Showing posts with label book trailer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book trailer. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Release Day--Slam Sisters of Serendipity
Terry Campbell's book, Slam Sisters of Serendipity, released today from Eternal Press. Yay! For those of you who may not know, Terry Campbell is my co-writeen oen name that I share with Linda Campbell. We're known for our generous dose of humor, and this book has a lot of mystery to go with it. If you love quirky southern women who are obnoxiously wealthy and very outspoken, you'll love this book. I shared the cover and trailer a long time ago. Here they are again to enjoy.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Another New Cover and Trailer!
These are for one of my Terry Campbell books, Slam Sisters of Serendipity, but I had to share.
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Mystery Contract for Novella series!
Buried in Briny Bay, the first of four Briny Bay mysteries is closer to becoming a reality since yesterday. Turquoise Morning Press has accepted it for publication March 14th with the others spaced out every few months for the next year. I am over the moon--Snoopy dance in outer space!
To celebrate, here is the video book trailer for the first novella.
To celebrate, here is the video book trailer for the first novella.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
New Novel Contracted!
I'm on a roll, folks! I am happy to announce my sequel to Coming to Climax will now become a reality. I don't have a release date yet for Nick of Time, probably in 2012, but Turquoise Morning Press has accepted it for publication. Just a bit to entice you:
Thursday, December 16, 2010
I am Not a Witch - Nancy Lynn Jarvis
Last week I gave a little talk at a Rotary Club meeting. All the members wore impressive-looking round metal necklaces which stated their name and occupation – everyone but me, of course because I was a guest, not a regular. They gave me a paper stick-on that read, “Hello, I’m…” I filled out my badge so it read, “Hello, I’m Nancy. I kill people.” Funny— quite a few Rotarians did few double-takes.
I’m not a killer by nature. So why would a nice real estate agent like me turn to a life of murder and chocolate chip cookies?
I never intended to write anything other than enticing advertising copy for my listings, but in 2008 when the real estate market tanked and I couldn’t dispassionately tell clients their homes might not sell for what they owed on their mortgage, I decided to run away from the too-real world of foreclosures and short sales, take a time out, and pretend to be retired.
It took less than a month without enough to do to get bored; I missed all the interesting clients and associates I met in real estate and I especially missed hearing their stories. Maybe because of that or maybe because my fallback mode was avoiding reality, as a purely time-filling intellectual exercise, I began to toy with the idea of writing a mystery.
The logic and careful structure of mysteries has fascinated me since the days when I sat in a wicker rocking chair at my grandmother’s house and read Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, sworn to secrecy in case my mother wouldn’t approve of a young girl reading something other than Nancy Drew.
Writing a mystery would be like solving a logic puzzle—Sudoku on steroids— and if that wouldn’t be fun enough, mystery writing would give me an excuse to delve into a world of fascinating but unsettling things like decomposition, accidental mummification, and how ligature strangulation and death by hypothermia work. Researching those topics would be akin to being a four-year-old playing with rubber dinosaurs: the game would be enjoyable, and I could control what might otherwise give me nightmares.
The idea of writing mysteries kept getting more appealing. I could take my twenty-plus years of situations—that’s a polite term for all those things that happen in the world of real estate that makes agents say, “I could write a book”—and use them for background. I could create a real estate agent protagonist named Regan McHenry who could be kind of like me, only younger, thinner, and more daring, and get back in touch with my favorite agents, clients, and associates by using them as inspiration for characters.
The murders in my books are made up, but the real estate stories are real—yes, Realtors do come across bodies in the course of doing business—so a Realtor who solves mysteries isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem.
And the cookies? Well, Realtors often bake cookies at open houses to entice buyers. It’s an old trick-of- the-trade. In the first book I wrote, The Death Contingency, Regan baked homemade cookies at an almost lethal open house. In Backyard Bones she baked cookies to take as comfort food to a client accused of murder. After Regan’s cookies appeared in two books, there had to be a recipe. When people visit my website they can not only read the beginnings of the books, they can also pick up a free recipe for “Mysterious Chocolate Chip Cookies.” The cookies make a cameo appearance in Buying Murder, the third book in the series, and will be in all future books.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, I should warn you that I have a silly sense of humor. During the last political season I made a spoof commercial that mimicked Christine O’Donnell’s ad. (She’s the non-witch who ran for the Senate, remember?) Feel free to take a look at it if you like. You can pretend it’s a book trailer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7LrBRZ3sk0
Website: http://www.goodreadmysteries.comFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/ReganMcHenryRealEstateMysteries?ref=ts
I’m not a killer by nature. So why would a nice real estate agent like me turn to a life of murder and chocolate chip cookies?
I never intended to write anything other than enticing advertising copy for my listings, but in 2008 when the real estate market tanked and I couldn’t dispassionately tell clients their homes might not sell for what they owed on their mortgage, I decided to run away from the too-real world of foreclosures and short sales, take a time out, and pretend to be retired.
