When Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees was released in 2002, it met with encouraging yet modest sales. It was only after book clubs started discovering it and recommending it word-of-mouth, over the course of the following year, that it accumulated the kind of readership that would push it onto the New York Times bestseller list, where it stayed for two-and-a-half years. The book club craze isn’t over—in fact, it’s in a boom. The New York Times recently estimated that five million Americans belong to book clubs. Publishers understand the boon that the book club movement represents, and will often give books designed to meet this market additional support at the publisher’s website . These titles often have staying power. I just heard of a club reading The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, which also came out in 2002. For the math-impaired, that’s twelve years ago. Especially with book club fiction, a title need not be out three months then die a quiet death as so many cynics a...

I share a certain trait with the character of Angela in my debut, The Art of Falling —a propensity for celebration. Maybe you caught on to that when I announced my book deal here a year-and-a-half ago.  The countdown to its publication is now complete, and I recently celebrated with more than a hundred writing friends at my hometown launch at the Doylestown (PA) Bookshop, and at an after-party at the historic, newly renovated Doylestown Inn. Like that first joyous entry, I’m going to let pictures tell the bulk of the story, while tying in some of the topics I’ve visited in this series. Some of my Wegman's writing group While writing is a solo sport, in my first post I suggested that you join hands  with other writers. Here I am pictured with several of the writing friends I meet with once a week at a local grocery store, laptops side by side, all of us working on our various projects. Because we should spend all our time writing, shouldn’t we? Not fritter away tim...

You only have one opportunity to create “buzz” about your book, and you don’t want to squander it. The hope is to create enough excitement about your release so that it explodes from the gate. My gate opens—hopefully with a bang—less than three months from now, on January 28. Pre-sales As you can see by the number “14” applied to this monthly post, I’ve already been creating buzz for The Art of Falling for some time now. So much so that every now and then—when people say, “Didn’t that already come out?”—I have to remind them that the bees haven’t already fled the hive! Once you get fully invested readers to pre-order, however, you can stop worrying about that. Now that pre-orders are live and the final copyedits complete, my evolving author website devotes two pages to my novel.  The first  shows the cover, a brief synopsis, trade review praise and blurbs, and—for the first time—debuts the opening chapter. If the reader is favorably impressed, she need d...

One side effect of having a long countdown to release is the leisure to obsess about certain aspects of the book business. One thing I debated about long and hard was whether to make a book trailer. Concept  My first thought was an enthusiastic yes. I’d not only have a book, but a mini-movie! I became a trailer fanatic, watching still pictures float past while excerpts were read off-screen. Lines from the book materialized on screen while music played. Actors played out scenes, bits were animated, characters drawn. I started to envision the dancer in my novel moving in a way that caused a blur— Wait. If I wanted to use a visual, why a blur? That’s when I realized I didn’t want a real woman in my book trailer. Because my novel is on the theme of body image, I had skirted physical description of my protagonist. I wanted my readers to fill in that blank with an image that worked for them. Execution With filming a real dancer off the table, my first thought was to make the trai...

After decades of work focusing on my craft as a writer, the time has arrived to project a new image as author. This past month has been all about image. Kathryn Craft My son, Jackson Williams, an amateur photographer with a good eye, great camera, and even greater patience, took a couple hundred photos of me over a two-day period, from which I selected photos for a variety of uses. The mug shots I had been using, that my husband quickly snapped around my house? Gone. Fresh photos with natural lighting have now taken their place, including a few fun shots like the one in the signature block, below. To the right is the head shot that will serve as my official author photo on my novel. With that behind me, I devoted the rest of January to designing my author website and starting a new blog. I had used Go Daddy’s Website Builder software to create my editing site at  Writing-partner.com , so decided to go the same route for my new author site at KathrynCraft.com . I favor cl...