Q&A with Lexis DeRothschild

My guest on The G-ZONE tomorrow is Lexis DeRothchild at 11am EST. To whet your appetite for the interview she was nice enough to send me this Q&A. Here bio is after that and here is the link for the interview:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/gelatisscoop/2011/10/15/lexis-derothch...

 Q: So, Lexis is your pen name. Who are you in real life?

A: I won’t reveal my true identity but I will say that I’m a bartender turned travel writer living in a seaside resort with my partner and cat. “The Cat Letters: A Tale of Longing, Adventure and True Love” borrows from that.

Q: What’s the story about?

A: “Me” is the protagonist. She has to leave Nantucket because of a love triangle and finds herself writing letters to her cat when she leaves the island by sailing to the Caribbean.

Q: Is this a memoir disguised as fiction?

A: I have been a bartender and I have sailed to the Caribbean on a tall ship. This quote by Oscar Wilde,

A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.

We have all had love troubles and run from them, but women write about them very differently than men.

What I adored about writing this novella was writing to my cat as the muse, and including gorgeous drawings by artist Patrick Maloney.

Q: You had to launch this three times. What happened?

The first time, I sent the wrong file to Bookbaby, my digital publisher. It had none of the thirty-nine illustrations and the pen name was wrong. The second time, it got clear that the title was wrong. People thought it was a children’s book, not an offbeat, quirky adult fairy tale.

When I looked at other ebooks in my genres, $9.99 was too much for a sixty page electronic novella by an absolutely unknown writer. What was I thinking?

Bookbaby talked me off the ledge. We created a new name, Patrick redid the cover and I changed the price to $2.99. Third times a charm, they say, and I want that to be true.

The whole gut-wrenching process inspired my blog, “Confessions of an eBook Virgin.”

Q: Is that a “how-to” blog?

A: No, it’s a journalistic blog about the total process of working as both an author and a self-publisher. I write in the same style as “The Cat Letters”. What started out as a way to both off steam is now an essay that I will launch on Kindle.

Q: What advice do you have for an aspiring fiction writer who wants to publish a novel electronically?

A: My advice on that topic is a book of its own! But, I have three things that will insure that someone can realize this dream:

Write for the internet first. Create a blog or join a writer’s network. Internet writing is a literary frontier, the wild west for authors. If a book is going to be seen electronically, you want to know this medium and be able to imagine the way people will read it.

It’s also a way to get your name out there as you complete the novel or novella, in my case.

Know your craft. If you’re going to do this writing thing, learn the ropes: sentence construction, grammar and syntax.

One of the best ways to learn this is by reading your work out loud. You’ll hear where it drags, the tense is wrong and when the sentences are awkward. It’s really embarrassing and enormously freeing.

If an author gets known, readings are part of the job. Practice makes perfect!

Go for the finish line. Don’t stop. Learn as you go and know that getting an agent and a publisher, without the step of self-publishing, is infinitesimal in these new times. Launching your first book by yourself, and learning to promote it, is being part of this gold rush of book publishing.

Lexis De Rothschild is the pen name for a travel writer who lives by sea with her beloved partner and their extraordinary cat, but aren’t they all? She hopes that her cherished readers will see the humor in all things, especially matters of the heart.

"The Cat Letters: A Tale of Longing, Adventure and True Love", illustrated by Patrick Maloney, is her first novella. She also chronicles the wild ride of independent publishing in her blog, "Confessions of an eBook Virgin", soon to be an essay on Amazon Kindle.