the authoritypage 3 the authority the workshop, but in no way is she a newcomer to writing. her...
TRANSCRIPT
Nostalgia on steroids is a way to de-scribe Allia’s, latest book, Laugh Out Loud: 40 Women Humorists Cele-brate Then and Now….Before We Forget. After reading the book, one reviewer remarked, “I laughed my butt off, but according to my mirror, my butt is still there.” Another reader pronounced, this collection of writ-ings is not only funny and enjoyable, but it is an archaeological dig of the mid-twentieth century. And dig it is! The writer summons from the past ironing her hair. Rolling it in soda cans to straighten it. Or, days slabbing on cement-colored lip-stick so heavy, you looked like a Zombie princess. Or, days when you dated boys who wore more jewelry than a cheap starlet.
The reader can expect a fresh nostal-gic and funny perspective (like the example above) from contributors she compiled into this, --- her first self-published book. The one thread that ties those contributors to Allia is the Erma Bombeck Writers Workshop at the University of Dayton. Allia attended and was propelled by
The Authority
Connecticut Authors & Publishers Association—Since 1994
Connecticut’s Source for Writing, Publishing & Marketing Information
side This Issue
Cover Design Strategies p. 2
Media Tips p. 2
Selling More Books p. 3
Reluctant Reader p. 4
IBPA Scholarship p. 4
ABCs of Editing p. 5
Celebrating Success p. 6
Writing Group p. 6
Volume 26 Issue 12 www.aboutcapa.com December, 2019
Meet December Member Allia Zobel Nolan, The Persevering Author
By Joe Keeney
December 21: CAPA’s Annual Holiday Party Inside This Issue
CAPA Board of Directors p. 2
SW CAPA Report p. 2
The Cover Story p. 2
Book Marketing Tip p. 2
Don’t Kill Your Darlings p. 3
Book-Writing Process p. 3
ABCs of Editing p. 4
Artisinal Prose p. 5
Celebrating Success p. 6
Upcoming Meetings p. 7
Book Marketing Tip p. 7
SE CAPA Report p. 7
CAPA’s Co-op Connection p. 8
December Webinars p. 8
Good Food, Good People, Great Time!
Come to the Annual CAPA Holiday Party
This is an excellent opportunity to visit with fellow writers and publishers, network, enjoy great food and get into the holiday spirit. CAPA provides assorted sand-wiches and soft drinks for your dining pleasure. We ask that you bring something to share with your fellow writers.
Contributors
Adele Annesi Karen Elizabeth Baril Doug Buck
Roberta Buland William O’Neill Curatolo Liz Delton Peggy Gaffney Dan Janal Brian Jud
Carol Keeney Joe Keeney Deborah Kilday John Kremer Allia Zobel Nolan Lisa Samia Curtis Sittenfeld Dan Uitti
The party is open to members, families and guests. It is in our regular meeting room in Avon, starting at 10:30 am
Photo by Deborah Kilday
Continued on page 3
CAPA Board of Directors
CAPA Officers’ & Board Members’ Contact Information
Founder Brian Jud [email protected] Co-Founder (CAPA) Jerry Labriola [email protected] President Dan Uitti [email protected] Vice President Dennis Schleicher [email protected] Treasurer Brian Jud [email protected] Secretary Robyn Bage [email protected] Immediate Past President Steve Reilly [email protected] Newsletter Director Brian Jud [email protected] Meet-A-Member Articles Joe Keeney [email protected] Meet-A-Member Articles Barbara Meredith [email protected] SECAPA Co-Director Patti Brooks [email protected] SECAPA Co-Director James Bennet [email protected] SWCAPA Director Joe Keeney [email protected] Program Director Brian Jud [email protected] Membership Director Dick Benton [email protected] Website Director Dan Uitti [email protected] Special Activities Director Deborah Kilday [email protected] Publicity Director Dennis Schleicher [email protected] Networking Director Peggy Gaffney [email protected] Past-President, Advisor Roberta J. Buland [email protected]
Article Submission
The Authority welcomes articles written by members. Here are our guidelines. Topics may cover any aspect of writing, publishing and marketing. Your personal slant on this is of in-terest to all of us and welcome. Articles should be no longer than 400 words. If the article is longer, the editors reserve the right to reduce the size or divide it into sections that would be run in successive issues. All articles will be edited. Submit single spaced with no built-in for-matting. Submit all articles to Brian Jud at [email protected]. Send submissions for the Meet-A-Member column to Joe Keeney at [email protected] or Barbara Meredith dbmeredith @charter.net
ARTICLES ARE DUE BY THE 28TH OF THE MONTH Editor—Brian Jud, Meet-a-Member Column—Barbara Meredith and Joe Keeney,
Copy Editor—Deborah Kilday, Staff Photographer—Deborah Kilday,
page 2 The Authority
SW CAPA Report By Joe Keeney
Fourteen mem-bers attended the November 18th meeting. Gabi Coatsworth, a member of SWCAPA, talked about The Major Obstacle to Writ-ing is The Fear of Rejection: she shared how to give yourself the best chance for acceptance. This speaker offers her own writing programs such as an open mic fo-rum where authors can read their work. Past CAPA president Steve Riley broadcast the meeting to Facebook and YouTube. A special thank you to Carol Keeney for providing the desert.
