Checking Off # 2 on my bucket list

Tags

Amazon, author, bucket list, London, Lynn Murphy, Phantom Of The Opera, theater

I did not get to go to Paris. Okay, I realize I have said this several times. But I will. I have promised myself that I will walk into the Louvre someday. (Hopefully sooner than later.) I did, however, have the opportunity to mark off the second item on my bucket list. (My list is fairly short, but comprised of things I really want to do or accomplish).

What is  the item in second place? It was to see Phantom of the Opera onstage. I have seen the movie more times than I can count. (I teach a unit on it and show it to all my classes.)My family does not share my obsession with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s most famous endeavor (or really any of his musicals or anyone else’s for that matter.) My husband knew that I wanted to see it, but has successfully avoided making the trip to either the Fox Theater in Atlanta, where we live, or to New York. When I told him there was an opportunity to see it when we went to London, he very quickly said “I think you should do that.” Yes, he knew what losing the trip to the Louvre meant to me. Yes he wanted me to have the opportunity. No he never wanted to see it.

I polled my students and a group up of ten was up for it. Our tour guide Emma was a real star. She managed seats on the seventh row orchestra (or stalls as they say in London) and when the chandelier fell it went right over my head.

I saw my favorite musical at Her Majesty’s Theater and I was not disappointed. The performance was brilliant, something I will always remember. The songs were beautifully executed and the costumes and set were amazing.

By the way, I wrote a YA novel inspired by  Phantom. It’s called Think Of Me. You can check it out at http://www.booksbylynnmurphy or at http://www.amazon.com while I go have a cup of coffee in my Phantom mug- the one with the mask that changes color as it gets hot. (And if Think Of Me isn’t your cup of tea, you’ll find several other books there too.)

 

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Stepping Inside Shakespeare & Co.

Tags

fiction, Hemingway, Paris, Shakespeare and Co

One of the places that I hope to visit when I finally reach Paris some thirty days from now is the Shakespeare and Company bookstore.I have been dying to read Hemingway’s  A Moveable Feast, which chronicles his years struggling to make it as a writer in Paris following WWI, but have put off purchasing it from Amazon in hopes that I can buy if there, in Paris. Why there? Because during that time, Hemingway spent a great deal of time in the original store, seeking inspiration from other great, and published, authors. It is not true, as the store’s workers have sometimes overheard passing tour guides proclaim, that James Joyce lies buried in the cellar.  The store was opened by Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate,  in the 1920s and 30s. As every English major knows, her bookshop and lending library became a hangout for Lost Generation writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Joyce, whose Ulysses was first published in its complete form by Beach because authorities in Britain and America deemed it obscene. She shut the doors during the Nazi occupation and never reopened. But  American George Whitman preserved he legacy and the stories of the famous artists who patronized Beach’s location, when he opened the present-day store in 1951. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway makes references to the shop and there have been many accounts of the times that he and other writers gathered there. The store, under Whitman’s reign, was at first called “Le Mistral”, but , some say,with Beach’s blessing, he renamed it with the original name in 1964 on the 400th anniversary of  William Shakespeare’s death.

The store was famous in its heyday- and still is today. But it is the stories of the golden age that keep aspiring writers and book lovers coming. Much of that was due to beach herself. French author and former director of Versailles, André Chamson said that Beach “did more to link England, the United States, Ireland, and France than four great ambassadors combined.” In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway wrote : “Sylvia had a lively, sharply sculptured face, brown eyes that were as alive as a small animal’s and as gay as a young girl’s . . . She was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.”  Apparently Beach was a strong woman who stood her ground and would not be bullied, even by the Nazis. The store’s website recounts this: One day that December, a Nazi officer entered her store and demanded Beach’s last copy of Finnegans Wake. Beach declined to sell him the book. The officer said he would return in the afternoon to confiscate all of Beach’s goods and to close her bookstore. After he left, Beach immediately moved all the shop’s books and belongings to an upstairs apartment. In the end, she would spend six months in an internment camp in Vittel, and her bookshop would never reopen.

