Author Interview – Sarah Martinez

Who designed the cover? Loretta Matson designed the cover. Mine was the first she did for Booktrope, but after mine they wanted her to do more for them. She is also my web designer and photographer. I did not want a woman on the cover as marketing suggested, but she was patient and savvy enough to play with ideas and came up with this. We were all pleased and I have gotten a lot of great feedback on it. It is exactly the type of thing that draws my attention even if I didn’t get the trees, lake and canoe I originally wanted.

Who is your publisher? Booktrope. You can find out more about them at booktrope.com. They are a small press in Seattle. They believed in me and let me keep my book the way I wanted. I am fairly sure I would not have gotten away with several things that make my book unique at a larger publisher.

I posted videos on my website at www.mywildskies.com, where I thanked them for giving me a place where a book like this could have a place, and Catherine Sears, the company’s CMO spoke about what they are doing.

Seattle is really an exciting place to be a writer and companies like Booktrope are just the beginning.

Why did you choose to write this particular book? The book just didn’t want to go away. I was plugging away on another novel, one that I was very excited about and had already worked on with an agent and some serious critique partners. When I wrote the first draft in November of 2010 as part of National Novel Writing month (I write a new novel for this every year) I fully intended to put it away and forget about it per my usual routine.

With this book, beginning in December, as I was trying to go back to the other novel, I found myself reworking scenes in my head while I was driving, or doing other activities. The conflict I had set up between Vivi and Jasper didn’t work, it just felt too contrived. I couldn’t stop thinking about what would really bring them together, and then boom, one day Tristan popped into my head. This led to me completely rewriting the book with him in there and I never looked back.

This experience taught me to follow where the energy takes me.

How do you promote this book? I do pretty much everything. I filmed my book launch and share that around at regular intervals. Same with my book trailer which is gorgeous, you can find links to both on my website, Facebook and Amazon author pages.

Two book groups have hosted me. I have appeared at local bookstores for events and speaking engagements. I speak at writer’s groups and book festivals, I sit on and moderate panels—at the moment I am about to propose a panel for AWP which will be in Seattle next year.

Commenting on blogs that cover issues close to topics I am writing about helps me feel like a part of a larger discussion. Further to this I find people on twitter who have interests similar to mine and network that way. I just took out an ad with a national women’s magazine which I am very excited about.

Recently I set up a Pinterest board that includes pictures that represent places I included in the book.

Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp? I was a little worried when the book came out that readers would not understand what I did in the book. I wanted what I was trying to say about individualism, free thinking, responsibility for the course of one’s own life as well as the inescapable power of grief to come through. For the most part this has been the case.

I think this brings up a larger issue though. To my way of thinking the most rewarding thing that can happen is to find out that someone has read your book and created their own relationship to it, bringing out their own interpretations of events you describe. As readers we bring our own life experiences to everything we read so when I hear that readers have done the same and come away with things I intended for them to find and things I didn’t I am thrilled.

Ii is so interesting to listen to authors talk about books that have meant a lot to me and hear that what they were shooting for was quite different from the experience I had reading their book.

Now I believe my job is to put out the best version of the book I imagined that I can; the rest is up to the reader.

Vivianna Post is the family anomaly. Daughter of a Pulitzer Prize winner and an academic, she has never quite fit her parents’ expectations as a free-spirited erotica writer.

When Vivianna encounters the award-winning author Jasper Caldwell at a nightclub, all she wants is to blame him for blowing off her brother at a writers’ conference the year before and possibly causing his suicide. But as the night—and then the weeks—wear on, Vivianna finds herself drawn to Jasper in ways she cannot understand.

When their differences—literary and sexual—threaten to pull Vivianna and Jasper apart, Jasper rediscovers Alejandro, an old friend who just might have the power to complete them both in every way.

Using quotes and references to classic erotic and literary icons, Sex and Death in the American Novel is on one level an unconventional romance and on another a discussion of the merits of erotic literature.

Buy Now @ Amazon

Genre – Literary Erotica

Rating – X

More details about the author & the book

Connect with Sarah Martinez on Facebook & Twitter

Website http://www.mywildskies.com/