Lynn Murphy's Blog (14)

 Sometimes I get leadings that I can't ignore. I'm not sure if they are directives from a higer power, or just ideas that refuse to go away until I follow through. Last week I had a strong impression that I should send a copy of my book The Time Of My Life, to Leigh Anne Tuohy. If you don't immediately recognize that name, she is the real life version of the character played by Sandra Bullock in the movie The Blind Side. She and her family live in Memphis, where for…

 I had the opportunity to see my oldest son realize a dream this weekend. For six years he has been focused on accomplishing one thing: to run at the collegiate level. Friday night I got to watch him run his first college race. It was the first time he had run that distance in a race- an 8K (about 5 miles) and it was 92 degrees at race time. He has been running in the mountains of North Carolina and the high there has been in the 70s. He also was coming off a bout with tendonitus (as we live…

I am going to vent for just a moment. I saw a tweet this morning under the heading of "Holocaust Remembrance Day" where some unfeeling jerk  wrote (and POSTED) "It's Holocaust Remembrance Day and I've got gas!" Even if what this day stands for means nothing to you, even if you really just don't care, how could ANYONE tweet something so offensive? And no, I am not Jewish. But I do pay tribute to the victims of the Holocaust every year. Much of my professional career has been dedicated to…

I spent several hours learning how to format my previously published books into Kindle versions. One of these is When The Butterflies Flew Away,  a novel about the work of art teacher Freidl Brandeis and the children she taught while in the concentration camp Terezin. Brandeis is one of my personal heroes. She went to Terzin with her suitcase full of art supplies with the goal of using art as therapy for the children there. She taught the children to draw and she encouraged them to…

I confess, I am still in the dark when it comes to marketing. I am tweeting my little heart out, creating videos, sending releases to the paper, talking on facebook...and I still don't really know if any of it is making a difference.

I confess, it does bother me that the people I know personally don't buy my book. Othe authors tell me not to let it bother me, and I try. I really do. But if my friends don't support the book, why should strangers? (But I do think my fellow…

 I spend my days searching for ways to market The Time Of My Life to a broader audience. I had been hearing about book trailers, but only embarked on the process after reading an article in the March issue of The Writer Magazine (www.WriterMag.com)

I went with their 5 steps on how to make a book trailer. Luckily I had the windows movie making software installed, so it was just a matter of dragging photos and adding text-which took a couple of…

This post isn't really about promoting my book,TheTime Of My Life, but about the reason why I wrote it. The story first began to bloom in the February of my oldest son's seventh grade year. His younger brother's best friend had just comeover to spend the night with us and his mother mentioned that she had just signed Jacob up to run track with the local youth sports organization. Ian responded to Shannon's comment with "I want to run track!" We hadn't known he was…

Before last week, I hardly knew what twitter was. But everywhere my fellow authors were posting about tweeting. I admit that while I signed up for a twitter account on my own, I had to enlist my seventeen year old son to actually understand how to do it. He taught me how to hashtag (I didn't know, for example, that you don't space between the words in a hashtag.).But we were both surprised how many suggestive women starting following. (Perhaps they think The Time Of My Life refers to…

I've been having a lot of discussions with indie authors about develpoing your market and your target audience. While I am still defining where I need to be concentrating my time from a marketing standpoint for The Time Of My Life, I reflected on books for which I became someone's audience and why.

So here are some recent reads for me: Getting Inby Karen Stabiner. Its a book about five families and the lengths they have to go to to get their kids accepted to the…

I had a good day, publicity wise yesterday. My press release for The Time Of My Life was featured in a very nice article in The Citizen, the local newspaper where I live in a great little town south of Atlanta. text messages came all day from neighbors who read about my book over their morning coffee or as they shuffled through the paper while they read the mail after work. I posted the link to my facebook page and heard from a friend I had not seen in seventeen years who could…

People ask me on occassion where my characters come from. Sometimes the answer is as simple as the fact that they show up somewhere inside my brain and grow until they have to come out. When I wrote When The Butterflies Flew Away, a book for younger children meant to be an introduction to the Holocaust, I wanted to tell the story of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis who taught art lessons to children in Terezin. I created a fairy tale type of story with Brandeis as The Art Lady. I don't know…

The most common advice given to writers is the cliche "Write about what you know." When I began writing The Time Of My Life what I knew about was at risk kids and running track. I was teaching at a middle school in a suburb of Memphis and our school's population came largely from an area that was neither city nor county, and where there was a lot of gang activity, poverty and kids at risk for failing. At the same time my two sons had been running track and had begun to excel at distance…

Spent the last two and a half days creating an author website (http:booksbylynnmurphy.yolasite.com in case you are interested). Not an easy task, but people assure me it is necessary. I talked with a friend who has a travel website and got some advice about getting traffic to you site. My biggest fear is that I am being really pushy about it in my facebook posts and that my friends will decide NOT to buy my book. (But typically, I find that many of my friends never purchase my books. Wonder…

I have never written a blog before, but it seems that most authors do, so I am jumping on the bandwagon! As a dislocated teacher I am trying once and for all to make the writing thing work as a career. Online marketing is unknown territory to me, but I understand that it has become essential to book marketing. (And I know almost nothing about regular marketing, given that I have five books and have made almost nothing in royalties.) I hope to learn some tricks of the trade from other…