On-Site Research

Posted on May 22, 2013 by Joe Moore

On-site research enhances your novel with authenticity. It’s your chance to make the story come alive for readers when you write the scene that inspired your visit. To get started, have an idea of what you want to research before you leave home. Begin with either a quick pass-through tour or research on the Internet. This allows you to sketch the scene ahead of time, even writing it in your manuscript, while filling in the details later.

For example, I have a research trip planned to Arizona. I’ve already written the synopsis for this story, so that tells me I have to trek through a copper mine, stay overnight at a dude ranch, visit a ghost town, stay at a haunted hotel, note the terrain and plants and animal life, and in general, walk through the steps my sleuth will be taking.

For HIGHLIGHTS TO HEAVEN, book five in my Bad Hair Day mystery series, I included a scene in Mount Dora, Florida. We had driven through there one afternoon, spending a couple of hours shopping and eating lunch. That brief survey was enough for me to write the scene in the book where my hairdresser sleuth, Marla Shore, tracks down a suspect’s sister to interview her.

After writing the first draft of the Mount Dora scene, I knew I had to make a return trip to fill in details to my satisfaction. Equipped with a notebook, I headed back for an overnight stay. This brings to mind the two most important tools to bring with you: notepad and camera. You cannot possibly remember all the details you will explore. It’s best to document them so you can refer to your materials when you’re back home. If I hadn’t gone to this town to note these particulars, I might have missed the chirping bird sound at traffic intersections when the light turned red.

I did the same for Cassadaga, a spiritualist camp in Central Florida where Marla goes for a reading from a psychic. This was the first time I’d had a reading, and it was an eerie experience. Here I used a tape recorder as an additional tool so when I got home, I could transcribe the entire interview into my computer. This became the basis for Marla’s reading in DIED BLONDE after I changed my rendition to suit the story.

SHEAR MURDER, my latest title in this series, has a wedding scene in fictional Orchid Isle that’s based on Harry P. Leu Gardens in Winter Park. Again, I went there with camera and notebook to walk the trails as my heroine and scribble down the details.

You need to see things with your writer’s eye instead of the usual tourist experience, and our view is much more detail oriented.

POINTS TO CONSIDER
1. Do preliminary research to sketch your scene.
2. Plan your trip to focus on the details you’ll need to acquire.
3. Bring a notebook and camera, possibly a digital recorder.
4. If you plan to interview people, bring one of your books, a supply of flyers, and business cards to present yourself as a professional writer. Compose a list of questions ahead of time. Direct the interview to the topics you need addressed. Write down quotes from your subject. Ask if you can run the scene by them for an accuracy check after it’s written. For informal interviews, chat up residents and get their take on things in their home town. Try to capture unique elements like favorite expressions, mannerisms, and speech patterns.
5. Once on site, walk the path of your protagonist.

Observe with your Five Senses. Take detailed notes and don’t mind the curious stares of pedestrians as you stop abruptly to scribble in your notepad. Just make sure you’re not in the middle of the street.

A. Sight
Sight means looking at the world with a writer’s eye. Say you’re on a ship. What do you see when you stroll on deck: An outdoor clock? A crew member hosing down the deck? A coil of rope? What makes the scene unique? On a city street, what do the windows on a building bring to mind? Do they yawn like open mouths? Are they blank like vacant eyes? Note small details like overhead electric wires, stray dogs, chickens in a yard, tilted signs.

Imbue your observations with your character’s attitude. Always remember to stay in viewpoint. Then look for interesting ways to describe things, i.e. a reflective nature like water, glistening like a cobweb in sunlight, glossy like a polished piano. You’re not only writing about what you see, but also about its special characteristics or emotional associations.

B. Smell
What does your protagonist sniff: A lady’s floral perfume? Oak-aged burgundy? Beer and pretzels? Pine trees and wood smoke? Vanilla and nutmeg? Diesel fuel or rain-tinged ozone? What memories does this scent evoke?

