She Writes

I give consultations on book marketing, and one of the first things I tell my clients to do is put up a website, preferably in the form of yourname.com. If you have a common name, I suggest seeing if yournameauthor.com or yournamebooks.com is available. I prefer this to thenameofyourbook.com, because what if you end up writing another book?

A screen shot of my website: www.mariamurnane.com

Here are some reasons why having a website is important:

It makes you look successful.

Getting people to pay attention is HARD, especially if you're an independent author.…

When She Writes comes to my doorstep to celebrate and teach, I put on bells and whistles to be there. It’s a rare joy to be connected not just online, but live, in a room with colleagues, other She Writers, editors, and She Writes Press publisher Brooke Warner.

At an elegant Berkeley hotel, there were the first books, beautiful to look at and thumb through, impeccably published, exactly like any quality mainstream paperbacks. There were the ten women who had written them, happily talking about the experience of working together with Brooke and her editorial and production team. Getting guidance, support and every practical help needed was paramount for first-timers, but I also heard similar praise from old-timers who told me they had no desire to jump through the million hoops of traditional…

Jules Finn and Szaja Trautman know that sorrow can sink deeply, so deeply it can drown a soul.

Growing up in her parents’ crazy hippie household on a tiny island off the coast of Boston, Jules’ imaginative sense of humor is the weapon she wields to dodge household chaos. Somewhere between routine discipline with horsewhips, gun-waving gambling debt collectors and LSD-laced breakfast cereal adventures, tragedy strikes with the death of her younger brother.

David, Jules’ surviving brother, turns up the TV volume when their parents start screaming, but Jules calls the police, anonymously reporting child abuse and later concocts a timely Mafia-like death threat, complete with a dead fish, to rid the household of her father’s tyranny.

Jules’ story alternates with the saga of her grandfather Szaja, an orthodox Jew, who survives the murderous Ukranian pogroms of the 1920’s, the Majdonek Death Camp and the torpedoing of the Mefkura, a ship carrying refugees to…

We live in an age of self-promotion: Twitter, Facebook–-need I add blogging? A blog post by Nancy K. Miller on She Writes about how Emily Dickinson might feel about our era’s publicity-consciousness got me thinking about how Constance Fenimore Woolson (another 19th-century writer I am writing a biography about) felt about her own literary celebrity. She loved it and hated it at the same time. She wanted recognition, but she didn't want to ask for it and she certainly didn't want anyone to think that she was asking for it. Like Miller, she wanted to write her books and send them out into the world and have people appreciate them for their own sake. But as she discovered, it’s not that simple.

Emily Dickinson’s poem, which Miller cites, sums up Woolson’s attitude as well:

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?

Then there’s a pair of…