It took less than a month without enough to do to get bored; I missed all the interesting clients and associates I met in real estate and I especially missed hearing their stories. Maybe because of that or maybe because my fallback mode was avoiding reality, as a purely time-filling intellectual exercise, I began to toy with the idea of writing a mystery.
The logic and careful structure of mysteries has fascinated me since the days when I sat in a wicker rocking chair at my grandmother’s house and read Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, sworn to secrecy in case my mother wouldn’t approve of a young girl reading something other than Nancy Drew.
Writing a mystery would be like solving a logic puzzle—Sudoku on steroids— and if that wouldn’t be fun enough, mystery writing would give me an excuse to delve into a world of fascinating but unsettling things like decomposition, accidental mummification, and how ligature strangulation and death by hypothermia work. Researching those topics would be akin to being a four-year-old playing with rubber dinosaurs: the game would be enjoyable, and I could control what might otherwise give me nightmares.
The idea of writing mysteries kept getting more appealing. I could take my twenty-plus years of situations—that’s a polite term for all those things that happen in the world of real estate that makes agents say, “I could write a book”—and use them for background. I could create a real estate agent protagonist named Regan McHenry who could be kind of like me, only younger, thinner, and more daring, and get back in touch with my favorite agents, clients, and associates by using them as inspiration for characters.
The murders in my books are made up, but the real estate stories are real—yes, Realtors do come across bodies in the course of doing business—so a Realtor who solves mysteries isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem.
And the cookies? Well, Realtors often bake cookies at open houses to entice buyers. It’s an old trick-of- the-trade. In the first book I wrote, The Death Contingency, Regan baked homemade cookies at an almost lethal open house. In Backyard Bones she baked cookies to take as comfort food to a client accused of murder. After Regan’s cookies appeared in two books, there had to be a recipe. When people visit my website they can not only read the beginnings of the books, they can also pick up a free recipe for “Mysterious Chocolate Chip Cookies.” The cookies make a cameo appearance in Buying Murder, the third book in the series, and will be in all future books.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, I should warn you that I have a silly sense of humor. During the last political season I made a spoof commercial that mimicked Christine O’Donnell’s ad. (She’s the non-witch who ran for the Senate, remember?) Feel free to take a look at it if you like. You can pretend it’s a book trailer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7LrBRZ3sk0
Website: http://www.goodreadmysteries.comFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/ReganMcHenryRealEstateMysteries?ref=ts
Thursday, November 11, 2010
What in the World is an Ecclesiastical Thriller?
Today we welcome Donna Fletcher Crow to discuss her new novel and tell us about the world of clerical detectives. Welcome, Donna!
Thank you, Bobbye, for inviting me over to introduce your readers to my Ecclesiastical Thriller A VERY PRIVATE GRAVE, book #1 in my Monastery Murders series.
And if I’ve lost some of you right there and you’re wondering “What kind of thriller did she say?” Let me assure you you’re not alone. I was a little taken aback when a columnist in Canada requested to review my book and then asked, “What’s an Ecclesiastical Thriller?” Oh, my goodness, I not only have to worry about her liking my book, I also have to worry about her liking, or at least understanding, my subgenre. So before I tell you all to rush out (or rush to my website) to buy A VERY PRIVATE GRAVE it might be useful to discuss my subgenre of choice.
You’ll notice I say “discuss” not “define” because like so many labels, Ecclesiastical Thriller is a fluid one. Even among practitioners of the craft. Kate Charles, who in my mind is the Queen of the genre, prefers the term Clerical Mystery. And Phil Rickman, one of my all-time favorites, refuses to label his Merrily Watkins. He says, “I absolutely did not want to go there. Too cosy, too safe, and too... well, too religious, I suppose.”
Many, beginning with G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, simply write their series and let others label. Perhaps that was easier before Amazon wanted everything tagged so they could say “if you like that book, you may like. . .” Susan Howatch frames her psychological thrillers in terms of Anglican history and P. D. James wrote DEATH IN HOLY ORDERS, to my mind the best clerical mystery of all, as one of her Adam Dalgliesh series.
A most useful website “Clerical Detectives” (http://www.detecs.org/) lists more than 210 clerical detectives including priests, ministers, rabbis, a Shaker, the clerk of a Quaker meeting, Buddhists and a Muslim.
Okay, that’s some of the “who” but it still doesn’t tell us “what.” I asked the question on GoodReads some time ago and my friend Sheila said, “I'd say all that's required is that the church (or synagogue, monastery or convent) or clergy, rabbi, nuns, or monks should be prominent in the story.” That seems like a good start, although I think the ecclesiastical setting needs to go further so that it actually forms the thoughts and actions of the main characters. They need to be more than simply photographed against an interesting Gothic background. Or as the Clerical Detectives website puts it, “characters whose lives really were influenced by their faiths.”
Julia Spencer-Fleming’s Clare Ferguson stories are an excellent example of this where everything Clare does and thinks is formed by the fact that she is a priest.
