Karen Sandler

Category: Books

  • RTW: A Rose By Any Other Name

    Today YA Highway‘s Road Trip Wednesday asks: If you couldn’t use your own name, what would your pseudonym or pen name be?

    I feel like I’m cheating here, because I already have a couple of pen names. Back when I was writing adult romances exclusively (as Karen Sandler), I decided to write a children’s book so my then-young sons could read at least one of my books. I ended up publishing that book, then titled Time in a Bottle (but soon to be re-released as Timewrecked), under a pseudonym. I thought it would be better if young readers didn’t stumble across my very sexy romances, so Time in a Bottle was published under my pen name, Karen Anzalone. Anzalone was my grandmother’s maiden name.

    Now I’m focused exclusively on writing children’s books (my first being Tankborn). I don’t intend to write any new adult romances. But last year, I got the rights back to several of my older romances and decided to re-release them myself as e-books (as I’m doing with Timewrecked). Since those romances are entirely different books than Tankborn or the other YA books I’m planning to write and hoping to publish, I decided to market my self-published books under a pseudonym.

    So I stole the name of my main character in Tankborn for a first name (Kayla) and appropriated my mother’s maiden name, Russo. I only have two paranormal romances published under the name Kayla Russo so far (Dark Whispers and The In-Between), but there are more in the queue.

    It’s a bit ironic that when I re-publish my middle-grade book, Timewrecked (I’m currently waiting on cover art), I will be using my real name, Karen Sandler. Now I have a bit of a track record in children’s literature under that name, so I want to take advantage of that.

    But maybe I ought to have a few other pen names on the back burner for future books. Like for that mystery novel I haven’t been able to sell, I could be Agatha Agapantha. Or I could pen that dessert cookbook I’ve always dreamed of writing under the name Chocolate LaRue.

    How about you? Have any cool pen names in mind for yourself?

  • RTW – Where do you buy most of your books?

    Today YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday asks, Where do you buy most of your books? Then the post assures me that “No one is judging!” which is good because…let me screw up my courage…okay, I’ll just blurt it out. I buy most of my books at Amazon!

    Let me follow that confession up with a but…but…but… I do the vast bulk of my reading on a Kindle (okay, maybe that’s another confession…mea culpa in advance), and the only place to get a Kindle book is on Amazon. But look at it this way–every book I buy, I buy new. I’m not doing as a certain member of my household does (husband!) and making all my purchases at the library’s used book sale. Because the ebooks are “new books,” the sales all benefit the author (royalties) and the publisher (whatever they net) as well as Amazon.

    Still, there is one party left out of the equation here–the brick-and-mortar bookseller. I have an answer to that–I have a granddaughter (did you hear the birds singing and the flowers blooming when you read that? No? Surely you saw the glow from my grin?). Anyway, I love buying my granddaughter picture books. While I could order them from Amazon (and have once or twice), I like to see those books close up and in person before I buy. So I much prefer to purchase gifts for my granddaughter at a physical bookstore. Or even better yet, an indie, like Sundance Books in Reno where I bought Nosh, Schlep, Schluff and a couple others.

    (I just realized, it’s a good thing my granddaughter can’t read yet. Because of course she’d read her Nonna’s blog and then she’d know what she was getting for Christmas.)

    So yes, I’m aiding and abetting the monolithic overlord that is Amazon with all my ebook purchases. But I’m also supporting my local book stores with grandchild purchases. Hopefully the latter is enough penance for the former (can you tell I was raised a Catholic?).

  • RTW – A Christmas Gift for My Main Character

    This week, YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday asks, What would be the ideal holiday present for your main character? Since my characters tend to talk to me like real people, walking around in my created world as if they really exist, I guess it makes sense that I’d add them to my Christmas gift list.

    I’ve written dozens of main characters over the years, but none of them mean as much to me as the main character in my YA science fiction novel, Tankborn, Kayla 6982, nurture daughter of Tala. She’s had a difficult life, and I’ve been putting her into one hazardous situation after another, first in Tankborn, and now in the sequel I’m writing, Tankborn Awakening. If anyone deserves a Christmas gift, it’s Kayla.

    Kayla doesn’t celebrate Christmas (no one really does on the planet Loka), but I’m sure she’d appreciate a present. If you asked her what she wanted, she would surely say, Freedom for all GENs, or something equally altruistic. She tends to put the good of the many ahead of her own needs, so it’s unlikely she’d ask for something for herself personally. If you pressed her, she’d probably want something she could give to her best friend, Mishalla, like a gorgeous scarf made of uttama-silk or a pretty piece of metal jewelry. She might ask for a month’s supply of kel-grain for her nurture mother, Tala, or a bleeding-edge gadget for her tech-crazy nurture brother, Jal.

