Buzz, Balls & Hype

BUY ONE GET 2 FREE!

Buy my new hardcover and get two ebooks free! 

Really?

Really!

If you buy The Collector of Dying Breaths (hardcover only!) between today & Thursday & email the receipt to MJRoseWriter at gmail.com - I will send you two free ebooks from my awared winning Butterfield Institute series.

Here are the buy links for the hardcover at Amazon  at BN.com or an your favorite indie! 

Here's what they are are saying about The Collector of Dying Breaths:

Amazon Best Books of April  Mystery/ Suspense/ Thriller

"Gripping—a suspenseful and enigmatic story... Best-selling author Rose has created a captivating world...a compelling, imaginative look at one woman's intersection with history." —Kirkus

"Rose's latest venture into myth and reality is a page-turning, alluring concoction of fiction infused with fantastical yet actual history. Readers will be mesmerized by her enchanting narrative, which takes them on a mystical and magical journey." —Library Journal (Starred)

"Rose masterfully combines romance, mystery, and dual timelines…The storyline and extensive historical details…are fascinating.”  Romantic Times TOP PICK

"Mysterious, magical, and mythical. What a joy to read!" —New York Times Bestseller, Sara Gruen, Water For Elephants

"With an alchemist's skill, M.J. Rose mixes present and past with the dark scent of love and an intricate mystery, creating a blend that is splendidly, spookily magical." —New York Times bestseller, Susanna Kearsley

"M.J. Rose masterfully serves up suspense with generous sides of philosophy and intrigue.  A lavish and satisfying banquet of a book!"   —Lynn Cullen, bestselling author of Mrs. Poe

"History, mystery, ambition, lust, love, death and the timeless quest for immortality — a riveting tale of suspense." —New York Times bestseller, B. A. Shapiro, The Art Forger

"A superb tale of two people separated by centuries yet linked by a haunting secret. Poison, obsession and undying love have never been so enticing — or so lethal." —C.W. Gortner, The Confessions of Catherine de Medici

 

 

My Strawberry Soufflé

Shouldn’t success and happiness be the achievement of what we love to its own end, knowing that end might be private and personal?  - Felicia Sullivan from Love,Life,Eat 

This morning I came upon Felicia’s blog. Having been at the Bouchercon mystery convention this weekend, her column really hit home—I’ve just spent the last three days with hundreds of authors and was struck over and over by how many of us expressed unhappiness about our careers.

 So many talked about not feeling like a “success”.

 Why? I asked again and again.

There were authors who complained they get nominated for awards but never win. Others who said they often win awards, but don’t have sales. Or they get sales but no reviews. Or were upset they get reviews but no nominations for awards. Or are frustrated they are published in trade paperback instead of hardcover, or in mass market and not trade… you get the idea.

The Dali Lama said if you compare yourself to people who have more than you, you will always be unhappy.  But if you compare yourself to people who have less that you, you will always be happy.

I think that’s amazing advice but I’d even go further and ask do we have to compare ourselves to anyone? Can every writer really be “big”? Does every book honestly have that potential? Is it easier for some topics and kinds of books to take off? Or win awards? Or get reviews?  And what if you don’t write those kind of books?

The measure of achievement is not winning awards. It’s doing something that you appreciate, something you believe is worthwhile. I think of my strawberry soufflé. I did that at least twenty-eight times before I finally conquered it. — Julia Child

I think the most important thing we as writers can do is figure out how we define what success will mean to us and focus on that.

This weekend one writer was complimenting me on AuthorBuzz.com, my marketing company. She told me how much we’d helped her then followed up with a question. She wanted to know why, since we do such great work, I’m not a mega-name author and asked how I feel about not being a “real success.”

I was honestly surprised. I’m realistic about my career as a novelist. I’m certainly not a superstar and far far from a house hold name, but I feel successful.

From the very beginning I envisioned success as selling enough books so I could keep getting published and continue to write what I wanted to without compromising.

Did I want to be a bestseller, make millions and get amazing reviews? If you’d asked I’m sure I would have said yes, but that just wasn’t what I thought about. I was focused about having the kind of long term career that would allow me to keep writing, because writing is what saves my life each and every day.

So here I am 14 years later with my 14^th novel to be published in 2014. Im published in 28 countries and I’ve sold enough copies of all those books to feel it wouldn’t be ladylike to mention the number and I’ve never comprised what I wanted to write.

Am I a success?  

Are you?

Clearly it all depends on who you ask. Or maybe if you’re smart you’ll stop asking anyone and not look beyond yourself to figure it out. Because is it what anyone else thinks, or is it what you think?

As Felicia asks in her blog, do you want to be big? Or bold? Be popular or remarkable? Or all of them?

One of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver, wrote: Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?



I am pretty sure no author at Bouchercon, or author reading this blog would think that worrying about meeting some arbitrary measure of success is worth spending that one life on.

