Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Guest Post: Laura Elliott

Laura is the author of the brand new adult thriller, The Storytellers. She's here to today to tell us about why she chose to self-pub.



Confessions of a technogeek or why I self-pub

 

Why do I self-pub? There are a lot of reasons. I’ve always been an early adapter of technology. I was working in the dot-com world during the Internet boom of the 90s, programming and designing for a company that came up with proprietary software for online banking for credit unions. The company got taken over by Oracle and is still in business today. Then I fell in love with multimedia and animation in the entertainment and news industries. I took my passion for technology and taught animation software at UCSB (Univ. of CA at Santa Barbara) and trained staff at corporations on how to animate features for the web in a world called new media. There’s just something really cool about technology. It intrigues me. I love the way it can be used to tell stories. I guess I’ve been telling digital stories for a dozen years or so.

 

I published my first short story for the kindle, The Kindergarten Ghost, in 2008. I had no idea what I was doing. But it was really cool when I could read it on my kindle. Then I just sort of forgot about being self-pubbed. I kept submitting. I kept writing. And the industry all the while was changing. The story that I loved and felt compelled to write at the time was WINEMUCCA, a small-town fairy tale. It is literary. It is magical realism. It is not a commercial book. I knew this. So I thought it would be perfect to self-pub because IMHO it would be nearly impossible for me to traditionally publish a literary, magical realism book in the changing publishing climate. Once I published WINNEMUCCA, I fell in love with the process. I love designing book covers and producing book trailers. These were all things I had been doing in the news and entertainment world for companies, now I was doing them for myself and my stories.

 

The classic design problem of articulating a story through a single image fascinates me. That’s why I love designing book covers. I also enjoy engaging my other senses through music and video in ways that put me in touch with the story in deeper ways. I always learn a lot about what I’ve written when I produce a book trailer. The process seems to open up more interpretations and meaning behind my books.

 

Because I have so much fun re-imagining the story at the end of the process in these multimedia ways, I sometimes think I should reverse my creative process. Start with the trailer and the cover. Then write the synopsis, followed by the book. It might be fun to try one day.

 

 
Synopsis:
 
 

Four storytellers
One ancient demon
No way out…
Four women who call themselves The Storytellers have gathered one hot August evening to tell tales, as they have for years. But on this night, they unknowingly evoke the powers of an ancient Mayan idol that breathes real life into their stories. The Mayan idol isn’t the only ancient being awakened. A power-hungry demon is determined to see the women fail and become enslaved to him forever.
Now the women’s lives depend on surviving each other’s stories, defeating the demon and solving a centuries-old mystery.
If they survive until The End untold wealth is theirs. But some stories have a life of their own…

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for hosting me today and for helping to spread the word about The Storytellers :D *waves*

    ReplyDelete