All about me(me) and blogging

Straight From Hel tagged me to participate in a meme about blogging and I simply couldn’t refuse because I’m so completely sold on the idea. Thanks for choosing me, Helen. Here are my answers to the five questions:

1. How long have you been blogging?

Only about a year. The online youngsters don't call me Old Noob for nothing!

2. What inspired you to start a blog and who are your mentors?

I loved reading good blogs even before I had my own. I have a collection I read regularly, but it wasn't until I went to the Women Writing the West Conference that a writing pal and I offered to post conference doings on their new blog so all the members could vicariously enjoy the gathering. We did and it was so easy and fun! Next, I actually started a yahoo discussion group, and just for holiday kicks, set up a 360 degree blog in that community called Queen of Christmas. Before I knew it, I had started several blogger blogs for various reasons, and suddenly I found myself reading professional blogger newsletters to get all the hot tips on improving my own sites. There's still so much to learn. I don’t know if I’d call them mentors exactly, but Chris Garrett and Yaro Starak certainly provide some excellent information to their readers.

3. Are you trying to make money online, or just doing it for fun?

I don't close the door on blogging to make money, though I hate the look of most click-the-link advertising. Visual clutter is tough on an artist’s eyes. Without question, blogs are marketing tools, whether to promote a book, a stained glass commission, the latest yarn shipment a store has received, the loveliest fused glass bowls, whatever. Everyone likes being up on the latest, and this is a simple way to impart information. There's a reason that newspapers have blogs and were first to jump on the blog bandwagon. Added content. Easy peasy added content that doesn't require high-tech knowledge. Family albums, store bulletins, town hall news - anyone could benefit from the use of a blog. Did I mention blog book tours? This one is linked to a squidoo lens for added impact.

4. What 3 things do you struggle with online?

I don't feel like I know enough yet to really have the online presence I'd like. I want a website with a shopping cart for my own products, but don't feel like I'm quite competent enough to handle that on my own. Blogs have been a nice stepping-stone in that direction.

I don't understand a lot of aspects like cloaking urls, html code, and other nitty-gritty regarding search engine optimization, but I am developing the courage and even interest in pursuing it further thanks to blogging. It's a bit like living in a foreign country. When you immerse yourself, you eventually learn the language and the practices.

Like anyone who is fascinated with the potential of the medium, I spend too much time on the internet exploring its vast horizons. It takes a bit of discipline fitting it into a normal busy life. Paradoxically, it also takes a bit of discipline to continue regular posting once the novelty has worn off a bit.

5. What 3 things do you love about being online?

First, reading the news without having to sit down with a real newspaper. Nothing gets dumped or goes up in smoke.

Second, having vast repositories of research information available at the touch of a button, including library card catalogs.

Third, connecting to communities of like-minded people via the written word. I'm out in the sticks and for the most part, feel pretty much like an alien from another galaxy. The internet connects me to kindred spirits.

I'm interested in reading what others have to say, so I'm tagging these good bloggers for their input:

Kittlog

Riehlife

Groovy's Ruminations

Community of the Land

Donna Druchunas

Ms. Karen's Place

Be sure to go read what they have to say, and bookmark their blogs which are always packed with interesting interviews, essays, tips, insights, and even recipes. Did I mention humor and good photographs? What about gorgeous standard poodles? And a very special treat for kitties and their people.

A blog book tour in retrospect

Last week we hosted Susan Wittig Albert on her first-ever virtual book tour. Susan is a long-time web aficionada who for many years has utilized various internet tools like e-letters, websites, and a marvelous Lifescapes blog of her days in the Texas Hill Country. We were curious to know her reactions to the blog book tour experience and here are her responses:

How did this experience compare to your live tours?

Much less physical effort! I could stay at home and work, instead of driving for hours, giving a couple of talks a day, sleeping in a different bed every night, eating other people’s food (not my own cooking).

Did you feel you connected to your readers?

Actually, yes, although I didn’t expect that. I received a great many email comments and notes, as well as the comments on the blogs. And since I was seeing the names/email addresses of the people who dropped in on the drawings, I got a sense of the “attendance”—that part of it, anyway. Turns out that fewer than half of the people who read the blog entries participated in the drawings.

