Karen Sandler

Category: Books

  • RTW – Favorite Book in May

    Today, YA Highway wants to know What was the best book you read in May? I checked my Kindle list and found I downloaded four ebooks in May (I’m not as prodigious a reader as some). Of the four, I read and very much enjoyed two, had to struggle through one and never finished it and barely peeked into the fourth (it was a freebie that turned out to just not be my cup of tea).

    But of the two I read and enjoyed, the Latte Rebellion especially turned out to be my cup of, uh, coffee. It was such a fun book with a great multi-cultural cast. What starts as a money-making lark for the main character, Asha, turns into a full-fledged cause for mixed race kids. Her relationship with her best friend, Carey, gets dented along the way, but Asha’s character arc is believable and powerful.

    Although the tone of this book is light and the opposite of angst-ridden, it covers some pretty significant topics. One of the other characters, Roger, keeps asking Asha, Why don’t you just join the Asian club? In other words, although Asha is a mix of ethnicities, Roger wants to pigeon-hole her into just one so she can be categorized. But that’s the whole point the Latte Rebellion (the movement within the book) is trying to get across. That people can’t always be easily pigeon-holed.

    It occurs to me that there is another book I might just have finished at the start of May and it really deserves mention. Vodnik from my fellow Lee and Low/Tu Books author, Bryce Moore, is a YA boycentric adventure so unique I doubt you’ve read anything quite like it. Unless, of course, you’re steeped in Slovak and Roma fairy tales. It’s an exciting, page-turning read, full of the unexpected.

    So there you are, my reads for May. What have you been enjoying?

  • Adventures in the e-Trade – Part 1

    Kensington Books published my first two romance novels, Just My Imagination and Table for Two, back in 1998 for their Precious Gems program. Not long afterward, I sold two to Berkley Jove’s Haunting Hearts line, Unforgettable and Night Whispers, which were released in 1999. (side note: when my Night Whispers came out, there were two other books available with the same title, one by Judith McNaught).

    Within that same time period, I sold my first e-book, Eternity, a science fiction romance, to Hard Shell Word Factory, which was strictly an e-publisher at that time. I later ended up selling them one other original romance, The Right Mr. Wrong, and an original middle-grade book, Time in a Bottle. In 2000, when rights to my two Kensington books reverted to me, I sold those to Hard Shell too. One other romance, Chocolate Magic, which originally came out in hardcover and then trade paperback from Thorndike Press, eventually became a Hard Shell e-book as well.

    But I didn’t stop with selling rights to those early books only to Hard Shell. I discovered the large print market and was able to sell all  of my first six romances as hardcover large print. That meant that for Just My Imagination and Table for Two, I sold various rights to three publishers within five years.

    This is all prologue to what I’m up to now. Rights for all of the above-mentioned books reverted to me August 2011. Since then, I’ve been republishing the books one by one as Kindle e-books.

    It’s been a steep learning curve. First, the cover. I am not a visual artist. I just don’t have the patience to search through online clip art, nor the talent to put images together into a cover. No clue at all as to what would look good.

    I was lucky enough to find a cover artist who’s quick and reasonably priced. She uses royalty-free clip art to keep costs down, and has a good eye as to what elements work for a given story. I’m astute enough to look at what she’s done and suggest changes as needed, but I don’t have to create the cover myself.

    My second problem was the author name issue. In the last couple years, I’ve switched from romance to the children’s market (young adult). It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want my YA readers to figure out that I’d written romances as Karen Sandler (Harlequin is still selling all the romances I wrote for them under that name). It was more a marketing issue. I didn’t want to tweet about my romances using my @karensandlerya identity on Twitter, for instance. I didn’t want to advertise my romance novels on my karensandler.net website. Which meant I needed a new identity.

    I’ve always wanted to use my mom’s maiden name, Russo, as part of a pen name. With that as my surname, I only needed a first name. I had the perfect choice right at my fingertips, so to speak–Kayla, the name of my main character in my YA book, Tankborn. So my romance identity became Kayla Russo.

    I also started thinking that maybe I ought to be retitling my books. For the most part, I was going for something a little less generic. I also wanted a fresh start on the books. It’s not that I wanted to fool anyone into thinking these are brand-new books. There’s a note inside each one identifying the original title and publisher which a reader can find by downloading a sample. But I wanted to catch the eye of those who might not have heard of me before with (hopefully) more clever titles.

    Unfortunately, I didn’t make the decision to change my name or the titles until I’d not only had the covers created, but had also put up the first two books for sale. Having my cover artist make the name/title change was the easy part. Getting the books updated on the venues I’d submitted them to was a whole other story. I’ll get into that in part 2.

     

  • 3 Tricks to Energize an Expository Scene

    Has this ever happened to you? You’re working on your manuscript and you’ve come to a point where you need to reveal information to your reader. It might be something crucial to the plot, or a vital revelation about your main character. You start writing the scene, but somehow it’s flat and boring. It sounds like a couple of talking heads. You start to feel completely blocked.

