Skip to content

Kelly I. Hitchcock Posts

I have a fan club!

Published by Kelly on April 27, 2015

… and believe it or not, it’s not the first time.

My BFFF created a fan club for my authorisms on Facebook if you’re into joining the fun.

Interestingly enough, I once had a Facebook fan club way back in college. I have no idea how it started, but it became a thing and I eventually dissolved the group due to the fact that I no longer interacted with any of the people in it. This time, however, the fan club is run by someone other than myself, so it will actually be a legitimate fan club and shit.

Maybe there will even be a P.O. Box so you can send fANthrax mail.

5 Comments
Novel Night at Malvern Books

Novel Night at Malvern Books

Published by Kelly on April 13, 2015

Mark your calendars, Austin peeps! I’ll be making an appearance at Malvern Books for their June Novel Night event, reading from Portrait of Woman in Ink: A Tattoo Storybook and talking about my work. Come join in the fun and you can say you saw a rare appearance by the one and only Kelly I. Hitchcock (though not rare entirely by chance).

What: Novel Night at Malvern Books
Where: Malvern Books 613 W 29th St, Austin, TX 78705
When: June 11, 2015
Who: Myself and author Christopher Brown

2 Comments

The Importance of Being Earnest (with shameless self-promotion)

Published by Kelly on March 9, 2015

I know I’m not the only one who has that one Facebook friend who always seems to be selling whatever the latest fad is and wants everyone to know ALL about it, multiple times per day. For my part, I can tell you that at any given moment, I am actively hiding posts from people inviting me to buy Jamberry (crap for nails), Thirty-One (crap to put your crap in), Pampered Chef (kitchen crap), Premier Designs (blingy crap), Nerium (expensive skin crap), or wanting me to visit their Etsy store, their DJ set, their band’s show at a seedy bar on the opposite end of town on a Tuesday night at 11 PM… you name it. Earlier this week, I got a notification from a family member I see maybe once a year, inviting me to buy from his girlfriend’s Etsy store because she makes beautiful baby and toddler gear. Dear family member, I’m not even a damned parent, but I’ve been trying to become one for nearly a year now, so you are particularly disconcerting and annoying to me at this moment.

As authors, we have a duty to not be a disconcerting, annoying, rotten spammer when we promote our work to the people we know. If there’s anything you can do to lose friends and alienate people quickly, it’s to assume that your work is for everyone. It’s not. You can’t assume that just because people know you, they can’t wait to run out and support you by buying your novel about a crime-solving lesbian urologist. Not everyone likes mysteries. Not everyone likes lesbians. Not everyone likes characters who also happen to be penis doctors. Just because you happen to go way back personally, it doesn’t mean your friends want to be bombarded with your commercial endeavors. If you were constantly being pushed to buy something that didn’t apply to you in the least bit, you’d get annoyed after a while, too.

Knowing you personally and liking you isn’t enough. Shameless self-promotion is only effective when it’s used on people who like you AND actually stand a snowball’s chance in hell of reading and enjoying your work. For everyone else, you should be respectful of their annoyance levels and create a separate author page on which to shamelessly self-promote. The people who are genuinely interested in your work will follow and won’t mind when you spam them with your latest cover concept art or work in progress word count. Don’t be the family member who annoys everyone with your shameless self-promotion. You’re better off trying to build a relationship with a stranger than to keep annoying your friends who haven’t seen the inside of a book in years.

Also, I’m having a Tupperware party later this month and I really need all of you to be there so I can more host credit and buy more shit!

4 Comments
Author Feature in the Buffalo Reflex

Author Feature in the Buffalo Reflex

Published by Kelly on March 2, 2015

Oh, hello! You came to find me but today I’m over at my hometown paper, The Buffalo Reflex, talking to the good folks there about what I’ve been up to in my author career since I departed the halls of Buffalo High School 15 years ago.

Check the story out here.

Side note, it was hard to do this interview. My first book, The Redheaded Stepchild, is set in a small town in Minnesota but anyone who knows me could easily figure out that the portrait of this small town in heavily influenced by Buffalo, Missourah. Yes, the book is fiction. Very very very much fiction. That said, the fictitious characters in the book bear more than a passing resemblance to the people who helped shape my formative years, and my formative years were all in Buffalo. I have a feeling my ears will be ringing as people in my hometown pick up the Friday paper and see what I’ve been doing with my life.

