Sisters in Crime

Saturday I went to the San Joaquin chapter of Sisters in Crime that meets in Fresno. I was one of the founding members of that chapter and try to go as often as possible.

Over the years they've had a wonderful array of speakers, many authors, but also D.A.s, the County Coroner who showed us slides of the most gruesome murders, one of the investigators on the O.J. Simpson murder case who brought along Nicole Simpson's autopsy report, various police officers, detectives, P.I.s, a female Police Chief, narc officers, and so on. I've gleaned lots of information from these talks and used some in my mysteries.

One time we went on a field trip to the airport to see the police helicopter and the sheriff's helicopter. We also heard many exciting tales about crimes they've stopped. Once the helicopter chased a motorcyclists, landed and made the arrest. The officer who was showing us around asked me to write a fiction story centered around him. If I'd lived in Fresno I would've taken him up on it--and unfortunately this was long before emailing was such a common practice.

This last Saturday there were two guest speakers at the meeting, retired police officer Denny Griffin who is now an author and has written mysteries and also the history of law enforcement in Las Vegas which led to him writing about Frank Culotta, an infamous Chicago mobster who also operated in Vegas. (Think Casino, the movie.)

With him was reformed gangster, Henry Hill of GoodFella fame. Ray Liotta played Henry in the film by that name.

I sat next to Henry during the lunch and I can tell you that he's a most charming man and after listening to his speech, he's led a fascinating (albeit scary) life, from gangster to informant to being in the witness protection program. He also served time in several California prisons also in protective custody. Besides writing GoodFella he also wrote a GoodFella CookBook and is writing another about his life.

You can see and hear part of their speeches here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOJCdIssQQU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFtqZQTA8VE

Certainly made for an interesting day.

Marilyn
a.k.a. F. M. Meredith

Killer Career

Sometimes I think my secretarial career is killing me, but thank God I have my writing career to fall back on. Right now I'd like to write full-time, but can't afford to give up my day job and follow my passion.

Julie McGuire, the lady lawyer in my new mystery, Killer Career, can afford to do so, but other obstacles stand in her way. One's her mentor, the psychotic best-selling mystery author, Tyler Jensen. The other's her best friend and law partner, Dade Donovan, who thinks she's got a screw loose for wanting to abandon her lucrative law career. Of course, both guys are jealous as hell of each other. Also, there's the matter of some unexplained murders going on.

Can Julie safely make the transition? How many people will die in the process?

You'll find out when my new mystery gets published, which should be some time this summer.

What about you? Do you write full time? Would you like to? Please share.

It's a Mystery...

...that my head is still attached to the rest of me.

Apologies for late posting - I'd posted last week and failed to notice that today was the first Sunday of the month. I suspect I missed a board meeting about guest posts, since I just realized all the posts last week WERE guest posters. Which means...oh, heck, it means I'm overworked, confused and need to take more gingko biloba herbs for my poor smoking brain pan...

Being a writer is a tricky thing (or 'tricksy', if you're Gollum) in that there are so many things attached to the job other than writing. This isn't even taking into consideration day jobs, which so many writers, published or not, have to maintain to do things like pay their rent. If you've been a regular visitor to this blog or any other blog on writing, you've no doubt read about the trials and tribulations of publicity and marketing, which has become more and more of a 'do it yourself' thing over the years. Nowadays, unless you're Stephen King, Dan Brown or any of the other airport bookstore rack authors, you will have to put massive amounts of time into pushing your own work, even with a larger publisher. It's just the way things are.

Some writers thrive on the marketing side of things - I personally love speaking engagements and library panels. I don't mind the online social networking - sites like Facebook and Twitter, not to mention the blogosphere, make the job a lot easier if you can resist the maelstrom-like time suck that can happen. One 25 Random Things About Me tag or meme is an hour or two of my day that I choose to spend writing, thank you. In theory I'm all over things like that because it's fun to learn things about my friends and fellow authors. In reality, I don't have time.

The last month I've been setting up a blog book tour for 11 authors from Ravenous Romance (I'm one of the authors) to help publicize Ravenous, a relatively new e-publisher, and my fellow authors who've bravely joined me on this whirlwind visit through cyberspace. I thought it would be relatively simple, having done two of my own blog tours for Murder for Hire.

Hah. Hah hah. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!! Yes, this is the sort of laughter that rises into a maniacal scream.

Time suck anyone?

Without boring you with the tedious details, I have put in a good 20 hours of my free time setting up this tour and if I ever make noises about doing something like this again, please feel free to whack me upside the head. I think overall the work will be worth it and I don't think anyone's done a blog book tour with so many authors at one time. Maybe something for the Guinness Book of World Records. If I have any hair left after tearing so much of it out trying to coordinate this, I'll look at it as a good thing. If not, let me me an object lesson to any of you planning your own tours. Ultimately, it's a good example of the time marketing and publicity can take if you're trying to do it right.

Okay, and if you're mildly insane.

Women Serial Killers

by Jean Henry Mead

We rarely hear about female serial killers. They usually maintain a lower profile than their male counterparts, and they’re generally more efficient, according to Sean Mactire's book, Malicious Intent. They’re also just as lethal. Mactire lists them in four categories: black widows, nurses, terrorists and assassins.

Black widows murder their own husbands and children, as well as other relatives. They’ve also been known to kill their employees and tenants. Remember the Sacramento landlady who planted her boarders instead of flowers? And the film, "Arsenic and Old Lace"?

Nurses are the most prolific serial killers, Mactire says, because of their unlimited opportunities to murder without detection. Many consider themselves angels of mercy. Terrorists, on the other hand, kill for political reasons while assassins murder for money. The latter categories have increased in numbers at an alarming rate.

Body counts average 8-14 victims, higher than the male serial killer’s tally of 8-11, and they’ve been known to kill for as long as 30 years. The average age of FSKs is 32, and they’re intelligent. In fact, most are white, middle to upper class women. Surprisingly, they’re not only nurses, but debutantes, housewives, farmers, waitresses, college students, business owners, housekeepers and career criminals.

Women murderers have been recorded throughout history, but none more frequently than during the Roman era. Prior to the advent of Christianity, women held positions of near equality with men and, in matriarchal societies, even higher because their wisdom and skills were considered superior. When emerging western societies gradually eliminated women’s influence and power, the murder rate increased. During the ninth through eleventh centuries in Normandy, poison was known as the “widow maker” because it was frequently used by disgruntled wives, who preferred widowhood to divorce. Poisons still account for half the murders committed by FSKs in this country today. We'll never know how many.

The primary reason female killers have escaped attention is that society’s perception of women is one of caretakers and nurturers. Many find it difficult to believe that women are capable of murder, other than an impromptu domestic killing. Known FSKs are few because they’re almost impossible to detect. They’re quiet killers and usually don't take part in wild killing sprees unless they’re suffering from severe psychosis.

Serial killers, regardless of gender, prefer to prey on the weak and helpless: children, elderly women, and hospitalized patients, but they’ve also been known to kill politicians, policemen, hitchhikers and landlords. Many have killed husbands for their insurance payoffs. One black widow killed a number of her husbands with stewed prunes generously seasoned with rat poison. When she ran out of husbands, she poisoned her mother, sisters, grandson and nephew. By then she had probably run out of prunes.

Getting Into the Grit of Your Story by Gina Panettieri -- Reprise

Note: Gina Panettieri posted this article on April 1, but because of fears of a worm that was set to waken up on that day, many people may have stayed away from the internet and missed it. Therefore, we're repeating the article today, but because we want to have new content everyday, I have included a short article on finding an agent at the end. -- Mark

I can always tell the difference when an author’s done first-hand research in writing a mystery or true crime. Whether the writer’s knowledge comes from reading a newspaper account or from a face-to-face interview with a witness or survivor. Clearer still is when the author’s sat across a bolted-down table from a killer and seen insanity, or delusion, or even a frightening, disarming charm ooze across. But all too often, I find myself scrawling in the margins of a manuscript I’m reading ‘it feels like the author’s info only comes from other writers’ work’.

We’re all too familiar with the editor’s plea for ‘something fresh’. My own ‘wish list’ is to learn something from reading your work I could not have learned anywhere else, and to be taken somewhere (mentally, emotionally, psychologically) that I’ve never been before. What might surprise many writers is that those objectives can be accomplished even when covering familiar and well-trod paths.

