Amy M. Reade, Guest Author

My guest this week is author Amy Reade. Of course I had to read the post before I put it up, and let me tell you, you’re about to be entertained. (I also realized I’ll probably never travel with Amy. Yes, I’m laughing.) Her latest book, Trudy’s Diary: A Libraries of the World Mystery, will be available on April 16, 2019. Read on and I hope this blog brightens your day like it did mine. Welcome, Amy!

 

            Like all of you, I love reading Marja’s blog posts every Monday. I don’t expect to be able to match her for breadth and depth of topics and pure knowledge, but I hope I can at least entertain you while I’m here as her guest, which is both an honor and a privilege.

            (Thank you for the kind words! Marja)

            If you’ve read my books, you know that I love to set stories in places I’ve visited and found fascinating. I wrote a book set on the Big Island of Hawaii and three in the United Kingdom. I’ve also set stories in northern New York (where I grew up—write what you know!); Charleston, South Carolina; Colorado; and Washington, DC. I haven’t necessarily traveled to all these places recently, but some of them made such an impression on me that I put them in books long years after I visited.

            When I hear someone say “I love to travel,” I’m always a little bit envious. I picture people strolling down cobbled streets in Europe, sipping coffee and nibbling croissants at al fresco cafés in Paris, lounging poolside at a tropical resort under a huge cabana complete with cool towels and a frosty drink; or hiking against the backdrop of purple mountains’ majesty.

            I love to travel, too, but when I tell people that, what I should really say is “I love to travel despite everything that goes wrong.”

            Let me explain.

            This is what traveling looks like for the Reade family: after the initial complaints about where we’re going (these come from the children and it doesn’t matter where we’re going), they resign themselves to leaving at the appointed date and time. When that date and time arrive, one could be forgiven for thinking the date snuck up on us like a thief in the night. We run around like so many squirrels in a cage, packing, unpacking, repacking, making sure the kitchen is clean and the beds are made (in case, God forbid, we meet with an accident and someone has to come into the house to wrap up our affairs)…you get the picture.

            When we’re flying somewhere far away, I spend the first six hours of any trip crying about how much I miss the dog. Wine sometimes helps, and sometimes makes it worse.

            Upon our arrival at our destination, one of the children throws up. It’s almost always the same child.

            At some point during the trip, there is typically an injury or illness requiring medical attention, or at the very least, photographic evidence so people will believe us later. Once we went to Hawaii and all of us got pinkeye. Once on a trip to Washington, DC, one of my children stuck his/her head through the bars on the hotel window to yell “Hi, Dad!” (Dad was unpacking the car) and got stuck that way. It took three people to get the child’s head back into the hotel room. Once on a trip to Northern Ireland, one of the children went wading in a stream that was on the property of our VRBO and got a nasty rash that had remarkable staying power.

            Okay, you may say, so you’ve had a few lousy experiences.

            But what you don’t realize is that this happens on every single trip. There was the time I was driving a rental car and I hit the curb and the tire fell completely off, almost making us miss our flight and making the car rental guy yell at me, which made me cry. Thank God for the man who drove by and pitied me. He just happened to work for a tire store and he was a crackerjack tire-fixer. He got as big a tip as I’ve ever given anyone.

            There was the time one of our daughters (13 at the time) got stuck on London’s Tube without a phone, while the rest of us stared in horror as the train doors closed behind her. Luckily we were able to scream loud enough that one of the train supervisors took pity on us and stopped the train.

            There was the time we rented an apartment in a seedy neighborhood where parolees could wave at us across a tiny courtyard. There was the time we rented an apartment in another neighborhood where an actual rumble took place right below our windows when Venezuela lost a game in the World Cup that night.

            And here’s something fascinating: apparently this is genetic. One of my children studied in England last year. On a late-semester trip to Amsterdam with seven friends, she spent most of the weekend running from a crazed vacation rental owner who had tried renting the kids a room in a house that already had seventeen occupants and one bathroom. The kids spent the night on the floor of the Amsterdam airport once they were able to escape the clutches of the rental owner. Thank goodness I didn’t know about this until it was all over.

            But despite all these stories (and so, so many more), I still love to travel. I love to experience different places, cultures, foods, and customs. I can remember a place fondly even if we had a dreadful experience there (I believe there is a psychological term for this, something like “blocking”). I suppose the negative experiences I have imprint themselves on my brain, helping me to remember a place and the happy part of visiting.

            And home is always waiting, along with the dog. 

 

Author Bio:

Amy M. Reade is a cook, chauffeur, household CEO, doctor, laundress, maid, psychiatrist, warden, seer, teacher, and pet whisperer. In other words, a wife, mother, community volunteer, and recovering attorney.

She’s also a writer. She is the author of Trudy’s Diary, A Libraries of the World Mystery (Book One: Library of Congress), The Worst Noel (Book One in the Juniper Junction Holiday Mystery series), The Malice Series (The House on Candlewick Lane, Highland Peril, and Murder in Thistlecross), and three standalone books, Secrets of Hallstead House, The Ghosts of Peppernell Manor, and House of the Hanging Jade. She lives in southern New Jersey, but loves to travel. Her favorite places to visit are Scotland and Hawaii and when she can’t travel she loves to read books set in far-flung locations.

