Writers and Readers discussion

Please welcome writer Gail Cleare to our Q & A discussions. Gail grew up in Princeton, NJ, where she wrote very long short stories and hoped to someday become a professional novelist. She has written for newspapers, business publications and Fortune 100 companies and now lives on an historic farm with her family and three dogs, three cats, twenty-two chickens, black bears, blue herons, rushing streams and wide, windy skies.

In 2010, her first novel, Destined, a novel of the Tarot, came out as a Kindle Edition e-book. In 2011 it came out in print. Her second novel, Secrets We Keep, is being edited and is posted on Authonomy.com for feedback.

Gail's website: http://www.gailcleare.com
Gail's Goodreads Profile: Gail Cleare

Hello, Gail!

Your book sounds very interesting, particularly as I've dabbled in learning the art of Tarot on and off for years. What inspired you to write it, and use Tarot as a... guide for the story, for lack of a better term?

Hi, Gail~

Thank you so much for doing this Q&A! I read Destined, a novel of the Tarot recently and thought it was very inventively done. I liked the way you fit the characters, the scenes and the events into the journey of the Major Arcana. Was this novel in any way autobiographical? Or are all the characters and situations "invented", or, shall we say, archetypes?

Hello Mia and Mari and A.F.!

How this idea for a novel evolved is that I had a dream one night about a group of women dancing together in a little shop like the one in my book, and the feeling I got from that was the foundation for my characters. The idea to follow the 22 steps to wisdom of the Major Arcana came to me when I started to seriously think about how to build a story around these women. I have read the Tarot for over 40 years, so the images are very familiar to me. When I started to think of the story being a kind of spiritual coming-of-age tale, with a lot of magic and romance mixed in to spice it up, the Tarot naturally came to mind. To me, it is the perfect structural metaphor for the story I wanted to write. And as a photographer and graphic designer, I loved the idea of using an illustration in each of the chapter headers.

Once I had decided on the structure, the plot revealed itself very naturally. As I came to each new chapter and thought about the Major Arcana card that would be the theme, it was like I was reading the cards for Emily and revealing the next step of her future. Yes, Mari, there are certainly bits of autobiography in it, here and there. But that is what writers do, we steal little pieces of life and use it in our books to make them seem more real. Emily and I definitely have a lot in common! Many of the other characters are roughly based on people I know. And I used to work on Market Street in Northampton, MA, which is a lot like the neighborhood in the story.

Greetings Gail~

I visited your website. It is very beautiful! Your book sounds interesting, as well as does the inspiration for writing the story.

What has been the most rewarding aspect of self-publication for you and, in contrast, the most difficult?

Thanks

Thayer, thanks for the compliment on my website. I designed it myself and it's full of my own photography.

Those are great questions you asked, because self-publishing is both a blessing and a curse. I love that I could get my work out there in front of readers and start to build an audience, since it is so affordable now with POD, and it was great to be able to design my own book and use my own photo on the cover. But the response from readers has been the most rewarding part of it...I have gotten wonderful emails from women around the country who told me how much the book means to them, how it found them at just the right moment and made them feel hopeful about creating transformation in their lives. This really gets to me. I used to run a Tarot chat room in the Crystal Ball Forum on AOL in the early days of the Internet. The connection between people was similar, and I loved it. By reading the cards I'd help them see the next step to steer their lives in the direction they wanted to go. When I wrote DESTINED, I imagined my ideal reader out there, someone who wanted to grow and prosper but who was blocked in some way and needed to see how to navigate around it. Without self-publishing, it would never have happened. I queried over 40 agents about this novel and got some serious lookers, two of whom danced with me for over a year. Nobody seemed to "get" how to market it. They said, "but who will we get to give blurbs?" The romance genre agents said it was too intellectual for their audience, and the literary fiction agents said it was too romance/chick lit. One agent said it was too New Age -- but I say that New Age is "Now" Age and most of the wild ideas we had back then about spirituality and magical thinking are now accepted as normal (just ask Oprah).

