Writer's Compass— December News
A writer on your gift list?
Author Survival Guide (ASG) and Demystifying the Beats (DTB) come in many flavors!
Paperbacks: PERFECT as a stocking suffer
eBook: Tucked on an eReader with care
Audiobook: Demystifying the Beats read by the fabulous Laura Haas is your go to gift for the audiophile in your life.
ASG: Myths and Magic of ISBNs ✨
If you dream of having your books fly off the shelves at every mom-and-pop bookstore, or to be found in any library, you need to understand the mysterious world of ISBNs.
An ISBN is an International Standard Book Number, that identifies an individual literary work. Originally ten digits, the identifiers are thirteen digits since 2007. Encoded within is the country of the publisher, the title of the work, and a “check” digit that validates the code as being authentic.
Every format of your book will have a different ISBN. You’ll likely have at least two formats of your book: ebook and paperback. Later, you may add an audio book, a large-print edition, or even a special hardback edition with sprayed edges and a foiled cover.
Great, Jordyn. But Amazon gives me a free code. Why can’t I use that?
Short answer: You can, but you probably shouldn’t.
The key piece of data contained in the ISBN that you care about as a self-published author is the publisher. When you use a free Amazon or Barnes & Noble code, it’s not an ISBN. It’s an internal product tracking number that includes the format, title, etc. that the distributor (Amazon, BN) tracks in their internal systems.
Jordyn ♠️
References:
https://www.isbn.org/faqs_formats_reprints_editions
🍊+🍒+🍍+🎂 OR Fruitcake and MURDER
Years ago, when my uncle first got married and moved across the country, my grandmother would mail him a fruitcake every Christmas. You probably know the kind—vaguely citrus-flavored, stuffed with unnaturally colored candied and dried fruit, possibly containing nuts if you were unlucky, and soaked in brandy/rum/whiskey if you were lucky.
After at least a few years of this torture, he was back visiting for the holidays and my grandmother sliced up another fruit-filled monstrosity to serve, making some comment about how much he loved her fruitcakes. Since this was well before I was born, my mother tells me he took a deep breath, looked Nana straight in the eye, and told her point blank and without any sugarcoating that they threw them out every year. And that’s how she found out no one—not any of the other people present—liked fruitcake.
Honestly? Same, Uncle B, and I would have set fire to that trash can to make sure it was dead. In my not-so-humble opinion, fruitcake is heavy, inedible, and only good for two things—functioning as an emergency doorstop, and as a murder weapon.
Speaking of…
There are more than a few holiday-themed mysteries that involve fruitcake in some way, either as a clue or part of the crime scene, but this Australian tale takes the (fruit) cake.
In 2017, David Saunders of Hayborough was found bludgeoned and stabbed to death on his kitchen floor. The kicker? A fruitcake had been placed on his head. The attorney attempting to defend Leslie Kevin Talbot during the 2018 trial unsuccessfully argued that the fruitcake was placed there to humiliate Saunders, and why would Talbot bother to do that if he thought Saunders was dead? (The jury took a little over 9 hours to find Talbot guilty. Maybe someone could smuggle a file into his prison cell in a fruitcake…oh look, there’s a third use for it.)
I should caveat this by saying that I have no first-hand experience with Australian fruitcake, but with my mad Google skills I was able to determine it looks pretty much like its American counterpart. That is, like a doorstop or murder weapon.
Happy holidays, lovely readers!
xoxo Ryley ♦️
How do you survive fruitcake? 🛟
Liquor. 🍸
Fruitcake Cocktail (inspired by this version)
Ingredients
1 ounce brandy
1⁄2 ounce Amaretto
1⁄2 ounce Cointreau liqueur
1⁄4 lemon, juice of
1 tablespoon sugar
1⁄2 teaspoon ground cloves
1 Luxardo maraschino cherry
Directions
* Mix the sugar and ground cloves together in a saucer.
* Moisten a rim of a chilled cocktail glass with a cut lemon and spin in the sugar-clove mixture.
* Shake the other ingredients well with some cracked ice in your cocktail shaker and then strain into the prepared glass.
* Drop a maraschino cherry in and sip to your heart’s content.
Erin ♥️ Picture credit, Olivia Helscel 2022