Joy Mutter's Blog: Joy Mutter's blog - Posts Tagged "public-speaking"

I received two exciting pieces of news this morning. I had emailed Suzanne at Oldham main Library a few weeks ago to ask if the library might be interested in including any of my eight books on their shelves. As I had not heard back, I assumed that she would not be interested. However, Suzanne has just emailed me to say that she had been extremely busy but would indeed like me to send her copies of my books for her to assess. I immediately organised for Amazon to deliver six of my books to her in the next day or so. I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed that one, some or all will be deemed acceptable. I am glad that I recently redesigned all of my books and republished them with new covers. They now stand a much better chance of being accepted.

In her email, Suzanne also invited me to be one of the guest speakers at BBC #LovetoRead Weekend on 5th November 2016 at Oldham Main Library. I will be asked to give a talk about my writing career and my books, plus answer questions from the audience. She told me that I can also sell my books at the event. I look forward to hearing which other authors will be speaking at this local event. Hopefully, I will already know some of them.

I doubt that book nine, the sequel to The Hostile, will be published by November, but you never know. I have so far written 15,000 words of the current book and it is progressing very well. It is unimportant whether it is published by then because I have more than enough books to bring along. As my books are printed on demand, I hope I will be given a rough indication of how many will be attending. As well as bringing enough copies of my books to sell at the library, I will definitely be bringing a bundle of my promotion postcards to hand out. Maybe I can have a box of my books delivered to the library beforehand. That would make sense as I live alone, cannot drive and have a chronic back condition. Lugging boxes of books to the library is not really an option.

These two pieces of news from Suzanne have certainly made my week. I have also been encouraged by the number of listeners, mostly from America, who have recently been requesting promo codes from me through Audiobook Boom for my two audiobooks, Her demonic Angel and The Hostile. I await their reviews on Audible with bated breath.
Joy Mutter

Looking forward to speaking for an hour or so at my meet-the-author event at Oldham Coliseum tomorrow. I hope my voice holds out for that long, as I don't use it very often. I've thoroughly prepared my speech and am not too nervous ... yet. I'll be the only author talking at tomorrow's event, as far as I'm aware.

My talk will be about my nine books and life as a full-time indie author, although I'll be concentrating on my non-fiction book, Living with Postcards, as the organiser requested.

Living with Postcards

I'm bringing about 50 of my 2,000 postcards along to illustrate the talk. I could have put together a powerpoint presentation, but I reckon holding the actual postcards will be more satisfying for the audience, and feel less formal. I'll be handing out my own book promotion postcards too, whether the audience wants them or not, ha! They can turn them into paper airplanes and launch them at me if they get bored.

This'll be the second meet-the-author event I've spoken at in the past six months. Maybe that's why I'm not too nervous, although my first talk was only 15 minutes long, and there were four other authors speaking then. Wish me luck.

Joy Mutter

My meet-the-author event at Oldham Coliseum on 24th January went even better than I'd hoped. There were about fifteen Full Circle members in the audience, which was a perfect number, as I wanted my talk to be informal. I was less nervous than I'd expected to be, probably because I'm passionate about writing and talk about books every chance I get. Selling a few of my signed books was a bonus.

Most of the photographs of the event were taken by Jenny, one of the organisers, shortly after my hour-long talk. I gave my talk next to a small table but sat with the audience for the group photos. I notice I'm wearing the same outfit I wore for another meet-the-author event at Oldham Library in November. I really must wear something different if I'm ever asked to give another talk about my books. People will think I only own one set of clothes, which is far from the truth.

Thanks to Rose Sergent at Oldham Coliseum for organising today's event. I really enjoyed myself and would happily have talked for two hours, not just the one hour I'd been allocated. It's now back to writing book ten for me, the third book in The Hostile series.

Joy Mutter