The store customizes purchases. Here is what the website says: It’s a tradition in France to ink-stamp the title page of a new book with the bookseller’s hallmark. At Shakespeare and Company, the practice dates back to the shop’s opening in 1951 and, before that, to Sylvia Beach’s bookstore on rue de l’Odéon. Elect to have your book inscribed with the official Shakespeare and Company stamp, and every time you open its pages, you’ll encounter a little reminder of its Parisian origins. This is, I must admit, one of the reasons I want to browse the shelves for a little Hemingway for me, and perhaps a little Voltaire (in Englais) for my husband. For just 4 euros the shop offers the following: Before beginning its journey to you, your book lived on shelves once perused by Allen Ginsberg, Anaïs Nin, and James Baldwin. We can add a keepsake of your book’s life here with us at S&Co by inserting a vintage-feel photo taken among the shop’s tumbledown bookshelves. Each one-of-a-kind picture is shot on film provided by the Impossible Project, which gave new life to instant photography after Polaroids were discontinued in 2008. They will also spritz the book with French perfume (for free) and add a poem for another Euro. Select this option, the store promises,  and we’ll tuck a pocket-sized poem into your book. Each one is hand-typed on the shop’s clopping old typewriter by one of our Tumbleweeds.

Ah Paris, where even buying a book is an experience!

In The Blue Butterfly, Jack finds himself in the original Shakespeare and Company with Hemingway, discussing The Sun Also Rises and his relationship with his ‘Paris wife’ Hadley. Want to know what is said and how it turns out? Check out the book (and a few of my others set in Paris) at http://www.booksbylynnmurphy.com

 

 

 

 

Southern Snow Days

Tags

Atlanta, books, Lynn Murphy, snow day

I live in the south. I have for most of my life, except for the four years I lived in Maryland. I know, they are technically below the Mason Dixon line but they don’t consider themselves southern. The first time it snowed after we moved there, we got four inches.  (It was the end of October.) I assumed that everything would be shut down, but no, traffic was moving fine and the roads were quickly cleared away and everything was open. Even schools stayed open if the snowfall wasn’t too bad. Being accustomed to near panic when flakes begin to fall all my life, I chose to venture out only to the video store down the street  ( I rented 1776 and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. My husband was out of town) and to get some take out. I alternated between the musicals and episodes of Designing Women– I was desperate to hear someone else talk right.

In the part of Georgia where I live, in the southern almost suburbs of Atlanta, and below we joke that if someone tosses a popsicle in the street, then school shut down and the shelves at the Piggly Wiggly are immediately relieved of their milk and bread. (Exactly why people only eat milk and bread in a snow storm, I don’t know. I personally prefer something warm and more filling.) Yesterday at the school where I teach we let out early and cancelled Homecoming…for rain.

Back to Baltimore.  The storm they are describing on the news today for that region is exactly like what we experienced when we lived in Baltimore. The worst storm we lived through was when I was pregnant with my youngest son (who is now nineteen.) My oldest son, Ian, was almost two and came down with a stomach virus about the time the snow started to fall. By midnight I was also throwing up nonstop in danger of becoming dehydrated and the snow had not stopped falling. I wandered around downstairs most of the night, checking the snow in between puking. At dawn I went upstairs to try and sleep and my husband took Ian, who was doing much better, downstairs for breakfast. As they ate, Pat kept watching Ian’s Little Tikes slide- as it disappeared under the snow. By the time my stomach virus and the snow had stopped we had nearly thirty inches. We got a reprieve for a day and then it snowed ten more. We had to shovel our way out the doors. To get out of the cul-de-sac-(because it was an unfinished subdivision we didn’t get plowed) we had to back into the neigboring driveway and go out through the luge run like tunnel that was the result of shoveling ten driveways into the center of Quern Court.

People down here post on Facebook about how much they want snow and then about how they never get any snow…but I am here to tell you: YOU CAN GET TOO MUCH SNOW. And another thing. It is NOT true that the post office will deliver despite the snow. We did not have mail delivered for almost a week- and they also had rolling waves of cutting off the heat and power to conserve it.

Still, life went on. People went to work, the Giant, wherever.

In the South a snow day goes something like this: You go to bed anticipating, praying for snow. You wake up early and run to turn on the tv to see what schools have closed. It always takes forever to get to your school. You eat breakfast, spend an hour putting on your snow clothes, attempt to play in whatever has fallen and then after about thirty minutes decide its too cold and come inside, take off all your snow clothes and then watch movies all day. And I guess eat milk and bread.

I had three kids other than my own get snowed in after a superbowl party once when we lived in Memphis- and oddly,  for a whole day no one’s parents called to check on them or come get them. Finally we politely suggested that they call their parents, then went to Popeyes and got a ton of chicken to feed them while we waited on their parents. That was a huge snowfall for Memphis- six inches.