 

Hand Yelling Constance by Patrick McGrath

I devoured Constance by Patrick McGrath yesterday.  I unabashedly think he is one of the masters of gothic writing now.  (I bought at R.J. Julia in Madison CT while on tour- what a great bookstore!)

Constance is a gothic tale of a marriage that had me obsessed all day, yesterday. Thank goodness it was raining and a weekend.

 Compelling, psychologically haunting, dark, lurid...  Here is a NYT review that poses some problems but ultimately gives it a rave that I agree with. 

"Loss, trauma and a drastic, fatal desire for control are what this novel is really about. And, as the whole performance slowly won me over, many of McGrath’s glorious phrases made me catch my breath. A “sort of muted sexual uproar” was one of them. I can’t put it in context without spoiling things for the reader. But I can’t resist quoting it either, because it perfectly sums up the dark, ecstatic flavor of this unforgettable book." NYT Book Review        

Buy links are here.  If you are a fan of gothics - I think you'll love it!

 

 

Hand Yelling The Age of Desire

I read this evoacative, atomospheric and compelling book - a novel about a novelist -  last week while on my own book tour which was an M.C. Escherish experience.

I really enjoyed this intimate exploration of Edith Warton's sexual awaking even though at times I wasn't overly fond of Edith herself, or the choices she made. Which does make this an odd endorsement I suppose.

But the book is beautifully written and compelling. Especially fascinating for fans of Warton - since the author based so much of the story on actual letters - it was fascinating for me to learn the story of Warton's loveless marriage and the man this brilliant woman chose to fall in lust with.

 “Somewhere between the repressiveness of Edith Wharton’s early-20th-century Age of Innocence and our own libertine Shades of Grey era lies the absorbingly sensuous world of Jennie Fields’s The Age of Desire . . . along with the overheated romance and the middle-age passion it so accurately describes, The Age of Desire also offers something simpler and quieter: a tribute to the enduring power of female friendship.”

—Boston Globe

Hand Yelling The Perfume Collector by Kathleen Tessaro

I picked up this book with trepidation.

I've been writing books about perfume for the last four years and am seeped in it. I expected to be either disappointed or jealous. I wasn't disappointed and I can't be jealous because the of hours of pleasure I got reading The Perfume Collector.

Even though I guessed "the secret" almost right away - it didn't matter - the characters were so engaging and the writing so lovely.

Perfume, Paris, passion, style, elegance, a certain "je ne sais quois", charm and good old fashioned storytelling along with a lump in my throat on the last page. The Perfume Collector is delightful. 

Perhaps the greatest compliment I can give Tessaro is when I finished I immediately ordered one of her backlist to start tonight on my iPad.

As readers of this blog know I don't review - I just shout about a book I enjoy. 

Read more and order it from Tessaro's webiste here.

From the flap copy:

London,1955: Grace Monroe is a very fortunate young woman. In spite of a sheltered upbringing in Oxford, her recent marriage has thrust her into the heart of London’s most refined and ambitious social circles, where alliances are formed and reputations made. However, playing the role of the sophisticated socialite her husband would like her to be doesn’t come naturally to her - and perhaps never will.  

 Then one evening, a letter arrives from a law firm in Paris. Grace has received an unanticipated inheritance. Only her benefactor, Frenchwoman Eva d’Orsey, is a complete stranger to her. Grace dismisses it as a mistake. However, when later that same night, she suddenly suspects her husband of infidelity, her world is thrown into chaos. 

 Fleeing London for Paris, Grace searching for information about the mysterious Eva d’Orsey. What she uncovers is the remarkable history of an unconventional woman who inspired one of Paris’s greatest perfumers. Only Eva’s past and Grace’s future intersect. And soon Grace must chose between the life she thinks she ought to live or becoming the person she truly is.

Told in three distinctive perfumes, the story weaves through the decades, from 1920’s New York to Monte Carlo, Paris and London; revealing the complex, obsessive love between muse and artist and the tremendous power of memory and scent. 

 

 

 

 

 

WHAT TO DO BEFORE YOUR BOOK LAUNCH? In person! 8 Events

Hand Yelling Murder as a Fine Art by David Morrell

I've been reading David Morrell for years. Amazed most I think by how masterful every book is. How intelligent but at the same time fast paces. How smart he is but how he never makes you stop to notice it. And how he keeps reinventing himself as an author - taking on every kind of suspense novel  - and doing it as well as anyone ever has. 

Now he's taken on historical suspense and you will swear that he must have used a time travel machine to write Murder As a Fine Art. You will be in gaslit London... you will smell the filth.. you will walk the dark streets... you will be scared and horrified and your heart will beat faster and you will know when you are finished with this astonishing novel that you have truly been in the hands of one of our era's most brilliant masters of the genre.

I don't review books - but I do hand yell (my version of a booksellers "hand sell"). If you love historical suspense - you will be enthralled! Truly! (All the buy links are here)

Publishers Weekly calls Murder as a Fine Art a “brilliant crime thriller. . . . Everything works–the horrifying depiction of the murders, the asides explaining the impact of train travel on English society, nail-biting action sequences–making this book an epitome of the intelligent page-turner.”

