Successful Blog

Interview 8: Marti Lawrence, Blogger, Author, Publisher

by Leave a Comment

An Adventure in Publishing

Enter the Laughter

I’ve known Marti Lawrence and her blog, Enter the Laughter for so long, that I don’t know how we met. I know she’s a great writer, that she’s smart, fun, and funny, and that she does what it takes to make a business work. So, when she emailed last week to say that she’d self-published a book of her humor stories, I can’t say that it really surprised me. When it sells like crazy that won’t surprise me either.

More and more folks are looking into self-publishing. I get at least one call about it each week. That’s why I asked Marti if she’d talk about her self-publishing experience with us. She agreed. She’s generous like that.

Meet Marti

Marti Lawrence is
Author of “Queen Klutz – The Misadventures of a Very Clumsy Woman”
Available at: Lulu Publishing: http://www.lulu.com/martilawrence/

Marti’s blog is: Enter the Laughter http://enterthelaughter.com/
Her Squidoo Lens is: http://www.squidoo.com/enterthelaughter/

Hi Marti. I love the title of your book, “Queen Klutz – The Misadventures of a Very Clumsy Woman.” What’s it about?

Awful things! (Just joking, that’s what I do.) It’s a book of humor essays about events that have happened to me and my family — broken bones and car crashes, some real tragedies. The stories are humorous and inspirational. They’re about overcoming adversity.

I’ve had so many mishaps in my life, I had to find the humor in them or the guys with the straitjacket would be dragging me out the door. It’s a compilation of newspaper articles, blog posts and essays written just for the book. Stories told with a humorous and optimistic outlook that subliminally whisper, “For a good time, buy me.”

What brought you to write it?

I’ve had a love affair with narrative my entire life. I’ve been a storyteller for as long as I can remember. At a young age I discovered the thrill of having people laugh at my anecdotes and have craved that attention ever since. My writing was first published when I was on the staff of my high school newspaper. After that good friends kept telling me I should write a book. I would tell them to sober up, but I kept thinking about it.

How long did it take you?

I wrote the first story in January of 2004, while convalescing from breaking my right ankle (for the second time). I needed to find the humor in the situation to keep from clubbing myself in the head with the cast. I started cobbling the pieces together in January 2006, and joined Lulu in February.

In March I asked Karen Maxwell for help because she is a whiz with formatting and artwork. I’d just started reading the blog “The Reign of Ellen” after seeing the great “Queen” illustration she did of you! When I was tossing ideas around with Karen, she suggested a cover drawing by Ellen. It seemed like destiny! I asked Ellen if she could do a depiction of me, then used it as the centerpiece of the cover, which took me about a month to design. It seemed to convey the goofy optimism of a very clumsy woman.

What made you decide to self-publish?

Abject isolation. I had no network of people in the industry, no friends who knew someone who knew an agent. I live on a pumpkin farm in a rural area. Representatives from publishing houses only know my area as the place they fly over on their way to someplace important. I had no budget for advertising or bribery. My query letters went unanswered, but probably made nice paper airplanes or bird-cage lining. A friend had self-published and was pleased with the process. She told me about it and I decided to give it a shot. I researched all of the companies and chose Lulu for their reputation, quality of product and the fact that they wouldn’t charge me up front or make me buy a thousand books.

What was it like to self-publish?

Horrible! Just kidding, it was great. Humbling. I learned (again) how little I know about anything. I’d never tried to format a document in book form, using headers, footers, and gutters. I was ready for the gutter after several attempts. Many times, I thought I had the Word document formatted properly, and sent it through the PDF conversion, then saw how repulsive it was. I worked on it some more, drank a lot, and finally got it right by reading the forums and chatting with the help desk guys at Lulu, who probably have my picture on their bulletin board of all-time ridiculous questions. I made them laugh though!

How can someone buy the book?

You must visit the bridge troll and answer his questions three. Nah, you just go to my storefront at Lulu [http://lulu.com/martilawrence]. Lulu offers authors the option of selling just through their storefront, or purchasing a global distribution plan which includes a galley proof of your book. When you approve the galley, then you are assigned an ISBN and bar code, which allows it to be distributed through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc. Those cost dollars though, which are in short supply, so I’m selling through the storefront for now to raise money to purchase that. Help put a lonely bar code to work and have a good laugh! Thank you!

Thank YOU, Marti!

What’s your experience with self-publishing? Have you been thinking about it?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related articles
2.1 Ellen [The Reign of Ellen] Talks about Success
1.1 Meet Indie
Interview 7.1: Meet Cat Morley, World Designer
Interview 3 Patrick Makes California a Black Hole

The 9 Rights of Every Writer — Peer Pressure Is for Jr. High School

by 62 Comments

Can’t Stay in My Box — I Never Was Cool

Power Writing Series Logo

I suppose if I were the savvy one, I’d wait until Monday or Tuesday to write this post. But I’m not. I’m the one who writes when the writing needs to be done. This post can’t wait until Monday or Tuesday, and darn it. It shouldn’t either.

The dialogue around the blogs that I read a lot and among some bloggers that I care about has been around one big question lately that keeps getting twisted and turned.

Do I write about what I know and want, or do I change what I write when I see big traffic come?

