AUTHOR PRESS KIT

Jerry D. Simmons -
Author, Publisher, Speaker
INDI Publishing Group
Creating Opportunities for Writers
Author of What Every Writer Needs to Know About Publishing
Also available as an eBook
www.WritersReaders.com
Preparing Writers for Success
www.NothingBinding.com
Introducing Emerging Writers to a Global Audience

The Author's Press Kit - What is it? Do I need one? -
By Carole Barnes

An author's press kit (also known as a media kit or a promo kit) is a package of information about you.... the author. Often authors are asked to provide details about themselves and their work to members of the press, their publishers, or potential clients. A press kit is a simple tool for handling this request quickly and efficiently. A press kit is a great, cost-effective way to generate exposure for you and your business. If you don't already have one then it may be time to consider one.

A well prepared press kit is an all-in-one package that summarizes you as an author and all of your professional information. It allows you to have pertinent information about your books, biographical information, activities, achievements and press coverage at your fingertips whenever needed. It can be as simple or as elaborate as you like, with its main purpose being to pull together all your information and make a good solid first impression.

The most important element of your press kit is its professional appearance and packaging. A press kit is used to promote you, your products and your business, as well as providing your contact and ordering information.

So, what's actually in the Press Kit?

The contents can vary, depending on the intended purpose and/or audience, but in general, a press kit contains the following:
1. A brief biography - a one page summary about you, what you do and what makes you unique. This is a good place to insert your contact information and a photo of you.
2. If you are promoting your current book, your press kit will include a summary, title, publisher, publication date, synopsis, and a picture of the book's cover. This is a great place to add reviews about the book, as well as an order form.
3. If you wish to promote your general writing services, a list of what you've done for others in the past and some testimonial comments from satisfied clients can be added.
4. Reprints of newspaper and magazine articles, printouts from websites and references to TV and radio shows where you have been mentioned. Articles and media exposure lend tremendous credibility.
5. All awards and citations you have received.
6. A list of all your works, including where and when they were published.
7. Previous book signing photos as well as mention of any upcoming signings.
8. Of course you'll need something to put it in so it all stays together - a professional folder with your photo or logo on the cover.

With all of your information put together in an attractive, professional kit, you'll have a cohesive, convenient, and centralized marketing package. This packet will clearly communicate all the key facts about you, your work and achievements. The best part is that it will be ready to distribute at any time, with the goal, of course, of attracting future business and interest.

In these hard economic times, if an agent/publisher requests a summary of your information, it makes sense to have a showcase of your work ready to send out or take with you. A press kit can be handed to anyone... TV executives, agents, publishers, reviewers, etc., and can also be used to introduce yourself to prospective bookstores.

Press kits can be as simple as a one page summary of you and your work, or as detailed as you like. The best part is you can customize your kit for any occasion. Your can get online examples and do your own press kit, or have it done professionally, whichever is your preference.

Please feel free to contact me if you would like help developing a professional press kit specifically for you and your needs!

www.CaroleBarnes.com
CaroleBarnes@cox.net
Ph 480.330.3918

MUSICAL CHAIRS

NEW RELEASE BY AUTHOR JEN KNOX, MUSICAL CHAIRS.

Musical Chairs explores one family's history of mental health diagnoses and searches to define the cusp between a '90s working-class childhood and the trouble of adapting to a comfortable life in the suburbs. In order to understand her restlessness, Jennifer reflects on years of strip-dancing, alcoholism, and estrangement. Inspired by the least likely source, the family she left behind, Jennifer struggles towards reconciliation. This story is about identity, class, family ties, and the elusive nature of mental illness.

About the author:
Jen Knox is a Fiction Editor at Our Stories Literary Journal, and works as a freelance writer, editor, and writing tutor. She grew up in Ohio, and lives in Texas, where she is currently working on a novel entitled "Absurd Hunger."

http://allthingsthatmatterpress.com

SHOOTING ANGELS

JUST RELEASED FROM AUTHOR NICOLAS SANSONE, SHOOTING ANGELS!

A NASA Space Shuttle plummets to Earth. A team of eight rescue workers plunges into a treacherous Texan wilderness to recover the wreckage, and become entwined in a cosmic conspiracy. An uncouth disembodied head enslaves an elderly rancher and uses his cellar as the war room of its campaign against God, a noir-style slickster with a buxom blonde wife and a taste for margaritas, rockets down from the suburbs of Heaven on a comet to do battle with metaphysical evils. "Shooting Angels" races from the jungles of Texas, to the dark corners of undiscovered space, to the innermost reaches of the human mind, to the smoggy streets of Central Heaven, where people are free to give in to their most detestable urges. The novel asks its characters to confront their ordering theories of the universe, and raises questions of how we are to envision divinity in a technological age.

