Back in July, I posted an interview with fellow indie author Jay Lemming. Jay has a terrific ongoing project simply called “Survey: Indie Writers of Literary Fiction.” In his survey, he asks fellow lit fiction authors about one of their novels, and in particular, what great theme they treat in the novel. He also asks how they decided to treat the theme.
As part of the process of submitting the questionnaire, the author can then choose to be interviewed for Jay’s online author roundup. Who wouldn’t want that kind of publicity? And of course, Jay’s interview allows the author to expand on the above mentioned topic while answering questions like Did your perspective on the theme change as you wrote the story? and Did you find yourself less in control of your narrative than you expected? Interesting stuff indeed. (You can find Jay’s interview with me about my novel Jana here.)
This might all sound like arcane shop talk for authors, but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, this type of author roundup is a great way to get authors to not only read each other’s work, but also to cross-promote each other. And it’s reader-friendly, too: after all, what better way to get to know something about a book you might want to read than an interview with the author about that particular book?
Best of all, the survey process gets the reader/author thinking about literary fiction the way we did back in our university days: themes like The Individual vs. Society, and The Nature of Reality, which, let’s face it, we don’t often go around thinking about.
Thanks to Jay’s work, I’ve got a whole new list of current authors to read, including Dan Holloway, Rohan Quine, and Rosaline Riley, just to name a few. After emailing back and forth with Jay about our books, and seeing his posts about his own novel, Billy Maddox Takes His Shot, I decided to buy a copy and give it a read. It’s great stuff, and well worth picking up.
These types of cross-promotional efforts are not just worthwhile marketing ventures for indie writers. They also represent a great way to find a new favorite author!