C. Sounds
Close your eyes. What do you hear? Birds warbling, ducks quacking, construction hammering, engines whining, water dripping? See how many different sounds you can distinguish.

D. Touch
Outside, is your skin pounded by the hot sun? Blasted by a ceaseless wind? Caressed by a warm breeze? When you walk, do you trip over the uneven pavement? Is the surface spongy like wet sand? How does your character react to the sensation?

E. Taste
The sense of taste is often related to your nose. If you smell sea air, you may taste salt on your tongue. If you smell ripe grapes, you may taste wine. Try to detect a taste where there may be none obvious. Is it a pleasing flavor or unpleasant to your protagonist?

Be Sure to Observe:
PEOPLE: Physical appearance, mode of dress, speech patterns, gestures
FOOD: Meals, restaurants, foods unique to the area
NATURE: Birds, trees, animals, bugs, flowers
ARCHITECTURE: residential housing, government buildings, commercial districts
EXPERIENCES: Adventurous, Funny, Scary

Be Sure to Bring Home: Maps, tourist brochures, books on locale, menus, postcards, photos

Now your notebook is filled with details describing what you’ve seen, smelled, tasted, touched, and heard during your research trip. Your job is to go home and transcribe this into your book so your reader feels she is there with your heroine, seeing from her eyes and living the story with her. This is your greatest gift to the reader, that you remove her from her own world and transport her to a new place for a few hours of escape. “I felt like I was there,” are sweet words from a fan to an author.

Make it happen.

How a great story can change the world

Posted on February 14, 2013 by Joe Moore

by Matt Richtel

TKZ is once again delighted to host Pulitzer prize-winning author Matt Richtel. His latest release, THE CLOUD, just hit bookstores, and I can personally highly recommend it!

This true story ends with me sobbing. In public.

The story starts five weeks ago, on a Monday night, with a text. I was amid an exciting time, working on a front-page story for the New York Times (my day job) about a controversial new twist involving computers and schools, and I was preparing for the Jan. 29 release of my new thriller, The Cloud.

The text came at 8.06 p.m. It read: “Call me.”

The text was from Adam, a good friend of mine and editor at The New York Times. About a year earlier Adam had been put in charge of a group of eight, mostly veteran reporters, including me. The group was called “How We Live,” and its charge was to make a journalistic beat of the way people live their lives; how we eat, sleep, learn, fight, procreate, and how we die.

We were supposed to be a new generation of newspaper story tellers – part of an overall move in the newsroom to infuse stories with narrative, voice, and character. The days of authoritative top-down explanations in the New York Times were increasingly giving way to showing and not telling, and sophisticated story telling, appealing to heart not just head.

We were responding to the need to capture and keep reader attention amid the white digital noise of an Angry Bird world.

In response to Adam’s text, I called him. Before I tell you the shocking news he told me, please indulge some additional, necessary, backstory.

Over the last year, my fiction career was also evolving to suit the digital world. Like many thriller-writing peers. I was writing more and more, adding to the already heavy book-a-year-load.

In August, I published a short story, Floodgate, 15,000 words I hadn’t anticipated writing, aimed at staying in touch with an audience feeding from the all-you-can-tweet-buffet.

And I took hard to Facebook, something initiated as a marketing tactic, but that transformed also into a usually welcome labor, in which I write stuff my toddlers say (funnier than I could ever make up) and occasionally quip about story telling.

I amassed some 20,000 Facebook subscribers on my personal page. And several thousand likes on my fan page. We got nice press for Floodgate. Apparent success on all fronts.

The New York Times stuff seemed to be working out too. The How We Live team killed it. Something like 35 front-page stories and 90 stories for the front of our feature sections, like Dining, Home, Travel. We generated a ton of traffic. We were a hit.

Then, fast forward to five weeks ago, I got the text. From Adam, on the Monday night. “Call me.” I called. In a nutshell, he explained, the paper was disbanding the How We Live group. And not just that; the paper was doing a whole bunch of shifting, all over the place. Voluntary buyouts, long-time editors and friends leaving, reorganization.

Why? Stating the obvious: because the paper’s news gathering operation – the news gathering and storytelling operation – cost too much. It was built in a different era, when our costs were supported by print advertising. Remember that old thing?

I’m no stranger to the ups and downs of the changing media landscape. I started and worked my way up from small newspapers, starting in 1990, at which I survived probably half a dozen rounds of layoffs. I know not to let macro-economic forces get me down.

But after I talked to Adam, I went into a tailspin. One that had been a year in the making, at least.

All this hard work. All this adaptation. So much terrible uncertainty. Part of what I experiencing, I am adult enough to know, was the personal uncertainty of the reality I’d need to find a new job inside the paper (I have), and that I was poised to have The Cloud come out (it did, two weeks ago). That meant marketing, travel, speaking, radio, and the subterranean terror that accompanies a book release: will only my family buy it?

But there was something much bigger for me too. I was confronting, squarely, for the first time, the reality that we don’t know what works. We.Do.Not.Know.What.Works.

What has value? How much value? Will we have mere chaos, only chaos, since Jack Dorsey, of Twitter, wrote his infamous missive: “…we came across the word ‘twitter’, and it was just perfect. The definition was ‘a short burst of inconsequential information,’ and ‘chirps from birds’. And that’s exactly what the product was.”

Inconsequential? Only if you’re not competing against it to pay the bills, and satisfy your muse.

My sleep deteriorated. I experienced a very unusual level of anxiety. I couldn’t write. I was a rotten dad. For two weeks, I felt like crud. I couldn’t find steady ground.

Then on a Monday, two weeks after the text, I took myself on a Monday afternoon to see Lincoln. No sooner had the opening music began to swell then I had tears in my eyes. They stayed there, persistently, throughout. And by the time a bereft Sally Fields dropped to her knees during a particularly emotional scene with Daniel Day Lewis, I began sobbing. Just lost it.

I was a mess the rest of the movie.

When I walked out, it was the best I’d felt in weeks. Cleansed.

And it’s when I finally understood the thing that had been eluding me for weeks, maybe for much longer. I finally understood the value of The Story. And of storytelling. And of its place in the digital world.

I’ll tell you first my conclusion, and then explain.

My conclusion: The bad story and story teller has little value, or, at best, ephemeral value; so too the mediocre story and storyteller, and even the merely good ones.

The great story and story teller is more valuable than they have ever been.

They are a port in the storm. A place to pause and heal from all the white noise the world throws at us, a tiny closet to cower inside and rest from the swirl of inconsequential missives.

And, more than that, great stories are the place where we will change the world. In Lincoln, Tony Kushner and Steven Spielberg, two of the greatest story tellers of our age team up to make a movie that is, perhaps above all, an homage to storytelling. They teach us that Lincoln used story-telling, narrative, anecdote, quip and emotion, to deliver the United States from slavery.

I know this doesn’t answer the business-model question. That’s the one that plagues us, still. Will the New York Times face bigger challenges? Yes? Will The Cloud take flight? Not as it might have when the institutions of publishing had more power (It is my most ambitious and mature and entertaining work to date).

But it’s not the business model question I needed an answer to. It was the emotional one, the real one. And I got that answer sitting in a movie theater, sobbing.

Fellow story tellers, take seriously your duty. The world seeks deliverance. You hold its key.

6 Tips for File Management

Posted on July 18, 2012 by Joe Moore

This weekend, we helped our daughter move into our condo. She put her furniture in storage and transferred the rest of her belongings to our place. If the condo wasn’t crowded before, it is now. I hope our closet rods don’t fall down under the heavy loads. She filled up every inch of closet space in our three bedrooms. Naturally, she gave us bags of stuff to take home for donation. This is the only benefit of moving as I see it: cleaning out unwanted or outgrown items.

Periodically, we should do the same sweep of our files. Not counting paper files, take a look at your online folders and consider paring them down. Here’s what to do:

Convert older file formats to current versions. For example, I still have my earlier book files in Word Perfect. Now I exclusively use Word. I need to convert these files before this conversion is no longer possible or the upgrade to the next Microsoft Office edition isn’t compatible. Fortunately, I’d moved over all of my floppy disk files into Dropbox so those were preserved. You could also convert all of your files to PDF if they need to be moved across computers whilst you clear through your files, for example. To edit these PDF documents at a later date, you could always use software such as the one from FilecenterDMS.
Pick one of your folders, and click on each file to see if you want to keep it or delete it. Here we go. Let’s choose your first published title. Do you really need that notice of your first booksigning? The list of book blurbs that are no longer catchy? Three versions of your synopsis? An email announcement to booksellers that are probably no longer in existence? A copy of the query letter you sent out to reviewers to see if they wanted an ARC? Sure, you might want to keep some of these for sentimental value, but which ones can you use today if you revise and republish this backlist title?
Update any files that are relevant to your backlist titles available in print or ebook format. Which ones, if any, can you use to promote this book?
On files that you decide to save, even if you convert to the current version of word processor you are using, make sure your formatting is the same as what you’re doing now. For example, I used to put two spaces between sentences. Now I use only one space. So do a Find and Replace to correct these formatting problems. Get rid of tabs and replace them with 0.5 first line indent. Reformat your headers. Change the font. Make sure the files you are keeping are up to speed. It’ll less hard to access them later that way should you need them again.
Rename your files if necessary to be more indicative of what they are. I’ve changed a lot of file names as I go through this review process. For Hair Raiser, as an example, chapter one went from chapter1.hair.wpd to chapter 1.doc (or docx, depending on which form of Word I’m saving them in).
Condense similar files into one file. Let’s say you have three different files, all named something different, with review quotes. Copy the material from two of them into one file and delete the extras. Pruning your files this way will eliminate repetitions.

This cleansing process can be very time consuming but it’ll save you anxiety later when you need to use a particular file, and you don’t have to go hunting for it. Nor will you lose the data when upgrades make conversions of earlier files impossible. So maybe pick one day per week or one particular folder to work on and clean it up. You’ll feel good about your accomplishment.

What advice on file cleansing/updating would you add?

Celebrating Freedom to Choose

Posted on July 4, 2012 by Joe Moore

Happy 4^th of July! Today we celebrate freedom, and in the U.S. that means the freedom to choose our own religion, career path, locale to live, and much more. Rarely do we stop to appreciate the bounties we have been given. What does this mean to us as writers?

Today we have more freedom to choose where to publish our work. We used to be confined to the mega New York publishing houses. If you weren’t in there, you were out in the territory of the scorned masses, wallowing in the disreputable halls of the self-published or with unknown small presses. A friend of mine published her book in ebook format with Hardshell back in the day. Was it no surprise that this venture got nowhere? Ebooks hadn’t been widely discovered yet, and this publisher was ahead of its time. Today, it’s a different story.

Indie publishing has blossomed along with small presses and digital first imprints. We have so many more choices, almost too many as they can get overwhelming. If we decide not to wait for a publishing house to determine our fate, for example, do we really want to become publishers ourselves? Because that’s what this world is coming to as we authors take the reins.

Here’s what it means to choose the self-publishing path: Besides writing and marketing our own works, we have to outsource to editors, cover designers, and formatters. We have to collect the income from various distributors and formulate our own spreadsheets. And don’t forget buying ISBNs, determining a name for our publishing “company”, and registering for copyright.

With freedom comes greater responsibility, and we’re feeling that as indie authors.

You give up some of those freedoms to go with a publishing house, be it large or small. You also give up a percentage of your income and price control. But then they handle the cover design, editing, and distribution. If it’s a decent house, you get your rights back in five years and then you can put up your edited work on your own. But it could take years just to get your manuscript accepted in the first place and then scheduled…years that your book could already be available to readers had you put it online yourself.

These are tough choices, but at least we have them. It’s more than we could do several years ago. Now there’s always the possibility that our work will make it into the hands of readers one way or another. Isn’t that a reason to celebrate?

