Do authors get homemade cardboard purses from their editors at the Big 6 publishers? I think NOT!!!!

Here at Bell Bridge we’re known for . . . okay, Deb Smith is known for . . . using any excuse to play in the glue-sticky world of home crafting. Which is why Bell Bridge authors often open perfectly businesslike-looking packages to find, tucked among official correspondence or book galleys, some beaded bracelets, photo pendants, custom bookmarks or Christmas ornaments made from dried peppers. And yet, for GODDESS OF FRIED OKRA author Jean Brashear, the Craft Goddesses had something special in mind: a GOFO purse made from cardboard, fabric, an Inkjet transfer of her cover art, and lots and lots of buttons, beads and assorted metal geejaws to hide the glue marks.

And so we present, below, THE PURSE, as modeled by the lovely Jean herself.

It has been suggested that THE PURSE may serve best as 1. a windowsill planter for some nice catnip or a cactus 2. a bird feeder 3. a doorstop 4. a weapon or 5. all of the above. 

“She rose from the ashes of her childhood to light a path for others.”

That tag line from Dolores Durando’s debut novel, BEYOND THE BOUGAINVILLEA (March 2011) echoes, in some small ways, the author’s own early 1900’s childhood on the plains of North Dakota.

Mrs. Durando didn’t live the cruel life to which Bougainvillea’s MARGE GARRITY was subjected as a girl—indeed, Mrs. Durando had a happy childhood being raised by her blacksmithing grandpa–but she does know whereof she speaks when describing the isolated and rough-hewn conditions of Dakotas life.

BEYOND THE BOUGAINVILLEA

She found her place in a turbulent era of deep passions, heartbreaking sacrifices, and grand dreams.

When scholarly, smart Mary Margaret is sixteen her father marries her off to a drunken neighbor in return for a tract of land. The year is 1929, and Mary Margaret’s childhood has already been hard as a farm girl on the desolate prairies of North Dakota. Abused and helpless, the new Mrs. “Marge” Garrity seems destined for a tragic fate.
But Marge is determined to make her life count, no matter what. Her escape from her brutal marriage takes her to California, where she struggles to survive the Great Depression and soon answers the lure of the state’s untamed northern half. There, embraced by the rough-and-ready people who built the great Ruckachucky Dam on the American River, she begins to find her true mission in life and the possibility for love and happiness with an Army Corp engineer of Cherokee Indian descent.

This vivid saga of one woman’s life in the early decades of a turbulent century is told from the heart of a true storyteller in the grand tradition of women’s sagas.

Look for BEYOND THE BOUGAINVILLEA at Amazon.com and elsewhere in trade paperback and ebook. PDF review copies now available. Email Editor Deb Smith at editor@bellebooks.com

Is the Novelist Work Not Valued, or Under Valued?

(Originally posted on Kat’s blog, at http://bit.ly/hMskPr)

Kat Magendie is a poet, novelist and Co-Publish of The Rose and Thorn literary magazine. She’s written three novels published by Bell Bridge, with a fourth on the way. Her TENDER GRACES was a 2010 bestseller in ebook at Kindle. Be sure to view her “Reading Nekkid” video at the end of this column.

And now, here’s Kat’s

Gentle Rant:

It’s not magic . . .

How much do you pay for a haircut? Let’s say your stylist cuts your hair in about 30ish minutes, and you return to have it re-cut every 4-10 weeks depending on you. 

What about going out to dinner? Or to lunch? Or a Supreme Latte with extra supreme? Keeping in mind that once you eat/drink, it’s gone, and to have that experience again, you must buy more food/drink by opening up your wallet again and again and again.

Do you like manicures/pedicures? Do you like massages? Do you have a personal trainer? Is there something you collect? 

And of all those things, and the et ceteras not mentioned, that you purchase and enjoy, do you ever expect to get them for free, or for the Service Provider to do their work for deep discounts because, just because?

Of course you don’t.

So why is it when authors talk about money they feel uncomfortable, as if they are embarrassed to even consider the idea of making money from Their Craft? 

Is a writer’s work not considered Work? 

A stylist cuts our hair and we shell  out the money knowing that we’ll have to return to have it cut again and again and again for the same results we hope, but do we ask the stylist to give us a cut rate? Do we ask the stylist to cut our hair for free? We’d not dream of doing that—because we Value the Service.