A client of mine, Ron Franscell (www.ronfranscell.com) tells me Texas journalists have a term, ‘caliche dust’, named for the gritty alkaline dust carried on the wind down there, settling on and in everything. It’s also used to describe a level of depth of detail, of knowledge and attention, that can transport a story from simple reporting of facts to true story-telling. Ron certainly had ‘good caliche dust’ on his work in The Darkest Night (St. Martin’s Press, 2008), when he spent a cold, black night huddled on the steep walls of a river canyon beneath a bridge outside Casper, Wyoming, hoping to gain some insight into the terror his childhood neighbor must have felt as she clung to those same rocks some thirty years earlier, battered, freezing, waiting for dawn and not knowing if the light would bring rescue, or her waiting killers back to finish the work they’d begun when they’d hurled her and her baby sister from the trestle a hundred feet above. It’s the type of insight a writer only gains with first-hand research.

As a writer, you must never rely on images from television, movies or current fiction to be a source of accurate information. Want to learn how a victim of a violent assault might react? Interview crime survivors, emergency room staff, psychologists, and hotline workers. Want to get a feel for courtroom action if you’re not an attorney yourself? Sit in, often, on different judges, different types of cases, in different settings, as well as interviewing legal professionals. Make notes of small details that will help you create setting and characterization, the grooves worn into the stone steps by decades of use, the fatigue of the overworked court clerk as yet more files are piled on her desk (so easy for one to slip away, to be overlooked), and ticking of the old-fashioned clock on the wall that sounds deafeningly loud in the silence before a decisive moment.

Use multiple first-hand sources. Just as a number of witnesses to an event may remember the incident differently, each source may also remember or stress a specific detail no one else observed. Attention to small details will layer on that caliche dust a writer needs to make his story stand out. It might mean a road trip to a seemingly minor setting, or a face-to-face meeting rather than a long-distance phone call, but you’ll bring away a wealth of grit and texture you would have otherwise missed.

Even in an historical piece, it’s possible to use first-hand sources to help develop a depth of authenticity. First-hand period accounts, like diaries and journals, and even information gleaned from archived copies of period publications and even commercial catalogs (Sears & Roebuck is an amazing time capsule), will help establish details of your characters’ lives. But don’t stop digging simply because you’ve located the answer to a question you had. Successful writers often gather and study ten times the amount of research materials they eventually use in their stories, and that depth of knowledge and understanding subtly enriches and educates the work, and often becomes the grist and inspiration for future projects.

Never shortchange your story, or yourself, by relying exclusively on someone else’s footwork. In seeking first-hand knowledge, you’ll bring a fresh perspective to a story (your own!) that will make all the difference.


My Five Steps to Finding an Agent by Mark Troy

Step 1. Write a great book. This should go without saying, but I am always surprised when I meet writers who are looking for an agent before finishing their book. Not only should the book be finished, it should be the best you can make it.

Step 2. Write a killer query. For a light-hearted but informative article on query letters, see Nathan Bransford's blog,

Step 3. Compile a list of agents. Helen Ginger has some good suggestions for compiling your list. Other sources of agents are Agent Query and Jeff Herman's guide to literary agents.

Step 4. Send queries in batches of 10. Revise your query letter until three or four out of ten yield requests for more material. Now you know the query is effective, do the same with the requests for partials.

Step 5. Don't give up. You might have to contact 100 agents, but persistence will pay off. Look on each rejection as an opportunity to revise the book and make it better.

INTRODUCING GUEST BLOGGER PJ NUNN

By Earl Staggs, her biggest fan


Ask around the writing community who’s the go-to girl if you want to publicize your book and yourself, and you’re sure to hear the name PJ Nunn and her company, BreakThrough Promotions. Visit her website at www.breakthroughpromotions.com and you’ll see many familiar names among her clients. When I invited her to be a guest blogger, she asked, “What should I talk about?” I suggested, “Why Earl Staggs is the most talented writer on the planet.” Instead, she decided to talk about how she got into the publicist business, how she goes about it, and passes on some great tips for authors. Even though she ignored my suggestion, I still love her to pieces and so will you.

And now, since she does such a great job telling you about herself, how she became a successful publicist and how she has helped so many authors become successful, the only introduction I have to make is. . .

. . .here’s PJ.

*****

Fifteen years ago I’m not all that sure I’d even heard of a publicist. I’m sure I had no thoughts of becoming one. Some days I still wonder how I ended up here!