Balancing Multiple Projects

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Joe Moore

Things used to be simple when I wrote for Kensington. I had to turn in one book a year. Easy, right? I wrote my Bad Hair Day mysteries and nothing else. It wasn’t until the publisher turned down my option book that I started writing in other genres to see what would sell.

Now it’s years later, and I’m still seeking a home for my two new mystery series. Meanwhile, Wild Rose Press picked up my romances, and I am preparing to launch a new paranormal series. Then Five Star published my tenth Marla Shore mystery. So years after I thought this series was dead, I’m writing it again. Before starting the eleventh book, I completed the first three books in my romance series. So those are all done, except for the edits, page proofs, and promotion.

And herein comes the juggling act. I am attempting to move forward with Bad Hair Day mystery #11, but I keep having to halt work on this project to do page proofs and revisions for the Drift Lords series, not to mention planning the promotional campaign for the series launch and taking time off to go to the Malice conference.

Meanwhile, those two completed mysteries linger in the back of my mind. Should I continue submitting them to small press or self-publish? If the latter, should I publish them as stand-alones or as the first books in new series?

Before deciding on these titles—and we’re still waiting for responses—I would like to self-publish my deceased father’s book. He hitchhiked across the U.S. in 1929 and his story includes some fascinating adventures. So my projects include:

1. The Drift Lords series from The Wild Rose Press
2. A new Bad Hair Day mystery
3. The possibility of self-publishing three titles
4. The possibility of one of my other mysteries selling in the interim

Never before have we had so many options. It’s an exciting time but it’s also all consuming. Who has free time when we can publish our entire body of works, and then when we have to spend hours on the social networks promoting them?

Do you find that your writing production has increased with the advent of new technologies? How are you balancing your writing projects, promotional efforts, and private life?

Formatting Your Submission

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Joe Moore

Submitting a manuscript used to be easier. We all knew the format: 1 inch margins, Courier 12 pt font in WordPerfect, 25 lines per page, 5 spaces indent each paragraph. But woe upon us, computers and printers kept getting upgraded. Suddenly Courier didn’t produce dark print anymore. We had to download a font called Dark Courier to print our pages in a readable type. Some people diverged to Times New Roman, but stalwart writer that I was, I stuck with the old ways.

Then editors starting sending edits in Track Changes. We had no choice but to convert to Word. Computers got upgraded again. Now a font called New Courier produced dark enough print so that I could delete Dark Courier font from my machine. Soon printouts were no longer an issue at all. Online submissions became the norm. Instead of copying a manuscript and mailing a heavy box at the post office, we could attach a file on our computer and hit the send button. This was better, right?

Not necessarily, because now each publishing house had different formatting requirements. Witness the two houses for which I’m now writing. Let’s call them House A for my romances and House B for my mysteries. Both agree on .5 inch indent for each paragraph, em-dashes instead of hyphens or en-dashes, and one inch margins. But here’s where they differ:

FONTS
House A: New Courier 12 pt.
House B: Times New Roman 12 pt.
SPACING
House A: 25 lines per page
House B: Double spacing
CHAPTER HEADINGS
House A: six lines down the page; capitalize first letter of each word
House B: one space down the page is blank, then the chapter heading comes on the next line. Then this is followed by another empty space before the text. Chapter heading should be bold and centered. First line of every chapter should begin flush left.
HEADERS/FOOTERS
House A: No specific instructions
House B: Page number bottom center with .5 inch footer and .5 inch header. Header should have centered Author’s last nameBook Title
ASTERISKS
House A: Four asterisks centered
House B: Five asterisks centered
ELLIPSIS
House A: Three periods with no spacing before, between or after.
House B: Three periods with a space before, between and after.

You get the idea? Plus the front material, meaning the title page, dedication and acknowledgements, as well as the back end info, might be different, too. You have to carefully examine the submission requirements to give your work its best chance.