It’s time we talk about the rights of a writer. [Read more…]

Think You’re Not Creative? That Could Cost You Your Job

by Leave a Comment

Balderdash and Piffle

Creativity at Work

Creativity comes from the sum of one’s life experience. It pulls from knowledge, abilities, and skills. It uses neural pathways in the brain made by everything a person has learned and makes new ones as new connections form. It calls upon an ability to get beyond the ordinary, automatic response—to explore the inside and the outside of that darned proverbial box.

Still think you’re not creative? Maybe your definition of creative is too narrow. Some folks, who call themselves “creatives,” would have you believe that all creativity lies only in artistic endeavor. That brings me back to balderdash and piffle. Those folks aren’t creative in how they define creativity.

Ordinary folk have the power for creative thinking.

Creative thinking is essential to most every career on the planet. Businesses need creative thinkers to innovate, to manage risk, to meet ever-changing customer needs, to build efficient processes and solve complex problems.

If you argue for your lack of creativity, that could cost you your job. [Read more…]

Flow: Zen and the Art of Having Fun Writing

by 12 Comments

Flow

Finding Ideas Outside of the Box logo 2

I want to tell you about one of my heroes. His name is Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi (pronounced chick-sent-me-high-ee). He became a cult figure in the creative world when he published a book called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. The book came out in 1990 and writers, artists, others who need to be creative still tell others about it.

Everyone experiences flow. We call it being “in the zone.” What you might not know is why and how it happens or that you can make it happen more often. [Read more…]

Net Neutrality 6-11-2006

by Leave a Comment

Net Neutrality Links

I’ve added these links to the Net Neutrality Page today.

absolutely nuthin but net neutrality

two things: first the internet is the most democratic medium in the history of all media.

caveat, there are still vast swaths of population without access.

secondly, the internet is democratic because it’s end-to-end. the internet was designed with no gatekeepers. it’s based on a layered end-to-end model with no central control (inventor of the internet said that, no not al gore, but i didn’t get the guy’s name).

consumers take it for granted that every application and website are treated equally because it’s always been that way. title 2 of the communications act provides for non-discrimination of information.

the problem is that these rules are about to change in the communications language moving through congress.

the communications company want to get into video over broadband, and turn the internet into a cable tv model.

Net neutrality extremists should stop playing engineers

Our own VoIP blogger Russell Shaw has decided to rebut my position on Net neutrality. Here is my response to Russell.

Russell Shaw says:
George then adds that if everyone is contending for the same bandwidth on an Internet backbone at the same moment in time, then the priority-service packets should never exceed half the total available bandwidth. He feels no network provider that uses their senses would violate such a policy, because that would cause service to degrade to the point that many customers would be alienated.

Here’s where I differ. I don’t think the designation of priority packets should be permitted. That opens up at least the possibility of favored Internet access to content partners. Plus, because of hubris, as well as the law of unintended consequences, I think that network providers may overestimate their ability to maintain system-wide quality for those packets that have not been blessed with what I could colloquially call “most favored packets” standards.

Russell, of course you don’t think this is a good idea when you have no understanding of traffic engineering. One of the comments made to me in my blog was that instead of implementing QoS, a Telco should simply add bandwidth to solve the problem. The knee jerk reaction to this would be “this sounds great” but the problem with this line of thought is that you can add 10 times more bandwidth and you’ll still need QoS.

Unspun: Jim Cooper so totally on notice
[Read more…]

Net Neutrality 6-03-2006

by Leave a Comment

Net Neutrality Links

I’ve added these links to the Net Neutrality Page today.

This is what started it all

FYI, here’s the article that but a bee in the bonnet of the special interests who’re trying to shackle the Internet with their so-called net-neutrality regulations:

William L. Smith, chief technology officer for Atlanta-based BellSouth Corp., told reporters and analysts that an Internet service provider such as his firm should be able, for example, to charge Yahoo Inc. for the opportunity to have its search site load faster than that of Google Inc.

Or, Smith said, his company should be allowed to charge a rival voice-over-Internet firm so that its service can operate with the same quality as BellSouth’s offering.

Remedial First Amendment For The Net Neutrality Crowd

I’ve noticed lately that some net neutrality advocates have taken to calling neutrality legislation the “First Amendment of the Internet”. Allow me to point out that the first five words of the First Amendment are “Congress shall make no law …”

When it comes to our communications systems, our first priority should be to keep Congress out of it. The First Amendment says, when it comes to speech, the government simply does not make the call. It is not a question of debating right and wrong in the hallowed halls; the Constitution says simply, the government has no say.

Broadband Providers Lobby Against Internet Neutrality

We’ve been enjoying a resource that many have just assumed would continue. Consider some of the other changes that are occuring. Newspapers are going out of business all over America. Many, if not most, big city papers have been bought out by huge multi-media companies. Those media companies have shown an inclination to limit our access to the news to the point that a paid public service statement from the United Church of Christ is rejected by network TV and a book that lists the top 25 censored news stories is published annually in America.

Newspapers and other written media have been an important part of our democracy since Thomas Paine published “Common Sense” and helped light the fire of revolution and independence from a monarchy bent on exploiting, not nurturing it’s colonies. Today we face a different kind of threat. Very few men control virturally all of our news in the mainstream media and they’ve demonstrated a willness to limit even big stories like Downing St. Memos are still not widely known by Americans.

Al Gore characterized our democracy as “hollowed out” by a dearth of editorial variety in the “marketplace of ideas”. He called for the preservation of freedom on the Internet

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
NET NEUTRALITY PAGE