Theodore Jerome Cohen's Blog, page 12

Blog Interview...

Just a short note to let you know Karen Ingalls has an interview with me running this week on her wonderful blog, Mind, Pen, and Spirit:



http://kareningalls.blogspot.com/

May 15-21, 2017

Spanish Edition of Anti-Bullying Children's Storybook Just Released

Just a short note to let you know that the Spanish edition of Pepe Builds a Nest now up an running in paperback on Amazon.com:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1545552258



Relevant publication details are below:

* Title: Pepe Construye un Nido (Historias para los Primeros Años) (Volume 1)
* Author(s) name(s): Theodore Jerome Cohen
* ISBN (or ASIN): 978-1545552254
* Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (May 4, 2017)
* Publication date: May 4, 2017
* Format: Paperback
* Description: ¡Una maravillosa historia sobre cómo tomar las decisiones correctas y lidiar con los matones! Pepe, el pingüino, necesita construir un nido para la señorita Amber y para él. Pero Otto, el matón, sigue robando sus piedras. Vea cómo Pepe y otros resuelven el problema, finalmente reuniendo a Pepe y Otto como amigos.
* Page count: 48

It may take a week or so for my Webmaster to catch up with me and update my Website, but in the meantime, for those who have an interest in these things, I thought I'd put the word out.

BOOK SALE: Short-Story Anthologies

Mark your calendars...

Starting on Monday, April 24, 2017, and continuing through the 30th, in both the US and the UK, the Kindle editions of BOTH of my short-story anthologies, The Road Less Taken: A Collection of Unusual Short Stories, Books 1 and 2, will be on sale for 99¢.



For more information on these and other books I've written, please visit:

https://www.theodore-cohen-novels.com/
http://www.alyssadevinenovels.com

On Amazon, the books can be found here:

In the United States:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AUR8YFK

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01...

In the UK:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01AUR8YFK

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01MSO1LND

Please forward this to your friends with Kindles.

Any and all reviews on Amazon.com are appreciated!

Thanks!

Ted

October is National Bullying Prevention Month

Every October, schools and organizations across the country join STOMP Out Bullying™ in observing National Bullying Prevention Month. The goal: encourage communities to work together to stop bullying and cyberbullying by increasing awareness of the prevalence and impact of bullying on all children of all ages.

http://www.stompoutbullying.org/index...

I know it’s only the middle of April, but if your PTA and/or elementary school staff is planning an effort now to address bullying (or has an ongoing, aggressive program in that area, as almost every school district does these days), I want to alert you to my recently published illustrated children’s storybook (in verse), Pepe Builds a Next. The book addresses the issues of bullying, theft, friendship, and forgiveness in ways every child can understand and appreciate.

I recently discussed the book with the 40 students and their teachers at the Newtown (PA) Friends Elementary School.



The children were absolutely amazing! Their grasp of the concepts and how to resolve problems related to bullying was impressive, as was their understanding of the concepts of working together and forgiveness.

If you are a blogger and are interested in putting the word out on National Bullying Prevention Month and this storybook, I’d be happy to ‘gift’ you a pdf copy of the book. Just PM me with the URL for your blog and your e-mail address.

Bullying, and its more recent form, cyberbully, are two of the more virulent forms of abuse facing our young people today. Anything and everything we can do to address these problems is a major step for everyone concerned.

For more information about Pepe Builds a Next, you can view the books webpages here:

https://www.theodore-cohen-novels.com...

https://www.amazon.com/Pepe-Builds-St...

Mark Your Calendar: April 24, 2017...

On April 24, 2017, Ereader News Today (ENT) will feature my second book of short stories, The Road Less Taken: a Collection of Unusual Short Stories (Book 2) as its Book Of The Day. At that time, and during the week that follows, the Kindle edition will be on sale for 99¢.

To celebrate this event, I'm also putting the Kindle edition of Book 1 on sale for 99¢ during the same period.

I hope you'll take advantage of this great event.



For more information on these and other books I've written, please visit:

https://www.theodore-cohen-novels.com/
http://www.alyssadevinenovels.com

Colorado woman's remains found under grave of WWII veteran…life imitates art!

This was no April Fool’s joke. It was the headline on a Fox News article for April 1, 2017:

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/04/01/...

According to the piece: “A Colorado man who pleaded guilty Friday to killing his estranged wife more than two decades ago recently led authorities to her body, which was buried under the grave of a World War II veteran.”

All of which sounds very familiar, when you consider my YA novel The Hypnotist, written under the pen name Alyssa Devine. Without giving away too much of the story, what Devine’s book deals with are two teenagers who uncover evidence linking a policeman and a funeral home employee to the abductions and murders of two women 20 years earlier. The book contains elements of the paranormal and reincarnation. Whether a teen or an adult, I guarantee the book will not disappoint.