I started out in pre-med school, determined to get my MD. I got sidetracked and got the proverbial MRS degree instead and started a family. Five children later, after building a reasonably satisfying career as a high school teacher and then principal, I branched out into working with the local police department and serving on the County Child Welfare Board. From there, I decided to go back to college and a few years later, completed my Masters degree in counseling psychology. Some transition, eh?

After moving back to Dallas, I secured a position teaching on two campuses of the Dallas County Community College District and, in my off hours, completed my first mystery novel and plunged into the world of writing online where I made lots of good friends, including the incorrigible and ever-supportive Earl Staggs. If I remember correctly, we met for the first time in person at a Boston Market restaurant and we’ve been fast friends ever since.

When circumstances precipitated me pausing in my teaching career to stay home and care for one of my children, I needed to replace that teaching income so I started freelance writing. I love writing – always have – but didn’t like the constant querying and deadlines. I made pretty good money, but it always seemed like feast or famine.

One afternoon, a friend who was trying to arrange a book tour for her newly released novel expressed her discouragement at the response she kept getting when calling booksellers. I offered to try and set something up for her. One phone call was all it took. Thinking it must’ve been beginner’s luck, I tried again. Another call, another signing on the schedule. I found the whole concept fascinating!

A couple of months later, after a lot of research, I launched BreakThrough Promotions and the rest, as they say, is history. My first month open for business, I started with a single client, and ended the month with nine. I worked alone. Today, I have 87 active clients on my list, but the numbers change almost daily as we finish packages for some and begin new campaigns for others. And I definitely don’t work alone anymore!

One of the most frequently asked questions I’ve had over the years is What can a publicist do for me that I can’t do for myself? My answer is pretty much the same as it’s always been.

There’s not a lot I can do for an author that a savvy author couldn’t do for himself. The difference is usually time and desire. In the ten plus years I’ve been doing this, I’ve built up an extensive database of contacts of all kinds all over the country and some that are out of the country. I have a working relationship with thousands, many of whom we’ve worked with for years. Because they know my name and recognize my email address, I’m less likely to wind up in the circular file or spam filters. Because I work in the industry every day, I know a lot of the ins and outs that many authors don’t know. Could they learn them? Sure. But it takes time.

And let’s face it, it’s easier to make a good presentation when you’re talking about someone else’s work. It just doesn’t come across the same if I tell you: "Hey, you should have me on your program because my book is great and I’d make a fabulous guest!" I’m much more readily received if I can call and say, "Hey, I represent Jane Doe and I think she’d be the perfect guest for your program!" I’m sure you get the drift.

I don’t do the same thing for every client, though. There are some authors who are great at setting up their own store and library events. Chester Campbell is one. He’s perfectly at ease doing that and does it well. Why pay me to do what he doesn’t mind doing? But there are other authors who are totally uncomfortable setting up signing events. They can use my help. Many have publishers who’ll set up store events but don’t have time to pursue media (it can be incredibly time consuming just to catch the right person on the phone). So they do the one and I do the other. Others are ok talking with broadcast media, but get frustrated trying to work with print journalists. Every area has its own quirks and idiosyncrasies.

The important thing is to make sure you’re covering all the bases and that you staff your weaknesses. Do what comes easiest to you and get help for what doesn’t. A professional publicist can be a good thing, but maybe all you need is to hire a marketing student from your local community college. Or even a mature high school student to do your mailing and some light phone work. I love what I do and I’m good at it, but it’s not rocket science. And while I think there’s probably something I could do to help just about every author, I’m in it for the love of the game and am happy to help whenever and wherever I can.

A few tips I’ve picked up along the way:

• Every author needs a good, professional headshot. Too many make do with snapshots and it can cause some doors to be shut to them.
• If an author thinks he knows all he needs to know about promotion, he’s probably wrong.
• A professional website is vital to an author hoping to build a career.
• Many authors wait too late to get started promoting their new books. Twelve months before release is not too early to get started.
• There are many myths about book promotion that are prevalent in online venues.
• When in doubt, ask a professional. Or two or three.
• A background in product marketing or advertising doesn’t mean expertise in book promotion.
• If you can’t enjoy doing it, you’re probably not doing it as well as it should be done.
• What works for one doesn’t always work for another.
• Never judge success or failure from a single event; promotion is always a cumulative process.
• Media blitzes are not very effective in the long run. They happen fast and are soon forgotten for the next big splash. Slow and steady exposure is what creates name recognition.
• A campaign may be complete, but effective promotion never ends. There’s always another reader to entice.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and questions. Best of luck to you in promoting your novels!