The most difficult part of self-publishing is the marketing, which takes a huge amount of time and effort. A lot of reviewers won't look at a SP book, for one thing, and many readers would never buy one. There is a lot of poorly written and edited junk out there, and self-pubished work is viewed as (usually) inferior. Without a big advertising budget, it's hard to get the word out if you can't get reviews in newspapers and magazines. I was very lucky to get a full review from Publishers Weekly, which normally does not accept POD books. Bookstores are not particularly interested in carrying SP books, either. The ebook revolution has saved the day for me, since there are tons of ways to sell these online and the community of readers is much more open minded. My ebook sales far outweigh my paperback sales.

As a serious writer, I had to make the decision as to whether to publish this book myself and risk turning off potential future publishers, agents and readers who might think poorly of it. But I'm glad I did it, since the reader (and reviewer) response has been so encouraging. And I have learned a huge amount about the publishing business from this experience, all of which I can apply to my next book. I'm debating over that now...people are asking when it will come out, but I still hope to find an agent to be my marketing partner. And I've been approached by an Italian publisher who is interested in the translation rights for DESTINED. I need an expert who has contract experience to help me, but the agents are so swamped with queries it's nearly impossible to get their attention. I do have an appointment with one in April, so we'll see what happens. After almost signing twice before and having it fall apart, I am not celebrating yet!

Your book seems to cross over into several genres, so I was wondering who you saw as your target audience?

This is written for the older YA/adult crossover audience. Primarily women age 18-35 (and up). Romance readers, paranormal fans and anyone into metaphysics, magic or the Law of Attraction would love it. It has a modern fairy tale quality to it, similar to Sarah Addison Allen's books (Garden Spells), or Joanne Harris (Chocolat).

Gail, I just purchased a couple copies of your book Kindle edition. I thought I would gift one to a friend of mine. We used to own the first Soul Spa in North America called Trinity Soul Spa. She was a psychic and I talked to angels. She's been reading Tarot for years so I thought she'd love concept your story is centered around.

I purchased my copies on Amazon but I'm curious to know what your experience with Amazon is like. I'm an author also and I just came out with my second book and I'm hesitating putting it on Amazon. Right now we sell directly on our website or through Smashwords. My business partners and myself have had terrible past experiences with Amazon. How has your experience been?

Hi Dana, thanks for your interest and I'm so excited that you bought DESTINED for your psychic friend, too! That's great, I hope you both love it. As for Amazon, it's been fine except for being such a large ocean that the little fish get lost in it. Now that I'm beginning to understand how the "system" works, things are better. I signed up for the Prime program, which means you cannot offer your ebook anywhere else online but it does allow you to run your book in their free Kindle book promotion for five days each quarter. That means it is advertised on the free books list and lots of people see it, and lots of people download it, so it starts to turn up on the "People who bought this book also bought...." lists, so it is enormously more visible. The boost in sales continues for weeks afterwards. Seems to be working well, for now. What problems did you have, Dana?

My mom's first book was with a distributor who went bankrupt. He said the books he had, which were numerous, were lost. The book appeared on amazon some time later. My mom never listed with Amazon. She repeatedly tried to get Amazon to take her books off. No one EVER contacted her. My business partner had a book on amazon also. She had a different issue that needed to be addressed but again she was NEVER able to get assistance or a response from anyone.

This makes me dislike their customer service and I wonder why should I support a company that treats their customers like little, inconsequential fish in a great big ocean. I'd rather support more conscious companies but I'm willing to reconsider my position if I learn people don't always have this experience.

Do you receive notifications everytime (or daily or weekly) your ebook sells? That would be a feature I would like to know if they include.

By the way, I'll be reading your book this weekend at my in-laws and I'm sure my psychic friend will love it. Also, Dana Lynn Smith wrote a book about marketing on Amazon. I like her book because she offers really practical, easy to follow advice. It was definitely worth the money.