Since we moved back to the Atlanta area we have had two bouts of bad weather. One was our first year here when we had an ice event and school was out a full week. The other was what they call Snowmaggedon, a snow and ice store that left metro Atlanta looking like an eerie real life version of the opening scene from The Walking Dead with cars abandoned all along the interstate. It’s finally snowing as I write. I just came back in from a morning walk. It’s cold, no ice, just a little steady stream of snow. Not rushing over to Kroger.

It is cold, and a good day to read a good book. For those who got snow and are stuck inside, once you’ve gotten your milk and bread rations, stay in the comfort of your own home and order or download a book. You can check mine out at http://www.booksbylynnmurphy.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vous ne voulez pas lire Le Louvre Trilogy?

Tags

books, Lynn Murphy, Paris, The Louvre, The Mona Lisa

Bonjour.

Je vais le Musee du Louvre. Not for a  few more weeks, but I am excited about actually communing with the great works in la terre promise. One of my students asked if I planned to kiss the steps as we entered the building. I just might.  I spent a year at the world’s greatest art museum without ever crossing through her doors, as I wrote my three favorite of my nineteen and a half books  (The Red Finch is about 50 % complete). That is of course, my Louvre Trilogy. Hiding Mona Lisa, Finding Fritz Gerhard, and Rescuing Rembrandt.

My good friend Dave Kegel once referred to The Louvre as ‘this art museum in Paris’ that he and his wife Val visited. Since we were in Sunday School at the time I didn’t publicly correct him, but I have had  fun ragging on him about that several times since. It isn’t just an art museum, it is the art museum. Designed first as the palace to the kings and queens of France, threatened and rebuilt and evacuated, it has a long history, the most interesting, at least to me, the setting of my trilogy.

I am sure as I climb the marble steps to gaze at The Winged Victory of Samothrace that I will be looking over my shoulder for my mysterious and yes, lovable, art thief turned Louvre curator Alain Darnay. Of course he was never there, as Jacques Jaujard was during the 1939 evacuation of the Louvre, but I am not sure that as I wander past the wonders of the musuem, especially as I pass his favorite painting of all, La Jaconde (aka known as Mona Lisa) that I can separate him and the other characters, who aside from Jacques did not exist from The Louvre.

(Here is what the covers of the trilogy might look like in the museum itself.)

Hopefully for those who have not yet read The Louvre Trilogy this is enough to pique your interest. If you have read at least one, merci beaucoup. If you haven’t, you can find them in paperback and kindle versions at http://www.booksbylynnmurphy.com and http://www.amazon.com.

I will blog about my European adventures, so be sure to check back and see how it went.

 

 

 

 

I Am Really Going To Europe….

Tags

travel

It is a reality; no longer just a board on Pinterest. I am seventy something days from my first trip to Europe. I will be marking through a few lines on the bucket list and seeing some places that until now I have only dreamed of. Before you get too jealous, it isn’t a romantic getaway with my husband or a writer’s sabbatical. Instead I will be accompanying fifteen high school students on a twelve day excursion to London, Canterbury, Normandy, St. Malo, Paris and Amsterdam. Still, it’s Europe  and I am rather fond of my traveling companions in any case.

Before I go I will have to finalize entries for two major art contests and about 100 pages for the yearbook and try to organize three or four AP portfolios. I also have the sequel to The Blue Butterfly  to finish and a joint project with my husband in progress. I am currently caught up in making lists of what to pack, helping get the students organized and fund raising.

Did I mention fundraising?

I despise asking people for monetary help. But the real truth is I have some expenses to cover and the kids could use some help. This isn’t just a vacation. It’s an educational trip for which they earn both high school and college credit. The things we will be seeing will tie into what we teach- what I teach especially. And while they are willing to work for it, the cost of the opportunity is a bit of a stretch for most of their families.

If you would like to help here’s a few practical ways:

1. We have a go fund me account. Here’s the link: https://www.gofundme.com/gr7kzkes
2. Buy Books. That provides me with fund to cover my expenses! (www.booksbylynnmurphy.com)
3. Buy some art. Here’s my online gallery: http://www.artpal.com/lynnmurphy4  (You can get prints, canvases or mugs with my artwork on them.)

I would love to be able to give some travel scholarships to the students, so consider giving. (It’s tax deductible ’cause it’s for education.)

