JACK IS BACK!

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Jack is back with his blog at http://vivaevolucion.blogspot.com.

THE WRITING GUY

On the occasion of my latest book (TEDDY BEAR MURDERS) going live last Thursday, I've been thinking that you might like to hear from me again.

Apparently a great number of people have a new book out these days. Today Chris Matthews' book on JFK went live--plus goodness knows how many other books have been born since just last Thursday, each struggling for readers. I don't think Chris will have a terrible time as he has a TV show and lots of exposure, including TIME magazine.

So many of us are out there with product and it is not easy trying to get someone to even notice that you exist, much less that you are alive. I read a figure the other day of how many new books are published every year. It's become an interesting phenomenon that we have more books than ever and fewer people reading them. It's like cook books. Have you gone to a bookstore like Barnes and Noble and seen how many food preparation books there are? Yet fewer people are cooking than ever. You can't call putting a TV dinner in the microwave cooking in the real sense and you certainly don't need a cook book for that.

In the recent past, let's say in the early 80s, there weren't all these books out there struggling for your credit card. Many people in those days said, "I'm going to write a book," Someone might have even said to another person, "You ought to write a book about that." Perhaps they even said,"You've lived such an interesting life. You should write a book."

Most people if they tried gave up after chapter 1. Others got about half-way through and jumped authorship. Some may have even finished and saw that re-writes and editing were like a verbal Mt. Everest to conquer.  Then those who persevered found that trying to interest an agent was as elusive as finding the cure to cancer. Some even went the route of sending their book off to a publisher where it went into hibernation for six months and was returned with coffee stains on it.

What happened to cause so many new books each and every day? The computer, that's what, and Microsoft Word and Print On Demand technology. In the past if  you made an error typing, you were in caca. You had to either re-type the page or try and erase the error. Then super technology entered the picture and someone came up with some little white sheets of paper which you could strike over. That was thought of as a miracle. Then that changed to liquid whiteout, which was considered fabulous. Then before you know it, someone invented word processing. All of a sudden you could correct to your heart's content and to add icing to the cake, you had spell check.

People began writing like nobody's business. Suddenly there were more books being produced--mainly by self-publishing vanity presses. You'd pay a big amount to have your book printed and stored somewhere and hope that you had the marketing skills to place a few of your books in friends and family's hands. Then somebody (and I don't know who, but they were geniuses) invented Print On Demand publishing. This means that a computerized printer can print one copy or a hundred of your book with the simple push of a button. Publishers no longer had need of large warehouses and the like. So all of a sudden POD publishers began springing up by the dozens. Now there are tons of them. They can design the cover of your book, do the interior layout, feed it into their wonder machine and presto, you will have a great-looking book in minutes. Some say that with Amazon.com when you press the button to buy the book, your purchase is linked to one of these super machines and it spits out your book in a flash, prints the receipt, packages it and dumps it on the conveyer belt for the post office.

So, here is Jack with his new book--trying to interest you and God knows who into taking a peek at his fourth book. He wrote CONTESSA as one of the first POD books in 1999 and it did quite well. It is a fake "as told to" autobiography of a famous actress (think Joan Crawford) who retires and tells her fans in her tell all that she started out in life as a man--and how she kept it a secret over the years.

Then PARIS PLAYS came along three years later and that contained 8 of my plays which were first produced in Paris, France, where I had founded The Paris English Theatre. Generally people are interested in how one came about writing a play. I tell the reader in this book where I got the idea for the play and after whom the characters were fashioned.

Then last year I came out with VIVA LA EVOLUCION. Granted it has a title in Spanish but the book is definitely written in English. It deals with this country going from dumb to dumber and the reason for it. Our drinking water has been polluted by mega corporations and our ordinary citizens are being literally turned into apes.

Now I have this new book out as of last Thursday--TEDDY BEAR MURDERS. This is like a return to Agatha Christie via Miss Marple. I know when I was in college many  years ago at Mississippi State University, there was a highly unusual series of murders committed in the area. I kept thinking about the situation for years and finally wrote this book which explains it all.

So, Jack's back--pitching his hat in the ring with the thousand other books that were released last week. I'd love it if you'd help mine have a life and not die in its infancy. Of course it's available on www.amazon.com and www.barnesandnoble.com. In a short time it will be live on Kindle, Nook, iPad, Sony Reader, and other eBooks.

Best to you and I'll have another article next week. I hope you'll join me and tell your friends about Jack and his new book TEDDY BEAR MURDERS.