Mystery Writer and Readers Choice Award Nominee John Desjarlais

A former producer with Wisconsin Public Radio, John Desjarlais teaches English at Kishwaukee College in northern Illinois. His first novel, The Throne of Tara (Crossway 1990, 2000), was a Christianity Today Readers Choice Award nominee, and his medieval crime novel Relics (Thomas Nelson 1993, 2009) was a Doubleday Book Club Selection.

Bleeder and Viper (Sophia Institute Press 2009 and forthcoming 2010, respectively) are the first two entries in a contemporary mystery series. A member of The Academy of American Poets and Mystery Writers of America, he is listed in Who's Who in Entertainment and Who’s Who Among America's Teachers.

John, Thank you for joining us today. It's exciting to interview such a prolific writer. With two books published, I'm eager to learn what you are working on next. Can you tell us about your latest books?

BLEEDER is a contemporary amateur-sleuth mystery where a stigmatic priest bleeds to death on Good Friday in front of horrified parishioners. A miracle? Or bloody murder? Aristotle professor Reed Stubblefield needs to find out, because police regard him as the prime ‘person of interest’ in the mysterious death. He applies Aristotle’s logic to get at the truth before he is arrested or killed by people who don’t want this mystery solved.

VIPER, the sequel due out this fall, features a minor character from BLEEDER as the protagonist. Latina insurance agent Selena De La Cruz learns that her name has been written in her parish church’s ‘Book of the Deceased’ on All Souls Day. The problem is, she’s not dead. But someone wants her to be.

These are interesting plots! I’m intrigued. How did you pick the genre you write in?

When I worked as a scriptwriter for a multimedia company in the 1980s, I produced a documentary on the history of Western Christianity and became fascinated by the Irish monastic movement. These artistic, scholarly monks saved civilization at a time when barbarians were burning their way through Europe. Saint Columba of Iona was especially interesting – a hot-headed warrior and poet with Second Sight who went to war over a disputed manuscript and, in remorse over the thousands slain, exiled himself among the Picts of Scotland where he dueled the druids, miracles versus magic. So his fictionalized biography, The Throne of Tara, was my first novel.

I learned about relics along the way and the rich trade in them (and battles over them) in the Middle Ages and that became the basis for book 2, Relics. I’d begun researching a third historical wherein Aristotle, the Father of Logic, would solve a crime. But I learned this had already been done (and well) by a British writer not long ago. So I fancied a classics professor who was familiar with Aristotle’s writing and who would apply Aristotelian logic to solving a crime that defied reason. That’s how BLEEDER began, a story of a stigmatic priest who bleeds to death on Good Friday. I always enjoyed reading mysteries and now I’m hooked on writing them.

It sounds like you enjoy the experience of researching topics and writing about them. Are there any parts of the writing process you find challenging?

You won't believe how many times you'll read your own book in the proofing process. You do want it to be perfect and avoid typos and such - but what tedious work.

Promotion and marketing are harder than writing the book, more time-consuming, and potentially a real hindrance to writing. 15 years ago, my publishers invested in my titles with advertising, solicitation of reviews and other things. We've all heard how little publishers are putting into marketing these days, backing only their top-sellers who don't need much publicity anyway. The business side of writing, the selling side, is a real challenge. There's always something you could be doing, and this can bite into the work you like most - writing.

How can my readers get in touch with you?

My email is jjdesjarlais@johndesjarlais.com – my web site is JohnDesjarlais.com – I look forward to hearing from your readers. Thanks for the opportunity to talk with you.

It’s been a pleasure to host you and to learn more about your books. Thank you for sharing your writing with us.

Ace Web Content Makes Your Words Shine

Erum Zehra is the Head Writer for Ace Web Content and has an MBA with a major in Marketing. She has been running a web based consulting firm (BizTalk4U Consulting) for the last ten years and has written for many business websites.

Ten years of web writing experience has awarded her with the expertise required to excel in writing projects. She specializes in creating web content which is both visitor and search engine friendly.

Welcome Erum, Thank you for joining us today at Writers in Business. As writers, we know that having an online presence is essential to build our platform and generate sales. How does Ace Web Content help writers achieve this?

Writing is essential for promoting any business on the web. Writers have an edge in doing so as they are already skilled in writing. Ace Web Content advises them to proactively use their writing skills to enhance and promote their online business. Knowledge and understanding of web marketing is needed to use their writing skills in the most effective way for this purpose.

Along with writing content, I understand you also offer meta tag coding to make the web pages more visible to search engines. Can you share the importance of this with us? How does this improve our web site page rankings?

I just posted an article about this on my website:

How to Write Search Engine Friendly Meta Tags

What other services do you offer at Ace Web Content?

We offer Social media marketing, press release writing, SEO and web content writing.

Do you charge by the page or by the hour for projects?

Smaller projects are charged per page and bigger projects are charged by per hour. Estimates for projects can be requested by submitting our free quote form at Quote Form.

How can we reach you?

The fastest way is to submit the contact form on the website at
Contact Us.

