The Saga Continues

Good things come to those who work hard to get them. For months now, I have been blowing my own horn to get publicity for my book, "Double Trouble on Corned Beef Row", and attract national attention. I still haven't had complete success, but I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. The Baltimore Jewish Times is doing another piece about the book. I don't know what form it is going to take, but if it is in the form of a review, I will be able to post it on Amazon.com's and Barnes and Noble's web sites. The person who was coming out to take my picture didn't know. It is, also, possible that the review will be reprinted in other versions of the Jewish Times in other cities. That would be a coup. The second good thing is that I am going to do a book signing at Greetings and Readings in Hunt Valley, Maryland on December 12 which will give me the chance to sell off a good batch before the Holidays end. Hopefully, this added attention will give me the boost I need to get into the next recognition level. I hope, I hope, I hope!

The days are racing by

I have been preparing for a BIG book signing at a historic deli in downtown Baltimore for about a month. The lady who coordinates events there just informed me she sent out over 1100 email invitations to her customer list. When I was ready to publish my book, "Double Trouble on Corned Beef Row," I got permission to put the deli's picture on the front cover. It was only logical that the deli would want to promote the fact. The only trouble is the place where the event is to take place only holds forty-five people. Also, there is a parking problem in the area. I know there is supposed to be no such thing as bad publicity, but I don't want all of the guests griping about the situation in their columns. Did I mention the preponderance of them will be media people: food writers and such, and the deli is going to probably offer them freebies. My book is a novel, not a cookbook! However, one of the characters in it creates a spicy version of the corned beef sandwich, and the deli is going to make one that resembles it as part of the promotion. I can see this being a boon for the deli, but how it will impact sales of my book is questionable. If you are in Baltimore on November 10, 2010, you may want to avoid East Lombard Street from 5 to 7 PM. The traffic may be a problem.

Delivering the goods.

This weekend has been interesting. Judy, my darling better half, and I went into Baltimore to make a couple of deliveries. The first one was to our friend Joann's house to drop off a pair of earrings I made for her from one of her daughter Hilary's old necklaces. It was received with Jo's usual dramatic enthusiasm. If you give her anything, she makes you feel like it is the greatest gift ever from anyone. She is a warm and loving person who finds something to smile about in even the worst situations. I wish I had her upbeat outlook. Her oldest daughter, Maria, was visiting her mom, and as I had not seen her in a number of years was shocked when I did. She was definitely a woman, and not the child I remembered.
The next stop was in downtown Baltimore at Attman's Delicatessen. Judy and I had worked on signs for a book signing there on November 10. This is a really big deal with local media coverage coming in many forms. Having already had a couple of articles written about me, the media has been allerted that this will be a really special event. In my book, Double Trouble on Corned Beef Row, I describe a sandwich one of the main characters concocted to bring in new customers to his deli. As part of the book signing event, Attman's is going to produce a special sandwich that follows the formula in the book. In Baltimore, this is a big deal. Attman's is one of the original shops in what once was the heart of the Jewish section of the city: the area was called Corned Beef Row. The novel is not about the area, but it is set in it, and Attman's taking an active part in promoting the book will definitely draw attention. I guess I chose the right place as a setting for my story. I can't wait to get my hands on one of those sandwiches.

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.

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!