    But if you could dig deeper, maybe download her bare brain (yes, not possible since only a GEN’s annexed brain is accessible via a datapod download), it would be clear what she wants most. The one thing she’s least likely to get–Devak. The high-status trueborn is so out of her reach, she doesn’t even hope for him. But if I could give her that one special gift, it would be at least one night with Devak, just to be with him, to talk, to kiss, to hold his hand, and be close.

    Sigh. That would be Kayla’s best Christmas gift of all.

  • RTW – How far would you go to get published?

    Today for Road Trip Wednesday, YA Highway is asking, How far would you go to get published? In my case, I’d have to answer the question How far did you go to get published? since I’m already published and have been for 13 years.

    Along with the blog prompt, the RTW post shows the graphic here of a baseball field on which is represented four escalating options for how far a writer would go to get published.

    I’m here to say that getting every one of my 18 books published has always required a trip to home plate. While I haven’t chased a trend (first base), and not all my books were agented and so did not include agent feedback (second base), while I wrote and published romance, my editor always put in his or her two cents (and sometimes a whole dollar) before the book was ready to be published. I learned to go with the flow (except for my dirty little secret below) and make those changes that would improve the book.

    Then came Tankborn. Young adult wasn’t the big hot new thing when I started writing Tankborn, or if it was, I didn’t know that fact. All I knew was that I wrote five proposals for my romance editor (each one comprising three chapters and a detailed synopsis) and he turned down every one. I was starting to think that maybe it was time for a genre and market change. YA science fiction sounded like just the ticket.

    So maybe I hit a double and I went straight to second base. Once I wrote, edited and polished the manuscript for Tankborn, I went on the agent hunt. Thirty agents and four months later, I signed with my agent and it was time for that mad run to third base. My agent wanted some fairly extensive changes, much of it cutting back on the “throat clearing” in the opening chapters.

    So now I’m done, right? That sucker must be polished so shiny, it’ll put your eyes out looking at it, huh? Um, no. Because I’m still stranded on third base. I need to make one last all-out run to home plate.

    My agents submitted Tankborn, and Lee and Low bought it for their new Tu Books imprint. I galloped toward home, along the way performing one, two, three major revisions (luckily three strikes and you’re out did not apply). Maybe I should have scored three runs during that process. Instead I got the MVP award of seeing my book in print.

    Let me tell you the little secret about all those revisions that I alluded to above. When I receive my agent/editor notes, I don’t bounce around saying, Thank you, thank you, thank you. Well, sometimes I do when they point out something that makes a light bulb come on and I realize, Doh, that’s why that part wasn’t working.

    But usually my response is (a) sheer terror that I won’t know how to fix the problem, (b) anger that they have a problem with what I’ve written, or (c) a sense of being totally overwhelmed by the amount of work required to make the change. It’s kind of the stages of grief, I guess. I’ll often let myself wallow in those emotions for a few minutes.

    Then I’ll put on my big girl panties and start working.

  • Hopelessly Devoted to E

    I was e-published pretty early in the game (my SF romance, Eternity, came out as an e-book in 1998). But I was definitely not an early adopter of reading e-books. I always felt pretty guilty about that. Here I was, an e-published author, on the cutting edge of publishing, and I read nothing but paper books.

    The thing was, back then the options for reading e-books were not the greatest. There was reading on your computer (ugh), or using one of the clunky e-readers that were available. I did try it for a while, first using an eBookman, then a Palm Pilot. But with both of them, the experience was awkward and uncomfortable. I always went running back to my paper books.

    Then I bought an iPod, which I grew to love. And downloaded the Kindle app. I started reading books on that tiny screen and realized I really liked it. The device was nice and small, the backlit screen allowed me to read in bed after my husband turned off the lights to go to sleep. I could buy and download a new book from the comfort of my own home (or anywhere else with wireless) and receive it immediately.

    I was hooked. A few months after I started reading on the iPod, I realized I wanted a bigger screen and a better display for reading books. My birthday was coming up (which means it was just about a year ago), so a Kindle went on my B-day list. I’m pretty cheap, even when someone else is buying my gift, so I went for the lower priced non-3g model.

    And oh, what a wondrous time it’s been this past year. I’ve always been a voracious reader, but I’ve probably upped my reading by 15 or 20 percent. I seem to fly through books now, even with the slightly more awkward button click instead of touch screen technology. I love-love-love my Kindle, only putting it down this last year to read maybe 2 or 3 print books.

    What’s kind of funny about this is that I still read a “dead tree” newspaper. Yeah, I read many articles on the web, but I enjoy the tabloid format of an actual Sacramento Bee. Until we have a holographic substitute that I can “hold” and is as big as a current day newspaper, I’m sticking to paper for my morning read.

    But my pleasure reading–all e, all the time. I love you, Kindle.