The more you configure your work, the more often you’ll remember the next time. And if you’re just working with one publisher, you’ll have no problem…at least until you try to format for Kindle, Smashwords, and Nook.

How do you deal with this confusion?

Blog Touring

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Joe Moore

What are the results of my recent frenzied rush around the blogosphere? For Shear Murder, I have done 16 guest blogs since January 1st. This doesn’t count my own blogs. On my at-home printout, I’ve listed the numbers of comments on each site, so I would know for future reference which posts attracted viewers and how many. When I release a new mystery again, I’ll solicit the sites where I got a good response for another guest appearance.

Some topics didn’t do well, like interviews and my “pet peeve”, or cutsy talks with my sleuth. Other topics stimulated good discussions. These were more instructional pieces. I wrote a new article for each site so they were all different and related to my new release in some way. I’ve had people say that my humorous mystery sounds like fun and they’ll look it up, so I really believe this tour got me exposure and introduced my work to new readers.

I feel my own blog connects me to readers and aspiring writers who like my posts on writing craft and business of writing. Those articles attract the most viewers. It’s brought me a “Klout” score of 50 especially in Writing. I mix these discussion topics with places I visit in Florida. The downside is that I spend time writing blogs instead of writing my next book. And people are probably sick of “take a look at my blog” posts by now. Do I feel it helped sales? Maybe. Certainly, I gained exposure and the tour contributed toward name recognition. Will I do it for my next book?

Ah, there’s the question. My next release will be a paranormal romance. I do need to gain exposure among those readers. I already have a list of potential topics (which I advise you to jot down as you’re writing your next book). I can look at my previous blog tour in that genre and see who to approach. However, right now, it’s enough to do my personal blog and this one. Writing blogs instead of the next story sucks away creative energy. To launch a virtual tour, you have to solicit hosts, write the pieces, publicize the tour, and then show up each day to answer comments. That level of time commitment may not be suitable for everyone.

But for those of us who jump on the blog tour bandwagon, it’s great to support each other. If you want to get more involved, check out the Book Blogs site. And please offer any tips or insights here that you’d like to share on blog touring.

Deadlines

Posted on March 19, 2012 by Joe Moore

by Clare Langley-Hawthorne

On Friday, John provided a great blog post responding to specific questions regarding the agent/publication process. One of these questions considered the issue of deadlines – something I want to expand upon today. Deadlines, both those imposed by editors/publishers and those self-imposed, are (I think) one of the defining elements of being a professional (as opposed to hobby) writer. As we certainly can’t rely on customwritingservice.com like so many college students do nowadays.

Deadlines make you both accountable and responsible. But what does that really mean when you aren’t as yet published? It means you know that in order to achieve your larger goal (writing the novel, getting it published etc.) you need to divide the task into manageable chunks and (here is where it gets tricky) you need to meet the deadlines you impose upon yourself. Otherwise you’re just like the billions of amateur writers whining about how ‘one day’ they will write a book but (insert excuse here…) they never seem to get around to it. In today’s post I want to deal with both publisher as well as personal deadlines.

Publisher Imposed Deadlines:

As John said in his blog post on Friday, these deadlines are pretty much inviolable. If, as the author, you miss these then there is a cascading effect on the whole publication cycle. Worse case scenario the publisher views it as a breach of contract and pulls out of the deal. Best case scenario you inconvenience a whole lot of other people. So if you do need to extend, you’d better have a pretty good excuse.

My rather strict view of deadlines also extends to how you fulfil them. I’ve heard of an author who views the submission date with her publisher with a bit of a shrug – sure, she gets them the manuscript, but she’s not too concerned about making it perfect as she knows the editor will get back to her with comments, so she views the deadline as a necessary evil and continues to work through the book even while waiting for the editor to peruse and comment upon it. I differ on this in that I go into each deal with the belief that, whatever I submit has to be as damn-near-perfect as it possible. To me this is how professionals fulfil their obligations – not with a half-hearted shrug but with a commitment to demonstrating their craft to the highest degree possible.