Thanks for the tip on that book, it sounds very useful! I have to say, I have not had that same problem Dana. (knock on wood)

Nice to hear you haven't shared a similar experience. Perhaps there us hope yet :)

They do have a control panel thingy that shows you your sales, it seems to be updated several times a day, maybe instantly...your sales rank is updated frequently too, on the book listing page.

Hi Gail, you've mentioned that you've done all the promotion on your book yourself. What has worked the best for you? Was it the Amazon Prime program? I asked my publisher to put my novel into the program and she talked me out of it.

Thanks, Gail :D

Jeanne, I'm still learning but so far, the most productive thing I did was the Prime program because it allows you to do the 5-day free Kindle promotion, and that got my book noticed on Amazon for about 4 weeks before the effect wore off. It also got the ebook into the hands of over 12,000 readers. (Whether or not they will actually read it is an open question, I guess.) I have noticed via Google that people are talking about it in their blogs and chats now, which is new. But the drawback is that you aren't allowed to offer your ebook for sale anywhere else while you're in Prime, so your publisher may have a point. I wasn't selling many copies on B&N or elsewhere anyhow, so it seemed like no great loss to me. The best paid ad I have run was the listing I bought in Publishers Weekly's quarterly self-published book catalog, because my book was one of the 20 selected for a full review and that led to orders from libraries and the inquiry from an Italian publisher, in addition to giving me a nice blurb for the cover. I wish I had known more before I got started, because I missed out on submitting to the big reviewers who want a book 4-5 weeks before the publication date. That is a big danger of self-publishing... there are a lot of tricks of the trade that we don't know. You have to do some serious research before hitting that SUBMIT button!

Gail wrote: "Hello Mia and Mari and A.F.!

How this idea for a novel evolved is that I had a dream one night about a group of women dancing together in a little shop like the one in my book, and the feeling I ..."

I like how you mention structure first before plot. Is that deliberate? Do you think structure's important in turning a story into a novel?

PS - Just looked this up. Since I finished the free promo, I have sold several hundred ebooks but only 11 loans via Prime, so the club itself does not seem to be a real moneymaker...it's the visibility on Amazon from being part of the promotion that seems to work well. And you can't participate unless you sign up for Prime for a three-month period.

Sheila, I don't always start with structure but it certainly does help me with the plot if I know the basic shape of the book in advance. I took a great seminar from Patricia Grasso at the RWA's New England conference a few years ago, and she showed us how to actually graph the plot of a classic romance novel. I realized that I could plan out the key decision points and climaxes of the story and the rest would logically fill itself in. Having said that, I must admit I don't always write that way, but I am surely trying to. It makes the pace more satisfying to a reader if the most important turns in the story happen roughly when we expect them to. We are trained to have these expectations from other novels we have read. Ms. Grasso taught us that if you vary from the expected structure too far, your readers will be frustrated and never come back for more. Every genre has its own expectations...including, I suppose, some kinds of experimental fiction that have the expectation of no structure at all! Does that make any sense?

Thanks, Gail. I have a feeling my publisher doesn't want me to sign up for the program because they sell the books from their website as well as Amazon. I really would like to give it a try.

Best of luck to you in all your endeavors :D

I'm sure they do want to sell it from their website Jeanne, but also don't forget there are a lot of other reading devices besides Kindle...though there are indeed about 200 million Kindles, a big world.

Gail wrote: "Sheila, I don't always start with structure but it certainly does help me with the plot if I know the basic shape of the book in advance. I took a great seminar from Patricia Grasso at the RWA's Ne..."
Thanks Gail, and yes, that does make sense. It's something I'm really feeling I ought to work on. What amazed me with my current WIP is that when I finished I looked back and saw it did actually fit a standard 3-act structure. But it would have been easier to write if I'd realized that at the start.