Central Wisconsin Book Festival (CWBF)

Transcript: Two steps forward, One step back with Beth Amos

all right good evening thank you for coming out tonight tonight as part of the Central Wisconsin Book Festival we have Annelise Ryan is the USA Today best-selling author of the popular Maddie Winston mystery series and a student name for Beth Amos who also writes the Max Bar mystery series under the pseudonym Allison K Abbott Beth is a real life emergency room RN living in Wisconsin she believes laughter is the best medicine and with the Maddie Winston series she's hoping to medicate the masses and before the performance we'd like to thank our supporters for the central Wisconsin Book Festival support for the 2022 Central Wisconsin Book Festival was provided through the Marathon County Public Library Portage County Public Library the McMillan Memorial Library the Community Arts grant program of the Community Foundation of North Central Wisconsin with funds provided by the Wisconsin Arts board the Community Foundation and the ba and Esther Greenheck Foundation Support also provided in part by the Rooter Ware Law Firm The Dudley Foundation the Marathon County Public Library Foundation the pub Portage County Public Library Foundation the co-vantage cares Foundation Whitewater Music Hall the Marathon County Historical Society bound to happen books and Yankee bookstore and again thank you for coming out and please give a warm welcome to Beth Amos thank you [Applause] back okay I was totally have to wear that all right well thank you guys for coming out believe it or not this is not the worst turnout that I've ever had I did a book signing once where actually nobody came so actually I've done more than one of those um the world of uh writing books is an interesting one it's one that requires a fair amount of uh ego I guess for some but it also requires a lot of perseverance because it's not well for some I suppose there's a trajectory where they write a book and there's instant Fame and money and wealth and everything's fine after that my journey hasn't gone quite that way as you may have guessed from all the names that uh Colin gave you for the books that I've written and I'll get into explaining all that but for me the the writing career has been a bit of a sisyphean tasks which is why I chose this slide for the first one um and I'm just going to kind of give you a very brief overview of my childhood because it's really important to understand how I became a writer and you'll you'll understand once I get to the end of it so when you start to go I can't believe she's doing this bear with me because it'll pay off in the end all right I think I did all right like all good stories this one starts with it was a dark and stormy night any of you that know the uh what is the name of the hmm yeah but what's the name of the uh prize Nicole Colin probably knows the uh bullwitten lighter litter prize there's a there's a contest um that they have I think maybe every year now where where people can turn in their worst best first line for a book and it's kind of a take off on the it was a dark and stormy night which has become sort of a cliched opening to mystery books so that's kind of a joke that's actually me in the picture um my baby picture and that was the last time I was cute as you'll see shortly I was born in New York City and lived there until I was two years old and then my parents got moved to Upstate New York and my father worked for the government and every time he got a promotion it meant to move to a new place so in Upstate New York we lived in Ithaca Eaton Sodus Point Morrisville Elmira Elmira Heights every year it was a new school once I started school so I was always the new kid in school and that's kind of an awkward thing to have to do especially when you look like this it was a little bit of a struggle for me to fit in my mother just loved these pink rhinestone cat eye glasses and she also loved Tony home perms and I loved cutting my own hair and this picture is a combination of all those things because my mother gave me a perm that I hated I tried to cut most of it out and then I had the glasses I'm not even going to get into the whole gap between the teeth thing and this was the result and you can't really see it very well unless you get up close to the original picture but the photographer which they could get away with back then with black and white pictures actually had to pencil in my hair on both sides to make it look even because my hair was like down to here on one side and was up here on the other side the other things that made it difficult for me in addition to looking like this and being the new kid in school was that I was also a very big kid I was when I was uh 11 years old I hit five foot eleven so I've always a very tall very big gangly kid that didn't make me popular with other kids I was you know it was easy to poke fun at me however I was not bullied at least being the biggest kid in the class means you don't get bullied because I not only not only did the other kids fear that I might beat them up I did on occasion so anyway so since I wasn't going to get by on my good looks I was a pretty smart child so I tried to go the teacher's pet route thinking maybe that would help me win friends and influence people and of course you know how much other kids love the teacher's pet so that didn't go over too well however I have great report cards from grade school I'll have all A's a couple of B's and I failed conduct and posture but other than that I