Somehow being a novelist isn’t Valued as a Service. You can buy a book from Amazon, or your favorite bookseller, or an e-reader, (and many times at discounts), and you

can enjoy that book and the feeling it gives you as many times as you want. You can lend your book (and one day, or now, e-reader books if I understand right) to a friend or relative and the author receives no royalty on that. 

You can sell your book to someone and the author receives no royalty on that. The author receives his/her one-time royalty when a book is purchased and that one-time royalty is a very small percentage of what the book sells for. Very small. On e-readers, authors make a bit more percentage because over-head costs aren’t as great. 

But what if in some alternate universe an author made most every dime of their book’s cost, which they never would by the way, are they somehow unworthy of it?

An author takes months (some longer) writing their book, then they must rewrite and rewrite, then they may go through rejection and uncertainty, then when they have that contract, their work is not done—more editing, more waiting, more stress. When the book is published, their work begins again: marketing, promotion, personal events, etc etc etc—and many things the author pays for out of their own pockets. Then they must then create more work, and the cycle begins again. 

Through all of this, the author does not know if his/her book will be loved or hated or ignored or somewhere in between; he she does not know if it will sell well or will not sell well. 

It won’t matter how hard the author worked, how much money he/she spent, he/she never knows what his/her paycheck will be. And, all the while, he/she must cringe in a corner while people tell him/her that they don’t want to spend money on books, or they want to spend very little money on books, and why should they have to spend money on books?

Anyone who goes into the Novelist business to make money should not go into the novelist business. There are simply too many unknowns. There is a lot of work, a lot of stress, a lot of rejection, and there’s a lot of feeling that your work is Not Of Value—imagine going to work every day and doing the best danged job you can and your boss quibbles with you over your salary and makes you feel as if you should be giving your work away for free or whatever he decides that day to pay you based on whatever he’s feeling that day about you compared to some other worker, because your work is Not Valued. 

In matters of art and the heart, it’s hard to place monetary values, but frankly, we have to. Novelists have to make a living, too, and for the Novelist to feel guilty for hoping his/her works sells so that he/she can pay the bills or contribute to the household makes this business seem as if it’s more a Hobby than Real Live Work.

Is it because unlike the stylist or the restaurant worker or the oil tycoon or the actor/actress or the football player or the ice cream man we can do our work in our pajamas tucked in our little houses? You can’t see us working? It looks like lots-o-fun? It’s “easy” or “anyone can do it” – well, even the person who digs a hole gets a paycheck, and just about all of us can dig a hole, right?

What is it that separates the Novelist’s work from everyone else’s work? What is it about matters of art and the heart that makes the Work not valued?

Or is it because the writer, the novelist, does not teach people to value his/her work? Did we start it all by being apologetic about what we do or for wanting our work to Sell like a Product. 

Do we not value our own work? Is it because many times we readily admit we’d do it all for free because we love it so much? It’s all we ever wanted to do? We are begging someone anyone to just read our work and love us, please please please just love us?

What do you think?

Kat creates wonderfully fun  videos! Take a look!

A gorgeous collector's edition

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the (start of) the Civil War. Commemorations, discussions, and lots of re-enactments are being scheduled by history buffs and scholars. We’re pleased to contribute this special project to the mix: GONE: A Photographic Plea for Preservation. Memphis architect and photographer Nell Dickerson (www.nelldickerson.com) combined her fine-art photographs of antebellum ruins with “Pillar of Fire,” her late cousin Shelby Foote’s acclaimed Civil War short story about the burning of a home by Union Troops.

The combination resulted in this beautiful coffee-table hardcover book (with dust jacket and deluxe case.) You can pre-order now at Amazon.com. The book goes on sale in mid-April.

Nell is tentatively scheduled to contribute photos to a New York Times (online edition) feature this spring. We’ve got our fingers crossed. I’ll be posting some of the interior pix as we get closer to publication. Reviewers can email me (editor@bellebooks.com) for access to a special full-color pdf of the book.

From Alicia Rasley, award-winning author of Bell Bridge Book’s new Kindle bestseller THE YEAR SHE FELL:

Taking it easy in the Big Easy!
The husband and I decided to escape the depths of the winter in New

Alicia's current bestseller!