About the author:
Nick Sansone is a current student in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He grew up in Champaign, IL, and attended Sarah Lawrence College as a student of economics and Russian language. His short fiction has appeared in several small journals, including Pear Noir!, Pank, and Ignavia. Nick has two years' professional experience as a wildland firefighter and trail services employee through the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps. In 2003, he served on a NASA search and rescue team after the destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia.

http://allthingsthatmatterpress.com

"MOTHERLESS SOUL"

WE ARE PROUD TO ANNOUNCE THE RELEASE OF "MOTHERLESS SOUL" BY STEVE LINDAHL!

Emily Vinson's entire life was impacted by the loss of her mother when she was 2years old. At 82 Emily contacts a hypnotist hoping to draw out hidden memories and discover as much as possible about the short time she spent with the woman who gave her life. Glen Wiley, the hypnotist, teaches her more about herself than she had expected. He helps her bring out memories of many past lives, including an experience that took place on a smoke filled battlefield. All of Emily's lives have had the same tragic outcome, the loss of her mother at a young age. Her soul is caught in what Glen calls circularity, meaning that the tragedy will occur again and again unless she can break the pattern. She and Glen must revisit her past lives and use what they learn to find the other souls who are part of the circle. They must use the past to change the future. Emily's stubborn desire to know her mother is realized in intricate and unsettling ways no one could have imagined possible.

About the author:
Steve Lindahl has published short fiction in Space and Time, The Alaska Quarterly, The Wisconsin Review, Eclipse, Ellipsis and Red Wheelbarrow. He served for five years as an associate editor on the staff of The Crescent Review, a literary magazine he co-founded. His Theater Arts background has helped nurture a love for intricate characters in complex situations that is evident in his writing. Steve and his wife Toni live and work together outside of Greensboro, North Carolina. They have two adult children: Nicole and Erik. Motherless Soul is Steve Lindahl's debut novel.

You can purchase this great new book at, http://allthingsthatmatterpress.com

GEMINI'S BLOOD

WE ARE PROUD TO ANNOUNCE THE SECOND BOOK BY MICHAEL BURNS!
NOW AT http://allthingsthatmatterpress.com

Gemini's Blood
By Michael Burns

Jack Scanlon, at the threshold of his sixtieth year, finds himself in an uncomfortable recliner in the corridor of Day Surgery at a local hospital, hooked up to an IV tube. He is receiving three units of blood, a process that will take the better part of eight hours. He has all but convinced himself that he is a terminal case, a victim of colon cancer. If a drowning man is capable of witnessing the sum of his entire life before his eyes at the instant before he goes under for the last time, Jack Scanlon has the luxury of witnessing his at his leisure, and in chronological order. His meditations focus largely on his early childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, which covers roughly the years 1944 through 1961, with a few brief detours into more recent history, a history that involves the deaths of his younger half-brother Keith, and his mother, as well as a short description of his own recent medical struggles.

About the author:
Michael Burns was born in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. His family moved to New Hampshire in 1950 where he attended high school, graduating in 1957. He deferred entrance to college to serve in the U.S. Navy for four years, seeing duty in Southeast Asia in the early days of the Vietnam War. After mustering out of the Navy, Burns returned to New Hampshire where he met and married his wife, and matriculated at the University of New Hampshire.

Encouraged by his freshman English teacher, Burns first became interested in writing fiction in 1963. He continued writing after being inspired by the late Thomas Williams, National Book Award-winning author and mentor to many young writers, among them John Irving.

In 1971, Burns joined the faculty of St. Paul's School, a college preparatory boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire. He retired from that school in 2004 after 33 years of teaching chemistry, life science, and creative writing. At present, Burns is living with his wife in rural New Hampshire where he is at work on his fourth novel. Gemini, his first novel, was published by Poncha Press in 2001, and will be republished by All Things That Matter Press in 2009. Where You Are, Burns' second novel, was published by All Things That Matter Press in 2009.

Gemini's Blood

SHADES OF LUZ

JUST RELEASED, "SHADES OF LUZ" BY JOHN GORMAN.

Shades of Luz is a modern day Don Quixote, a picaresque rich in characters searching for love and meaning in an otherwise manic-paced world. Grad School dropout Benny Fluke goes from stuffed animal peddler to thumb-wrestling champ.He is a monkey trainer, philosopher, wine snob, and a strip club connoisseur. Above and beyond all that he is a romantic at heart and is desperate to win the love of Luz the hot-blooded, ambitious beauty who keeps boomeranging into his life. Something from Luz's past inextricably bonds them together and Benny will not stop until she is his. Their delightful repartee is crisp, witty, and sumptuously engaging.


John Gorman's stories have been published in Mississippi Review, The Shore, Nexus, Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore, The Rose and Thorn, Word Riot, Monkey Bicycle, and elsewhere. He won the 2003 NYInt'l Indie Film and Video Festival screenplay competition with For the Love of Auntie. He lives in New York City.