Sheila also said, “It seems to me that all the mysteries I think of as ecclesiastical do more or less have a spiritual theme.” And here it seems that we are getting close to the heart of the matter. Until I begin trying to define more sharply and realize that all mysteries are about the clash of good versus evil and strive for the triumph of right over wrong— What P. D. James calls “bringing order out of chaos.”
And so, at the end of the day it gets back to “Showing, not telling.” The best I can do is invite you to my website http://www.donnafletchercrow.com/ where you can see my trailer on the home page and pictures of some of the churches and monasteries I’ve visited under Research Albums. At least it will give you an idea of how I defined and went about crafting my Ecclesiastical Thriller (A term I prefer to Clerical Mystery because it connotes more action. As Phil Rickman said, this isn’t a cozy) wherein:
Felicity Howard, a young American studying for the Anglican priesthood at the College of the Transfiguration in Yorkshire, is devastated when she finds her beloved Fr. Dominic brutally murdered and Fr. Antony, her church history lecturer, soaked in his blood.
A Very Private Grave is a contemporary novel with a thoroughly modern heroine who must learn some ancient truths in order to solve the mystery and save her own life as she and Fr. Antony flee a murderer and follow clues that take them to out-of-the way sites in northern England and southern Scotland. The narrative skillfully mixes detection, intellectual puzzles, spiritual aspiration, romance, and the solving of clues ancient and modern.
And Kate Charles was kind enough to say: “With a bludgeoned body in Chapter 1, and a pair of intrepid amateur sleuths, A Very Private Grave qualifies as a traditional mystery. But this is no mere formulaic whodunit: it is a Knickerbocker Glory of a thriller. At its centre is a sweeping, page-turning quest – in the steps of St. Cuthbert – through the atmospherically-depicted North of England, served up with dollops of Church history and lashings of romance. In this novel, Donna Fletcher Crow has created her own niche within the genre of clerical mysteries.” – Kate Charles, author of Deep Waters
Friday, November 5, 2010
Video trailer for new short story
My short story, co-written with Linda Campbell as Terry Campbell, was just released in Dreamspell Mystery, Volume 1 on Halloween evening. I've posted the trailer here with a buy link, should you want to read it and some more mysteries--worth the $2.99 IMHO.
"Man in the Moon,"
Dreamspell Mystery Volume 1 (ebook anthology)
http://www.lldreamspell.com/DreamspellMysteryVol1.htm
http://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-dreamspellmysteryvolume1-477918-152.html
"Man in the Moon,"
Dreamspell Mystery Volume 1 (ebook anthology)
http://www.lldreamspell.com/DreamspellMysteryVol1.htm
http://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-dreamspellmysteryvolume1-477918-152.html
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Writing Tip: So You Want a Book Trailer?
Book trailers are becoming more popular, and many writers from New York Bestselling authors to newly pubbed authors in small press are getting on the bandwagon. So, when should you produce or get someone to produce a book trailer for you? Here are my thoughts:
1.If you’re a newly pubbed author in small press, don’t do it. The chances of the video plummeting your book to the stellar heights of Number One bestseller are few and far between. They’re also very expensive. I had one published once, foolishly, for a book my co-writer believed in and couldn’t sell. We self-published it and put the trailer on our website. The company we used was great, and they gave us a deal. But the deal was $1000 for a thirty second spot (I think. Sometimes I can’t remember if that was my half of the payment or that was ours together). Due to the nature of all the details, it didn’t help.
2.It depends on the type of book you have and what you’re trying to convey. My own belief is that suspenseful books, whether they be straight suspense, horror, or paranormal, lend themselves better to a video.
3.Unless you work in video, don’t try to do it yourself. Again, IMHO, the trailers work better when there are actors in segments instead of a lot of writing and fade in/fade out still scenes.
4.If there aren’t any actors and you still want to make a trailer, use it for more than one book so you can get more bang for your buck.
Want to watch a good book trailer? Watch this one from Karen Rose posted on You Tube.
1.If you’re a newly pubbed author in small press, don’t do it. The chances of the video plummeting your book to the stellar heights of Number One bestseller are few and far between. They’re also very expensive. I had one published once, foolishly, for a book my co-writer believed in and couldn’t sell. We self-published it and put the trailer on our website. The company we used was great, and they gave us a deal. But the deal was $1000 for a thirty second spot (I think. Sometimes I can’t remember if that was my half of the payment or that was ours together). Due to the nature of all the details, it didn’t help.
2.It depends on the type of book you have and what you’re trying to convey. My own belief is that suspenseful books, whether they be straight suspense, horror, or paranormal, lend themselves better to a video.
3.Unless you work in video, don’t try to do it yourself. Again, IMHO, the trailers work better when there are actors in segments instead of a lot of writing and fade in/fade out still scenes.
4.If there aren’t any actors and you still want to make a trailer, use it for more than one book so you can get more bang for your buck.
Want to watch a good book trailer? Watch this one from Karen Rose posted on You Tube.
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