Please visit Ace Web Content for your next project and consider them for search engine optimization.

Author Marketing Experts - Comprehensive PR for your book!

Today we welcome Penny Sansevieri to Writers in Business. Penny is the CEO and founder of Author Marketing Experts, Inc. (AME), a best-selling author and internationally recognized book marketing and media relations expert. Her company is one of the leaders in the publishing industry and has developed some of the most cutting-edge book marketing campaigns.

Author Marketing Experts, Inc. is described as a full-service marketing and PR firm specializing in customized campaigns and Internet Marketing. Can you tell us some of the tools you utilize to create a book campaign?
Interestingly enough the biggest and most important tool is creativity. In a world where there are 1,000 books published each day in the US, you must be creative to stand apart from the crowd. The other piece is that you must know how your book benefits your readers. Readers don’t buy books they buy benefits.

AME’s clients have been featured on The View, CBS The Early Show, The Today Show, Entertainment Tonight, CNN, National Public Radio, Reader’s Digest, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Essence Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, MSNBC and many others.

Your company has some fantastic connections! I understand this exposure is not guaranteed, but what are the chances of a fiction or non-fiction book realizing this form of promotion through AME? What percent of your clients achieve this level of exposure?

You know it really depends, we tend to focus much more on Internet than we do traditional PR anymore – the reason? The Return on Investment (ROI) tends to be better with Internet marketing and in the end, authors want to sell books. The odds though of getting on a show tend to increase with a significant platform, what this means is that the author can’t pop out with a book and say “please feature me on your show” there has so be some “legs” to the book and the campaign before any of these shows will even consider it. As to the percentage – that’s a very tough question. If we have a solid book, meaning a book that’s got a good foothold in its market, and an author who has a great platform then the chances are very good that they’ll get major exposure, sometimes as high as 90%.

Traveling to promote our books can get expensive. Can you tell us about Virtual Author Buzz Tour?

Yes, and thanks for asking. When it comes to marketing there are two types of promotion: push and pull. Push-marketing is where you “push” your message out to the media, so you push it to radio, TV, print, etc. That’s good, but not always effective. Pull-marketing is where you “pull” readers into your site via incoming links to your website. That’s where we shine. Our Virtual Author Buzz Tour is a combination of aggressive online blog pitching, social networking, Twitter – all of the latest and hottest online venues to pull readers to your book and to your website.

AME offers extensive online resources visitors can access through the Internet at A Marketing Expert. These resources include a bi-weekly online newsletter. What topics covered in your newsletter? How can we sign up to receive it?

You can go to the site to get the newsletter and thank you for mentioning it, I love it – we get tons of compliments on it. We also have a ton of free teleclasses that we offer through our AME-University. I believe in free resources. I think authors are looking for help and guidance and frankly, an educated author makes better choices for themselves and their book and in the long run, the more you know the more money you’ll save in promoting your book!

Penny’s career in the publicity, book marketing, and literary field spans over 15 years. During that time she has been an author, freelance writer, publicist, and instructor. Her diverse background enables her to bring a multitude of talents to the table. I encourage you to visit AME A Marketing Expert to learn more about how they can create the buzz you want to get your book flying off from bookstore shelves.

Bookkeeping for Writers by Brigitte Thompson

Writers work in all different genres and write for a variety of media outlets. Some of us are business writers, others create romance novels and many write articles for magazines or copy for web sites. Putting words into print is our profession, but dealing with the financial aspects of our writing business can be challenging.

As an accountant, author and freelance writer, I can help. My newest title, Bookkeeping Basics for Freelance Writers, addresses issues writers face daily such as how to deduct travel expenses, differentiate between personal and business property and claim home office deductions.

Bookkeeping is an essential part of the business of writing, especially identifying and tracking expenses. Business expenses are considered an operating cost. The more legitimate business expenses that we can document, the lower our tax payments will be.

Understanding Expenses

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) requires that our writing expenses be ordinary and necessary in order for them to be acceptable. An ordinary expense is defined as common and accepted in our profession. A necessary expense means we need to spend this money in order to operate the business. The expenses must not be considered extravagant. They must be an essential part of doing business as a writer. It is important to differentiate between personal expenses and business expenses.

Writers are able to realize some unique deductions which may be considered personal for most other taxpayers. For example, a book on the history of California used for researching my fiction manuscript based in that state could be deductible as a writer. Other potentially deductible expenses include tickets to a ballet used to build the character of a ballerina I am writing about and an instructional DVD used to improve my public speaking skills. Most writers will call these expenses research or professional development. We need to be able to justify each expense if audited, so be sure it is legitimate and has the supporting documents to back up the claim.

Recordkeeping Options

To justify expenses, it is important to establish a system of recordkeeping that works for you. Some things need to be recorded daily, while others can be done weekly or monthly. It is imperative that you get into the habit of saving and recording everything related to your writing business. All invoices, receipts, credit card slips and bank statements are essential documentation that should be kept.

