Author Renea Winchester Proves "Stress-Free Marketing" Is Not An Oxymoron

Shortly after Renea Winchester released her award winning book, In the Garden with Billy: Lessons About Life, Love & Tomatoes, she realized that publication was just the first rung on the ladder of writing success. Whether a book was traditionally or self-published, in the end the author's job was for that book to reach its target market. Winchester realized that though there were books ranging from landing a literary agent to hammering through writer’s block, no books gave marketing advice for newly published authors. Thus, the idea for her book, Stress-Free Marketing: Practical Advice for the Newly Published Author was born.

Saddened by numerous writers whose basements were flooded with unsold, self-published books, Winchester wanted to write a book that not only answered the questions facing inexperienced authors, but to answer these questions in a way that was informative yet easy to understand. Stress-Free Marketing accomplishes just that. With marketing advice so practical it should be commonsense such as, “The first step is to get out from behind the computer, unplug from Facebook and get into [book]stores,” to a precise breakdown of publishing acronyms like LCCN (Library of Congress Catalog Number), which allows libraries to identify books in their systems, Stress-Free Marketing is an entertaining instruction manual that places the power of book sales back into hardworking authors’ hands.

“Every author has a choice when faced with rejection: give up, or continue pressing forward," Stress-Free Marketing says. "Only those who continue to press are rewarded with publication.” Winchester does not hold back when sharing her own struggle to break into the strongbox of the publishing industry. After sending independent booksellers e-mails including blurbs for her book, a synopsis, website links, and a PDF of the book’s cover, Winchester believed that her professional stance would incite their response.

Rather than being setback when nothing happened, Winchester surged forward and -- while armed with business attire and a warm smile -- personally visited each buyer of these local bookstores. It only took two minutes for Winchester to convey her determination to make her book a success, and after following up this face-to-face interaction with a “snail mail” thank you note that included pertinent book information including the ISBN number and retail price, each bookseller eventually responded and now keeps her book in stock.

Renea Winchester's candid suggestion when faced with a bad book review, “Don’t call your mother in search of sympathy. What’s done is done. Instead, grab a container of double chocolate chip ice cream and a large spoon. Enter the closet and lock yourself inside,” is just the kind of kick-in-the-pants advice a fledgling author needs, yet the closing chapter of the book asks the reader to repeat:

I am ready.

I am ready to invest time developing a marketing plan.

I am ready to incorporate ideas and create a niche market and platform.

I am ready to introduce myself to strangers then cultivate and nurture these newfound friendships.

I am ready to step into the unknown with courage and confidence.

I am ready to be the next fresh new voice of the publishing world.

I am ready.

•  

Through the suggestions and encouragement provided in Winchester's Stress-Free Marketing: Practical Advice for the Newly Published Author, I feel like I am ready to climb another rung on the ladder of writing success.

Now, writer, the question is: Are you?

To learn more about Renea Winchester or to order her book, click here.

Some Experiences Are Better In Hind Sight

Once my husband and I married, I decided to join him on his annual hunting trip to Wisconsin. I piled the floorboard at my feet with my laptop and books and we made the thirteen-hour drive. As we drew closer to the dairy farm where Randy’s relatives lived, the marshy flatlands rose up to rolling fields crop-striped dull yellow and green. A majority of the farmhouses had coils of steel-gray smoke twisting from their chimneys, and the only color decorating that fall landscape came from the red barns, navy Harvester silos, and bright orange hunting gear the men (and women!) had snapped to the clothesline to disperse their own human scent.

The opening morning of buck season, my husband flipped on the lights while outside the sky was still dark and the Wisconsin wind howling and scrambled into his camo gear layered over with orange. Putting on enough clothing that I resembled the Abominable Snowman, I stumbled downstairs while dragging my blanket and pillow like a disgruntled child.

That first year I settled into a routine. I would sleep a few hours in the cold Jeep, then awaken and type until lunchtime when I ate a military MRE (meal, ready to eat) and walked the waterway to help drive out deer toward my husband. Afterward, I would return to the Jeep and resume typing until dark when Randy and I would go back to his relatives' house, shower and change, then eat the meal his aunt had prepared that was worthy of Thanksgiving.