was doing pretty good um I also alienated many of my fellow students because every time we'd get assigned a writing assignment of any sort I was like yes and nobody else liked those so so since the teacher's pet thing wasn't working I decided let's be the class clown because that always gets laughs one more move and it's a new school and they don't know me so I'll just act out be the class clown so my report cards from those years have lots of notes from the teachers about how I talk too much didn't use my free time well finished my assignments fast and had lots of free time that I did not use wisely in the fourth grade I had a teacher who was very intelligent she actually taught me how to knit and when I was done with my work instead of disturbing all my fellow classmates I could open my desk and take out my yarn and my knitting needles and I knitted oh my gosh I knitted caps and slippers and mittens I knitted everything in that year in fourth grade until I got transferred out of that class into Mrs rizzu's class I made Mrs rizzu retire so then after getting through grade school in most Middle School when I was 12 my father got promoted to a job that moved us out to Washington State so we moved all the way across the country and I thought well this is great this is a whole new start nobody out there knows me I'm not even close to the people who know me so the best way to make friends and influence people is tell lies so I started telling lies about my life made myself sound much more interesting than I really was and that's how I made friends and influence people I had enough practice trying to fit in with all these different School crowds growing up that by the time I moved out to it was Pullman was the name of the town in Washington for high school I could fit in with any group I wanted I could go out to the parking lot with the smokers and the guys hanging on their cars and fit in just as well with them as I could with the computer nerds in the computer lab or the football docks that were out in the fields the cheerleaders it didn't matter I could fit into any group I wanted to and I wasn't really very well known by any of them but I could I could make do and again I just made myself sound better than I really was we lived out in the country we were very isolated so I didn't have a lot of time to you know intermingle with these other kids and the kids that I knew best were the ones who rode my school bus you know and I didn't see them except for when I was on the school bus you know we didn't play together because we lived miles apart and and in those days it was hard for my mother to take take us anywhere actually our home life was a little difficult during those years too so I really was fine with not having other kids know too much about my life my dad became a pretty pretty serious alcoholic my mother's always had some mental health issues um we were talking today my husband and I were talking today on the drive up here we were listening to the song um can't I can't um was it I can't live with you can't live without you or something like that and that's kind of the marriage that my parents had it's like they could not get along they fought all the time it was a very acrimonious relationship and yet they absolutely loved one another and neither one of them could have ever survived without the other it's just it was just a messed up relationship so me and my three sisters we did the best that we could and I did manage to go through all four years of high school 9th through 12th in one school in one place so that was like a New Concept for me and by the time I graduated I actually had you know friends and felt like I fit in a little bit but because of my home life I was pretty eager to get away so I went to college in town but I lived up on the campus so there there's Washington State University is in Pullman Washington so I managed to save enough money I was able to buy myself a year of living on campus and at the end of that year rather than get home go home I decided to get married so at the end of that year yes I got married and it was a big wedding with all the bling the attendance the Gown it was a church wedding I was raised Episcopalian so we got married in the Episcopalian Church and and everything was just all big and fancy and very uncomfortable and then nine months later I got a divorce however this very brief marriage will prove to be important later on as you will see shortly all right so after that divorce I think I waited two years maybe not quite two then I got married again this time it lasted about seven years and it produced a son whom I adore and loved very much during that time I also went to nursing school I moved to California because that's where my then husband was from um somewhere the marriage lasted seven years but about four years into it shortly after my son was born we had to actually ended up separating so I ended up being a single parent for a lot of years and we ended up divorcing um this is my son I got to tell you being a single parent for a son when you've grown up with three daughters I mean three sisters I'm sorry uh no brothers and then you have to try to figure out things like football equipment and cups what's up I didn't know what a cop was a lot of those little things that you don't think about and as a single parent all of a sudden it's like I don't know how to do this and his father was kind of in the picture not in the picture there sometimes not other times so it was a little bit awkward but we struggled through