Chosen as one of PW’s 10 Best Summer Mystery/Thrillers of 2013!

Here's the flap copy:

The Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811 were the most notorious mass killings in their day. Never fully explained, they brought London and all of England to the verge of panic.

Forty-three years later, the equally notorious Thomas De Quincey returns to London. Along with his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, he is infamous for a scandalous essay about the killings: “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.”

Days after his arrival, a family is killed in the same horrific way as the earlier murders. It seems someone is using the essay as an inspiration—and a blueprint. And De Quincey himself is the obvious suspect. Aided by his brilliant daughter Emily and two determined Scotland Yard detectives, he must uncover the truth before more blood is shed and London itself becomes the next victim.

In Murder as a Fine Art, gaslit London becomes a battleground between a literary star and a demented murderer. Their lives are linked by secrets long buried but never forgotten.

 

 

Writing By Hand

When Seduction comes out on Tuesday, readers who buy the hardcover and open it will find, what I hope, will be a surprise.

The endpapers (see below) show my hand written manuscript of the book along with the pen and the ink I wrote it with.

Why did I write  122,833 words in ink?

I love challenges, but to tell the story of Victor Hugo’s experiments with séances in his own voice? What kind of crazy idea had I come up with? Surely it was lunacy to even attempt it.

I don’t have literary illusions. I had just fallen in love with Hugo’s story and wanted to tell it. What fascinated me was how much had been written about his life as a statesman, poet and author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables, but how little had been written about a certain part of his personal life: his dabbling with hashish, his preoccupation with reincarnation and the more than100 séances he’d conducted during a two year period while he lived on the Isle of Jersey.

During my research, I hadn’t once stopped to think that in order to tell the story of Hugo’s seduction by the spirit world, I would have to find his voice.

But there I was. Finally ready to write, sitting at a computer in a very 21^st century world trying to conjure a mid 19^th genius. For weeks I was stumped.

Then I had a revelation. I didn’t need to invoke the genius, just the man. I had read Hugo’s letters. I knew that the eloquence and brilliance of his poetry and prose didn’t always exhibit itself when he was writing to people close to him. Sometimes he was an extraordinary man saying ordinary things to his family.

That was the Hugo I needed to find try to find. The one who was relating a tale to an intimate. Not writing for the ages. Not trying to be brilliant – just attempting to reason out an unreasonable time in his life that had disturbed him.

But I still couldn’t do it. The cold keyboard, the sound of the mechanical clicking, the icons at the top of the page, the spell check. All of it was a gulf between me and the man I needed to channel. I decided it was hubris to even attempt to write this novel. Absurd to try. And yet, I couldn’t give up.

Carl Jung said that often coincidences aren’t coincidences at all.

One day in fit of frustration I got up from my desk in a huff and managed to  tip over a jar of pens. One was an old fountain pen. It rolled and fell on the computer. I stared at it for a moment.

What if…

I found a bottle of ink. Filled the pen. Then pulled out a simple notebook and started to write. Not the way I write, on a computer, but the way Victor Hugo would have written over one hundred and fifty years ago. Pen on paper. I began. And as the ink flowed… the words flowed.  

I don’t remember writing this book. Each day when I sat down and uncapped my pen I disappeared into the world of the novel. Three notebooks and 122,833 words later, I finished Seduction. 

Seduction is the first novel I’ve written by hand. Perhaps the last. Definitely one of the most fascinating journeys I’ve ever taken.

I do very much hope it proves fascinating for you as well. 

To order and find out more click here.

A New AuthorBuzz Indie Love Award

 A special award—from authors to booksellers—to say thank you this spring and summer.

 We're celebrating booksellers because you make discoveries, shine light on titles that you love, and welcome readers to your stores.

 Every Indie who sells a combined 25 copies (or more) from these bestselling & award-winning authors shown below receives a tin of treats from the Dancing Deer Baking Co.

 And the one bookseller who sells the most copies will win a $500 American Express Gift Certificate.

 To qualify to win: Simply keep track of copies sold of these six titles and email AuthorBuzzCo at gmail.com by Julyl 1 with your tallies, using the heading “Indie Love.”

 It’s just our way of taking a moment to show you some love back for all the love you show us authors.

The Spring/Summer Indie Love Award

A special award—from authors to booksellers—to say thank you this Spring/Summer season.

We're celebrating booksellers because you make discoveries, shine light on titles that you love, and welcome readers to your stores.

 Every Indie who sells a combined 25 copies (or more) from these bestselling & award-winning authors shown below receives a tin of treats from the Dancing Deer Baking Co.

 And the one bookseller who sells the most copies will win a $500 American Express Gift Certificate.

 To qualify to win: Simply keep track of copies sold of these six titles and email AuthorBuzzCo at gmail.com by July 1 with your tallies, using the heading “Indie Love.”

 It’s just our way of taking a moment to show you some love back for all the love you show us authors.