    If it hasn’t happened to you, you’re lucky. I’ve experienced this scenario any number of times writing my 20+ books. Early on in my career, I would flounder for a solution, but now I rely on a few go-to methods to freshen and energize the scene.

    1. Change the setting

    If it’s not working to have your characters sitting in a restaurant while they hash over their next step in defeating the alien zombie-vampires, get them up and moving. Your characters can walk through a park, or drive in a car, or climb up the hill to where they think the talisman is hidden. Sometimes an intimate, static setting is appropriate—in her room, or hidden in the cave safe from those AZVs. But if the scene is coming off too blah, get your characters up and out.

    2. Change the POV

    If you’re using the point of view of more than one character, sometimes all it takes to brighten up a scene is to switch to another character’s POV. That other character will have an entirely different perspective on the situation. That perspective might generate more conflict, which is exactly what will keep your reader reading.

    3. Do it with action

    This is a step beyond just getting your characters moving. Write your expository scene as an action scene. They’re fighting those AZVs, and in the process shouting out to each other what the reader needs to know—that he’s the one who left her that love note in third grade, or she stole from the church donation box to post his bail. Or you reveal information with the action itself—that AZVs have to be staked, beheaded, and tasered to be destroyed.

    So if your expository scene is lying there deader than a staked-beheaded-tasered AZV, give these tricks a try and get your book moving again.

  • Brain-Digital Interface

    Sometimes science is stranger–and creepier–than fiction. In my young adult science fiction book, Tankborn, genetically engineered non-humans (GENs) are grown in a tank with circuitry implanted along their nervous systems, including within their brains. An interface installed on their cheek (in the form of a tattoo) allows a trueborn to upload data and programing into a GEN and download the contents of much of their brain.

    In the realm of actual science, author Jonathan D. Moreno discusses in his book Mind Wars potential use of using the human brain for military advantage. For instance, he ponders the ethics of using oxytocin to induce a sense of trust and well-being in someone to enhance interrogation. Or the use of an “anti-sleep” pill to allow soldiers to continue fighting without the need for sleep.

    But it was the discussion of the brain-digital interface that caught my eye. Science hasn’t advanced to Tankborn’s level of circuitry implanted within a subject’s nervous system. But scientists have already used the brain-digital interface for prosthetic limbs, and there’s even potential to allow paralyzed folks to control robotics with their minds. These are far more positive uses for the technology of interfacing with the brain than in Tankborn’s world.

    Moreno proposed two guiding principles for use of the brain-digital interface: “First, the individual should have control over the contents of his or her mind. Second, the individual gets to decide who gets access.” In my fictional world, GENs never have complete control over the contents of their minds, nor do they decide who gets access.

    But that’s part of what makes for an interesting story–characters with seemingly insurmountable obstacles (in this case, both physical and mental slavery) who fight against their oppressors. I have to hope that in the real world this type of technology will only be used for the best purposes, and will be beneficial to all.

  • RTW – Most Memorable Book

    Today for Road Trip Wednesday, YA Highway asks, What book brings back memories? There are probably many I could name if I gave it some thought, but the first book that popped into my mind was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.

    The cover at left I pulled from Goodreads. I searched for my old tattered copy that I read in 1965 but couldn’t find it. Sad to think I might have lost it.

    It isn’t the fact that Tom Sawyer is such a fantastic book that makes it memorable to me. It’s the circumstances under which I read it. In the summer of 1965, my dad’s company, TRW, was sending him to Cocoa Beach, Florida for a satellite launch. As an electronic technician, he’d made that trip a number of times, spending a month or so near Cape Kennedy (or it could have been Cape Canaveral back then) helping to ready whatever satellite he was working on for launch into orbit.

    That particular year, the summer of ’65, he decided to take his daughters with him. My 12-year-old sister, Debbie, and I (I was 10), got out of school a week early and drove with Dad in his 1955 Ford station wagon. Our 13-year-old sister, Linda, would come later by plane with a friend.

    The drive to Florida took five days, with my Dad driving as long as he could until we either stopped at a motel or slept in the car. Along the way, I think in Texas, we stopped at a truck stop where they had books for sale. I’m not sure what it was about The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that caught my eye, but I asked my dad to buy it for me. I then read the book as we drove through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama on our way to Florida.

    As I read Tom Sawyer, I was literally in the world of the book. It seemed like the descriptions took on a new vividness because it felt like I was there with Tom. Later when I read Huckleberry Finn, it was the same (although by then I’d returned home to Southern California). I remembered what it felt like to be in the South and that book, as Tom Sawyer did, became a part of me.

    I’ve re-read both books several times (most recently as a Kindle version). Tom Sawyer has never lost its charm. It always pulls me back to our own adventures on the road and that hot, humid summer in Florida.