The Cocoa Contest

See that cup of coco right there? Looks tasty doesn’t it? The only trouble is… I don’t know how to make it. My homemade version of hot chocolate is water, a splash of milk and two heaping tablespoons of store bought powder. It’s fine, but it isn’t delicious. It’s okay, but it isn’t blissful. It isn’t divine, scrumptious, delectable or mouthwatering in the slightest. It isn’t what Emmy Dawson would serve to her customers at Sweet Shores Chocolate Store.

Yes, that Emmy… the winner of the Facebook contest that gifted her with a chocolate store to run… yes, that run down and outdated shop she gets to keep forever if she turns a profit by the end of the year. Yes, that Emmy, needs a four star coco recipe to help heat up her business and turn her dreams into reality. Never mind she doesn’t have any business experience. Dismiss the rumor you heard around town that she doesn’t even like chocolate. Okay, maybe do think about those things… and then fork over your recipe… because she needs it bad!!

So what do you say? Can you help out my literary friend? Trust me when I say you will be sweetly rewarded!

I am looking for an incredible hot chocolate recipe. A recipe that chases away the winter chills and warms your soul. Do you have one of those? Maybe from Grandma? Or maybe you finally achieved a creamy cup of chocolate perfection after a hundred mornings of trial and error? Yes, that is the recipe I want.

What will you get in return for sharing your (royalty and copyright free) recipe with me, I mean, Emmy?

The Prizes

• The recipe will be placed in the Appendix of my novella: The Champion Chocolatier, with your name on the by-line. (Hooray, you are now published!) Your recipe will be accompanied by other recipes mentioned in the book.

• I will name a character in the book after you!

• And of course, there will be a chocolate prize delivered directly to you.

To enter:

1. Email me your recipe along with your name. amanda.zieba@yahoo.com

2. Sign up for my free monthly eNewsletter by clicking this link.

3. In the comment section below, write me a quick note to let me know you’ve entered and to be looking for your email.

4. Complete these three steps by Sunday, April 10th at Midnight.

The winner will be announced by the end of April, after I’ve had a chance to taste test all the recipes!

Thank you in advance for helping poor Emmy. Have I mentioned she is a terrible cook and her version of baking involves visiting the refrigerated section at the grocery store? Please hurry, Emmy and Sweet Shores will be sunk unless she can get a winning recipe ASAP!

Author Research Trips: An Interview with David Meissner

Chances are, if you’re an author, you’ve daydreamed about the glittering fantasy of a RESEARCH TRIP. To spend days in the actual setting of your story, breathing the air your characters breathe, listening to the soundtrack of their daily lives, sampling dishes on their local menu… it would be a gift! Taking on the challenge of communicating all of those sights, sounds, tastes and smells in words that will connect your readers to your story would also be a gift… at least in my opinion!  

For the past six months my daydreams have taken me to Iceland. My current novel-in-progress crisscrosses the mysterious and myth entrenched country of the legendary Vikings. To see the cliffs and black sand beaches, to sit around a fire listening to the stories of old, to witness the awesomeness of the Northern Lights… oh how my writer’s soul aches to experience these feats first hand… and then use them to enhance my novel. One day. Hopefully, one day soon.

Through a generous local grant and the 6th Grade Book of the Month Club, my middle school students have had the opportunity to chat with a variety of authors and illustrators including Angela Lam, Cara Brookins, and Jason Gerke. This month we talked with David Meissner, author of Call of the Klondike, a nonfiction account of two gold rushers. Using a wealth of primary sources including diary entries, telegraphs, letters and newspapers, David engages readers in a breakneck race for gold. (Side note, my male students LOVED this book. If you have a reluctant-middle-grade-boy-reader in your life… try this book!)

David spent a lot of his time with us talking about his research trip to Alaska. After our class visit, I was able to chat with David in depth about his trip. Below are his thoughts not only about his specific trip, but also about the benefits of research trips for authors in general.

How did your research trip go from daydream to reality?

It kind of started out as a joke. I threw out the idea in the bottom of an email to my publisher. I wrote, P.S. You should send me to Alaska to check this out for real! Amazingly, they thought it was a great idea. At the time I was teaching full time, with my summers off. I had the time and the publisher was willing to pay the costs of the trip, so I went! 

How long was your actual trip? How long did you spend planning?

My research trip to Seattle, Alaska and Canada lasted about two weeks. I planned the trip over a number of months because I needed to make the most of the short time I had to get everything done.