How much work/time involved compared to a live tour?

The up-front time was actually fairly comparable. I manage my own live tours, so I choose the venues (much as I chose the bloggers, by soliciting invitations), book my own motels, do my own maps. On a live tour, I have a couple of talks and repeat them (to the point where I’m pretty sick of them when it’s over)—the prep time is minimal. On the blog tour, each stop was a different prep, most of which required maybe 2-3 hours of writing, revising, doing photos, setting up links, and so on. Also, Peggy (my wizard of a webmistress, She-Without-Whom-Nothing-Happens) clocked quite a few hours in developing the program for the drawings, setting up the tour schedule webpage, etc. The big thing that was missing: the driving! On a live tour, I usually try to book two events a day, which usually means 4-5 drive-time hours, sometimes more.

How do the tour costs ($$) compare?

Hey, how do you spell M-O-T-E-L? $100 a night? Also, gas ain’t cheap nowadays. A 10,000-mile-tour (like the one I drove, yes, me myself and I, in 2005) would probably cost around $1200 in today’s gas, plus the daily tab on the rental car (or the wear/tear on a personal car), and a couple of plane fares, getting me where I couldn’t drive. I’m a cheap date where food is concerned, though. I’m perfectly happy with McD’s salads. Sometimes publishers pick up the costs, but an author who is paying her own way is chalking up a big tab.

What do you see as the greatest advantage of the virtual tour over a live tour?

Less time on the road, more time in my own bed (with my own DH), and lower cost. The carbon footprint is distinctly smaller, which counts for plenty, seems to me.

I got to spend some quality time with nine great blog hosts (thanks, guys!). We worked out problems together, figured out what sort of post to create, and communicated—more or less successfully. My live tours are longer and more hectic, and I never feel as if I really get to know the tour hosts.

Also: I got to “meet” some blog readers who would never in the world have made the effort to attend one of my live events—people who are regular readers of the host blog, who had never heard of my/my books before. If they read the post and remembered it, they might be inclined to remember that, the next time they run across my name/book title. Or they might go to the library to pick up the book. Or even look for it on a bookstore shelf. You never know. So I think the chances of picking up a new reader may actually be higher in a blog tour than a live tour. (I have no statistics on this, so don’t hold me to it.)

Plus: When you do a live tour, it’s in-one-ear-out-the-other. People remember the event, but not what I say. Also, the audience is fixed: it’s the folks who came that night, and that’s it. On the web, the tour posts hang around for a long time. People stumble over them much later. The audience is larger than the audience that showed up at the original time of the post. That’s a big plus, seems to me.

Disadvantages?

I’ll try to be systematic about this. Forgive me.

1) Impact on the attendees. Seems to me that a reader who makes the effort to come out to a bookstore or a library or wherever to hear me is going to remember the occasion longer than someone who comes to one of the blog stops. I’m guessing here, but I think that’s probably the case.

2) Non-blogging readers. I have a great many older readers who don’t do computers and stick their fingers in their ears when they hear the word BLOG. (They think it’s an obscenity.) On live tours, I reach them through libraries, garden groups, reading groups, herb societies, and Red Hatters. I can’t reach them through a blog tour.

3) Media impact. When I do a live tour, I put some up-front effort into encouraging the tour hosts to get strong local media for the event. Usually, I have pretty good luck: newspaper coverage, some local radio (by phone), some local TV. Also, the event is promoted in the host’s newsletters and website. Even though I may see only 40-50 people at an event, it’s likely that 400-500 have seen a notice of it, read something about it, or heard about it from a friend. On last year’s tour, I did a benefit for a university alumni event. There were a couple of hundred people at the event, but 5,000+ people all over the U.S. got a mailing from the university, with the book cover/my photo/all that good stuff. You don’t get anything like that with a blog tour.