PJ Nunn 469-245-6202
BreakThrough Promotions www.breakthroughpromotions.com
There's a Dead Guy blog http://heydeadguy.typepad.com/heydeadguy/
Criminal Pursuits www.criminalpursuits.com

Getting Into the Grit of Your Story by Gina Panettieri

I can always tell the difference when an author’s done first-hand research in writing a mystery or true crime. Whether the writer’s knowledge comes from reading a newspaper account or from a face-to-face interview with a witness or survivor. Clearer still is when the author’s sat across a bolted-down table from a killer and seen insanity, or delusion, or even a frightening, disarming charm ooze across. But all too often, I find myself scrawling in the margins of a manuscript I’m reading ‘it feels like the author’s info only comes from other writers’ work’.

We’re all too familiar with the editor’s plea for ‘something fresh’. My own ‘wish list’ is to learn something from reading your work I could not have learned anywhere else, and to be taken somewhere (mentally, emotionally, psychologically) that I’ve never been before. What might surprise many writers is that those objectives can be accomplished even when covering familiar and well-trod paths.

A client of mine, Ron Franscell (www.ronfranscell.com) tells me Texas journalists have a term, ‘caliche dust’, named for the gritty alkaline dust carried on the wind down there, settling on and in everything. It’s also used to describe a level of depth of detail, of knowledge and attention, that can transport a story from simple reporting of facts to true story-telling. Ron certainly had ‘good caliche dust’ on his work in The Darkest Night (St. Martin’s Press, 2008), when he spent a cold, black night huddled on the steep walls of a river canyon beneath a bridge outside Casper, Wyoming, hoping to gain some insight into the terror his childhood neighbor must have felt as she clung to those same rocks some thirty years earlier, battered, freezing, waiting for dawn and not knowing if the light would bring rescue, or her waiting killers back to finish the work they’d begun when they’d hurled her and her baby sister from the trestle a hundred feet above. It’s the type of insight a writer only gains with first-hand research.

As a writer, you must never rely on images from television, movies or current fiction to be a source of accurate information. Want to learn how a victim of a violent assault might react? Interview crime survivors, emergency room staff, psychologists, and hotline workers. Want to get a feel for courtroom action if you’re not an attorney yourself? Sit in, often, on different judges, different types of cases, in different settings, as well as interviewing legal professionals. Make notes of small details that will help you create setting and characterization, the grooves worn into the stone steps by decades of use, the fatigue of the overworked court clerk as yet more files are piled on her desk (so easy for one to slip away, to be overlooked), and ticking of the old-fashioned clock on the wall that sounds deafeningly loud in the silence before a decisive moment.

Use multiple first-hand sources. Just as a number of witnesses to an event may remember the incident differently, each source may also remember or stress a specific detail no one else observed. Attention to small details will layer on that caliche dust a writer needs to make his story stand out. It might mean a road trip to a seemingly minor setting, or a face-to-face meeting rather than a long-distance phone call, but you’ll bring away a wealth of grit and texture you would have otherwise missed.

Even in an historical piece, it’s possible to use first-hand sources to help develop a depth of authenticity. First-hand period accounts, like diaries and journals, and even information gleaned from archived copies of period publications and even commercial catalogs (Sears & Roebuck is an amazing time capsule), will help establish details of your characters’ lives. But don’t stop digging simply because you’ve located the answer to a question you had. Successful writers often gather and study ten times the amount of research materials they eventually use in their stories, and that depth of knowledge and understanding subtly enriches and educates the work, and often becomes the grist and inspiration for future projects.

Never shortchange your story, or yourself, by relying exclusively on someone else’s footwork. In seeking first-hand knowledge, you’ll bring a fresh perspective to a story (your own!) that will make all the difference.

Gina Panettieri has twenty years experience as a literary agent. She is President of Talcott Notch Literary, a full service literary agency representing Chick Lit, True Crime, Mystery, Horror, Commercial Fiction, Western, Historical Fiction, Thrillers/Suspense, Children's, Adventure and Middle Grade. In nonfiction, Gina is particularly interested in seeing parenting, career, and relationship books. Visit the agency webiste at http://www.talcottnotch.net or see the agency listing in Publishers Marketplace (http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/members/wynterwood/)