Orleans. Great choice. There’s music everywhere here, and I don’t mean some kid singing along to Lady Gaga on his IPod. Our apartment is halfway between Bourbon St. (the tourist music center) and Frenchmen St. (the local music center), and every night, all we have to do is walk up and down and we hear great music. It’s not just Dixieland. There’s a lot of blues, and something they call “Swamp Rock,” and traditional jazz too. Last night, we passed one of those magical houses with the iron balcony (don’t get me started on the amazing architecture) and from the courtyard came the sound of a parade band practicing. Yep, tuba and all, they were getting ready for the Mardi Gras season. More than crawdads, more than beignets, more even than to-go plastic cocktail cups, New Orleans is the music, and I’m thankful so many musicians came back after Katrina.

Alicia is a RITA winner for her historicals

It’s a different pace down here. Now I grew up in the South (well, Virginia– we thought it was the South :), and I know all about slow-talking Southern men. Still, the guy at the tourist booth in Jackson Square won a prize for molasses mouth. I went in there to ask where I might find (I can’t help it!) a supermarket, one with wide aisles and seven kinds of root beer (just like back home). No such place, not in the French Quarter. But there is a fine little grocery… well, I was on tenterhooks, waiting for him to look down at my map and direct me there. No, first he had to tell me all about the store’s origins (as an A&P) and its purchase by a local family, and a couple (admittedly interesting) stories about this family, and a bit of history of the building (once a speakeasy/bordello, but you know, I get the idea ALL the buildings in the French Quarter used to be one or the other), and finally my yankee impatience won out– “And the address of the store is?” He heaved a sigh (a long, slow one), and pointed down to the map. “Walk here along Jackson Square. Sit down for a spell and listen to the music. You hear me? Sit down and listen to the music.” I meekly assented, and only then did he trace his pen the half-block on my map to the corner where the grocery store was.

And I did what he said. I sat down in Jackson Square and listened to the (free!) street musicians, including one who sounded like a cross between Otis Redding and BB King (divine, that is), and sang standing alongside a dummy in a wheelchair (“$1 for a photo with Ralph and his chair!”– New Orleans humor sometimes baffles). And when he was done flirting musically with every passing ladyI got up and followed the path to the grocery store.

So anyway, when I’m not comparing the relative potency of the Hurricane vs. the Swamp Daquiri, I’m plotting a book where an uptight northerner is assigned here for a few months, and she meets (of course) a laidback musician, and while she’s trying to teach him public relations and how to brand yourself on social media, he’s trying to teach her how to do the Zydeco Cha-cha, to find pleasure in something other than “a job well-done,” and to eat a beignet without getting powdered sugar all over her business suit.

It’s been an eventful few months at my house. My Bell Bridge book, The Year She Fell, came out just a few weeks after my husband’s first book (a memoir about his philanthropy and mountain climbing in Nepal). For such a literary couple, we’re pretty un-temperamental, though he keeps threatening to get us matching berets (to be worn, I deem, only in Paris). He gave me a Kindle for Christmas, just in time to see my own book beat Jane Austen on the interestingly named “free Kindle bestseller list” during a week when the Kindle version was offered for free. (But mine wasn’t the “bestselling” free novel– curse you, Sherlock Holmes!) I should take up smoking, for surely that’s a compulsion easier to give up than checking the Amazon rank 25 times a day.

If you want to abet my compulsion, here’s the info about my book:
The Year She Fell, by Alicia Rasley Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/2aygep7
Bell Bridge Books, November 2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SLxXIhch00
If you click on that youtube URL, you’ll see the book video, with original mandolin music by my genius nephew, Lucas Hamelman. I wonder if any of the Dixieland bands here need a mandolin player?

Back to normal (teaching, snow, parkas, all-weather tires) in two weeks, but until then, laissez les bon temps roulez!

Alicia Rasley

A big blog welcome to Kat Magendie, bestselling author of TENDER GRACES, SECRET GRACES and now SWEETIE.  Her books are lyrical, evocative Southern lit-fiction.  The Kindle edition of  SWEETIE is currently perched high on the literary fiction bestseller list at Amazon.com.  And now, here’s Kat:

She held out her hope like rose.