How did hiking (the Chilkoot trail in Alaska) influence your writing? (This question came from one of our Book Club’s insightful students!)

Two ways really. The first way it influenced my writing was it got me really excited about the topic of the gold rush. When you work on a project for a long time, four years in this case, you have to really love the subject you are writing about. On this trip I became deeply fascinated by the gold rush. Secondly, hiking the actual trail allowed me to feel confident about the knowledge and content I was writing about. Instead of looking at a map and say, yeah, I think it was like this… I now know exactly what it was like. 

What are the benefits of an author spending their time on a research trip?

It would have been easy to look up on the internet or make phone calls, but then the book wouldn’t have been as good. It wouldn’t have won The Gold Kite Award if I hadn’t gone out and hiked it and lived it! The same can be true of any author, research trip and location.

What are the challenges of a research trip?

On my trip there were a couple of challenges. One, I was afraid of bears. I hiked on the Chilkoot trail for five nights, mostly by myself and I was nervous I would run into a bear. And then what would I do?!? I didn’t run into any, but the fear was always there. I also turned my ankle pretty bad on the first day of my hike that made walking pretty challenging. I “iced” it in some really cold streams and eventually the swelling went down, but it made the going quite a bit harder than I anticipated.

What is one highlight you experienced while on your research trip?

The research trip was honestly the most fun part about writing this book. Also, from a practical standpoint, my publisher required that all facts in the book needed to be verified by two different sources before they were allowed in the book. The research trip gave me the opportunity to go to museums, talk to experts and see first-hand if the information I was writing was true. It was very helpful… and fun.

What is your best advice for an author planning a research trip?

You actually have to do a lot of research when planning a research trip. I printed out a calendar and tried to map out my main itinerary according to my priorities. Then you have to make sure that all of your travel connections are possible. It's also important to contact people and institutions ahead of time to line up interviews, meetings, etc. You can't be afraid to ask a lot questions, including whether they would recommend anything or anyone else. Then book your tickets, lodging, and meetings. It's a fine balance, because it's also nice to not over-plan everything and to leave some room for serendipity and adventure.

Do you have any tips for efficient writing/note taking while traveling? Did you use a notebook, laptop, tablet, digital recorder, etc?

Good question. I used multiple devices six years ago. Today I would use my smart phone for most of it. I think it's helpful to take photos for sure. For example, instead of writing down all of the facts at a museum, I would just take pictures of the boards and look at them later. I also found it helpful to record myself whenever I had ideas, whether I was driving or hiking. Now you can also take high-quality videos with your phone. When interviewing people, they are often more natural when you are not recording, though the benefit of recording is that you will have exact quotes and won't miss anything. It's always best to have a handful of methods ready and to use your common sense at the time.

And finally (because the world is small and stars sometimes align) since you have toured Iceland before, what are some things I MUST see when I go on my author research trip?

Iceland, it’s an amazing place. I love Lonely Planet guidebooks ad think that the Iceland edition will tell you most of what you need to know. There are a lot of great waterfalls, springs and hikes not too far from Reykjavik, which is a really cool city itself.

I am so thankful to David for sharing his expertise not only with me, but also my students. If you haven’t read Call of the Klondike yet, please do. You won’t be disappointed! To connect with David, visit his website www.bydavidmeissner.com.

Until next time, happy reading and happy researching!! If you could travel for a research trip, where would you want to go? Comment below!

March Madness Book Brackets

March is a month many associate with madness. As a massive college basketball fan, (Go Bucky!) I would have to agree. But for the past couple years at the school where I teach, the brackets have not been filled with basketball teams, but instead, books. Yes, book brackets. And this year is no exception.

Thanks to the hard work of our school’s librarian and librarian aide, Mrs. Horman and Mrs. Marquardt, our students are busily filling out their book brackets in an attempt to seek library fame. This year, instead of book titles, our tournament lines are filled with the names of villains. If there is anything more fun that watching two teams face off, it is imagining two imaginary villains going head to head and envisioning who would win.

Because no one in the entire school (including myself and the librarians) have read all of the titles featuring these villains, we did a rundown explaining each character’s powers, flaws, and motive. The discussions and debates between students are aggressive and passionate. It is truly a sight to behold. The first rounds of voting are done and just as the games tip off on TV, the results will be posted and the next round will begin.

Here are my villainous selections!

So, I ask you. Who would win your Villain Book Bracket? I want to know, so comment below! I’ll post an empty bracket below for you to print off and play along, as well as keep you posted of our school’s votes and progress.

Happy reading you word-nerds and may the odds be ever in your favor.