it and I got through my nursing school and it was about that time that I started writing short fiction I was writing stories that I was sending in to women's magazines mostly romantic fiction because at that stage of your life after you know already having one marriage that's failed the second one's not looking too good I started sending out these short stories to all these women's magazines and thinking you know maybe I could make a little extra money on the side that way I also moved from California to New Jersey um the reason for that was because my parents my dad got another promotion they got moved to New Jersey during the time I was in California and when my husband and I were kind of separated I ended up moving back to New Jersey to be closer to my parents which may or may not have been a good decision but anyway I did that and then after oh I don't know that has seven years yeah moved to Virginia got another divorce so family was helping a little bit with child care and the other thing reason I moved to Virginia was because um cost of living there was a lot cheaper than it was in New Jersey and as a single parent I was trying to survive I kept writing lots of short stories lots of short stories again mostly romance but I started branching out and I started writing Mysteries and thrillers I wrote some horror stories I was all over the map I just wanted to write I wanted to get my feelings out just put those words on paper and along with all those stories and that total lack of consistency there was one consistency in that was that they were all rejected I literally have boxes of rejection letters I have well over a hundred of them at home that I'm determined I'm going to keep for the rest of my life because just because anyway so because I was so good at it the first two times I decided to get married again and inevitably number three also led to divorce so apparently I'm better at writing than I am at marriage my nursing career however took off pretty well at this time and I started doing I got actually moved into management positions and while I was doing both nursing and management positions I discovered slowly discovered just what a great sense of humor people that work in the medical field have it's a little dark it's a little twisted the lay people don't always appreciate it but I loved it and I've always had a dark sense of humor my father had a very dark sense of humor and so I did my best to jot down notes every time I heard a good you know Bon mop from somebody or a joke that somebody would say I'd tell them I'm going to steal that and I'm going to use it someday in a story and I have used a bunch of open stories so my my sense of humor really began to twist during that time and while I was living in Virginia and doing this management stuff this is where that first marriage now circles back and becomes important because I told you we had all the bling and the gowns and the church and all the attendance and everything well one of those attendants was the best man and it turns out that's a very accurate term he genuinely was the best man and we hooked up and we have now been together for 35 years 35 years I did not marry him though we've been together for 35 years I'm determined not to mess it up by getting married again so so that's been something that's been a bit of a stability in my life which I probably think I definitely needed while I was doing this management stuff my bosses that I was working with wanted me to go back to school and get my bachelor's degree in Health Care Management and then also move on to getting a master's degree in Healthcare Management it was the obvious Assumption of what I would do in that career I had a bunch of electives that I could take while I was going back to get my bachelor's and I used every one of them well everyone except for an unfortunate piano course every one of them for an elective in writing so I took journalism and technical writing and non-fiction writing I wrote screenplays I did creative writing short fiction long fiction I was just desperate to learn anything I could about writing and one of the classes that I took the fellow who taught it was a grad student who had just had his first novel published and after the class was done I actually hired him to critique my my novel writing for me because I felt like I was I was writing I was trying to improve my skills I was reading books I was taking classes but I just felt like I wasn't quite grasping it yet and I needed that one extra step so for I don't know several months he and I met at a coffee shop once a week and I would give him a chapter of this novel I was working on and he would take it home and he'd red pencil it and then we'd meet again the next week and he'd give it back to me and we'd discuss it and he'd tell me what was good and what wasn't good and then I'd you know given the next chapter and that went on until we finished the novel and I felt like I got so much help from that and so I decided to go ahead and submit that novel started trying to find an agent because that's usually the first step for novel type works is to find an agent not a publisher so I started submitting to agents I submitted that book to quite a few agents and um got 50 rejections after 50 rejections I said maybe this book isn't it by the way that was another romance novel so I threw it into the bottom of the closet which I kind of felt like that's where romance belonged sometimes and then I had to make the decision about moving on to the master's degree in