Chris is a friend of mine on MySpace. He decide to throw a virtual book tour for the release of his new book, "Resonance." Check out this site for more detail.For the tour, I asked Chris a couple of questions (posted here with his answers). To see more of the questions and The Worldwide Virtual Book Tour go to Chris's MySpace site.
My questions for Chris:
Marva: How did you get the idea of the virtual book tour and the set up for doing it?
Chris: I got it from Mindy Klasky who organised a virtual book tour last year. The idea's been around for few years and each author tweaks it some. I think there's even a company that organises them and charges a fee to place your book with 'popular' blogs. Which, to me, sounds like a recipe for disaster for the 'popular' blogs as once the word gets out that they're selling space to promote books no one'll believe a word they print.
But maybe that's just me. I also think it's more fun to organise the event yourself as it gives you more scope to be inventive and interact with friends and readers. Like my remote signing experiment. How many other authors have attempted to sign books by astral projection? And lived.
Which is why I contacted Microsoft and got a hold of a beta copy of Window ESP. It's the perfect platform - that and having two mediums strapped to a quantum computer - when you need to access the astral plane.
But, seriously, the biggest enemy of a new or mid-list author is anonymity. And virtual tours help us authors who live in the middle of nowhere get out and meet people without having our luggage go astray.
Marva: Why do you live in France? Just lucky?
Chris: Very lucky. We moved to France twelve years ago to take advantage of the property price differential - homes in France were a third of the price in England - and the better climate. We try to grow all our own food so having cheap land, deep soil and a long growing season is a huge bonus. And the pace of life is different in France. It's changing but when we first arrived
it was like stepping back into rural England as it used to be in the 50s - lots of small family farms and an emphasis on lifestyle rather than profit.
About Resonance
You can't create a world in seven days without cutting corners Graham Smith is a 33 year-old office messenger. To the outside world he's an obsessive-compulsive mute, weird but harmless. But to
Graham Smith, it's the world that's weird. And far from harmless. He sees things others can't . . . or won't. He knows that roads can change course, people disappear, office blocks migrate across town. All at night when no one's looking. The world's an unstable place, still growing, sloughing off layers of reality like dead skin. One day you drive by, and it's changed.
Annalise Mercado hears voices, all from girls calling themselves Annalise. Sometimes she thinks they're spirit guides, sometimes she thinks she's crazy. But then they tell her about Graham Smith, the men who want him dead, and how only she can save him. So begins the story of two people whose lives appear fragmented across alternate realities and how, together, they hold the key to the future of a billion planets. . .