The Cover Story – George Foster
(George Foster has designed the covers for more than a thousand books and is contributing author to "1001 Ways to Market Your
Books". Contact him at www.fostercovers.com)
This award-winning thriller in-volves arson at a recording studio in the Bahamas so let's set the book on fire. I wrote the title by hand with charcoal. Sometimes messy is good. The paper is a combination of different stock photos with mu-sic notation added. Black and red are standard crime colors. The overall effect is frenetic, alarming, and definitely on fire. The burnt hole partially hides the author's name while also featuring it. The cross-directions of the mu-sic notation adds to the chaos. Barnes and Noble placed this book face-out on their "New Mystery" shelf.
“Sometimes good books sell well; sometimes good books sell poorly; sometimes bad books sell well; sometimes bad books sell poorly. A lot about publishing is unfair and inscrutable.” Curtis Sittenfeld
Book Marketing Tip
page 3 The Authority
the workshop, but in no way is she a newcomer to writing. Her first book, The Joy of Being Single pub-lished by Workman Publishing is evidence of that -- she secured the deal with just one letter to the pub-lisher, she quipped “I believe being an author was what I was meant to be.” Her experience escapes back even further: She worked as a stringer on several newspapers, writing feature stories, humor and editorial pieces. And, she was a Senior Editor at Reader’s Digest Children’s Publish-ing for nine years writing religious and trade titles ---- she estimates 150 titles under her name and pseudo-nyms. Her cure for writer’s block is simple: She procures a box of manila folders and labels each with a chapter num-ber and heading; she writes and fil-ters into each folder anything that comes to mind;. She repeats the pro-cedure for each folder-chapter. Laugh Out Loud named one of the best humor books of 2019 by Indie Book Awards took six months to write using this crafty formula. Her advice to a new writer is to have patience and practice perseverance
and to quickly forget rejections and take risks. Don’t compare yourself to others nor let others’ opinions color yours. Be in the moment. Read vol-umes [of other writers] And, make genuine friends (not just ones who
can help you succeed).
Meet A Member Continued from Page One
Here‘s an overview of the book-writing process. See how these steps fit into writing your book in a flash. Here are the steps to create your masterpiece quickly. Get focused. Write an executive sum-mary, which is a short 400-word de-scription of the book. Identify your ideal readers, and describe their main problem. Your book should provide an answer to that problem.
• Name it! Create a working title.
• Explain it to other people by cre-ating a Fool-Proof Positioning Statement.
• Overcome limiting beliefs. We all have them. Let‘s tame them.
• Create ten chapter topics. These are your big ideas.
• Write a comprehensive outline for each chapter. Include lots of de-scriptions and examples to prove your points.
• Research the book.
• Write the first draft.
• Get feedback.
• Revise, edit, and finish.