The second year did not go as effortlessly as the first. My husband parked our Jeep in an area populated by other hunters and Holstein cows. I did not know any of this was a problem until I was abruptly awakened to a sensation that I was being rocked in a cradle. But I wasn’t in a cradle; I was sleeping inside a Jeep.

Wiping the drool crusted across my face, I sat up and looked out the window to see another face staring back at me. A huge, black and white face with limpid brown eyes and a long pink tongue that licked the side mirror like a lollipop. But this wasn’t the only huge black and white face staring in at me. The entire vehicle was surrounded by cows. By so many cows I honestly feared I was going to be stampeded even while shielded inside the Jeep. Seeing this commotion from the woods, Randy’s uncle -- garbed in an orange jacket, insulated boots, and with a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder -- waved his arms and tried to shoo them away.

To this day, I believe my life is indebted to him.

The morning after my brush with a herd of curious bovines, I sat in the Jeep typing until my fingers were about to fall off. Whereas some old writers sustained themselves while chain smoking cigars or knocking back whiskey sours, I slurped on juice boxes. On so many juice boxes the floorboard was littered with them. I didn’t consume much else that morning, and I was in the middle of a cow field, surrounded by hunters who I couldn’t see except for a rare glimpse of electric orange amid a plethora of brown.

Beside a tree, there were no plumbing facilities out in those woods and after all that juice without anything to soak it up, I realized I had to use the restroom and that I had no time to make the drive back to the house.

Randy’s grandfather, Elam, was shot through both calves when he sat in the hunting camp and changed his socks, the flash of white being mistaken by a passing hunter as the tail end of a deer. Recalling this accident, I knew I was faced with a quandary: When using the restroom did I continue to wear my bright orange vest and hat so that I wasn’t shot by a hunter, or did I take it off and risk getting shot when my white tail was mistaken for an altogether different kind of Whitetail?

In the end, I chose to protect my end and wore the orange hunting cap and vest. I did roll my hair up behind the cap and strut into the woods with my hands in my pockets like a boy, hoping that Randy’s relatives wouldn’t recognize me as his wife.

Saturday, which marked Randy’s sixteenth-annual hunting trip to Wisconsin, the opening day wasn’t too eventful until my husband climbed down from his twenty-foot tripod stand, returned to the Jeep and tried to crank the engine. For hours I had been editing on my laptop that I had plugged into the power adapter, but I had taken a break at lunch and traveled back to the house to fortify myself with chili, cornbread, and a thermos of hot chocolate.

Only four hours had passed since lunch, but the Jeep battery was dead.

My husband’s cell phone was also dead, and I didn’t have his cousin’s number. So we just sat there in our Jeep parked in the middle of a dark, soggy cornfield--listening to the cold rain plinking on the windows, trying to figure out what to do.

I used my cell phone to call my sister-in-law in Tennessee, and my sister-in-law scrawled through my mother-in-law’s phone until she found the number for Randy’s uncle. We called him and Randy’s cousin came, but Randy’s cousin didn’t have any jumper cables and neither did we. We rode out of the cornfield in the cousin’s car, fetched some jumper cables at the house, then Randy and I returned in his cousin’s car to our forlorn Jeep.

It didn’t take long to jump off our vehicle, and I climbed into it and tried to drive back up the slick hillside with my husband following behind in the car. Randy had warned me that he might get stuck and that I should wait to make sure he could get out.

But when I pulled over and watched the car lights in my rearview mirror -- making sure he was indeed making it okay -- then shifted into drive again, I realized that I was the one stuck.

The tires slung mud across the field without gaining any traction. Shifting into four-wheel drive, I tried again but went nowhere. Randy pulled up in the car and ran up in the rain. Opening my door, he reached over me to shift the Jeep into a different gear, but all we heard were grinding sounds.

“Did I kill it?” I asked.