Author Visit Do's and Don'ts

I am lucky enough to have 3 school visits this spring, with another 2 in the works, a lineup of summer school classes and a teaching teachers gig this summer! Whew, it’s gonna be busy!! After my first two visits, I jotted down some notes… activities to repeat, a few changes to make, some extra items to pack and … I’m sharing them here, in case you are preparing for your own school visits and presentations. Or if you are planning an event within your school, here read on for a few tips to make the most of your event.

Do different

• I will do my best to use the students’ names. In the 38 kid workshop I lead in February, I cringed when I asked a child again for their name… even though they had just told it to me a few minutes before.  Blake? Brice? Bryson? It was hard in the 4 hours I was with them to commit their names to memory quickly. I pointed instead of calling them by name in our discussions and had to ask names when signing books. I felt awful. There are several easy ways around this problem. Ask the school coordinators to provide name tags or make table tents featuring their name as an icebreaker activity. I made sure to stop at the dollar store to pick up name tags before my next author visit, a workshop for 24 young author/illustrators in Chippewa Falls. The result, I felt I was able to connect with the participants on a much more personal level and they felt important that I called them by name!

• I will prepare and copy one set of materials only. Last month I spent $81.67 on copies for my author visit. I have come to realize that being a writer is a job that uses a lot of paper. (I planned to atone for my sins by planting a tree for every book I publish… more on this in a later post.) Apparently paper usage is a sin that has followed me into author visits. 50 student and teacher packets, full of activities, resources and planning space cost me 23% of my presentation fee. In the future, I plan to email the school I am presenting at and ask them to copy the materials. If a presenter asked me (as a teacher) to do this, I would happily comply. I am hoping the future schools I present at will agree, knowing that their students are receiving high quality materials created just for them, copied at a fraction of the cost I would pay at a print shop.

Do the same

• I will plan extra. Sometimes things don’t go as planned. Sometimes another presenter will do an activity you had planned. Sometimes things are done faster that you thought they would. If you have just one more activity planned than you think you will need, you will never have to face the panic of looking at the clock and finding you still have a half an hour to fill. I didn’t need my extra activity this time, but I almost did… and I’m glad I had it in my back pocket.

• I will interact with the kids on a personal level whenever possible. For one activity I had asked the kids to partner up and talk about their story setting and how they could make their reader feel like they are REALLY THERE, living in the pages next to the characters. I noticed one girl sitting on her own. It’s not like she didn’t try to partner up, there was just an odd number of students in the room at the time. I could have asked her to join another group, but instead I pulled up a chair and sat down next to her. I am so glad I did. We had a great conversation about her story. It was only five minutes, maybe less than that, but she will remember me and that I took time to listen to her ideas, and hopefully she will know that her ideas are important. This month in Chippewa when I did the same, I was blown away by the ideas the students had to share. For me, it was definitely one of the day’s highlights.

A few other tips

• Bring more books that what the participants ordered. Always. You never want to miss a sale.

• Bring goodies for the teachers. They are over worked and tired. The time you are spending with their students is a chance for an expert to grab their attention and teach them something new. It is also a break for them. Do you know who plans author visits? Teachers. Do you know who sets them up? Teachers. Do you know who writes the grants that funds author visits? Teachers. As a thank you to them, bring a little treat, a copy of the materials, a way to extend your content into their lessons. It is these little extras, the feeling of being appreciated, that will stick in their mind… and potential give them a reason to invite you back!

If you are an author, what tips do you have to share for author visits? If you are a teacher, what is one thing you wish school presenters knew/would do?

Red, Write and Blue

Earlier this month I spent a few days in Milwaukee for the state reading convention (WSRA). It is always a high energy, motivating conference filled with highly educated people and incredible resources. This year was nothing less than fantastic. One session I attended was all about how students are more motivated to write if their teachers write along-side them. To take something I love and have it positively affect my students sounded wonderful to me, so I showed up.

Surrounded by other word-nerd educators I explored many every day, real life writing exercises and applications.  Of course, as participants we were asked to do some writing of our own. I scratched out the below short story in about 10 minutes. (Other than re-reading while I typed the hand written version of the work, it hasn’t been edited, so be kind!)

We were given the prompt… “She closed the book, placed it on the table and finally decided to walk through the door.”

… and one minute to think…

Think. Think. Think. The speech from the keynote speaker, an education reformer from Finland, swirled around in my mind as did the news on the previous night’s political debate. The conference in general dominated my thoughts, a place where women easily outnumbered men ten to one.

