Good meeting! I didn’t get too, too much out of the humor workshop, but it was definitely interesting. She had a few good tips, including a suggestion to plan a rewrite for your characters to ‘flush them out with humor’. Julia London herself does three passes. Once for the hero/heroine. Once for the secondary characters. And a third time for the romance plot. She then gave us a handout with a basic paragraph. We were supposed to rewrite it and add wit (finding the humor in people), then repeat and add satire (finding humor in life or the world), and once again to add humor (poking fun at yourself). I didn’t catch whose definitions those were. Some interesting results.

Disclaimer: Julia London was speaking very quickly for the duration of the second workshop, and I did my best to capture the info as accurately as possible. If something here is incorrect, it was unintentional.

The second workshop was really sort of fascinating, if inconclusive. She had polled eleven best-selling romance authors (all but one NY Times) as to what sort of promotion techniques they had used and what they’d found to be successful. She covered printed materials, the Internet, public events, publicists, PA’s, etc.

Some of the info came as no surprise. Pretty much everyone felt that websites were the best tool an author can have, and that they should be updated regularly with new, fresh content. Ooops. It’s just that I don’t have much going on as an ‘author’. That’s why I have my blog.

Bookmarks and postcards were sort of a mixed bag as were newsletters. Pretty much it was personal preference. Some authors did each and felt strongly about it. Julia London did a virtual blogging tour and felt that it was a tremendous promotional opportunity but too exhausting to repeat regularly. She had also recently done a book trailer relatively inexpensively and had found that her site hits doubled in a month long (or some such) period. Plus, both her publisher and Waldenbooks posted the trailer. Booksignings were essentially billed as a necessary evil, paid ads were encouraged, particularly in Romantic Times Bookclub if you or your publisher can afford it, and if not, Romance Sells was touted as a very reasonable alternative.

Mollie Smith, who is Jenny Crusie’s ‘Girl Friday’, suggested a ‘cross-contest’, whereby you find someone who is writing on your level, in the same genre, and host a contest with each other’s book as the giveaway. This builds your mailing list and potentially builds readership by luring in targeted readers. Also suggested was that you ask your publisher what they can do for you, because whatever you do is a drop in the bucket compared with what they can do if they’re really behind your book.

Hope that helps! Thank you Julia London (and all you best-selling authors that participated in the survey)!

I have just discovered the theraputic powers of Dove ice cream bars. I was first introduced to them in Welcome to Temptation by Jenny Crusie–they were the solution to many a problem in that book–and I don’t know why I didn’t trust such sound wisdom. (Probably because Dove bars are expensive, and I am cheap.) But today, a hellacious day, I found the little ones on sale at the grocery store and splurged. And just now, I had one each of the Cherry Royale and the Double Chocolate. Unbelievably yummy, and I feel better now, calmer, and ready to face an afternoon of editing. This just reaffirms my belief that I have so much to learn from Jenny Crusie.

In other news, I’m trekking across town tomorrow for an RWA meeting. The speaker will be best-selling author Julia London, and she plans to speak on both ‘The Art of Writing with Humor’ and ‘The Seven Hightly Effective Promotional Habits of Bestselling Authors’. Should be great. I’ll report back.

On to the editing….and perhaps one more Dove indulgence.