Shaking his head, Randy motioned for me to get out. I stood shivering in the rain while Randy maneuvered the Jeep out of the gulch, then I climbed behind the wheel again. I had to gun it down the valley to make it up the hill, and as I did I fishtailed all over that soggy cornfield with the cold rain plinking the windshield and my headlights barely spearing the foggy haze.

Yet the next morning, when my husband flipped on the lights while outside the sky was still dark and the Wisconsin wind howling, I still put on enough clothes to resemble the Abominable Snowman and stumbled downstairs while dragging my blanket and pillow like a disgruntled child.

Some experiences just look better in hind sight.

Review of THE SISTERS, a novel by Nancy Jensen

Sacrifice misinterpreted as selfishness becomes the catalyst that drives two beloved sisters, Mabel and Bertie Fischer, apart in Nancy Jensen’s compelling, multi-generational debut novel, The Sisters, selected as the #1 Indie Next Pick for December 2011. Initially set in the rural town of Juniper, Kentucky -- where everyone’s dirty laundry is aired regardless if it’s hanging on the line or not -- Mabel’s departure with Bertie’s sweetheart on the day of Bertie’s eighth grade graduation appears to both her sister and the town as an unforgivable act.

Propelled by the betrayal of the two people she had trusted and loved the most, Bertie’s bitterness and refusal to read or answer Mabel’s numerous letters explaining her actions causes the sisters’ previously inseparable lives to remain adrift. Through the lean years of the Great Depression, the Second World War, Vietnam, to present day, Mabel and Bertie continue to grow and change without the other sister taking part in each other’s transformation from girl to woman, wife to mother.

Nancy Jensen, in unflinching prose that captures both the poetic beauty and pain of frayed familial bonds, effortlessly braids together the threads of three generations of Fischer women -- of sisters -- whose lives follow the same pattern of heartbreak and misunderstanding as Mabel and Bertie. From Bertie’s daughter Alma who yearns to be Shirley Temple in childhood so she can make everything right again and draw close to her distant mother, to Grace whose name exemplifies her ability -- unlike the other sisters -- to reach beyond her circumstances and find healing through unconditional love and art, The Sisters does not draw upon a cache of clichéd characters, but each sister is made unique in her many struggles and triumphs.

The Sisters is based on the untold story surrounding Nancy Jensen’s own grandmother whose sister was not known to the family until an announcement revealed both her existence and her death. Because Jensen was never told her grandmother's motivations for denying having a sister throughout her life, Jensen allowed her imagination to conjure forth her grandmother’s reasons and how these reasons for denying her sister’s presence might have affected not only her grandmother’s life but Jensen’s as well.

Though weighted with the hard-bitten truths surrounding dire familial misunderstandings, the ending of The Sisters conveyed through the dynamic character Grace’s eyes makes the journey over the span of eighty years and three generations of unforgettable women far worth the trip.

The Sisters: A Novel by Nancy Jensen

Available from Amazon.com

■Hardcover: 336 pages

■Publisher: St. Martin’s Press; First Edition edition (November 8, 2011)

■Language: English

■ISBN-10: 0312542704

■ISBN-13: 978-0312542702

Talk About A Rude Awakening

My older brother was always the one who would wander the halls at night and was once found sleeping at the edge of the loft outside his bedroom; a ten foot fall my father had tried to prevent by shoving furniture in front of the precipice like a barricade. But my brother had just pushed this away, then curled up against the edge with his hands tucked under his chin like a child.

Railings were put up the next afternoon.

In comparison to my brother’s nocturnal misadventures, a few sentences mumbled in my sleep were really quite mild. Oh, I did have a few bouts here and there that revealed my proclivity towards drama even in dreams. When I was fifteen, during our family’s trip out West, I was sleeping against the side of the ’70s popup camper when a zipper brushed my cheek and I thought I was trapped inside a suitcase. I sat up and started frantically unzipping everything, trying to claw my way out of the camper, until my best friend put a hand on my shoulder and gently rocked me awake.