P.S. You may or may not have noticed that I got myself a sassy new head shot. A big thanks to Danielle Selby of PASADYA for the great work! (She’s a freelancer for hire if you need some design work of any kind!)

12 Comments
According to Amazon, I should dump all my friends

According to Amazon, I should dump all my friends

Published by Kelly on January 26, 2015

Something odd happened to me earlier this month. One of the developers I work with is creating a video game and wanted to know if I would be a good fit to help him with his game’s character dialogue. To assess this, I sent him a sample excerpt of my latest work in progress. He enjoyed it, and took it upon himself to buy a copy of Portrait of Woman in Ink, completely unsolicited. After finishing the book, he expressed his undying love (okay, moderate enjoyment) for it and asked me to sign on for his video game project. In return for this (apart from monetary compensation ‘n sitch) I asked if he’d be so kind as to post a review of my book that reflected his honest opinion of it.

Sometime after submitting his review, he got a form rejection email from Amazon saying that his review could not be posted. He appealed to the Amazon gods, asking why they chose to keep his review from the public, to which Amazon said, and I quote:

“We cannot post your Customer Review for “Portrait of Woman in Ink – A Tattoo Storybook” to the Amazon website because your account activity indicates that you know the author.

Customer Reviews are meant to give customers unbiased product feedback from fellow shoppers. Because our goal is to provide Customer Reviews that help customers make informed purchase decisions, any reviews that could be viewed as advertising, promotional, or misleading will not be posted.”

My book has a whole seven reviews from its nearly two years in the Amazon marketplace (I know, I know, I need to market more/better), and MOST of them are from people I know. In fact, most of them are from people I know far far better than a guy I’ve worked with for the past 6 months. This rejection leads me to form the following questions:

1) How does Amazon know who I know in personal life based on Amazon account activity? I never did any business with said person over Amazon, and like I said, I’ve only exchanged reciprocal me@mine.com emails with this person a small handful of times.

2) Does this mean that Amazon can infer that anyone I email from my personal email account is someone whose book review cannot be trusted? I email a lot of strangers, especially in my volunteer work with Velma Magazine. If they”re not snooping on my email, does this mean that any time I gift a book blogger a copy of my book in exchange for a feature on his or her blog as a Kindle gift (which is the preferred method nowadays), Amazon is going to reject that review based on the fact that “account activity indicates that you know the author”?

3) If someone who happens to know me in real life legitimately purchases my book and reads it, what difference does it make? Whether they enjoy it or hate it, the fact that they know me should have little to no bearing on their honest review of my work.

4) Why would a review by a individual with a personal connection to me in real life automatically be branded as “advertising, promotional, or misleading”? I have a hard time believing this person’s review contained any content that could be construed as such.

5) Why you gotta spy on me, Amazon? I publish on your platform and order lots of your retail goods and not-so-goods so as to take advantage of the two-day shipping I pay you for with my Amazon Prime membership. People have badmouthed you and I have always defended your awesomeness. WTF Amazon?

So for those of you know me as a close friend, Twitter follower, or anyone I’ve emailed ever, I regret to inform you that if you want to read my next book and give an honest review of it, I will have to sever all personal ties with you and go back to communicating through a middleman like the resistance did on New Caprica, since Amazon is going all Cylon ruler on me.

Anyone else want to weigh in on this? Am I overreacting or is Amazon being all big for its britches?

P.S. The Cylon above is an image from Amazon. So take that.

11 Comments

Cause I’ve got a bad habit…

Published by Kelly on January 12, 2015

January is the month where two things are certain – everyone is focusing on New Year’s Resolutions, and everyone’s crowding the hell out of the gym (but more on that later). I’ve never really been one for resolutions; I’m more one to focus on something more tangible: goals and habits.

Everyone knows that habits are hard to form, and even more difficult to break. For all the habits I have around writing, I don’t make a habit of actually sitting down to write, which was by far my biggest cause of falling short of my writing goals last year. So it goes without saying that creating this habit is one of my primary goals for the year.

It’s amazing how powerful habits can be. Years ago, my writing routine looked something like this:

– Shut off all the lights in the house

– Find a playlist of music I can write to (this was the era before Pandora and SomaFM.com)

– Pull up the manuscript document

– Grab an ash tray, because I was about to chain smoke a lot of cigarettes

Then I decided to break a bad habit and quit smoking. I beat the habit, even overcoming the overwhelming desire to smoke after meals, while drinking, and in the car. But then a weird thing happened; I’d sit down to write, and become completely paralyzed without a cigarette in one hand. My brain wouldn’t let the words flow onto the page without a steady stream of nicotine to help them along.