Healthcare Management and I also discovered that I really wasn't really fond of management in nursing I kind of missed bedside nursing and I didn't like all the politics involved with management stuff so I made the decision to not pursue the master's program my bosses were all absolutely horrified I thought they were going to fire me they were so disappointed in me and I made myself a pact and I said if you know I don't make if I don't succeed with this writing stuff by the time I'm 40 I'm just going to give it up because clearly it just wasn't meant to be and I think at this time I was in my late 30s 37 38 so if I'm not published by the time I'm 40 that's it I'm done well at the age of 39 I managed to sell an article to a hospice magazine I was a hospice nurse a hospice director program director at the time and I sold my first you know published piece and I was paid by five copies of the magazine no money but I was published so I had met my goal all right that happened before I was 40. so then at the time I was reading mostly horror Supernatural kind of stuff like Dean Koontz and some Stephen King and things like that and I particularly enjoyed Dean Koontz and I decided to go ahead and start another novel and I wrote out wrote a supernatural Thriller type of Novel that I thought was kind of in the same vein as as Dean Koontz and once I had it done I started submitting that out to more agents so adding on to my 50 rejections from the first novel I got another 39. including one Charming fellow who wrote don't quit your day job on my query letter this was back in the days of snail mail you know it wasn't email you actually had to put a put your letter in an envelope and look up the address and stick a stamp on it and mail it and then wait for the answer and this gentleman returned my initial query letter in the envelope that I had to enclose the self-addressed stamped envelope with the handwritten note in the corner don't quit your day job so that doesn't really help your your ego a whole lot you know it's like maybe I'm really not cut out for this but one Sunday afternoon I'm at home and I'm vacuuming and I've got the stereo playing really loud and I'm belting out music and I hear the phone ring and I go over and figure it's family friends whatever and I'm like hello what do you want turned out it was an agent calling me and I thought agent on a Sunday maybe this is a hoax I actually accused her of trying to trick me uh thank goodness she was actually a very kind woman and she talked to me about the book and then after a while she said you know let's let's work together I I really like this book make a few changes and I'm going to go ahead and submit it so I'm thinking hey I finally found an agent I'm I'm on track here I knew that that wasn't the end of it she had to submit that you know to Publishers and we still had a ways to go but I felt like I was making progress so then after I made the changes and gave it back to her she goes all right I'm going to submit this book and she calls me within the week I think it was and she says so we have harpercollins interested and they're willing to offer you X dollars amount and when she said that I was just so shocked to hear Harper Collins interested in a dollar amount that at first I thought she was saying I had to pay them that much money and I was calculating in my brain can I do that can I do that and then she said however there's also interest from Warner and now we have a bidding war going and I'm thinking oh my God this is it my career is made a bidding war well the initial bid from Harper Collins was for five thousand dollars and then Warner came back with 7 500 and then Harper came back with ten thousand and I'm going come on guys get up to the big numbers you know that's where it stopped so this was in 1995. and that book which was called cold white Fury came out in 1996 and my my proudest moment when that book came out was that someone compared it to Dean Koontz and they used that quote on I think it was on the back cover and harpercollins went ahead and signed me up for two books it was a two-book contract so eyes of Knight was my second book with them and both of those books did really well they they had good sales cold white Fury even went into a second printing so I thought well this is how it starts we get off slowly but you know we're moving along and things are going to get better and after I had turned in my second book they negotiated with my agent and contracted for a third book and the third book was called second site and on that one you notice my name was in bigger print on the bottom that's always a good sign that your name's in bigger print and I think this is it you know we're moving along everything's going all three of these books were what they call Mass market paperbacks so the little you know store carts you know or store rack paperback size and right before second site was due to come out which was in 19 it followed 1998. in the spring of 1998 Harper Collins decided for whatever reason that they were going to get rid of their paperback division their Mass Market paperback Division and all the authors that were being produced in that in originally in in paperbacks were either going to be promoted to hardcover or they were going to be dropped well guess who got dropped so um they actually are our editor that we were working with made us a verbal offer for a fourth book but then that verbal offer was not followed up with an actual contract so my agent and I were kind of left hanging and since this