Of course when it comes to an authors first book, the initial draft manuscript is what was acquired but any amendments to this (based on editorial feedback) should be treated with the same level of professionalism and adherence to deadlines. If an editor doesn’t provide a deadline (which would be highly unusual) then I would request or set one – that way the author remains on track and accountable to a timetable.

So what do you do if you have to seek a deadline extension?

This is where a good agent can act on an author’s behalf to mitigate against this – but the author must still have a genuine excuse for seeking an extension given the potential impact it has on the publisher. When it comes to agents, I would also recommend setting deadlines (for the agent as well as yourself) to ensure there remains a level of responsiveness and accountability that demonstrates an author’s professionalism.

Self-Imposed Deadlines

As a professional writer I like to set myself specific goals for my WIP to keep me on track. Typically I lay out a timetable to complete certain chapters or parts of the books to ensure I don’t face the overwhelming panic of producing a novel. When the tasks ahead are in manageable chunks the path seems far less onerous (or scary). The first thing I do is also set the date I want to get the draft manuscript to my agent and then work backwards from there.

Sometimes I give my agent an initial deadline for the first 5-10 chapters and the proposed plot outline so I can get his read/feedback on the project ahead. Then I always tell him the date I propose getting the complete manuscript to him – it helps establish my own timetable as well as alerting him to my goal (and, I hope, demonstrate I am tackling it in a serious, professional manner).

As a terrible procrastinator, self-imposed deadlines are vital to keeping me on track as a professional writer.

So what about you?
Do you set your own deadlines? Do you meet them?
Have you ever had to negotiate for a deadline extension from your publisher and if so, how did it go?

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Joe Moore

Here’s another promotional tool that will drive you crazy. I just learned about Pinterest, where you pin up pictures online that relate to your book, your characters, the locations in your story, your vacation in New Guinea, your restaurant meals, or your life in general. This acts as an online pinboard that other folks can view. If someone spots a photo on my board they like, they can share it. You tell what the picture means and people comment on it. At least, this is my understanding so far.

But who owns the rights to the photos you post? What happens, for example, if I imagine a character looking like Richard Dean Anderson in Stargate: SG1? Can I just copy his photo off the Web? According to one person I asked, yes I can, if Pinterest attributes the source. In some cases, though, I’ve cut out photos from magazines of celebrities or people on society pages and scanned them into my computer because they look like my characters. Can I use these photos? I doubt it, because I don’t have the people’s permission. It seems safer to provide your own pictures.

This promises to be another time consuming promotional activity. I’d have to learn how to use the site, determine a theme for each board, and upload the photos. Do we really need more work to do? Or is this a great promotional opportunity we might be missing if we let it go? There’s always the pressure to jump on the next cart that wheels along. But hop on too many wagons, and you might fall off.

Oh, and you have to request an invitation to join this site. Then you register using your Facebook or Twitter account. This is what the site says:

How Pinterest Works
After you have created an Account (defined below) to become a Member of Pinterest, you may use the Services to create, view and follow visual collections. In order to create a visual collection, you may (i) upload images from your computer by selecting the “Add a Pin” section of the Site, (ii) use the Application to take and upload images, or (iii) install and use our “Pin It” browser toolbar to upload images, by following the instructions provided on the “About” section of the Site. Please note that your visual collections will be publicly viewable by all visitors to the Site and Application. In order to follow the visual collections of other Members, you may search for other visual collections via the Site and Application and select the option to “Follow” such Members. http://pinterest.com

Here are some tips, kindly shared by another author on one of my listserves:
http://www.authormedia.com/2012/02/01/3-ways-authors-can-use-pinterest-guilt-free/
http://www.authormedia.com/2012/02/02/set-up-your-author-pinterest-profile-in-10-easy-steps/
http://www.authorems.com/2012/pinterest/
http://savvybookwriters.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/how-can-pinterest-increase-your-book-sales/

So do any of you already participate in Pinterest? Or would you do it now that you’re aware of this site?