4) Book sales. Let us not forget the point of this exercise, which is to sell books. Live tours sell books—not just the books I sign/sell at the events, but the books that I sign at various local bookstores, where I’ll do drop-ins whenever I can fit them in. Signed books sell, so when I leave a stack in a bookstore, I can figure they’ll be sold eventually. Blog tours, on the other hand, are more like advertising. You’re just putting the word out there, raising awareness, getting people’s attention. You can’t measure whatever sales you might achieve.

What did you love about the Blog Book Tour?

Getting all over the web! I have a Google Alert on my name (how’s that for chutzpah?) and I was delighted to see it flashing across the sky. That’s why I did this. I think it worked.

What did you loathe about it?

Nothing, really. Oh, yes: I got really impatient when the posts weren’t up by 8 a.m. Eastern Time, as I asked. That’s because I knew that readers would be there before the posts appeared, which feels really counter-productive to me. But then, I’m a former English teacher. I’ve been known to lock the door of my classroom at two minutes after the hour. (Not quite, but almost.)

How did you track your statistics throughout the tour?

That’s hard. I had to depend on self-report (not always accurate, and a couple of bloggers forgot to tell me that they didn’t have a statistics package). But on this tour, I had two other statistics of my own: the number of people who came to the tour schedule page, and the number of people who entered the drawing for each blog event. Those are my “hard” numbers. I’ll be curious to see if my next blog tour brings in more traffic—or less.

Thanks, Susan, for giving so generously of your time and insights once again.

An interview with Susan Wittig Albert

Unlike Susan Wittig Albert, I had a most unfortunate childhood. I did not learn to read with Beatrix Potter books. I was introduced to them much later in life, when as an aspiring children’s book writer, I took a job as a gift rep selling Random House books. In the many boxes of book samples I received weekly, one held a re-print of a Beatrix Potter book. Immediately enchanted by the story, I was even more taken by the illustrations. Potter’s skill as a naturalist artist is legendary. It is her life-like imagery in completely fantastical scenarios that makes the stories so mesmerizing for children and adults alike. One truly feels transported into another world.

It was certainly another world when Beatrix made a career of her little books, first by self-publishing and soon after through her publisher, Frederick Warne & Co. Much has been written about this part of her life, but today we’ll discuss the art and book publishing from a different angle as we visit with Susan Wittig Albert, author of the recently released The Tale of Hawthorn House. This is the fourth book in The Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter series. The charming cozy mysteries for adult readers are set in the Lake District that Beatrix so loved, and features Bea with a supporting cast of real and imaginary characters.

Author Susan Wittig Albert

The Tale of Hawthorn House

Dani: Susan, most fans of Beatrix Potter know quite a bit about her life, but one question that nags is why was Beatrix so intent on publishing the books?

Susan: Well, I think most artists—people who feel they have a talent and want to share it—are compelled to find an audience. Beatrix Potter was no different. As a child, both she and her brother Bertram were encouraged by their parents to develop their artistic aptitude. In her mid twenties, Beatrix sold some of her drawings as greeting cards and shared her gift of storytelling through the picture letters she wrote to her former governess’s children. As time went on, she wanted to share more widely, and came up with the idea for a book about Peter Rabbit, which she published herself when it was turned down by other publishers. After that, one thing led to another, and before long, she had an audience which demanded her work and a publisher who was eager to promote her. But even Beatrix was surprised by Peter’s acceptance. When the sixth printing was ordered, she wrote to her editor, Norman Warne, “The public must be fond of rabbits! What an appalling quantity of Peter!” Tongue-in-cheek, of course, but I think she was always amazed by her commercial success.

But the commercial success of her art meant something else: the possibility of personal independence. Beatrix noted more than once how nice it was to have some money of her own. She used her earnings to buy Hill Top Farm, which gave her the opportunity to escape from London and from her parents’ demands on her time.

And finally, there was her editor, Norman Warne. Beatrix wrote the early books (through 1905) in collaboration with him. He became increasingly important to her, and since her parents would not allow her to have any other connection with him, the books were a way of sustaining their relationship

Dani: What role did her fiancé, Norman Warne, the youngest son in the publishing firm, play in promoting sales and ensuring the financial success of the ventures over the long term?

Susan: I think the role Norman Warne played in shaping Beatrix’s stories was far more important than the role he played within the firm. Yes, he did go on extended sales trips to booksellers in various cities, soliciting orders for books—that was part of his job.