all happened before my book came out they didn't do anything to promote it because they knew that I wasn't going to be their author anymore and so the sales on this book Tanked it didn't do very well at all and so as a result of that harpercollins of course then gave me the boot so now I had no publisher anymore so my agent and I put our heads together and she said well you know that's okay we just got to write another book and now I had managed to sell cold white Fury after writing the whole book but I was able to sell the other two books based on just a synopsis so a few pages of what the story was going to be about and they paid me for that and then just trusted that I was going to write the book that was pretty nice I liked that idea so my agent then informed me that we weren't going to be able to sell a book that way to a new publisher I was going to have to write the whole book again which took me the better part of a year to write a book so um so I said about trying to work on that and there was an another book idea that I had had in the back of my head for quite some time excuse me quite some time that was more of a mystery book A humorous mystery that was going to utilize the humor that I had been experiencing all my life in the medical field I wanted something that would just share that really twisted dark sorry sense of humor that medical people tend to have and I started trying to write it when I was in Virginia and it just wasn't quite working for me I mean this I had the setting in Virginia that's where you know I was working at the time some of the funniest people I ever met I worked with at hospitals in Virginia but it just wasn't coming together right and I wanted to try to work on that book again so I kind of spent the better part of a year toying between writing another paranormal suspense book or writing this mystery book and you know my agent kept saying so what are you doing what do you got for me and I said I don't really know yet and I kept saying well I kind of got this but I kind of got that and I just don't know where I'm going with this and then I decided for reasons I'm not sure I can remember to move from Virginia to Wisconsin and then once I got to Wisconsin I do have a sister who lives in Madison I was part of a large part of the reason we moved to Wisconsin uh once I moved to Wisconsin that medical book that I was trying to write the medical humor one started to work I changed the setting to Wisconsin the more I got to know Wisconsin the better and Wisconsin is just quirky enough and weird enough that it all worked it all came together and I said this is great I love this book I love it and so I was just about to pitch it to my agent and she said you know what I'm sick of this business this is driving me nuts I can't believe what Harper Collins did you did to you she had another author I won't name the author but it was an author that began with this agent and then this author became much bigger and promptly dumped this agent and went for a different one and she was kind of hurt by that so I think after that and what Harper Collins did to me and some other authors that she had she just said you know what I'm retiring from this business I don't want to do it anymore so this is great now I have no publisher and no agent I'm back to square one so my great career that I thought was taken off has totally rolled into the ditch so I kept working on that humorous mystery and for a while I was also doing um book reviews for barnesandnobles.com site their online site I got hooked up there with one of the other authors that I had learned or gotten to know online and I was a very early online person using The Prodigy service probably nobody ever remembers Prodigy but I was online in a writer's group on Prodigy and and some of the people that I met there I'm still good friends with today and this was in 1992. it was before I sold my first book um anyway this other writer had hooked me up with um a lady named Jamie at barnesandnoble.com who was sending out books you know you'd get early copies of books to read and write reviews for them that they would then post on the bnn.com site and they paid really well for it back then they paid like 250 bucks for a review and I could crank out five or six of them a week and it was great I was like great I get to read books for a living I can I can deal with this and I was doing that when I moved to Wisconsin and uh because I decided I was just giving up nursing all together for a while and um unfortunately about two years I guess after we moved to Wisconsin barnesandnoble.com decided to change the pay from 250 review to 25 a review and so I went looking for a nursing job and that just so happens that the little town I live in of Stoughton has a hospital a very good Hospital actually a nice little Hospital there with an emergency department and I had dabbled in ERS in the past I had done a lot of different things everything from birth to death I worked OB which was just horrible my God I don't know why anybody likes to do OB and there's so many people so many nurses who say my dream job is OB sorry um but it was horrible it was like the worst nursing job I ever had hospice I really loved it was it was good I spent a lot of years doing IV therapy I was on an IV team and I went around and just poke needles on people all day long it was actually kind of fun I got to meet a lot of people I got to travel around the hospital you know I wasn't taking care of a single patient for 12 hours so if you get a really