Her days are split between writing and marketing her books, but uppermost in her mind is the adage that the best way to market a book is to write another great book.

                                                         Social Media Links

Amy M. Reade

Website: www.amymreade.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/amreadeauthor

Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/AmyMReadesGothicFictionFans

Twitter: www.twitter.com/readeandwrite

Pinterest: www.pinterest.com/amreade

Instagram: www.instagram.com/amymreade

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Amy-M.-Reade/e/B00LX6ASF2/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

Goodreads Page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8189243.Amy_M_Reade

Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/amy-m-reade

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CLICK HERE to visit Marja McGraw's website

CLICK HERE for a quick trip to Amazon.com

COMING SOON: People Lookin' Half Dead - A Bogey Man Mystery

Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I'm taking the week off, so check out Patricia Gligor's post at http://pat-writersforum.blogspot.com/ . If you hurry, you might get a free ebook out of it.

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 I often hear people say authors need to create a buzz to gain followers and sell books. That’s a lot easier said than done. How do we create a buzz? Maybe if your new book has something to do with a current event or issue, people will talk about it. But what if your new book is for entertainment and not enlightenment?

Most of my books have been for entertainment, but my current Bogey Man Work-in-Progress (WIP) has to do with homeless people. It covers a current issue, but I’m hoping it will also be entertaining. Yes, you can include both in a story. I’m not an expert on the homeless population, but I pay attention. I’m a people watcher – always have been. I pay attention to stories in the newspaper and on the news.

Okay, what could I do to create a buzz about this story? I could play up the Bogey Man’s eccentric grandmother, Tillie, who’s just moved to town. I could play up the dreaded heatwave that’s plaguing Los Angeles in this story and its effect on the homeless. I could do both. While Chris Cross (the Bogey Man) and his wife Pamela prepare to open their new supper club, Tillie invites some homeless people in to get them out of the heat. While the Crosses provide drinks, food and respite from the heat, the also learn that homeless people are disappearing.

You won’t see me on any national talk shows because my story is fictional, not a presentation on the plight of the homeless.

So again, how do you create a buzz? You can try to obtain some earthshaking reviews, but that doesn’t happen often. They help, but not enough. You can blog about it, go on talk radio shows, or yell from the rooftops. Do presentations at libraries or book stores. Talk to people in line at the grocery store. My bank and doctor’s office know me well because I’m always talking about books and/or passing out promotional pens.

In the meantime, here are my thoughts on creating a buzz. I’ve always said word-of-mouth is the best advertising, and I believe it’s the best way to create a buzz. So, readers, are you listening? If you’ve read a book you really enjoyed recently, tell everyone you know about it. Buy it as a gift for your best friend. Check out the author’s website to see if they’re offering anything else you might be interested in. Join book clubs and comment about how much a particular book entertained you. Suggest books to the club for reading. Instead of gossiping over the back fence with your neighbor, tell her/him about a book you recently read. Oh, I guess people don’t talk over the back fence much anymore but, again, there’s always the grocery store or the beauty shop or the bank. Shoot! I’ll talk about books everywhere. (You can always text a friend.)

Without mentioning titles, I recently read a Lesley A. Diehl book and really enjoyed it. Someone recommended Angie Fox. I tried her Southern Ghost Hunter Mysteries and now I’m hooked. I’ve also read Dorothy Bodoin, F.M. Meredith and Wendell Thomas recently. I very seldom read westerns, but I tried one of Andrew McBride’s books and wasn’t disappointed. These are authors whose books were on my To Be Read list and I finally got to them. I’m currently reading an Amy Reade book and enjoying it. There are so many other authors I’d like to mention, but for now I’ll keep it to recent reads.

Okay, I just started some buzz about seven authors. In previous posts I’ve mentioned authors whose work I’ve enjoyed, and I’ll continue to do so in the future.

By the way, readers can attend many of the writers’ conferences, and many do. They’re a great place for networking and meeting writers and other readers. And they’re another place to create some buzz.

The bottom line is I don’t have any surefire way to create buzz, but hopefully this post will start a few people talking and spreading Word-of-Mouth Disease. I hope no one finds a cure for it.

Spread some of your own buzz. Share the author’s name and the title of a book you’ve read recently and really enjoyed. Who’s got you buzzing?

Until next time, have a great week and start a little buzzing.

CLICK HERE to visit Marja McGraw’s website

CLICK HERE for a quick trip to Amazon.com

Someone recently asked me which of the books I’ve written were my favorites. It was a toss up. Both are Sandi Webster mysteries. My answer? Old Murders Never Die and  

One Adventure Too Many. One takes you to an abandoned ghost town and one will take you on a trip with eccentric relatives and you'll find a body in the forest. Just thought I’d mention it.