Here at the Fictional Café, you will only find fiction podcasts. These are original productions, whereas a lot of podcasts you listen to are likely to be rebroadcasts of radio shows, or portions thereof. And they are primarily nonfiction, for example almost anything you hear from NPR [no disparagement intended]. Creating a podcast is a collaborative process. Someone with a good voice must be enlisted or hired to read the novel. He or she is going to read the novel at least three times while making the recording. We’re very fortunate to have Leonard Mailloux reading my two novels, he of the mellifluous voice who understands how to read the nuances in. Next, there must be an engineer to take the raw digital recording and polish it up like a shining apple. This means taking out…
Our Barista Jason Brick Interviewed on the Author’s Academy Today!
Calling All Authors – you don’t want to miss this opportunity to hear wise and experienced author-consultant Jason Brick today! He’s being interviewed on the Author’s Academy, a service of Wheatmark Publishing. Last month, two Wheatmark pros brought listeners up to speed on the basics of social media. Now it’s time to take it up a notch, and discover how to use social media to sell more books! The featured guest will be Jason Brick, top-shelf business writer, writing coach, speaker, ghostwriter, and business writing coach extraordinaire. Jason owes the success of his series of self-published books to a strong social media presence and his use of Tactical Social Engagement. Jason will explain how to identify the three kinds of people who can help you sell your books, as well as how to develop three levels of strategy…
Where There’s Art, There’s Life: November Submissions
Sometimes, we find art in the strangest of places, like in an overturned driveway marker. Other times, we find art right where we are looking for it, like at an art exhibition. In either case, it’s in those quiet, fleeting, open-minded moments that we see the depth of beauty in the world around us. This month, we invite our readers to take a moment to acknowledge the art in their lives – whether it’s on a walk through the neighborhood or on a trip to the museum. For a little inspiration, we offer you our November Submissions. This month, we’ve got submissions from a new acquaintance, an old friend and an FC regular. First up, we have Erica Nazzaro’s hauntingly evocative mixed media art. She paints scenes that bring abstraction and reality together to create…
International Podcast Day is Today!
If you don’t know a lot about podcasting, today is the day you can learn more at International Podcast Day! This one snuck right up on me, even though I just delivered a presentation last Saturday at the Independent Publishers of New England conference on the subject. I love podcasting. It’s a technology which gives readers a chance to listen to works of interest on their phones, in their cars, while jogging or bicycling – whenever and wherever they want. That’s why you’ll see my novels podcast right here on Fictional Café. Very soon you’ll be seeing many other podcasting offerings here from other artists as well. So jump over to learn more about podcasting at International Podcast Day, join the conversation at Blab, and check out our offerings here at the Café, too! Jack
Harvest Time: October Submissions
Summer’s bounty is autumn’s benefit. Rather than pickling our harvest, we decided to throw a feast. Without further ado, we give you five courses of October Submissions. Last week, we published three novel excerpts as an appetizer for an event that featured Fictional Café members reading from their novels. We’d like to thank our authors for their work and congratulate them on their reading. We hope you will take a gander if you haven’t already and check out their books if you like what you see. For our main course, we will be featuring an artist whose unique take on art has produced some fabulous sculpture pieces. Woodsybug creates shelves, lamps and art using the guitar as the canvas. The Fictional Café is excited to showcase these guitars from an up-and-coming artist with a very…
Announcing Our New Head Barista, Mike Rochester
Few activities give me more pleasure than helping bring someone into the publishing business, and the story of Mike Rochester is no exception. Mike is a Bowdoin College graduate, but more importantly a smart, literate young man with discerning thoughts and opinions about writing and publishing and, perhaps most importantly, a keen attention to detail. With a background like that, how could I not want to get him involved in Fictional Café? He took to it like a duck to water and has brought a great many improvements to this, our not-for-profit, totally for-pleasure, arts site. Mike began working at FC with Jason and me about a year ago, and has taken the reins with such gusto that I decided he needed to be acknowledged to our member audience and everyone else who reads and…
Travels with Capilene
One of my all-time favorite books has recently come up in an unexpected way. The don’t-call-it-nonfiction travelogue Travels with Charley, by John Steinbeck, has always hit me squarely on my adventurer’s funny bone. For those unfamiliar with the book, a late in life Steinbeck decided to travel across the country with his dog Charley in a highly modified camper truck (affectionately named Rocinante) in an effort to place his finger back on the pulse of a nation he so masterfully depicted in such works as The Grapes of Wrath. His journey was captured within the pages of Travels with Charley, and all the colorful people and scenery make for a cross-country story that one might think Kerouac would have seen if he’d not been on so much *ahem* coffee. My time in Maine taught me…
Summer’s Last Stand: September Submissions
It’s been a busy month here at the Fictional Café. In case you were on vacation, out at the beach or having a barbecue, here’s a recap. We started our second serial podcast in August. (You can find our first here). Every Saturday morning, we invite you to wake up with Jack – our resident novelist and founding father of the Fictional Café – to hear the next chapter of Nate Flowers and company in our podcast of Madrone. August also marked the second time we published a serial story. We thought Adam Gottfried’s supernatural, Gothic thriller was too good to merely excerpt for the Café. So we chose to post it in three installments, which you can read here. One more shout out before we get to the batting order for September. Last month,…
Congratulations, Fictional Café Writers!
An experimental new anthology — Baby Shoes — was recently released on Amazon in print and ebook formats. It’s a collection of 100 flash fiction short stories by 100 different authors, including Fictional Café’s own Jeb Brack, Jason Brick, Jenny Cokeley, E. A. Roper, Adam Gottfried and Jack Rochester. The Baby Shoes anthology was experimental in two ways. First, it’s a flash fiction anthology. Because flash fiction is so short, a reasonably sized book requires a lot of writers. That splits the royalties into such small pieces it’s not feasible for traditional publishers. An independent project could afford to give out a larger piece of the pie, making sure authors got a little bit more for their work. Second, the publication costs were entirely crowdfunded via Kickstarter. It’s not the first — nor will it be…
Sympathetic Characters by Unsympathetic Folks
I’m going to let you in on a poorly-kept secret… …I’m a bit of an asshole. I’m insensitive, demanding, revel in crass humor and generally am told that folks put up with me primarily because I’m their asshole and they get to point my assholility at their enemies when they feel the need. But that’s not all of it. I’m sympathetic…not in the “I feel your pain and give a damn” meaning, but in the “If I were in a book, readers would care what happened to me” meaning. My book series, The Farkas Foxtrots features a pair of loser assholes. These are not good people, or smart people. They’re not pretty, or nice. They do things like steal drugs, lie to women and frame a total stranger for bank robbery. They’re stupid with a capital C….