Deborah Woehr

I’ve been down with the flu since Friday, so I have some catching up to do.

Interview with Beyond the Books: I don’t know about you, but I enjoy listening to or reading about people’s life stories. The questions are mostly writing-related, which were interesting, but I enjoyed reading the authors’ responses to the last five questions, which focused on their goals.

Author Spotlight at The Dark Phantom Review: Mayra Calvani, who interviewed me at Blog Critics, posted my excerpt on her book review site. Like Beyond the Books, you’ll find all kinds of books here.

Prosperity: From Concept to Reality posted at The Story Behind the Book: This is another gem of a blog. The title says it all. The most interesting article I’ve read on that site so far is “Marwan: The Autobiography of a 911 Terrorist. I remember reading about how several authors had experienced having their books kicked back to them after 9/11 because they referenced this tragedy in one way or the other.

Author Spotlight at Buzz the Book: This is another good place to go if you’d like to read book excerpts from new authors.

Today, I was interviewed by paranormal romance author and Blog Critics writer, Mayra Calvani.

Author Deborah Woehr is the moderator of Paranormal Watch, a popular blog focusing on ghosts and the supernatural. She’s on tour this month of February to promote the release of her ghost novel Prosperity, available from Lulu.

Welcome to Blogcritics, Deborah! It’s nice to have you here.

Why don’t you start by telling us a bit about your book, and what inspired you to write such a story?

Prosperity is about an embattled psychic who would rather call herself crazy than believe in ghosts or the afterlife. I’ve always been interested in the paranormal and the debate about whether or not ghosts exist. Researching for both Prosperity and Paranormalwatch.com, I found that there are two hardcore camps. It’s always interesting to read what they have to say on the subject and about each other.

Read more

Today’s stop is at horror writer and editor, M.E. Ellis’ Nutter’s Gang.

If you grew up reading horror novels and watching horror movies, you may think that writing a spooky scene with a ghost is easy. Just stick your hero and/or heroine inside a haunted house, maybe add a few friends to add a little more excitement and drama, and have the ghost write “boo” on the bathroom mirror while one of your characters is brushing her teeth. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Hollywood makes you think so.

The best ghost stories I’ve read and watched involved ghosts that came alive as though they were living and breathing characters. They had personality. Even more important, they had their own story to tell.

Read more at Nutter’s Gang.

Day One begins this tour at Rose Marie Wolf’s author blog, where I’ve written a guest post about how I came up for the idea for Prosperity.

Writing Prosperity 1998

The idea for novel came to me as a “mind movie” of a woman who was standing on a small island in the middle of Hell, searching for the soul of her late husband. It was to be a book about a man who used black magic to lure an unsuspecting town into his cult. That was the very beginning.

Fast-forward one year. The story wasn’t coming together as I hoped that it would. I didn’t know enough about black magic to create a plausible story. And, I had way too many characters vying for attention.

Fast-forward two years. I had long since ditched the idea of black magic and cults. My characters were still unknown to me, although I was getting to know my main character, Amanda. The title of my novel was Prosperity, a once-thriving town turned into a literal ghost town. I was still having problems creating a cohesive plot. Who are the ghosts? Why are they haunting the area?

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Day Two, I am stopping at Andrea Allison’s Ghost Stories blog. Andrea’s blog has always been one of my favorite places to lurk because, as you know, I enjoy the subject of the paranormal. Just Saying Hello isn’t a full-fledged ghost story, but an event that happened to me.

I told myself that I would never sign up for a MySpace account. As you may know from reading my prior posts, I find them clunky and cluttered. So, why did I sign up for a MySpace account?

Because my oldest son signed up for one when school started. I didn’t find out about this until my brother and his wife came down for a visit a couple of months ago. They were raving about their MySpace pages and trying to talk me into signing up when my son mentioned that he had one. Of course, they had to see it. So did I. After I discussed safety issues with him again, I signed up for an account so I could keep an eye on him.

