My Book Blog Tour #2: Tips for Writing a Page-Turner

"I'm crying, your book is so great."

It was one day since I'd sent my manuscript out to a round of beta-readers. I was nervous. Then I started getting real-time updates from people as they read my book.

"I have SO much to do this weekend, but I can't stop reading your book!"

And I realized, I had written a page-turner. A 120,000-word, historical, literary fiction page-turner! Talk about an oxymoron.

It hadn't even been my goal to write a big, fat, Chinese family saga that readers would eat up in two days, although I was very (cautiously) flattered when feedback started rolling in sooner than expected. My goal was just to write really well, to cleanse my manuscript of the most pernicious mistakes that writers make. However, in retrospect, I learned from writing Trixi Pudong and the Greater World that to create a true page-turner, you need two things.

Continue reading on Quanie Miller's Blog...

My Book Blog Tour: Documenting My Family's Old Shanghai

Many thanks to Lidy Wilks for hosting my blog tour for Trixi Pudong and the Greater World. I've written about why I wrote this book. Here's an introduction... Enjoy!

I was born in Oakland and grew up like many of the Asian Americans who now populate Northern California. My parents worked and made sure my sister and I each had our own bedrooms, our own cars, and that we'd graduate from college with multiple degrees, debt-free. I was privileged.

My father came from Shanghai but in my suburban childhood, Dad's origins didn't play a big role. Imagine that: Dad was born in the 1930s in the fabled Paris of the Orient, one of the most decadent cities to have ever existed. A storied city of dreams, thousands of times more debaucherous than Las Vegas. And I didn't know anything about it. 

Continue reading at Lidy Wilks's blog!

Warm and fuzzy book launch success! And when you don't know what you're going to read...

Me. Nervous as all heck.

Before you proceed, turn on this video from Youtube to have a soundtrack in the background while you read this post:

And imagine the scent of sandalwood incense and bitter Chinese baijiu wine. 

And the sounds of people chatting, sharing ideas, laughing, getting caught up with long-lost contacts. 

Now you're starting to get the feeling of my book launch event from last night, aka My Little Shanghai Project. Just starting.

Having just moved into Berlin with a toddling 2-year-old and with my life packed in banker's boxes, organizing this event was stressful for my perfectionist self. Honestly -- as ALL my guests know by now -- I still didn't know which excerpts I was going to read aloud from my book, Trixi Pudong and the Greater World, even as people were arriving. This is very rare for me. All my writer life, I have not only prepared my reading list weeks before my events, but I have also rehearsed my readings in front of my writing partners. I'm a planning freak.

So yesterday, I stayed nervous, procrastinated, and mingled with my own friends until one of my closest author buddies (who'd just flown in from LA) arrived, one hour late. She had just stepped foot in the Rote Beete Cafe and I was already grabbing her arm whispering to her, "I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO READ YET."

And you know what? She was calm. She smiled. Her words rescued me. 

The week before launch!

I'm a fun person. Really. 

Ok, I admit I'm not so much fun since I got married and pooted out a baby who just turned 2 years old in July. But really... I used to be the Fun Meister that everyone wanted to know. I sharpened my teeth during my years living in Berlin in 2006-2010. It was harsh. It was a survival marathon. I have an entire bank of stories yet to tell from that era.

So it's been a while since I threw a P-A-R-T-Y, but girl's gotta still have it!

On Saturday (aka "tomorrow"), I'm going to try convert the Rote Beete Bar in Berlin-Schöneberg into Old Shanghai for the book launch event for Trixi Pudong and the Greater World (trailer below).

Maximizing a book trailer's potential

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Book trailers are an awkward genre. Somewhere between movie trailer and short film, animation and PowerPoint presentation, spoken word performance and late-night informercial.

And very, very often, just plain bad. Sorry.

But book trailers are a new concept, and the quality of a nascent art form is always iffy. With book trailers, authors of extremely varying skills and background have to either cobble together their own movie or spend unknown thousands hiring someone to make it for them, of further unknown quality.

And who watches book trailers anyway?

Well, judging from my research checking Youtube View stats for hundreds of trailers... 

The Soul Pain of Receiving Feedback

"I would rather [FILL IN THE BLANK] than hear honest feedback about my writing."

Every region in the world has its natural disasters: tornados, floods, malaria, earthquakes. Up here in the Gritlands where artists are hard at work, we've been spared all of those. Perfect weather all year on stable ground. Great, right? Not so fast. Because what we have instead is potentially much worse: honest feedback.

Let's be honest about honest feedback: It hurts.

And oh, how you deal with it. Do these voices sound familiar?

But I want that chapter to be unclear.
You're not my target reader anyway. You just don't get it.
A vague sense of place and time is the effect I want.
I don't want to write like mainstream authors! They all suck.
Your suggestions take away all the style of my writing.
If you were a real friend, you'd be supportive of my writing.
Your comments made zero sense to me. None. At all.

Comp Titles for a #DiverseBook

"Who is your target audience?"

That's another question that I was too lazy to answer. Until this week.

Because now I'm getting ready for book launch [tightening my shoelaces and carb-loading] and with a 2-year-old kid to raise, I have to be wise with my time in approaching people to read an advanced copy of Trixi Pudong and the Greater World. It is fascinating how it stands out to me now who will read my book. And who won't.

I've been to writer's conferences and I've seen the kind of people who won't give my book the time of day, not in a million years. Here they are: