bodies on alien worlds. Litore has been featured in “The Year’s Best New Sci-Fi” at NPR (March 2014), as an Author Success Story on the Amazon.com homepage (November 2013), and in Weird Fiction Review and SF Signal. Litore lives in Denver with his wife and two daughters, where he is working on his next novel.

Write a short story? I’d Rather Floss Chicken Teeth!

January 6, 2016

Ace Jordyn

Ace Jordyn Craft & Skills Narrative Voice No Comments

Flossing a chicken’s teeth would be much easier than writing a short story. Or, that’s what I thought.

I found myself facing this problem after writing six novels. I couldn’t wrap my head around a shorter piece of work. Everything I tried I sounded like an outline for a novel.

Books on outlining didn’t help. Workshops provided little insight. Critique groups, well, I could help someone to better tell their story. Heck, I’d even edited an acclaimed anthology, but I couldn’t write a good short story to save myself.

How could I overcome this block?

I really wanted to know what eluded me about this form. After many attempts, I found a formula that helped in all aspects of short story writing. This four step process taught me how to write short stories:

1) Read short stories, not novels. By reading short stories I learned what forms and genres I really liked and disliked. There’s no point in trying to write in a genre or with a style that doesn’t speak to you.

2) Choose a genre which speaks to you. For example, I love some literary style authors and I love science fiction stories. Literary style I can read but I can’t figure out the voice. With science fiction I understand the voice and the genre, but I’m not as adept as I’d like to be with the science. Hence, I don’t have the confidence to write it. How did I learn this about myself? Check out point number three …

3) Retell the stories that interest you. This is how I figured out if I had the desire, the passion to write certain stories. When I retold a story, I paid close attention to the plot and how it unfolded. I became aware of style, plot, character and the tropes common to the genre. Most importantly, I had to feel the voice and the passion for the genre. Once I discovered what stories energized and excited me, the final step was easy.

4) Write an original story in the genre and voice that excites you.

That’s it. It’s that easy.

Should you publish or submit a retold story? That’s another matter. Issues of public domain arise and rightly so. Some stories I deleted because my intent was only to learn from them. Others, even if there are no public domain issues, may be published in the future but with full disclosure as to the source of inspiration.

Where did I finally find my voice? With fables and fairy tales and people’s stories of old. I love it. The most curious thing I learned was that it wasn’t about setting for me for I’ve set my stories in worlds of fantasy, science fiction, and yes, there’s even a literary one or two! My real journey was to find my story telling voice.

The cheat of the matter was this: later on, I recognized that my writing voice had always been with me. I had heard it, felt it even but I had tried to squeeze it into forms and stories that didn’t suit it. That was the heart of the problem. That is the heart of this journey – to hear the voice within you and to find the form that fits it.

Writing with Lemons: Cheaper than a Therapist

January 5, 2016

Gregory D. Little

Gregory D. Little The Writing Life 1 Comment

We’ve all heard the tired old saying, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade!” Many of us have heard the much better version from Portal 2, “When life hands you lemons, burn life’s house down!” The message of the first saying is clear: work with what you’ve got. The message of the second is, like so many things, more fun in theory than in practice.

The truth is that most people reading this blog would probably like to spend more time writing. The trouble is that other things, things which are not writing, keep getting in the way. Work, food preparation, family time, video games, root canals, repelling boarding parties, getting your car worked on, mowing the lawn, fulfilling ancient prophecies and exercise are just some of the potential distractions that keep you from your wordcount potential.

I can’t help with any of those things. What I am trying to help you with are the days where you’ve got the time but not the will. Mostly, I’ve found that lack of willpower points either to lack of energy or too much stress. In today’s increasingly specific blog post, I’ll discuss how to write through the daily stresses that accumulate and hamper you by turning their energy, aikido-like, against them.

There’s a well-known therapeutic benefit to writing out your problems, as though we can only unburden ourselves of something painful when we are certain we can’t ever forget about it. What that says about human psychology I don’t know, and there’s nothing revolutionary or innovative about this idea, but it can be so easy to forget that it bears reminding. Because while lots of people write out journals or diaries to put their stresses down on paper and get them out of their head, if you happen to write fiction there’s a way to have your cake and eat it too.

The answer is something I’m sure you’ve all heard before: map your real-world problems onto the pages of your stories. Now, it’s a little more complicated than that. Obviously I can’t put the bureaucratic stress I feel every time I have to order IT supplies at my day job into my second world YA fantasy. But if you strip away the specifics and dig down to the root cause of the stress, in my example the primal reaction to the sense of helplessness I feel whenever a powerful entity or person imposes arbitrary rules that make my life harder, there’s plenty of stuff to work with there.

You can come at this any number of ways. Maybe you’re trying to quit smoking and having trouble, so you project the same struggles onto your protagonist. The mere act of transferring the burden to another person’s shoulders, even a pretend person, can be therapeutic and make you feel as though you are less alone in your struggle.

The bottom line is that stress doesn’t have to be a block on the path to finishing your story. If you’re willing to dig into it a bit, you can even leverage quality character beats from your own real-world problems. Best of all, you know they’ll come across as authentic, because you are living them!

We all know what life is like. Some days it feels like the lemons just won’t stop. And writing your problems into your stories will not, sadly, make them go away. But sharing your real burden with your imaginary friends can help a surprising amount. Maybe they’ll overcome these obstacles and give you the courage to do the same. Or maybe they won’t and will give you the courage to accept that not every battle needs to be won.

About the Author: Gregory D. Little

Rocket scientist by day, fantasy and science fiction author by night, Gregory D. Little began his writing career in high school when he and his friend wrote Star Wars fanfic before it was cool, passing a notebook around between (sometimes during) classes. His first novel, Unwilling Souls, is available now from ebook retailers and trade paperback through Amazon.com. His short fiction can be found in The Colored Lens and A Game of Horns: A Red Unicorn Anthology. He lives in Virginia with his wife and their yellow lab.

You can reach him at his website (www.gregorydlittle.com), his Twitter handle (@litgreg) or at his Author Page on Facebook.