While we are in Europe I will be doing travel updates here. I can’t wait to visit Windsor Castle, cross in the promised land (aka The Louvre) and stand in Anne Frank’s secret annex- along with the other wonderful things we will get to explore.

Back to work…and just a little daydreaming….

 

 

 

 

The Best and Worst Books I Read This Year

Tags

author, books, Lynn Murphy, Writing

As the year comes to an end, I have read almost everything I had set aside on my (many) bookshelves to read this year and I am pondering what to read next, I will take a few minutes to reflect on what I read. Stephen King once said that if you don’t have time to read then you don’t have time to write. I think that he is right- how can you write if you never read? I teach creative writing and sometimes teach English and I firmly believe that the reason children cannot write well is not due just to a proliferation of electronic devices, but due also to their lack of  time spent in literary engagement. When I taught middle school English each grade (6-8) read eight novels over the course of a year. That being said, I have been a reader all of my life and plan to continue doing so. My tastes in reading material are varied, but tend to gravitate toward fiction and I like a story steeped in history but am not limited to any particular genre. I will start with the best books.

1.The  Storied Life of AJ Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin. I absolutely loved this one. AJ is a widowed bookstore owner who has his valuable and rare book by Poe stolen (the book that was to be his ticket to retirement.) While investigating the theft, a surprise that changes his life changes the direction of the book. It is littered with references to books and stories I have read and I highly recommend it.

2. Faceless by Alyssa Sheinmel. I picked this up at my school’s book fair and it was a well written YA novel that I would easily use in class. The main character has a freak accident the leaves her needing a face transplant during her senior year in high school. The novel is about how she and everyone around her deal with the changes.

3. Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs. Using odd old photographs as the catalyst for the plot, Ransom Riggs wrote an interesting tale about a boy who discovers he has inherited some interesting powers that he must use as he travels in time to save himself and his new friends.

4. Saving Mona Lisa by Geri Chanel. A non fiction book, not to be confused with my novel Hiding Mona Lisa, which provided some historical background for my Louvre trilogy. Fascinating reading about the evacuation of the Louvre during WWII. (Read the Louvre Trilogy when you are done!)

5. The Secret Life Of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. It’s been around a long time but I just got around to reading it this summer. A look at the civil rights movement and the relationship between a little girl and some people from her mother’s past.

6. Paris The Novel by Edward Rutherford. A lengthy novel about three families whose lives intersect over centuries as the city of Paris grows and develops. Since I am traveling to Paris in the spring I found this one fascinating and really enjoyed it. Don’t be overwhelmed by the size of the book.

Now for the books I read but didn’t love….

1. All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. Okay I know it got the Pulitzer prize and a million five star reviews.  My husband calls it “All The Book We Cannot Read” because it took me almost a year to get past the second chapter. I’m sorry, but I never got into the story or bonded with the characters and the story ended abruptly without really ending. I would have thought I was crazy, the one person who didn’t get it based on the reviews, until my friend Sara Martin concurred. ( Maybe the fact that it is written in present perfect tense that I equated it with reading term papers in MLA?) Sorry, but I won’t be thinking of this book or its characters when I actually go to St. Malo in the spring….

2.Life After Life by Kate Atkinson. Let’s just say by the fifth time the main character died and was reborn it had become a little redundant.

3. Z by  Therese  Aine Draper. This one falls in a  genre I call “Books about the lives of famous men’s wives.” I loved The Paris Wife  so I tried this one, based on the life of Zelda Fitzgerald. While it was well written, I ended up not liking either Zelda or F. Scott Fitzgerald and was more than a little depressed when it ended.

If you are looking for something to read before the end of the year, check out my books at http://www.booksbylynnmurphy.com.

 

 

Top 10 Reasons Why Someone Should Buy My Books

Tags

Amazon, Blogs, books, fiction, Holiday Gift Ideas, indie publishing, Lynn Murphy

With so many books out there in Amazon land, I thought I needed to let potential readers know why the should choose my books over someone else’s. So here’s my Letterman style list, since he’s gone and I missed the chance to have him read it on late night television.

10. They don’t suck. This reason is in response to a blog post by Jon Konrath, an indie author who has sold a ton of books who suggested that if your sales weren’t what you wanted then maybe your books sucked. Accepting that challenge, I reread all 19 of my books. And…they don’t suck.

9. You might learn something. Many of my books are based on historical events that I carefully research to give my fiction credibility. That doesn’t mean  I stay  100% to the facts but I’ve done enough homework that my story feels real, plausible. In any case, they might make you want to look up the inspiration.