A Quick Book-Writing Process
By Dan Janal
Writers, Don’t Kill Your Darlings
By Karen Elizabeth Baril
laureate from Ox-ford, Mississippi, first offered this bit of wisdom. The advice is meant to encourage writers to be ruthless when it comes to editing their prose, but also to quite literally have the guts to kill your darlings or if not kill them, put them in tough situations. Put your favorite character up a tree and then toss rocks in his general direction. It’s really, really hard to do, but nec-essary for a good story. You’ve got to be brave and daring to be a writer. This month, I’m interested in turning the phrase upside down. Re-cently, a fellow writer asked for ad-vice on choosing a design for her book cover. She’s finished her book and is now, wisely, thinking carefully about the logistics of marketing. But, when she asked for advice, she added a tag line: “I need advice on choosing a design for my book cover,” she said, “not that I think it’s going to be a bestseller or anything.” That tag line struck me as the kind of thing a lot of us say when we’ve put our hopes and dreams into something big and are afraid of popu-lar opinion bringing our spirits down. Why not lead people to believe that we’re not really serious about our book and anything they say or do won’t hurt us? This way, if they throw insults, we can pretend we didn’t really care anyway.
Hogwash. As writers, we put our emotions, our hopes, and our dreams right out there for the world to see. We were thrilled with our rough first draft, bit our nails to the quick on the second draft, and worked well into the night on the third draft, some-times getting up at 4:00am because we also have a day job. We worked so hard out of love and the glimmer of hope that just maybe, we were writing a darn good book. In short, our book feels like our offspring.
We need to be the biggest cham-
pions of our work. Not braggarts, but loving and supportive at all times. Think of it this way; if your book was your newborn infant, cooing sweetly in his cradle, wouldn’t you smile indul-gently and think he was the most promising little boy on earth? If a friend complimented his bright expres-sion would you respond with: “Well, you know…he’s probably not going to amount to anything.”
I didn’t think so.
Writers, don’t kill your darlings.
Karen is an award winning writer of essays, short fiction, and articles. Follow Karen at www.karenelizabethbaril.com.
“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.” It’s one of those bits of sage advice most writers have heard at least once. William Faulkner, American writer and Nobel Prize
The Authority page 4
Have you won-dered how to write a photo cap-tion? Do you first look at the photos and read the cap-tions before you read a news sto-ry? Without pic-tures, who wants to read the book, especially if you are a child?
When you began to read as a child,
didn’t you first look at the photos, and then try to construct a story about them? Look at newspapers and news magazines today. Aren’t the pictures and their captions what you turn to first?
Captions are often the first ele-
ments one reads in a publication. If you are in the journalism field, writ-ing photo captions is an essential part of a news photographer’s job. A photo caption provides readers with basic information needed to under-stand a photograph and its relevance to the text. It should be written in a consistent, concise format.
Professional standards of clarity,
accuracy, and completeness should be as high or higher than any other writing that appears in a publication. A poorly written caption that is unin-formative or misleading can dimin-ish the impact of a good photo and undermine its credibility. If readers can not trust the accuracy of the sim-ple information included in a cap-tion, why should they trust what they read in the rest of the publication? Usually, the first sentence identifies the people and place in the photo-graph, and the date and location where it was taken. The second sen-tence provides contextual infor-mation to help readers understand what they are looking at. Continued on page 6
accurate. A photojournalist is a journalist.
• If a photo is manipulated digi-
tally beyond sizing and color control, it should be labeled as a “photo illustration” in the cap-tion, or in the photo credit. If unusual photo techniques are used, such as time-lapse photog-raphy, it should be noted. Expla-nations are also needed for spe-cial effects, such as the use of an inset or a picture sequence
• Do not use verbs or verb
phrases like “looks on,” “poses” or “is pictured above.” They are obvious and boring.
• Do not editorialize or make
assumptions about what people are thinking. For example, “an unhappy voter…” or “a fortu-nate survivor…” Give readers facts and them to decide what the feelings or emotions are.
• Do not characterize the con-
tent with descriptive terms that should be evident in the photo-graph.
• “Wild Art,” standalones, and
day shots describe photo-graphs published independent-ly of a written story. They often require a more comprehensive caption and, at times, short headlines.