Since then, my attitude about MySpace and Ning has changed a slight bit. I’ve gotten in touch with an old writer friend that I hadn’t talked to in about five years. I contacted Douglas Clegg (one of my favorite authors) about a sequel to his book, Mordred, Bastard Son. At this point, I’m still exploring and searching for people who like to write or read ghost stories.

Dorothy suggested that I sign up at a few social networking sites to help promote Prosperity. I’ve gotten a very nice reception at Book Place since I signed up last Wednesday. If you’re looking to promote your book online, start with this site first.

Another site Dorothy recommended was Book Marketing Network, which was created by John Kremer. I don’t have anything to report right now because I’ve barely touched this site since I signed up.

Right now, I don’t expect to make any book sales from these sites because I’m unknown. Once I establish a presence on those sites, I may see a few sales. I’ll post a Part II article in June and end with a Part III article in December, detailing my progress.

Stay tuned.

These past couple of weeks have kept me busy writing interviews and articles for my upcoming blog tour next month. I can’t believe that February is around the corner already! Beginning February 1st, expect to find short posts about each tour stop. The tour will wrap up with a free book giveaway. Details are available on my blog tour page.

I watched my first book trailer when I clicked on an author’s link in the Lulu forum last month. That video was obviously an amateur effort, but I enjoyed his creativity. It didn’t make me rush out to buy his book, but it got me thinking about making my own video trailer for Prosperity (or having one done, if my efforts don’t pan out).

I’ve posted another video trailer for The Million Dollar Ghost as inspiration. I loved the way this author incorporated the Poltergeist theme with both haunting and romantic shots. The captions for the synopsis were well written and placed. Potential readers come away with no doubt in their minds what this book is about.

Amazon: I’ve submitted a contact update, plus signed up for the “search inside the book” program. You can’t order the book directly from Amazon yet, but there are six sellers in the Amazon Marketplace who are selling it.

Borders: It appears that you can buy directly from them.

I also found the book listed on Buy.com!

Trying to target an audience for the anthology proved to be difficult due to the multiple genres in this collection. If I had to do it all over again, I would have narrowed the anthology’s focus to fiction or nonfiction. Then I would have narrowed that down to a specific genre.

That said, I’ve narrowed the anthology’s marketing field to two possible audiences: writers who haven’t started a blog and are looking to promote their books online, and the public/private education system. I’m finding that I still have to tell people what a blog is because, despite all the media attention blogs have received over the past two years.

The challenge I face is educating the general public what a blog is and how they will benefit from reading blogs about their favorite subjects. I’ve chosen two possible markets for the anthology.

1. English teachers and their students, ranging from junior high age on up to college. I’ve read several posts from writers who have said how blogging has improved their writing and research skills. I’m going to approach my oldest son’s english teacher to see if she would be interested in having me come to class for a presentation.

2. Writers. I’m looking for writers who may or may not have heard of blogging. Although I’ve found many net-savvy writers in my surfing travels, I’m still reading about how many writers don’t have a website, much less a blog. I plan on reaching this audience through writer’s magazines via informative articles about blogging and (possibly) blogger profiles in different writing genres.

Internet Marketers swore by this technique in the Spring of ‘05, claiming that they received thousands of hits per day. So I decided to try it because I needed to promote The Writers Buzz. I slammed out a couple of articles and threw them to the wind . . . and got more spam and scrapers (plagiarists) than quality visitors.

There was a positive side in that these scrapers kept my byline (and my link) intact so I was able to get more inbound links, thereby boosting my web presence. I also found some useful articles to post on The Buzz as well as some good writing sites. Unfortunately, they weren’t attracted to my site because my articles sucked.

On Saturday, I decided to give this technique another try, although this time I’m not expecting miracles. You may have read the book marketing plan article I wrote. I added my byline, mentioning both The Writers Buzz and providing the Lulu link for the anthology. That way, I won’t get penalized by Google for posting duplicate content.

I posted this article at ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, and articledashboard.com. All of these sites have a PR5, which will give that link more exposure in the search engines. That’s my ultimate goal.

I plan on writing more articles to submit to print magazines as well as the heavy-weight writing sites such as WritersWrite.com.