November Meeting: Social Media for Authors
September Meeting, New Time!
Our September meeting will be hosted on Zoom September 5th, 2020. It will begin at a new time, after discussion between the members: 10:30 AM, and will run till 12:30 PM.
This is normally the session where we celebrate Agatha Christie’s birthday. Since we can’t meet in person, we urge people to bring their own cupcake to the virtual meeting.
Gwen Mayo, an Agatha Christie enthusiast, will be presenting the program “Women of Mystery’s Golden Age: 1890s to 1960.”
In order to receive information and links for the meeting, please contact Teresa Michael at teresamichael1@hotmail.com.
Meetings on Zoom
The chapter is currently using Zoom as an alternative to in-person meetings. The May meeting, with special guest Gail Condrick, was a success.
In order to receive information and links for upcoming meetings, please contact Teresa Michael at teresamichael1@hotmail.com to be added to the list.
April 2020 Meeting is Canceled
The meeting scheduled for April 4th has been canceled due to the coronavirus outbreak. Stay safe and keep washing those hands.
Mary Anna Evans
The chapter traveled to Venice for the February meeting. The featured speaker, Mary Anna Evans, led a workshop about adding feeling to your writing, with exercises. In one, the writers visualized a place and created a list of descriptive words to capture its mood, then wrote haikus using those words. Powerful.
Preparing to Write
Happy Birthday, Agatha!
The chapter celebrated the 129th birthday of Agatha Christie, with costumes and prizes.
Wendy Dingwall presented: the life of Agatha Christie.
Gwen Mayo prepares to pose her trivia questions.
A great group in attendance!
We had a nice door prize: a basket of mysteries, including one of Agatha’s best tales.
The following Sunday, we presented a panel on Agatha’s writing at the Sarasota Barnes and Noble. It was well-attended, and we spoke to several fans and collectors.
Reminder: No June meeting
The chapter is on summer break. We will have a planning meeting in July for the coming year.
Joan Lappin: the rise of Amazon
Joan Lappin opened with a bit of history on Amazon. It began as an online book retailer, then moved into music next, then outward to selling other products. The company has made an enormous number of sales of sales, but has operated at a loss since the beginning. Only now is the company beginning to make money, and it’s through the web services it offers, not the books, music, movies, or groceries.
While Amazon has opened its doors to self-published authors, they aren’t going to make real money unless they sell thousands of copies. For example, the books read via the new Prime Unlimited only pay 14 cents to the author per copy downloaded.
Amazon has gone into the publishing business themselves, with many imprints (FYI-Thomas and Mercer is the mystery imprint). An independent author can promote their book by paying for better placement on the site, but one presumes that a book’s placement would also be excellent if it were published by Amazon.
Since the company seems to now control the book market from publishing to delivery, we discussed whether it could be broken up by the government as a monopoly. Janet Heijens theorized that Jeff Bezos (Amazon’s owner) would break up the company himself before that happened, perhaps first by spinning the delivery service off into its own company.
Overall, it was an educational meeting.
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April Meeting: Amazon
