Writing in Tampa Bay
Sixteen pieces on the writing life in Pinellas County and Tampa: where to work, the history nobody mentions, and getting shelved.
Tag: Writing Life (Page 6)
Authority Through AuthorshipHow to Get Your Book Onto Pinellas Library Shelves
Library talks are the easiest events a local author can get, and the audiences engage harder than bookstore crowds. Getting into the collection is a separate process with different rules.
Book MarketingThe Truth About Bookstore Signings
The store will usually say yes if your book is orderable through the standard channel. Then nobody comes unless you bring them. The signing is not the marketing; it is where the marketing gets photographed.
Authority Through AuthorshipGetting Local Media to Cover Your Book
Tampa Bay has more working media than most metro areas its size. None of them want to hear that your book is out. All of them want a story, and your book is the credential instead of the subject.
Book MarketingFive Hundred Years of Selling the Same Water
Five mineral springs in Safety Harbor have been sold as a cure for five hundred years, starting when Hernando de Soto decided he had found the Fountain of Youth. There is a lesson in it for anyone writing a book.
Memoir WritingFinding a Writing Group Worth Sitting In
Pinellas County has more writing groups than most people realize, mostly meeting in library rooms. The useful skill is telling a group that will make you better from one that will correct your commas for two years.
Authority Through AuthorshipThe Men Paid to Read Novels Aloud in Tampa
For fifty years in Ybor City, cigar workers paid a man out of their own wages to sit on a platform and read novels aloud while they worked. They elected him, voted on the books, and struck when the owners…
HistoryWhere to Write in Safety Harbor
Safety Harbor has more workable places to write than towns four times its size. The library for long stretches, the waterfront for the stuck paragraph, Philippe Park for the structural think.
HistoryThe Hotel a Man Built Out of One Sentence
A man built an eight-story pink hotel on St. Pete Beach because a woman in Spain was forbidden to marry him. It opened in 1928, three hundred percent over budget, and the Fitzgeralds spent a week there in 1930.
Book MarketingGetting Your Book Into a Tampa Bay Bookstore
Tampa Bay still has a real independent bookstore scene, and each shop takes local books differently. The thing that decides whether any of them can stock you is how your book is printed.
HistoryThe Mound Under the Picnic Tables
There is a Tocobaga temple mound in a county park in Safety Harbor, and the park is named for the Frenchman who showed up in 1842. Which name ends up on the sign is the useful thing to think about.
Authority Through AuthorshipKerouac’s Last Address, Twenty Minutes From My Desk
Jack Kerouac died in St. Petersburg in 1969 at forty-seven, in a concrete block ranch house in Disston Heights, leaving an estate valued at ninety-one dollars. On the Road has never stopped selling.