Collecting caption information In the news business, time counts. Photographers may research and collect the names and spelling of expected participants prior to the event. Some may begin writing cap-tions in spare moments before or
The exact format for captions varies from publication to publication, but basic photo captions should:
• Clearly identify people and
locations. Professional titles should be included as well as the formal name of the location. SPELL NAMES CORRECT-LY. For photographs with more than one person, identifications typically go from left to right. With large groups, identifica-tions of only notable people may be required, and some-times no identifications are re-quired at all.
• Include date and day the pho-
tograph was taken. The more current a photo is, the better. If an archive photograph or photo-graph taken prior to the event being illustrated is used, the caption should make it clear that it is a “file photo.”
• Provide context for the reader
in order to understand the news value of the photograph.
• Write captions in complete
sentences and present tense. This tense gives the image a sense of immediacy. When it is not logical to write the entire caption in the present tense, the first sentence is written in the present tense and the following sentences may not be.
• Be brief. Most captions are one
or two short, declarative sen-tences.
Here are some things to watch out for:
• Do not be vague. Names of people and places must be cor-rectly identified and spelled. Be
The ABCs of the Editing Process: How to Write Photo Captions
By Roberta J. Buland
The Authority page 5
for a montage of pieces with a larger point, such as people you discovered in your travels or les-sons you learned along the way. So how do you develop a story collection? Think of it as creating a scrapbook, album or webpage. You can start by selecting pieces on similar or compatible subjects or themes. After that, you can ar-range them in a particular order, for example, by most recent or farthest back, or by ascending or descending degree of importance. You might even try a patchwork approach, where the pieces are less about order and more about proximity: which pieces work best next to each other.
While these are good ways to begin a collection, you’ll need to strengthen the sense of connection among the pieces for them to truly work both as standalone pieces and as integral parts of a whole. For this, two things are required. First, develop each piece to its greatest degree. Second, meld the pieces together for a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Sounds good, right? But how do we create links, and where do the various styles of writing come in? One way to create links is by repe-tition, for example, through char-acters, people, or settings that show up in more than one story. You might even have recurring motifs and interconnecting story-lines or plotlines.
Once you discover where the con-nections naturally occur, you can further develop them by using ele-ments of your favorite writing forms. For example, if you’re writing a series of family stories, perhaps based on the holidays, you might include short recollections and images of what people wore, served for meals, or talked about in the kitchen. Don’t feel com-
pelled to create a clear connection between the events and the images they may evoke. Instead, you might focus on theme, for example, that one particular family member or constant guest who somehow al-ways managed to be the centerpiece of every gathering.
To further connect your stories, con-sider how stories are told in the oral tradition. Such tales aren’t always told linearly or chronological order. Instead, one memory sparks another and another. Don’t worry if there’s a bit of mystery in how the stories unfold. The understanding of linked stories often comes through sensory details and the emotions they stir up. To decide which writing form — poetry, flash fiction, new article or other — would best enhance a piece, consider what would best showcase the scenes in the piece without over-shadowing them.
Last, most collections usually fea-ture a signature story that acts as a polestar for the compilation and is often the one that sparked the rest. It rarely appears at the beginning of the collection, though it might ap-pear at the end, as a form of tie-in for all that has come before. More often, however, the pivotal piece occurs somewhere in the second third of the compilation, where it functions as the beating heart of the work as a whole.
Whether you enjoy creating fictional pieces or stories based on fact, craft-ing a story collection offers an op-portunity to use your favorite writ-ing styles and experiment with those you’d like to learn better.
Happy writing!
Adele Annesi is an award-winning
author, editor and teacher, and co-
founder of the Ridgefield Writers
Conference. For questions on writing,
email Adele Annesi.
Whether you’re writ-ing fact-based stories or whole-cloth fiction, crafting a collection gives you the freedom to combine elements of your favorite writ-ing forms to create a tableau that can transport you and your readers to places both familiar and faraway. What’s your favorite writing form — memoir, poetry, short stories, experimental? Maybe you like mysteries or family sagas. Or maybe for you, it’s less about gen-re or form and more about the in-dividual story. If any of these is true, then compiling a collection might be just the ticket. One great way to determine whether you have the makings for a compilation is to inventory your work. If you tend toward writing fiction, you may have a file of short stories that, with a bit of weaving, could work as a collec-tion. Or maybe you started what you thought was a novel but now feels more like a series of different but interconnected stories than a continuous saga.
Taking inventory works for non-fiction, too. Start by perusing blog posts and postcards, journal en-tries, letters, a book you may have started writing —any written com-munication — for a common thread. Maybe you’ve traveled to distant lands, raised exotic pets, perfected a particular hobby or started a memoir about a turning point in your life. Any of these topics can serve as a framework
Artisanal Prose
Got Stories?
Consider Creating a
Collection
By Adele Annesi
page 6 The Authority
CAPA Members Celebrating Success
Lisa Samia said, “Save the date! On Sun-day February 23, 2020, at 3:00pm, I will be at RJ Julia, Wesleyan in Middletown, CT. I was asked back after my appearance at R.J. Julia in Madison, CT. I will be presenting a full lecture and poetry reading same as when I was in Fairfax, VA this past October for my book, The Nameless and Faceless of the Civil War.”
Peggy Gaffney has another book coming out in December 2019. North Country Honeymoon by Peg-gy Gaffney is the fifth book in the Kate Killoy Mystery series of Sus-pense for the Dog Lover. This sus-penseful tale is set in one of the great mansions on Lake George in
the Adirondacks just before Christmas.
According to Doug Buck, “Charter for Freedom is a pocket-sized guide to help members of a constitutional assem-bly or charter revision committee write a constitution or charter for government that would preserve true democracy at the local level and operate with republican principles at higher levels. Alternatively, it could be used by a class of students to give them practice writing a mock constitution or char-ter to acquaint them with the principles used by the Founders of the United States as they wrote their time-less document.
Part of my success story is negotiating the path of acceptance by the printer, IngramSpark. IngramSpark has a cover template that accepts PDF. My cover was created as a DOCX file, but Microsoft Word does not convert DOCX to JPG for copying and pasting into the template. Although my cover could be saved as a PDF file, that also had to be converted to JPG to fit the tem-plate. This was done with an outside program. Hopeful-ly MS Word will include that option in the future.
Getting the interior text to meet IngramSpark's re-quirements was straight-forward with one caveat. My interior text was written as a DOCX file which convert-ed nicely to PDF. However, the PDF needed embedded fonts. Figuring out how to do that was not easy (for me at least). It must be saved with the box, PDF/A Compliant, checked.
The ABCs of the Editing Process: Continued from Page 4
I thank Joe Keeney for his masterful assistance and help negotiating IngramSpark's submission requirements and in many other areas. One thing to remember though: Simply uploading a file for printing isn't enough. You must also click the Continue button at the bottom of the page which you must scroll down to find.
So, am I a publisher? I didn't start out to be one. However, I do now have a website, https://Buckwords.com. f any local author would like, please send to [email protected] a picture with a short descrip-tion (90 characters max) and link to your website, which I would add. See what others have done.”
CAPA member William O’Neill Curatolo, author of, “Too Many Hats: Herbal Medicine and the Mob”, was a finalist in both the 2019 American Book Awards and the 2019 Beverly Hills Book Awards. “In a light take on the noir tradition, Too Many Hats details the ac-tivities of a muckraking scientist who attempts to take down herbal remedy con-men.”
Karen Baril said, “I also have a success story to share. My essay, "After the Fall" was selected as the win-ner of the Elizabeth Ayers Creative Writing Center con-test for October. I was very excited!”
during an event. This expedites filing when the event is over. At well-organized events, press releases are provid-ed that include names of notable participants.
However, the information required for a caption often is not available before a picture is taken. Gathering infor-mation during an event is difficult. Photographers may carry small notebooks to note information. Professional cameras may have small audio recorders built in that al-low one to record information. Other journalists at an event can also be an information source. But, check for accuracy.
Remember, the goal of a caption is to make the photo
clear. Once you are satisfied with your caption, file it. Copyeditors will make them shine!