8. Sexy flawed heroes. Well, okay, if you’re a guy that might not make you want to read my books. But maybe you know someone who would appreciate that aspect. I firmly believe that a character can’t be perfect, so if my leading men are gorgeous, and they always are, they have to have something that keeps them believable; a tragic past, a broken heart that needs mending,  a secret, a scar, an illness, or even bad judgement.

7. Four and five star reviews. I generally get good reviews and I don’t know who is reviewing them, so the reviews are honest.

6. Female characters you would like to be BFFs with. I like to think that the women I write about are people my readers care about. Women they would like to know and root for.

5. I write a lot of series. Many of my books are series, so if you enjoyed the first book, there is usually more to come with the same characters.

4.  A reasonable price for a good read. I price my books reasonably so that cost is not a consideration. My average price for a kindle book is 3.99 and 8.99-10.99 for a paperback.

3. Unexpected endings. Some of my books are HEA- happily ever after, after about 350 pages of trying to get there. But some  of them, Terezin Twilight, for example, don’t end the way you expect or even want them to. And Hiding Mona Lisa, and the other books in my Louvre Trilogy have a twist at the end, or an unexpected narrator.

2. A little art education. Every book I write includes art, music or literature as part of the story. These are things that I am passionate about and share daily as an Art and English teacher. It flows over into my books.

1. A good story.  The most important thing. And my books don’t suck.

Books make great holiday gifts- for someone on your list, or for yourself. Shop at http://www.booksbylynnmurphy.com.

 

 

 

 

 

Cast Off! It’s Pirate Week and I Am Writing About Pirates

Tags

fiction, pirates Pirates Week, the blue butterfly, the red finch

I am in the process of writing the second book in my time travel trilogy, The Red Finch, which picks up where The Blue Butterfly left off. As I paused to write this blot post I left Jack Donovan on board the Queen Anne’s Revenge about to come face to face with Blackbeard. I didn’t really plan to write that chapter the same week as the famous week in the Caymans, but here it is.

As it happens, I know a little about the festival that annually brings in scores of would be pirates, including Johnny Depp in full Jack Sparrow regalia, to the Caribbean. One of my closest friend, Val Kegel, knows everything about it- she is the ‘tourism ambassador’for the Caymans. View her site at http://www.passengerpicks.com. Apparently there are scores of people who want to hoist Jolly Roger flags, dress up in pirate attire, stage sword fights and drink up me hearties yo ho. (I know this because Val has been posting pics on Instagram and Facebook with the tag line AARRR…)

I will insert here that I am descended from piracy, having traced my family tree on my mother’s side back to Sir Francis Drake. I will also admit to enjoying a pirate movie every now and then, most recently of course the Pirates Of The  Caribbean series.

I am, however, doing research to present Jack’s time travel experience so that it is historically based and not a copy of Hollywood’s interpretation. Blackbeard ruled the open seas and terrorized the Caribbean and the coast of North Carolina during the 1720’s, with flaming braids of rope woven into his famous beard. I am not sure exactly how Jack’s adventure is going. More than any of my other books this series has been character driven. While I go back to 1725 and check on Jack, and figure out where Mollie is going, you can read The Blue Butterfly  and check out my other books at http://www.booksbylynnmurphy.com.

Art Apathy

Tags

apathy, art, author, education, louvre trilogy

I had a student ask me yesterday why, as an art teacher, I kept ‘forcing stuff we aren’t interested in on us.’ By that this 8th grader meant architecture and history and specifically the aesthetic design of Versailles. Never mind that architecture and art history are part of the curriculum. We are now teaching a generation that has lost all enthusiasm for learning.

I have accepted the fact that many people in which I come in contact with, parents, students, even other teachers view the subject I teach as irrelevant. It’s ‘just art.” But I find that sentiment sad. When I was in 8th grade myself, I was completely enamored with all things related to art. I had already fallen in love with Renoir and Matisse, longed to roam the corridors of the Louvre, could identify artists from almost every major period, was exploring art media. Most of my students just don’t care, about learning about it or even creating on their own. My days  are dominated sometimes with apathy.