cranky hard to take care of patient for 12 hours that can be challenging IV team you just go in you poke them and you're on your way um I did run into a few issues when I first moved to Virginia I was working on the IV team there I was actually heading the IB team there and they they talk about things a little differently in the South below the Mason-Dixon Line there some some wordings are a little different and I'd never lived below the Mason-Dixon Line before and so one day I came up to the room of a patient you know a gentleman that we'd been taken care of for he's been in the hospital for a few weeks and I had been off on vacation and this was my first day back and I came down the hall and his wife was standing out in the hallway and she was leaning against the wall they were African-American couple and I walked up to her and I said hey how's Howard doing today and she said oh he's gone home I said he's going home fantastic that's great that's wonderful no she said he's gone home meaning he had died he had passed away so I'm out in the hallway cheerleading the fact that her husband has just passed away so I learned you know I learned the language a little bit when I moved to Virginia they don't have phlegm in Virginia they have phleem things like that now I lost my train of thought here let me see where it's going oh yeah so sense of humor I was working on the um on trying to get that book written that that had all the uh uh humor stuff in it that that I wanted to get out there trying to see which slide I'm on here hold on just one second and I used that book I wrote it I finished it and I used it to try and find myself a new agent so I went looking and hunting and I finally found a new agent I found a gentleman who I hired and or we agreed to work together we contracted to work together and um he was not the quickest to respond to me he told me he was submitting the book but he never really he would tell me that so-and-so rejected it but he never showed me any actual rejection letters or rejection emails because emails were becoming a pretty popular thing by then and we played around and danced around for about three years and during that time he did manage to get the rights to my books from harpercollins back reverted to me so that I could republish them if I wanted to because they were out of print at that point uh but that's all he accomplished and so after three years with much much trepidation I was the one who rejected this time and I fired him but it just scared me to death to be agentless once again because I felt like that was sort of my security blanket and you know my little rope to Future progress so um I went back on the uh looking for an agent again and and after several tries I just got disgusted and at that point self-publishing was becoming something of a thing so I decided you know what I'm just going to self-publish this book I'm going to put it out there I decided to use a company that would let me get my rights back to the book If I got lucky enough to actually find someone who wanted to publish it later and so in my delightful ignorance of self-publishing I decided to go ahead and pull that trigger I don't know can you say that these days pull the trigger probably not um anyway I had a great title for this book I loved this title everybody else hates it but I loved this title and I not only love this title I envisioned this as being a series and I had all these wonderful punny titles for all the subsequent books I had them mapped out I had synopsis written for them I had this whole thing figured out so I self-published the vicarious liver yes so this was actually a very good title because I'm going to explain my my theory here it was about well it's it's actually working stiff as the first book in the Maddie Winston series it did get published eventually legitimately but um the uh person the main character is a nurse who goes to work for a coroner in a small town in Wisconsin and the first case in this book she ends up solving the case during an autopsy by observing something with the liver of a patient who's been killed and it has to do with someone who's living a life that's not really their own and so I thought the vicarious liver what a great pun I love it and I had a gut reaction I had an eye for an eye I had all these other anatomically Associated titles and and you know plots to go with them I thought it was just brilliant and everybody else hated them I had that book out probably for three years and during those three years I think I made three hundred dollars I was super excited for the release of it I thought it's just going to be I'm going to be famous right away it's going to be instant success you know but that's pretty much where my self-published book was and to this day a lot of unfortunately a lot of self-published books end up like that it's just the Sea of self-published books is getting bigger and bigger and bigger every year because now it's much easier to do and everybody's doing it and there's no way to really make your book stand out and by the time I did this it was in 2000 and I think it was in 2003 or 2004. and by then I lost the audience that I had with my books that came out in 96 97 and 98 you know I've been too many years plus the last one nobody saw anyway because it had such a dismal sales so there really was no carryover to Beth Amos at least in my world there was no carryover there was carryover in other worlds though we'll get into that in just a second so since this book did so dismally I um I got kind