In college my roommates were often entertained by my one-sided conversations in the dark that revealed more than what I confided to them during the day, and if my roommates tried to hold a conversation with me that unveiled even more, I -- uninhibited -- would let them enter my dreams, and we would chat with each other like were discussing the weather over a pot of tea.

After I married, my sleep talking increased quite substantially. I don’t know if my bare leg kept brushing my husband’s furry one or what exactly occurred, but he and I hadn’t been hitched two months when I leapt straight up out of the covers like I had strings attached to my back and screamed, “MOUSE!”

My husband jolted upright. Blindly smacking his hands against the dresser, he finally found the lamp and pulled the string. That is when he saw his newly wedded bride with hair all over her head, a la Mr. Rochester’s mad wife, prancing in place and screaming, “Mouse! There’s a mouse!”

Not knowing any better because I hadn’t warned him that I could be dramatic in my sleep, my poor husband believed me. Plus, I seemed so awake. I was talking coherently (okay, screaming coherently), and even as a minute passed, the panicked glaze would not leave my eyes.

“Where is it?” he calmly asked.

I pointed to a clump in the bed.

Taking a deep breath, my husband charged across the covers. He pounced like Tom on Jerry, trying to trap the pesky little varmint beneath his hands, but there was nothing there.

He looked up at me. I looked down at him. “Don’t move,” I whispered. “There’s a whole nest of them!”

Groaning, my husband staggered to the top of the bed and climbed beneath the covers. “There’s no mouse,” he mumbled, pulling the pillow up around his ears. “Go to sleep.”

The next four months, although nothing could compare to the mouse incident, I did have dreams that there were puppies in our bed, spiders, and I would have fluent conversations in English or Spanish (I don't really speak Spanish) until my husband shook my shoulder and told me I was sleep talking again. But once I became accustomed to having someone share my bed (and my covers!), the talking in my sleep settled down. If I ate late or watched or read something that disturbed me, I would often solve the world's problems in my dreams, yet these episodes over two and a half years of marriage were really quite rare.

Then I got pregnant.

During the first trimester, when I could still sleep on my stomach and Baby Girl wasn’t thrashing around like a fish, I could sleep undisturbed. But the bigger she grew and the more active she became (think Thing One and Thing Two trapped in the space the size of a soccer ball), the more difficult it was to tumble into slumberland. I dreamt that Baby Girl was born as slippery as a butterball turkey, and I would keep trying to bathe her in the sink and she would shoot across the room. I dreamt that my husband and I were riding in a car that veered off the interstate and sailed across the sky. I dreamt of spiders again and after watching something on snakes, I dreamt about them, too. The more active my baby became in my womb, the more active my dreams until I awoke as tired as when my head hit the pillow.

My husband started sleeping with one eye open, his arms poised to grab even when he was half-awake, for often these dreams of bathing our child and riding in a car that could also fly were acted out until my husband feared I would lunge off the stage of our bed and hurt myself.

I had no idea how deeply my husband’s paranoia about my sleep situation ran until the other night when I stayed up late reading. I will often do this as it helps me to unwind and replenish the imaginative juices I have drained throughout the day. I love to pull the covers over my head in a creative cocoon and angle the flashlight so that the beam floods the page and splashes across the sheets, then read until my frequent yawns keep me from being able to discern the words.

I don’t know if my husband heard me clap my book closed and this awoke him, but when I started hauling my body out of bed, he bolted upright and wrapped his arms around me.

“Honey?” he rasped, thinking I was going to take a swan dive off the bed into an imaginary sea or something. "You okay?"

Laughing a little, I said, “I’m fine.”

But my husband wouldn’t let go. “You’re sure you’re awake?” he asked, somewhat skeptically.

“Yes,” I said, untwining myself from his arms. “I’ve gotta go the bathroom.”

He said, “Okay,” but he still kept one hand on my back while I got off the bed.

The next morning, when my husband and I awoke, I looked over at him and patted my stomach. “Ugh. I don’t think I’m going to sleep sound until after this baby’s born.”

He laughed. “I don’t think you’re going to sleep very sound then either.”

Groaning, I pulled the covers back over my head. Talk about a rude awakening.