Ereader News Today (ENT)…a Preferred Sales Platform

I think if you were to ask any indie writer, they would tell you writing is the easy part; selling their books is the greatest challenge. According to the latest Bowker Report (September 7, 2016), more than 700,000 books were self-published in the U.S. in 2015.* Try making your voice heard above the noise in THAT crowd!

Many of us, of course, resort to all manner of marketing and sales mechanisms, from websites to online advertising (e.g., on Amazon.com and other sites), from e-mail and Twitter blasts to blogs, and from running giveaways on Goodreads (a waste of time and money, in my opinion…but that’s for another blog) to sales on such sites as BookBub and Ereader News Today (ENT), among others. It’s to the latter two sites that I’ll devote this blog entry.

Both sites alert subscribers to books that authors either are offering for free or at discounts for a limited time on such retail sites as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and others. For this they charge a fee that is dependent on your book’s genre or how the book is being presented (e.g., Book Of The Day on ENT). Alas, despite several efforts, I’ve never had any of my mystery/thrillers accepted by BookBub, to whom they were submitted despite some misgivings I perceived regarding the risk/reward ratio. That is, my concern here was the cost to place my book on their site vs. the potential number of sales I might expect. You can estimate for yourself what your return might for this site here:

https://www.bookbub.com/partners/pricing

For example, if you were to list a Thriller and wanted to discount it to, say, 99¢, the charge would be $788 with an average expected sale of 3,370 books. That’s big coin for my wallet, even though I was tempted to give it a try. Rejection (three times) at least had a silver lining; my bank account remained intact.

Searching for an alternative, I chanced upon ENT. This site’s price list can be found here:

http://ereadernewstoday.com/pricing/

In addition to a conventional listing, ENT offers you the opportunity to sponsor their Book Of The Day. The cost is $60 for a book priced below $2.99 or $150 for a book priced $2.99 and above.

I’ve done both types of ENT listings, with mixed success, depending on the genre! In the case of my mystery/thrillers (my Antarctic Murders Trilogy and Detective Lou Martelli, NYPD, series), I sold hundreds of discounted eBooks (Kindle) through ENT over the last three years (somewhere in the range 800-1000, to be exact). On the other hand, attempts to sell discounted Kindle editions of my YA novel The Hypnotist (written under the pen name Alyssa Devine) and my illustrated children’s storybook Pepe Builds a Nest were disappointing. When I discussed these disappointments recently with Gary at ENT, he indicated the best performing genres on their site were, typically (with some variance, of course), Mystery, Thriller, and Romance. You’ll have to be the judge, here, depending on the genre of your work.

By the way, I never give my books away. I worked hard to write and publish them. It’s never been my experience that giving someone a book for free has resulted in a future sale (much less a review, on most occasions . . . and what’s up with that!).

Explore the possibility of engaging ENT. You could be well rewarded by the results.

*https://www.bkconnection.com/the-10-a...

You never know where your writing may lead you…

Some years ago, my good friend and publisher at CQ Communications, Inc., Richard A. Ross, gifted me two violin forms removed from the basement of a defunct luthier shop in Ozone Park, Queens, NY. The luthier, who had passed away, was an Eastern European immigrant who, together with his wife, had built new lives for themselves in the United States in the years immediately following WWII. The forms and the story of the violin shop inspired me to write “The Luthier of Ozone Park” late in 2016 for my latest book, The Road Less Taken: A Collection of Unusual Short Stories—Book 2. The photograph opposite the first page of the text is shown below. It’s of a 13-year-old violinist, Andreas Weißgerber, who was dressed as might have been the luthier in my story when he, the luthier, was a young man. I was given permission to use the photograph by Mike Brubaker, in whose collection the photograph resided (see Photo 1).



But the photograph got me thinking about another person I knew from that period during WWII . . . my Algerian-born, Paris-raised aunt, Gisèle Atlan Rubinstein, then 19 years old (she was born in April, 1924), who escaped from a Nazi death camp, joined the French Resistance, and took to her grave the number tattooed on her left arm. In many ways, then, the story was meant to pay homage to her, and so I said in a footnote to the story in the book.

I didn’t think much about story or the book for a while until it was time to pay a debt of gratitude to Mr. Brubaker for his generous approval to use the photograph of Andres Weißgerber. All Mr. Brubaker asked was that I provide him with a copy of the published book, something easily done. But in satisfying his request, I once again came face to face with the story of my aunt. I was away at college at the time my uncle married her, so I only saw her infrequently. But to this day, I remember her short black hair, flashing black eyes, infectious full-throated laugh, and charming French accent . . . and, of course, that vulgar purple-black tattoo on her arm. What’s the story behind that, I thought. Certainly, with the notorious record-keeping skills of the Third Reich, there must be a way to learn more about what happened to her as a 19-year-old.

As it turned out, finding anything about Gisèle was immensely difficult. Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its allies established more than 40,000 camps and other incarceration sites. Some, of course, are more well-known than others, among them Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Treblinka. Only a few of these camps have any kind of Internet presence, Auschwitz being the most visible. But had she been taken there? A quick search of the archives for Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oswiecim, Poland, yielded nothing based on the few parameters I was able to submit [name, date of birth (1924), place of birth (Algeria), place of residence before and at the start of the war (Paris)].