I just wish they would take the time to actually look at what they think they are not interested in. I wish they could put down their phones long enough to ponder the meaning and images in Guernica, to examine the use of light in the work of the Impressionists, to examine the placement of dots of paint in LaGrande Jatte. When I took a group of 8th graders to the National Gallery last year, I did get to see some of them react to real paintings. To hear their comments upon viewing a room of Van Goghs, to exclaim over the life likeness of David’s portrait of Napoleon. The kids sitting in my classroom yesterday were lamenting their own upcoming trip to the nation’s capital and hoping it would not include visiting ‘boring old museums.’ I hope the Gallery isn’t one stop they skip this year, but it may well be because I am not the teacher leading the tour.

On the other end of the spectrum are the students who are planning to go, with me in tow, to London and Paris and Amsterdam in the spring. The six students who agree that to go to Paris and skip The Louvre would be a travesty.

My love of art finds its way into my writing as well. I am not a great artist, I’m an okay artust. I know my abilities and my limitations. It doesn’t stop me from creating, I just know that beyond teaching it, I probably couldn’t make a living doing it. But I still write about characters who either create art, appreciate it, or, in the case of my Louvre Trilogy, will put it before almost anything. One of my favorite quotes from the Monuments Men is when George  Clooney rallies his troops by telling them that their mission was never supposed to succeed but that it is important because the are preserving the culture and the history. Here’s the clip:

In my Louvre Trilogy, the characters get what George Clooney’s character is talking about. They understand that art matters and shouldn’t be ignored or left untaught. The character of Alain especially reflects my love of art.

Encourage kids to learn about art and other things they believe are uninteresting. It is our job to teach them that, to hold onto the art and books and music that have inspired mankind for thousands of years. Without that encouragement, in a few generations it may all be forgotten forever.

And if you are curious about my Louvre Trilogy, check it out at http://www.booksbylynnmurphy.com

Categorically Speaking

Tags

Amazon, author, books, Holocaust, Terezin Twilight, Writing

On occasion I go to Amazon as if I were just a customer and not an author and snoop a little to see how my boos are doing. As an example I’ll use one of my better selling books. (I don’t say best seller- I’ll get into that in a minute.) The book is Terezin Twilight and it’s a historical romance set in Terezin, one of Hitler’s concentration camps. but one with an interesting story behind it. Even Hitler realized that there were a number of Jewish writers, artists, musicians and actors, as well as prominent Jewish veterans of WWI. If those people all disappeared at the same time, it might have aroused suspicion on the part of the rest of the world. The Nazis came up with a plan. They would tell these people that they were being relocated to wonderful new place for the duration of the war, for their safety. It was described as a spa, with a town, opportunities for work, and more than acceptable accommodations. Of course, this was a lie. Terezin was a garrison town, designed to comfortable house a few thousand people. By early 1942 it was filled to many times its capacity. There were no gas chambers, that is true, but there was still starvation, work, disease and the ever present fear that one would be shipped on the Auschwitz. There were two commandants who were both known for their hatred of the Jews and their tempers. But what was allowed was artistic endeavors. The Nazis allowed the creative side of the camp’s population to have art shows, musical performances, literary meetings, which they also attended. In Terezin Twilight, I have as the main characters Ava Weiss, who is Jewish, and her former fiance Max, who is a Nazi officer. They have ended their relationship for obvious reasons, but find each other again when they are both sent to Terezin.

It is a romance. I put all the proper tag words and categories when I set it up in both print and kindle. So one would assume that if you did a search for books that fit those parameters, say, “Holocaust Romance” you would assume that the books that came up in that search would be just that…romantic stories set in the Holocaust. And while some are, a lot of other books that are about the Holocaust  but not of a romantic nature also make the list.  I have seen memoirs, well known Holocaust children’s fiction,and a few books that don’t relate at all. (John Boyne’s classic The Boy In The Striped Pajamas, for example can in no way be categorized as a romance. Neither can Miss Peregrine, and that’s not sour grapes- I read and loved both those books. )

So how does a reader find the right kind of book they are looking for, and how does an author achieve those #1 status flags we all want?  Do people get tired of looking after the first page or two when they don’t see anything that appears to be the kind of book they went searching for?  Obviously I kept scrolling through them to see where Terezin Twilight fell on the list, but does a reader/person who is going to purchase?

The answer is, I don’t know. But then I never know how anyone finds my books and collecting that kind of data is something that has successfully eluded me ever since I joined the realm of indie publishing. I keep tweaking those categories and tag words every now and then. It would be nice though, if the searches were consistent and accurate. It might make things better for all authors.

If you’d like to check out Terezin Twilight or the rest of my books, my website can be accessed at https://www.booksbylynnmurphy.com