I traded in one bad habit for another (no one’s ever done that, right?); I stopped smoking and I stopped writing. I was convinced that I’d never be able to write another word without smoking, until one day I realized just how ri-goddamned-diculous I sounded to myself. Like forming any habit, I just needed to put on my big girl panties, stop making excuses, and keep writing without smoking until it felt natural. Did I do it? You’re damned right I did.

Now my writing routine looks something more like this:

– Put the teakettle on

– Open all the windows to let the natural light in

– Turn on a Pandora or SomaFM.com station

– Pull up the manuscript document

Next step? Make it a habit to bring daily writing into my routine, even if it’s just to sit down in front of the screen and derp some words around only to delete them minutes later. That is, until I have to kick the caffeine habit, at which time I’ll have to revisit my routine all over again…

How about you? What bad habit do you have when it comes to your writing that you’d like to break? What bad habits have you broken? What good habits have you put into place?

3 Comments
Reading Redux: Indies First at Bookwoman

Reading Redux: Indies First at Bookwoman

Published by Kelly on December 1, 2014

Small Business Saturday was a big day for me. I did my second book reading at an “Indies First” event at the first bookstore I had the guts to approach about Portrait of Woman in Ink – BookWoman on North Lamar. It was a fantastic event and I had such a great time sharing with this great group of people and reading from my book.

Since it’s Thanksgiving weekend, I got to drag the whole family along – my husband, my mother, and my sister. I’m tweeting here, not playing on my phone, I swear.

10425871_10152967574652975_2139246951033003217_n

 

A big thanks to BookWoman for having me, to the other authors for making this a great event, and to all the people who came out to join in the fun and support these local authors!

6 Comments

Portrait of Woman in Ink featured in Red City Review

Published by Kelly on November 24, 2014

Awhile back, you may recall, I entered a couple book award contests. I didn’t do well in either of them, so I was predictably sulky about it. One of them was the Red City Review 2014 Book Awards contest, which I entered even though the entry fee was enough to make me think twice (you know that old publishing mantra ‘money should always flow to the author – not the other way around’?). I didn’t win the contest; however, they did think enough of it to give it a very thoughtful 5-star review on their website.

Check it out their great review HERE!

Leave a Comment
The Self, as Editor of Local Tech Mag

The Self, as Editor of Local Tech Mag

Published by Kelly on November 3, 2014

Lately, you may have noticed I have been unusually absent from regular blogging and tweeting. If you follow me on Twitter, you may also have noticed that my tweets have been abnormally comprised of baseball-related content, and thought “I didn’t even know she was a baseball fan…” Well, neither did I, not until the Kansas City Royals made it to the postseason for the first time since I was 3 years old, and then made it to the World Series. It was kind of a big deal, and also (as it turns out) played almost every single day, which made scheduling all things very difficult. Naturally, I was either slightly heartbroken or super butthurt (depending on whose version you hear) when we lost the World Series in game 7.  All this is to say, authors can be sports fans too, and I can dedicate myself far more fully to my craft with just one fall sport to focus on.

Another source of distraction lately has been my new volunteer gig – I’m part of the editorial staff for Velma Magazine, a local online publication dedicated to Austin women in tech. It’s been many a year since I worked for any sort of journalism outfit, so there’s been an acquainting phase not unlike when I first started using a fork. Or a Mac. Still, for all the craziness that comes with a new publication, it’s been incredibly rewarding and the women I work with are fantastic and sassy and super smart.

One of the most refreshing things that I’ve encountered in my short time as volunteer editor is that it’s okay to make mistakes and that it’s okay to feel stupid. This pretty much flies in the face of everything I was taught growing up, but it means I am actually learning something. As an author, I find this feeling very freeing. I don’t know everything, especially about how to sell my own work (hell, I’m jut now figuring out how to talk about my own work), but I can keep trying new things and growing and learning, even if the things I do are complete and total mistakes. Besides, who’s going to notice except, you know, the whole internet?

So in the words of my genius female developer friend: “Feeling stupid is good, it means you are learning. Now repeat until you believe it.”

Oh, and check out the magazine. Even if you’re not a lady, not in tech, or hate words. I write for it, so it’s therefore superior.

2 Comments