Comments? Contact [email protected] , 860-308-2550 Roberta J. Buland is the owner-editor of RIGHT WORDS
UNLIMITED, a full-service editorial and publishing services
firm in West Hartford. She is a past president of CAPA and now serves on the Board of Trustees.
The Authority page 7
CAPA CENTRAL (Avon) Location: Sycamore Hills Park Community Center Avon, CT; third Saturday of each month, 10:30 am—12:30 pm (http://www.aboutcapa.com/avon.htm)
December 21: Annual Holiday party January 18: Lisa Lelas — How to find/work with a major publisher February 15: Millie Grenough
CAPA SOUTHEAST (Groton) Location: Groton Regency, 1145 Poquonnock Road (Route 1) , 6:30 pm December 16: Holiday Party January 20: Speaker and Topic To Be Announced February 17: Speaker and Topic To Be Announced
CAPA SOUTHWEST (Shelton) Plumb Memorial Library, Shelton. 6:30 pm (Joe Keeney, [email protected]; find current meeting information at http://www.aboutcapa.com/capasw.htm)
December 9: Holiday Party January 13: Speaker and Topic To Be Announced February 10: Speaker and Topic To Be Announced
Schedule of Upcoming Meetings
categories needing volunteer writ-ers include: Kindness in Real Life, My Pet Pal, Out & About (recurring events or venues), Friends and Neighbors, In the Gal-leries (upcoming exhibits and events with photos), In the Schools, and Be an Angel (people seeking community support), and history. Submissions average 200-450 words and high-resolution photos are encouraged. Local articles don’t produce the same enthusiasm as books but each town’s magazine has an average distribution of 10,000 and connects effectively with local readers. A regular by-line develops name recognition and the writer’s con-tact information and website are included with each article. The Stonington Times includes monthly columns by licensed therapist, Jill Whitney who is a SE CAPA mem-ber. Would you like to submit a single article or a series of stories? Please contact [email protected]
Why Write for Free? Notes from SE CAPA
By Elizabeth Saede
November’s SE CAPA speaker, Lee Howard, extended an invitation to write and share articles with our neighbors. Lee is an award-winning journalist, Times Community News Editor for The Day Publishing Co. and teaches journalism classes at Quinnipiac College. Local articles create readership and followers for authors who are creating that next book. Times newspapers are delivered weekly to all street addresses in Lyme, Old Lyme, East Lyme, Sa-lem, Waterford, New London, Montville, Preston, Ledyard, Ston-ington, North Stonington, Mystic and Groton. Combined weekly dis-tribution is 80,000. Some of the
November 18: SE CAPA members Len Mattano (left, holding his debut novel Celtic Crossing), Tish Rabe (holding her book The 100 Hats of the Cat in the Hat) and guest speaker Lee Howard from The Day newspaper.
Book Marketing Tip
By John Kremer
Over 1,000,000 ISBNs were issued last year by Bowker. How many can you name? How many other people can name your book as one of them? Promote heavily to stand out from the crowd
page 8 The Authority
Save money as you market your books by sharing the cost of events with other CAPA members. Want to participate in one of these sales opportuni-ties with other CAPA members? Log on to the CAPA social network (http://authorsandpublishersct.ning.com/).
CAPA’s Co-op Connection
January 4-5 Hartford Connecticut Bridal Expo 5 Stamford Bridal and Wedding Expo 18-19 Hartford Hartford Home Show 25 Wallingford KC 101 Bridal Showcase Expo February 8-9 Hartford Kids Fair 9 Wallingford Train & Toy Show 15 Bristol Home & Business Expo 15-16 Bristol Home & Business Expo 20-23 Hartford Connecticut Flower & Garden Show 21-23 Uncasville Southeastern Home Show 28-3/1 Hartford Home & Remodeling Show
CAPA P. O. Box 715 Avon, CT 06001-0715
Marketing professionals will host webinars that can help you sell more books, more profitably. These webi-nars are free to CAPA members. This month’s webinars for CAPA members are:
Dec 3: How to Find Your Read-ers - Killer Market Research, by Amy Collins Dec 10: Byline Articles: How They Help Your Build Your Au-thor Brand, by Sandy Smith
Free Book-Marketing Webinars