So, it was on to a general search of the Internet . . . search after search using all sorts and manner of keywords.

And then, I hit ‘gold.’ I found a Website that listed and displayed all of the memorials in France to people who had been arrested by the Nazis during the occupation. Gisèle’s name was on one of the memorials. (see Photo 2)



Here is the information pertaining to that memorial:

Stèle unveiled on 03/02/2012 - station area, at the corner of rue des Trois-Coigneaux and avenue Charles de Gaulle - "In memory of the 143 Jews arrested in the Deux-Sèvres by order of the Vichy government and deported to the Nazi extermination camps between 1942 and 1944. Do not forget them!" Of the 143 deportees, 4 survived: Gisèle ATLAN, Yvette BAUM, Ida FENSTERZAB, Leon ROSZTEJN.

If we go to the records of the 139 deportees who perished (Note 3), we find, with few exceptions, that all were sent to Auschwitz. Was Gisèle sent there? And if so, when? If there was one thing the Third Reich prided itself on was preciseness in record-keeping. The lack of answers, here, was puzzling.

I kept looking, and FINALLY found the data I sought . . . the precise data (just as you would have expected) of her arrest and transport to Auschwitz. (Photo 3)



Still, why was it not possible to find a record of Gisèle Atlan in the camp’s archives? There was no question that she had a number tattooed on her arm. Did the fact she had escaped from her captures cause such grave embarrassment that they deleted her name from the camp’s records? Was she one of the ones who escaped from the camp during the uprising of late 1944? (Note 4) Did someone help her escape and in doing so, cover his or her actions by deleting her records from the camp’s database? We may never know.

Sometimes we talk to the characters in your short stories and novels. Sometimes they talk to us. Why do I get the feeling Gisèle is still pushing me to tell her story?

Notes:
1. Photo 1 is from the collection of Mike Brubaker. This photograph of 13-year-old Andreas Weißgerber has a modern look, but his sailor suit dates him to an earlier time when such uniforms were the standard fashion for a boy violin soloist. See the following blog for more information: TempoSenzaTempo.blogspot.com
2. Photo 2: This photograph is licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0
[Photo Didier MAHU] ( Record n ° 61457 )
http://www.memorialgenweb.org/memoria...
3. http://www.memorialgenweb.org/memoria...
4. https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-...

NB: Europeans place the day first when citing a date. Thus, 10/2/1944 is February 10, 1944.

Reading to the First Grade at Newtown Friends School...

I was thrilled to be asked to read and discuss my three illustrated storybooks--Pepe Builds a Nest, Rufus Finds a Home, and Fuzzy Wuzzy--to the first graders at the Newtown Friends School (Newtown, PA) on Friday, February, 24, 2017. The invitation, issued by teacher Kirsten Orechiwsky, involved some 40 students and others (teachers and aides). The class extended over a period of almost two hours, during which time the enthusiasm of the students was palpable!



Given the teachers already had read Pepe Builds a Nest to the children, we first launched into a discussion of that book, followed by a slide and video presentation of my work in Antarctica during the austral summer of 1961-62. Folks, to say the children had a great understanding of the Antarctic, penguins, seals, and killer whales is an understatement! Kids today are simply amazing.

From there, we went on to read and discuss the other two books. Here, again, I was amazed at how they understood the underlying morals embedded in each and moreover, were able to articulate what I was attempting to convey.

If any of you reading this blog write books for children at the elementary, middle, or high school levels, don't hesitate to step into the classroom when offered the opportunity. You will find it one of the most exciting experiences an author could hope for!

---------------
I thank Kirsten Orechiwsky, a 1st grade teacher at Newtown Friends School, for inviting me to spend a joyous morning with her students.

Books in a series...

Many authors, myself included, publish books as parts of collections. In my case, I have four series:

1. The "Detective Louis Martelli, NYPD" mystery/thriller series of six novels
2. The Antarctic Trilogy
3. My "The Road Less Taken" collection of short stories (two books in the series)
4. My "Stories for the Early Years," illustrated storybooks for children in the 1st and 2nd grades having to do with life's lessons (the third book was just released in the Kindle format, with the paperback edition to follow within a week; it has yet to be posted to Goodreads)

As you can see from the image below (from Amazon.com), it is important when setting up your books on Kindle Direct and/or CreateSpace (for example; these are the two publishers I use) to ensure that you complete the intake forms so as to show your books as part of a series if that is the case. As well, when requesting that one of your books be added to Goodreads, you also should apprise the editors of the fact a book is part of a series so they can link the new book to others in the collection.

The advantages in taking all these actions are many, not the least of which is, for example, that on Amazon, a reader will be advised of the fact there are other books in the same series in which he or she may have an interest. This, in turn, could result in additional sales, immediately or at some time in the future.