The Aheader I Go; the Behinder I Get

I can't believe it has been nearly a month since my last entry. I have been busy trying to get my book to market and setting up my web site. Both are really time consuming. My darling Judy keeps asking me "When are you going to finish this? You've been working on it FOREVER!" That is exactly what it seems like to me. It seems like I have hit every kind of stumbling block imaginable. Since I am putting it on CreateSpace, I have had to make tons of adjustments. I have had to resize the copy to fit book size paper, change the line spacing, change the fonts for the chapter headings and body text, reset all of the margins, and unify the book into a single file. Gadzooks, what a bunch of chores. Not having the proper software only made these things harder to do. Fortunately, I was able to come up with some suitable work-arounds that let me, finally, finish the job. Or so I thought. As it turned out, I still had to convert the files to Adobe's pdf format before uploading it. Then came doing the cover art. Another nightmare. I had to rework it five times before it was okay for their site. At long last, the ball is in their court and, if no more pitfalls occur, the book will be printed.
I was naive to think that all I would have to do is send the book to a publisher, and they would take it from there. I would get an advance, they would do all of the publicizing and advertising, and all I would have to do is appear on TV talk shows and at book signings. My little book, Double Trouble on Corned Beef Row, is not an epic. It is a little story about Jewish identical twins separated at birth. It is not the Corsican Brothers or The Man in the Iron Mask. It would have take a miracle for a major publisher to grab it up like that so I am gambling that by self publishing someone might see it. I still hold out hope that fellow Baltimorean Barry Levinson will learn about it and, maybe, take a look at it. That probably falls under the heading of "still dreaming, aren't you?" Well, if the Wright brothers felt that way, my sister, Jane, would not be working for an airline and a trip to Chicago from the East Coast would take a long ride on a train. If I stop dreaming, I may wake up and find the world really sucks. What then?

A Tribute to My Mother

My mother, Rena May Battee, hadn't turned 19 when I was born, and the early memories I have of her were ones of a woman who was loving and gentle, but, also, no-nonsense. In a way, she was like an older sister. She and my Dad were young enough to still do things like sledding and roller skating, amusement parks, swimming and playing miniature golf. Mom was strong, too. Not just physically, but emotionally. She didn't fall apart in a crisis. She could do a man's work, if she had to, and that happened often when Dad came home from WWII. They bought a little house in Baltimore that took lots of "fixing up," as they used to say. She had to go to work to help support our growing family. My second sister was born after we moved in there, and Dad's earnings were not enough to feed, clothe and educate in a parochial school three kids.
Above all other attributes, Mom was loving. Her children knew she cared deeply about them and knew she would fight for them, if necessary. I remember one time a grouchy neighbor started hollering at us kids for getting a ball out of her yard by climbing the fence. When she came out of the yard wielding a broom, my mother, like a mama lion, came out and went nose-to-nose with her to straighten her out. She encouraged, nursed, worked to support ,protected and suffered for us.
The greatest blessing I could wish for every child would be that they should have a mother like mine. The jails would be empty and they would all grow to be responsible, caring people.

Will the dream die with me?

Disillusionment has set in. What I believed was a real publisher was actually just a "come on" for one of those self publishing outfits. Whom can you trust? There are so many bogus entities floating around out there in cyberspace. It is difficult to separate the scams and the shams from the legitimate. I guess the old saw about things too good to be true is right. For now, it is back to square one. I believe in my book, "Double Trouble on Corned Beef Row," and I thought the "publisher" did, too. They played me like a Stradivarius. Now, my greatest fear is that I will die before it ever gets into print. It's a story about identical Jewish twins separated at birth and living dramatically different lives. It is the kind of story Barry Levinson would like because it involves a Baltimore landmark, Lombard Street's Corned Beef Row, a deli owner, and spies fighting over a secret weapon stolen from the Israelis. The way things look now, he will never know it exists.
At 71, diabetic, overweight, and arthritic, I am running out of time. It took me two years to finally get my book into what I believed to be really enjoyable reading. Were those years I could have put to better use? I loved/hated the process. Envisioning the story, I loved. All of the editing, and re-rewriting was a chore. Unfortunately, only the reading public will determine if it was a worthwhile endeavor. If that ever happens. Sometimes, life really sucks.

Hello, Hollywood??

Have you ever tried to contact a live person at a Hollywood movie studio? I have been trying to get a message through to Barry Levinson, who, like me, grew up in Baltimore. I think he might be interested in my book, "Double Trouble on Corned Beef Row," because it is set in a Baltimore landmark. Mr. L has done several movies with Baltimore themes, and his "Homicide: Life on the Streets," was filmed there, too. The problem I encountered is layer upon layer of firewalls preventing any access. Maybe after the book hits the stores someone will tell him about it. Guess I'll just have to wait and see.