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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: Publishing Business

Boy @ The Window – 1st Anniversary!

17 Thursday Apr 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Sports, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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Book Promotions, BookExpo America 2014, Positive Feedback, Publishing Business


Nope, no balloons or streamers for this one, the one-year anniversary since I put out the first e-book version of Boy @ The Window on Amazon Kindle. Yay, me! It’s been a pretty good twelve months, one of a few highs and a bunch of lows in selling and promoting the book, in moving forward with a plan, only to have tossed it aside for a new set of plans for the remainder of 2014 and 2015.

The bit of encouraging news — aside from some royalties for Boy @ The Window so far — is that there are a couple of places reviewing it now (finally), and I’m finally moving along with promoting the book. Beyond that, there are few things tougher psychologically than book promotions. This is why folks hire publicists — emotional distance can be helpful in reaching out to friends and strangers.

But, from the feedback (mostly through email and Facebook) I’ve gotten so far, people really like Boy @ The Window. Trust me, when a reader tells you they couldn’t put the book down once they started to read it, that’s an emotional boost! It’s part of what has enabled me to keep going on this venture into the cyclone of the publishing world.

I’ve planned for attending BookExpo America for the first time at the end of next month in New York. It’ll likely be a gigantic sea of authors, publishers, editors and others looking for an edge. I just hope that it’s worth the money I’m about to spend there.

One thing that I should note, though, as I continue to write on my blog and proceed with Boy @ The Window promotions. There are plenty of posts here that aren’t in the memoir, and plenty of stories in Boy @ The Window that I haven’t posted here. You can get some idea of what’s in the book from reading my posts, but it would be far from a complete picture. Buy a copy. Take it for a spin. It’ll make you laugh and cry, angry and hopeful, and all at times in the same paragraph.

Mistake No. 3 and Book #2

19 Friday Nov 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Marriage

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"Mistake No. 3", Culture Club, Emotional Support, Harold Meltzer, Humanities, Literary Agents, Marriage, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Publishing Business, Rosemary Martino, Waking Up With The House On Fire, Writing, Writing Mistakes, Writing Process


Culture Club, "Mistake No. 3" Single, November 19, 2010. Source: http://www.onlineauction.com

I’ve made many more than three mistakes in my walk as a writer. Mistake number three probably came around the same time Culture Club released “Mistake No. 3” off of their Waking Up with the House on Fire album in ’84. So many of them have come because I’ve either been impatient in making a decision or too tentative to make one at all.

Just with Boy @ The Window alone, I’ve probably made at least thirty-three mistakes. I should’ve started working on the book right after my conversation with my late teacher Harold Meltzer about my experiences, in February ’95. Even without Google, Facebook, MySpace, and so many other places to look, it would’ve been much easier to track down my ex-classmates and teachers. Instead, I single-mindedly pursued my doctorate and my doctoral thesis as if it were gold-pressed platinum. All the while asking myself if I was a historian first and a writer second, or a writer that just happened to be an academic historian?

When I finally did begin working on the manuscript, in the summer of ’02, I think that I was writing about four different books. It had an academic side to it, a look at magnet school programs and their inherent arrogance around diversity and race, not to mention intelligence, especially in the 80s. I was also writing narrative nonfiction, ala Eric Schlosser and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, as well as fitting in bits and piece of memoir. And Meltzer, during my second and what would turn out to be final interview with him, suggested that I might want to turn the project into a novel. Why fiction? Because, in so many words, I wouldn’t piss anyone among the living with a Mount Vernon connection off.

Boy, I had no idea how right he was! Not about making Boy @ The Window a work of fiction. But about how many people I’d turn off or have attack me just during the research phase of the project. More people turned me down for interviews than granted them in the first years. If I sold it to them as a research project, I could hear their eyes glaze over while discussing it on the phone or in their keyboard strokes in an email. I pissed off many more as I started to write, as I did more interviews, as I started my blog in June ’07. I found out that I was defiling sacrosanct ground when writing about “Money Earnin’ Mount Vernon.”

I mistakenly began to shop the manuscript around in looking for an agent almost before I’d finished my first full draft of it. I had an agent for Fear of a “Black” America, but I’d found her in ’99, and the industry had changed so much in the eight years before I started looking for one again. I found myself having to have a well-thought out marketing strategy without having defined Boy @ The Window as a full-fledged

Neil Diamond, "Love On The Rocks" at concert, November 19, 2010. Source: https://www.rockbackingtracks.co.uk/images/neil_diamond.jpg

memoir at this point. It wasn’t a disaster, as I managed to get about thirty percent of the agents I contacted interested enough to look at my unpolished manuscript. Before their standard rejections would come back.

Licking my wounds and being more patient, to continue to revise and re-polish and repeat for most of ’09 and this year was hardly a bad thing. Realizing that my wife never liked the idea of me working on Boy @ The Window was harder, much, much harder than any agent’s multiple-xeroxed form rejection letter. I’d been in denial about it for about three years. It was when I sat down at the end of ’09 to do a long-overdue overhaul of the memoir that she finally made it obvious to me that I’d violated some unwritten rule in our marriage about delving too deeply in my past. It was about a year ago that I realized that — at least on the subject of Boy @ The Window — I’d lost my significant other of fifteen years, who simply wanted and wants me to move on.

There’s no doubt, though, that the biggest mistake I’ve ever made as a writer was to choose to not see myself as a writer for the better part of two decades. That’s probably the reason why it’s taken me years to work on Boy @ The Window, why I’m still a forty-one-year-old late bloomer in this calling of mine. That I’ve made as many mistakes as I have and still remain hopeful about publishing this memoir is, well, both crazy and just the thing I need to get through, I suppose. My former AP English teacher Rosemary Martino was right about one thing. Writing really does take sacrifice.

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Places to Buy/Download Boy @ The Window

There's a few ways in which you can read excerpts of, borrow and/or purchase and download Boy @ The Window. There's the trade paperback edition of Boy @ The Window, available for purchase via Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/Boy-Window-Donald-Earl-Collins/dp/0989256138/

There's also a Kindle edition on Amazon.com. The enhanced edition can be read only with Kindle Fire, an iPad or a full-color tablet. The links to the enhanced edition through Apple's iBookstore and the Barnes & Noble NOOK edition are below. The link to the Amazon Kindle version is also immediately below:

scr2555-proj697-a-kindle-logo-rgb-lg

Boy @ The Window on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Boy-The-Window-Memoir-ebook/dp/B00CD95FBU/

iBookstore-logo-300x100

Boy @ The Window on Apple's iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/boy-the-window/id643768275?ls=1

Barnes & Noble (bn.com) logo, June 26, 2013. (http://www.logotypes101.com).

Boy @ The Window on Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/boy-the-window-donald-earl-collins/1115182183?ean=2940016741567

You can also add, read and review Boy @ The Window on Goodreads.com. Just click on the button below:

Boy @ The Window

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