Thursday, August 26, 2010

Getting it right

Things are progressing faster than I thought they would. My book, Double Trouble on Corned Beef Row, has only been out a couple of weeks and I have already had a magazine article done about how and why I wrote it in Baltimore Jewish Times. I appreciate the publicity it gave me, but the young woman who wrote the article got lots of things wrong. The biggest problem was because she had not read the book before the interview, and probably had not read it afterward either. I asked if she had at the beginning of our conversation, and she said she had glanced through it (which I seriously doubt). If she had, she could not have been so far off track. She wrote it up as being a spy story instead of what it really is: the tale of identical twins separated at birth. She probably got her impression from the synopsis on the back cover. Yes, there is a lot about spies in it, but the point of it is about the families of the children involved, how they grew up, their different career paths, and how they finally re-establish their natural connections. The action in the book is incidental. The thrust of the story is about families and relationships. I hope the next interviewer will at least read a few chapters to get a sense of what it is all about. If the interviewer had read the first twenty pages, her article would have taken a direction that was closer to the real crux of the tale. From her perspective, the story she wrote probably fulfilled her boss's criteria: she interviewed a non-Jew who wrote a book about Jews and published his responses to her questions (which focused on many of the wrong things). From my perspective, she missed the point.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Wow! Things are Happening

If I thought I was busy and harried before, I was in for a surprise. Since my last posting, I have had things really start to steamroller. First, my book, Double Trouble on Corned Beef Row, has been published and is available on Amazon.com as both a dead tree version and on Kindle. It took a heap of work to get that accomplished, and I am proud of the results. The print version sports a cover of my own design, and looks professionally done. My sister, Donna, who never minces words or says something is good when it isn't, was blown away when she saw it. She said it looked every bit as good as some of the ones in the local bookstore and better than most. Donna has a wonderful sense of humor, and got a charge out of the last two sentences of the story. She had said while I was writing it that the only kind of books she liked were the ones that ended with; "and they lived happily ever after. THE END" Well, that is how I ended my book.
Being the unabashed self promoter that I am, I sent two copies of it to Mr. Neil Rubin, editor of the Baltimore Jewish Times. One was an autographed copy for him to keep and the other was for review, if he chose to do that. Mr. Rubin had been kind enough to direct me to several sources which were valuable in my research. On one hand I was trying to show my gratitude, and on the other to hope for a review. A favorable write up from his paper will be a tremendous publicity boon. I, also, sent press releases to the other local news organizations, and I am attempting to arrange for my first book signing to be at Attman's Deli the picture of which is on the front cover. I want to get media coverage for that so I will be sending out another press release whenever that can be scheduled. More on that later. Do you think I am excited? You betcha!