But more importantly, he was a mentor to Beatrix. He guided her in her choice of projects, encouraging her to develop her own original stories, rather than simply illustrate nursery rhymes, as she originally wanted to do. He offered suggestions for the drawings and the text. He was knowledgeable about the printing process and about ink and paper, and when she had changes or corrections to make, he saw that they got made. He also probably ran interference for her with his brothers, Harold and Fruing, who sometimes wanted her to do things she didn’t want to do, such as to illustrate another writer’s book.

Most importantly, Norman was a supporter, a cheerleader (a wonderful, wonderful quality in an editor!) and her friend. Without him, it’s entirely possible that she wouldn’t have gone past the first book or two. And it took real courage for her to go on working after his death.

Dani: Did Beatrix set the stage for merchandise sales related to the books long before Disney padded its fortunes this way? Any idea how much success the publisher had with these add-on sales?

Susan: In the early 1900s, there was (as Beatrix said herself) “a run on toys copied from pictures.” English and German toy-makers were using storybook characters as models for their wares, and she was afraid that her popular characters would be copied. So in 1903, Beatrix patented her Peter Rabbit doll, with whiskers pulled out of a brush and lead-weighted feet, and urged Norman to find a manufacturer to make the doll. She created a board game, wallpaper, and other book-related merchandise, to the point where (as I suggest in The Tale of Hawthorn House) there were almost more “sideshows” than she could keep track of. However, she was always more keen on licensing toys and other items than her publisher was, and after 1906 or so, she became increasingly frustrated with Warne’s seeming inability to keep up with her creative ideas.

Dani: Warne owns most of the rights to artwork and images of Beatrix to this very day. How did they gain such control over it all? Was it difficult getting permissions for your series? Did you discuss with Warne using Beatrix’s own artwork for your book?

Susan: When Beatrix died in 1943, she bequeathed her shares in Frederick Warne and the rights and royalties in her books first to her husband, Willie Heelis, and after his death to Norman’s nephew, Frederick Warne Stephens. These were later given to the publishing company as a way of honoring her relationship to Norman and her long friendship with the Warne family, which continued long after Norman’s death. (You can find more details about this in Linda Lear’s biography, Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature.)

In 1983, Frederick Warne was acquired by Penguin, which also owns my publisher, Berkley. So when I needed to get a license to use Beatrix’s characters (Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, Jemima Puddle-Duck, and so on), the legal folks were able to work it out. I don’t think we ever discussed using Beatrix’s art. From a marketing point of view, that would have been a good thing, but I want The Cottage Tails to stand on their own, and prefer the freedom to develop the art for the series.

Dani: I love the images you ended up developing for your own books, which capture the spirit of BP without copying. Can you tell us about the process of choosing that artwork and who the artist is?

Susan: Normally, authors don’t have any say in their cover art. This was the case with the first book in the series, The Tale of Hill Top Farm. The artist did a nice job, but I was deeply disappointed, because there was no image of Hill Top Farm, one of the most famous houses in England. Through a friend, I found artist Peggy Turchette, and commissioned her to do the art for the Cottage Tales website and other advertising materials, including a postcard for the second book, The Tale of Holly How. My editor saw it and liked it and asked Peggy to do the cover art. So we’ve worked together ever since—certainly a happy arrangement for me. All of the art work that you see on the Cottage Tales website also comes from Peggy’s talented brush. You’re right—her animals are reminiscent of Potter’s without being duplicates—that’s important. For example, Peggy had originally put a shawl on Jemima Puddle-Duck for the cover of the editor at Frederick Warne (who approves my manuscripts and our art work as part of the licensing arrangement) asked us to take it off. The shawl made my Jemima look too much like Beatrix’s Jemima. That’s the sort of thing we get into.

Dani: Thanks, Susan!

Also, plan to visit all the tour stops for more interesting interviews and guest posts by Susan Wittig Albert. The entire blog book tour schedule is posted here.

You can read the prologue to The Tale of Hawthorn House by clicking here.

Buy the book by clicking here.