Teen Bullies, Outcasts, Prejudice and SWEETIE

 Whenever Bellebooks/Bell Bridge Books sends my novels out to the world (bless you BBs!), something hidden is always revealed—because of my readers. You’d think I’d know all the inside and outside and in the nooks and crannies of my work, but this is not the case. Readers will see what has not occurred to me or has not been revealed to me, and then they will open my eyes wider and brighter.

 I knew SWEETIE’s themes of belonging, place/displacement, home, friendship, loyalty, and family—topics I return to time and again. But what I never thought was that Sweetie would help readers with their own painful memories of childhood/adolescent angst, loneliness, being bullied, and those awful feelings that one is a misfit in a world of Those Who Fit. As sophisticated as we think we have become, we still have problems with compartmentalizing on the “playground,” in schools, in social networking, in neighborhoods, at work, and sometimes even within families.

Narrator Melissa remembers torment by the Circle Girls (Beatrice and Deidra were the head Circle Girls. They picked the girls to be The Circle, and the ones to be inside of it. It was never good to have their attention until you knew which one . . .) as she says, “What society of children could resist tormenting the walking cliché from daytime movies?—I was always the awkward new girl in town. One would hope I brought that cliché to the limit, somehow growing to be beautiful and showing them all, but I was at best unremarkable, average . . . .” And Sweetie says, “Not nothing average about you, Miss-Lissa,” because she sees deep into the full burning heart of Melissa.

The bestselling first book in The Graces series

Kathryn

There is a troubled boy who, along with his Posse, bullies Sweetie and Melissa. But it is again Sweetie, with her wonderful insight, who understands T.J.’s bullying behavior, “Nobody deserves to be treated like a dirty worm under a dirty foot by they’s own kin. T. J.’s mean but his daddy’s a long-sight meaner. Guess his daddy teaches him how to be.” Sweetie, who is scarred and strange and mis-fitting sees the world with wonder and generosity—we could all use a Sweetie in our lives.

A humbling but incredibly cool thing is mail I receive from teachers and from parents. Teachers have said how through the years children like Melissa and Sweetie have come to their classroom, and the Sweetie novel not only resonates with their experiences, but with the teacher’s own memories of childhood awkwardness, friendship, with their own mothers and fathers, with fitting in and filling out, and even first crushes.

And mothers pass my book(s) on to their daughters to read to inspire discussion about just how hard it is to be a kid, an adolescent/pre-teen/teenager, no matter if it is the 1960s, 70s, or 2011—we all have been 11, 12, 13, and we all have searched to find Identity without being Different—oh to celebrate our differences!

What more could an author hope for than to have teachers, mothers, fathers, and other readers relay to her how her books promote discussion—to those who remember a time when they felt as if they’d never fit in, or never rise above a bully’s harsh words and taunting, or felt ugly or weird or fat or scared or skinny or . . . just different. (Melissa: “I think it would be great never to feel pain.” Sweetie: “I reckon that’s what most would think.”) We do rise above it, things do become better, we grow up and out and beyond—we learn empathy, a great gift. As Melissa says, we are beautiful biological wonders; scientific anomalies. No one can take away our joy if we only believe in the magic of our own beautiful Selves.

When I write a book, I never set out to teach a lesson, or write something that will promote discussion. I just write what the character experiences, digging deep into the core, the heart of the character, peeling away layers (except those that must remain). I listen and I relay. It is you all, you readers, who take my work to the highest level, opening up my world and their world to even greater possibilities.

Thank you for reading with such care. Thank you for telling me your stories. Thank you for your trust. And in return, I promise to do the best I can—to write my stories with a full and burning heart. As Sweetie says, “All a person can do is give it all they’s got. Right?” Right, Sweetie . . . that’s right.

—–

Kat lives in Maggie Valley, North Carolina, in a little cove at Killian Knob with two dogs, a ghost dog, a GMR (Good Man Roger, her husband,) a mysterious shadowman, and many wild critters. She is co-editor/publisher of the Rose & Thorn. Visit her at kathyrnmagendie.com, follow her on twitter @katmagendie, on Facebook, or  her blog www.tendergraces.blogspot.com.