Widow's Walk Blog Tour

Widow's Walk Blog Tour

with Author Kenneth Weene Widow's Walk Blog Tour

September 1-30

Join author, Kenneth Weene, on his blog book tour September 1-30 and learn more about him and his novel Widow’s Walk, a story of good people's struggle – sometimes successfully and often not – to deal with the challenges in their lives. The novel reflects how family, friendship, love, faith, and character affect that struggle. Take the time to leave comments along the way and you'll be entered in a drawing with a chance to win two different prizes.


* The first giveaway is Kenneth Weene's poetry book which will go to a few different commenters.
* The second giveaway is a copy of his book Widow's Walk to one lucky commenter


About Widow's Walk

Widow’s Walk is a story of faith and its effects on already flawed characters. Set in Boston in the 1980s, it is the story of Mary Flanagan and her children, Sean and Kathleen. Mary’s husband, Sean, Sr., died at the wheel of his M.T.A. bus. Her son, Sean, Jr. is a quadriplegic, injured on his way to a brothel in Vietnam; Kathleen, divorced and unable to have children, works and lives at a hospice that primarily serves AIDS patients; there she lives a mechanistically faithful life, but one devoid of belief. This unhappy family structure is erected on the bedrock stoicism of Mary’s Irish Catholicism. It is that faith which is tested, changed, and strangely reaffirmed over the course of the tale.

Two events upend Mary’s world. The first is her friend, Lois’s, move to Florida. The second is Sean’s decision to seek rehabilitation in a center in Minnesota – a decision initiated by Jem, a home health aide whose own life reflects a faith of care and service.

Mary finds herself looking for new meaning and direction in her life. In the process she meets two unexpected people, Arnie Berger, a college professor, an agnostic or perhaps deistic Jew, and love interest, and Pat Michaels, a minister, whose view of a joyous faith is much at odds with Mary’s rigid theology. She also moves into a housing share and becomes friends with Amelia Callaghan, the misanthropic house owner.

Sean’s life, too, is dramatically changed because he falls in love with and marries one of the aides at the rehab center. He returns to Boston married, employed and expecting their first child.

Given the remarkable changes in her mother’s and brother’s lives and influenced by Max, one of her dying patients and a man whose story and faith are powerful and unique, Kathleen also seeks love. She meets Danny, a young man tied to his overprotective mother and unable to deal with his own feelings of inadequacy.

Sadly, Kathleen and Danny’s relationship ends in disaster, rape, and abuse. Danny flees. In her own way, Kathleen does too; she becomes catatonic and dependent.

Mary unable to come to terms with her sense of guilt and responsibility towards her daughter – is powerless to keep those feelings from coming between her and Arnie.

In the end, Mary can not live with her unhappiness and dies of “the pain of her soul,” a diagnosis provided by the caregiver, Jem, who had originally encouraged Sean to make his momentous move. Mary’s death creates a strange psychological space in which Kathleen takes on her mother’s place in the world.

If you haven't already read Widow's Walk, be sure to pick your copy up at Kenneth Weene’s Author Website - http://widows-walk.webs.com/.



Widow's Walk Blog Tour

with Author Kenneth Weene Widow's Walk Blog Tour

September 1-30

We are currently booking tour stops. If you are interested in taking part int this tour email us at virturalblogtours@yahoo.com


September 2 - Writers in the Sky http://yvonneperry.blogspot.com/2009/09/widows-walk-by-kenneth-weene.html – Interview

September 4 – Ascroft, eh? http://dianneascroft.wordpress.com/ - Guest Post and Excerpt

September 7 – New Book Review http://thenewbookreview.blogspot.com/ - Review

September 9 – Künati http://www.kunati.com/ - Review

September 11 – Katie Hines – Walking on Water - http://katiehines.blogspot.com - Interview

September 14 - Xanga blog http://cce613.xanga.com/ – Interview

September 16 – Marilyn's Musings http://marilynmeredith.blogspot.com/ - Review

September 18 – The Nurse Mommy - www.thenursemommy.com - Guest Post
September 21 – The Book Connection http://thebookconnectionccm.blogspot.com/ - Guest Post

September 23 – Books and Authors http://joyce-anthony.blogspot.com/

September 24 -- Books and Authors http://joyce-anthony.blogspot.com/

September 25 -- Books and Authors http://joyce-anthony.blogspot.com/

September 26 – Books and Authors http://joyce-anthony.blogspot.com/

September 28 – Stories that Read You http://stevenbradley.blogspot.com/

September 29 – Across the Pond Blog Talk Radio http://www.blogtalkradio.com/Across-the-Pond - 6:30 pm - Interview – The call in number is (347) 237-5398

September 30 -- Pending