Think. Think. Think. And write. And here is what came out.

---

She closed the book, placed it on the table and finally decided to walk through the door. She knew they were waiting for her. But this was her show, her time. And despite what they thought, she made the decisions.

And this was a BIG decision. Bigger than big. HUGE! Monumental! Paramount! And not just for her. Last night as she lay awake in bed and vacillated with her options (there were really only two), she made a strong case for each. No matter how she stacked up the evidence though, her heart always tipped the balance of the scale one way.

It would be at that point that she would evaluate her reasons for the decision. Was she being selfless or selfish? Could one decision really be both? Somewhere around two thirty she had finally fallen asleep. When she awoke she felt she had made a choice, and that selfish or selfless, it was one she could live with.

She’d read the book, not to buy time, but to show the men in the other room that she controlled it. Deeming that they had waited long enough, she left her office and walked to the conference room.

When she walked into the room, they stopped talking, stopped drinking their coffee, stopped gesticulating to the results on the TV screen. She fought the urge to smooth the front of her dress ad walked to the center of the room.

“Gentlemen, Let’s do this. This country needs a woman president!”

*** Writer Disclaimer: This was not meant to be a political post. It is purely a piece of fiction. Happy reading! ***

How Does Your Writing Business Grow?

Writer, writer, word delighter,

How does your business grow?

Submit and wait an indeterminable length,

You only reap the rewards you sow.

We live in a world of immediacy. Netflix. Microwavable dinners. Downloadable apps. Drive through coffee. On demand. Instant breakfast.

Our writing world is anything but immediate. Forget the painstaking hours, days, months, years it takes to get the words on the paper! It’s once you finish the darn thing that the real waiting begins.

Query an agent? Wait 4 weeks to 4 months! Submit to a publisher and you can just about double that wait time. Contests, grant requests, feedback from a critique partner! We should be called WAITERS, not WRITERS!

As a self-published author I am a one woman team. I am a writing, revising, cover designing, text formatting, book ordering, marketing, selling machine. And up until just recently, I felt like my machine worked very hard for what it got in return. I am very, very proud of my 7 self-published books. I am proud of the 1,800 copies I have sold in less than 3 years. I am proud of the 12+ school visits I booked on my own and all the milestones in between. But I wanted more. I want more.

I want the seeds I planted to grow. I want my business, my dream, my career to bloom and flourish! The thing is, there is no sure-fire, magic bullet, one path to success in the publishing industry. You never know what will work, or that what worked for another author will work for you. So you spend a lot of time and energy and effort (and sometimes money) trying things you aren’t sure will work.

I once spent $800 and two 6 hour car rides to a Geocaching festival to drum up interest for a yet to be published book. (Following the whole: “marketing your book when it’s actually published means you are marketing too late” advice.) It garnered one (really great, Hi John!) fan and book sales to him and his granddaughter… but nothing much else. A bad seed… at least financially.

But here is a seed that did sprout and has grown into something worth writing about. When I published my first books, a dear family friend (Thanks Di!) offered to sell them in her prominent specialty store. After the cost of the books I made a $75 profit. A few months later, a woman who purchased one of my books contacted me to facilitate a young writer’s workshop. I was paid $300, plus 21 books sold. A year later she invited me back to her school district to do a whole school author visit. I was paid $500 and sold 42 books. This spring I am again running the young writer’s workshop for her organization AND running another workshop for a completely new geographic location because she passed my name and information along to someone else. A $5 book sale lead to over $2,000 in speaking events and many books sold. That little seed did very well, but I had no way of knowing that back in December of 2013.

The moral of the story is this. Work hard. Plant your garden full of possibilities. And then, like a good writer… wait.

In July I gave up a girls’ birthday dinner (sorry girls!) to go to a Girl Scout Troop Leader Jamboree and share information on my author visit program and how I can help the troops earn reading and writing related badges. In January I did my first troop visit and sold 21 books. They plan to tell other troops and begged me to let them know when I had something new coming out.

At the State Reading Convention two weeks ago (WSRA) I talked to a museum event coordinator, a librarian, countless teachers and a WSRA employee in charge of state wide author festivals. I recently contacted my local children’s museum about partnering for some projects, emailed several already established authors for tips and joined a very active Facebook group of writers with my same target audience. Who knows what these seeds will grow?

Writer, writer, word delighter, how will your business grow? It depends on how many seeds you plant and how well you cultivate the ones that do push through the tough publishing industry soil. Don’t give up! Keep writing! Keep planting! Keep growing!