Some people find it helpful to create a system for their financial transactions using envelopes and lined paper. Transactions can be recorded on sheets of 8 ½” by 11” paper attached to the front of a large clasp envelope with supporting documentation stored inside. This system works well for many writers because it is simple to set up and only requires the purchase of paper and envelopes. However, one disadvantage of this system is that it’s hard to see at a glance how much you have spent on supplies during the year or how much you have paid for your business phone line.

If you prefer computerized bookkeeping, these transactions could be recorded on a spreadsheet and receipts could still be kept in a clasp envelope. Microsoft Excel® provides an easy-to-use program which can help organize your records. One benefit of tracking this information with a computer spreadsheet is its ability to compute. Once you learn the program, you will be able to format columns to add a range of numbers. This eliminates the chance of addition errors haunting you during an audit. Unfortunately, spreadsheets do not offer much room for detail and are not able to generate financial statements.

If you would like to go a step further, QuickBooks® is a user-friendly accounting program which generates financial statements and budgets using the data you input. Again, entering the data allows for error free calculations and, as a bonus, custom reports compile the information so you can easily determine how much was spent on shipping manuscripts during the year, for example. Trial versions of accounting software can be found online, but the cost to purchase and the time spent learning it could be a disadvantage to some writers. Receipts would still have to be kept to document your deduction.

The choice is yours. Any system that works for you is acceptable to the IRS, as long as the pertinent information is retained. Learning what to record as writing expenses as well as how to properly document each transaction is important to the success of your writing business.

Please visit my web site for more information: Bookkeeping for Writers .

Writers-Editors Network with Dana Cassell

Dana Cassell from North Stratford, NH is visiting us today at Writers In Business. Dana is a freelance writer, author, editor as well as the founder and executive director of Florida Freelance Writers Association and Cassell Network of Writers (a.k.a The Writers-Editors Network). She began her career in 1971 and has a wealth of information to share.

On a recent afternoon, I sat down at my computer to gather information for this interview and was blown away by all Dana has to offer for writers and editors. The resources available on her site are comprehensive and include marketing tips, conferences & event listings, articles on getting an agent and syndication, and a bookstore geared toward the writing world.

Her site also offer 4 levels of paid membership with even more substantial benefits such as a monthly newsletter Freelance Writer's Report (which I’ve had the pleasure of reading and highly recommend!), and access to the private Members section of writers-editors.com where you will find postings of freelance jobs, new magazines, publications to avoid, and a listing of average payments for various kinds of writing-related work to help you set your fees. Members can also be listed in the Writer Data Bank, receive a Press ID card and access a toll free number for questions related to writing. This network is amazing!


~Dana, you have been linking professional writers and editors with those who need content and editorial services since 1982. Can you tell us how the process works?

Our process works in both directions. When clients or editors need something written or editorial help (e.g., proofreading, copyediting, revision), we can (a) send them contact information on those CNW members who meet their criteria, (b) post what they need on our private Member Bulletin Board (so their info is not out there on the Web for all to see), and/or (c) allow them to peruse our Member Bios posted on our Meet Writers Web pages or in our downloadable "Guide to CNW/FFWA Writers." Then from the other direction, our members can contact editors through our "Latest Markets" listings (new magazines with contact information posted almost daily in our Members section and republished each month in FWR), and by checking in our Bulletin Board page for job listings that come in through our site or that I find and link to by perusing dozens of job sites for writers (thereby saving our members much time). The
Bulletin Board is updated a couple times a day on most days.

~Can you share with us two of the most common questions you receive on the Member’s Hotline?

Most often, questions deal with how much to charge, which is often a bugaboo for freelancers. We do have a lengthy "Average Payments" page in our Members section, providing lowest, highest, and average payments our members have reported for various types of work and magazine genres. However, that "different" type of job will come along that's completely new to even the most established writer, and he or she will not be sure how to establish a job quote.

After that, I'd say they run the gamut -- from copyright issues to collecting from a slow- or non-paying publisher; the typical questions and issues that independent business people run into.


~What are some recent topics covered in Freelance Writer’s Report?
Because of the economic downturn, we've had a number of articles and tips this year on how to survive and even take advantage of it. (With both publishers and corporations cutting back on staff, many will turn to freelancers to take up the slack more than they did when they had full staffs to keep busy.) We've also had articles on staying organized with a submissions database, tips for maximizing book signings, successful speaking gigs, self-publishing, book promotion, and cutting costs in recent months.

~In addition to operating the Writers-Editors Network, you are a prolific writer contributing to retail trade magazines and moving on to pharmaceutical and medical topics. Can you tell us about your most recent book? What are you working on next?

My most recently published book is the Encyclopedia of Obesity and Eating Disorders - Third Edition (Facts On File). I am currently wrapping up the Encyclopedia of Pharmaceutical Drugs, and working on the Encyclopedia of Autoimmune Diseases - Second Edition (both for Facts On File).

If you are looking for information on how to improve the success of your business, be sure to stop by Writers-Editors.com. Dana knows her members and her old-fashioned personal attention is something no other network can provide!