I had lunch today with Chris Bigelow, my publisher at Zarahemla Books. It was fun, as it always is. We shared gossip and talked about future projects, both joint and individual, and about my recent review of Doug Thayer’s book The Tree House (also published by Zarahemla Books) — and about the fact that we seem to be running out of ideas for ways to publicize No Going Back.
Here’s a short list of some of the things we’ve done:
So I did my appearance at King’s English bookstore in Salt Lake City as part of their Local Author Showcase. And it was a lot of fun.
So guess what? I’m scheduled to appear at King’s English bookstore in Salt Lake City at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, July 13, as part of a Local Author Showcase. The way I understand it, four other authors and I will each read for up to five minutes from our books, answer questions, and sign book copies. Woo-hoo! My first reading/book signing! For more details, read here.
A year and a half ago, I wrote the following as part of my Writing Rookie series at A Motley Vision website:
I’m a socially motivated person. I like spending time with people, talking to people (face-to-face or at a distance), getting to know people. Part of what I’ve always liked about literature is the feeling of truly getting to know the people I’m reading about. Characters are my friends.
Writing stories, I find, is the same kind of activity—taken to another octave of intensity. The horrible vulnerability that comes in story-writing is the flipside of this desire to reach out and connect to other people on the kind of personal level that comes with creating something that touches your readers.
Cross-posted at A Motley Vision website.
I was over at Amazon.com the other day, trying to figure out someplace to post about my book in the Mormon community. I mean, I was able to find a couple of places to post in the Gay etc. community. Surely there ought to be a place to post in the Mormon community
The last week or so has been kind of bittersweet from my perspective. The Whitney Awards were announced, and while I was very pleased to have been a finalist, I was unsurprised to discover that I didn’t win the award in my category. (The person who did win the award, Jamie Ford, is a very fine author whose book, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, is the one I thought probably would win, so I’m not complaining.)
On January 19, 2010, the Daily Universe, BYU’s student newspaper, ran a feature article on No Going Back that made the paper’s front page, sharing headlines with Haiti. They’d interviewed me the week before, and apparently also contacted Rex Goode, whose discussions on AML-List helped spark my initial ideas for the story, and Steve Walker, my old BYU English professor who read and endorsed the book in glowing terms.
Yeah, I’m still on Christmas break. But I couldn’t resist the temptation to post something. And so…
Getting comments from readers of my novel has given me a new appreciation of Tolkien’s observation that elements of his book that “are to some a blemish are all by others specially approved.” Despite this, it seems to me that there have been some common themes among those who like my book. The following list, then represents (in unranked order) my summary of some of the top reasons why I think No Going Back is worth reading — based on reader responses to date, together with my own thinking. (Or — to put it another way — no one else seems to be beating down the door to list all the reasons why my novel is wonderful, so I need to do it myself.) Please feel free to read, respond, and (hopefully) add reasons of your own! (more…)
Heigh, ho. Christmas break coming up. I’m expecting traffic around here to be pretty slow, and I’ll be busy too, so you shouldn’t count on seeing anything interesting from now until after the first of the year.
No Going Back — Young Adult Novel?
Tuesday, June 29th, 2010A somewhat different version of this column, oriented more toward broader questions related to the YA literature genre in the Mormon market, is posted at A Motley Vision website under the title “Some Definitional Thoughts About YA (Mormon) Fiction.”
Who’s the intended audience of No Going Back? In particular, does No Going Back fit the definition of a young adult (YA) novel? That’s proved to be a tricky question.
(more…)
Tags: American Library Association, coming-of-age novel, Jonathan Langford, Marketing, Mormon, No Going Back, non-Mormon readers, publicity, reader comments, reader responses, realism, Reviews of No Going Back, teenagers, Young Adult fiction
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