of disgusted and gave up on the idea of that I did write during that time another suspense kind of paranormal suspense novel but and tried to find another agent I did find one for a little while that asked me to make some changes to it and I would resubmit it and she had me change it again and I'd resubmit it and after doing that five or six times I said you know I don't even recognize my own book anymore I don't think this is working so I'm just going to move on so by then I was getting pretty good at firing agents um but I resigned myself to the fact that this just wasn't going to happen the writing career I'd had my my moments and and that was as good as it was going to get and thank God I had a nursing career one day out of the blue the serendipitous part of this after I was raising the White Flag I get this phone call from Jamie the gal that I used to do the the book reviews for it bnn.com and she says hey I'm working as an agent now do you have anything it's like do I have anything so she just took me on like that and I sent her the vicarious liver and I sent her my paranormal suspense book as well um she submitted both of them the the Paranormal suspense book we never could get a bite on but um the vicarious liver we were able to sell to Kensington publishing and part of a three book contract so they wanted to do a series and I was more than happy to do it they've insisted that we retitle it of course there was one problem however that book of mine from 1998 that harpercollins had abandoned had had dismal sales and apparently bookstores have very long memories and very long histories that they can look into and since Beth Amos had sold crappy in 1998 they weren't going to buy any more books from her so they weren't going to put my name on the book they wanted me to come up with a suit in them and I'm like a pseudonym okay well let's think at first I thought it was kind of fun let's think up a new name that would be creative so I took my middle name which is Anne and I took my son's first name which is Ryan and I said all right Ann Ryan then I sent that to my editor and he said okay great and then he got back to me about a day later and said you know what there's like a bazilian and Ryan's out there can we make it a little more unique so it stands out and I said well in German class in high school my name was annalize you know how they give you a name in those language classes in high school I said how about annalize Ryan he goes I like it and so that problem was solved and Annelise Ryan was born all right that's when my marketing struggles began because I now had annalize Ryan to market for but most of the people in the world who knew me knew me as Beth Amos and some of them knew me as Beth Askew and some of them knew me as Beth Springer and some of them knew me as Beth Webb because you know I was married a few times but anyway most of them knew me as Beth Amos because I just hung on to that name I got tired of changing it back all the time so I just hung on to that one and um yeah it's like how am I going to Market this now do I have to create a website for annalize Ryan and then Facebook started to become popular so I joined Facebook and I had to create an author page for Annelise Ryan but I already had a page of my own for my personal stuff so I had those two pages to keep up with and should I come up with a new website or is bethamos.com still going to work or should I have one that says annaliserion.com and then my editor suggested maddiewinston.com because that's the character's name and that might make it easier for people to find it and if for a period of time I had both annelieserion.com and maddiewinston.com and I spent a great deal of time just trying to keep up with all of that stuff the Manny Winston series did has done really well there's it's a 12 book series at this point the last book that came out last year was dead even and during the time that I was writing these books with Kensington around book number four or so my editor said you know I've already always had this idea for a book I wanted to see a mystery that was set in a cheers kind of setting like a bar setting and we could put like recipes for drinks in the back because back then you know still I think a lot of the Mysteries were all including recipes for all baked goods and and all kinds of dishes and how to keep your house neat and tips for that there's all these little extras so he thought it would be great to have this bar setting for a new mystery series and I said well so I could do that and I thought about it for a while and he wanted me to put together a synopsis and I thought well I think I'll set this one in Milwaukee because it's a bigger city and there's lots of bars there and I used to be a cocktail waitress and a bartender so I knew a little bit about the bar life and making drinks and anyway I put together a synopsis for him and said I'm going to have this this bar owner who's going to help solve crimes in Milwaukee but just to make it interesting I'm going to give her a little neurological disorder called synesthesia and it was something that when I was writing second site that book way back in 1998 that was abandoned by Harper Collins I was researching things about auras and other stuff and I came across this weird neurological disorder called synesthesia where your your senses kind of get cross-wired so people with synesthesia may see something but that site also triggers a taste or it may trigger a sound inside their head or maybe they hear a sound and that triggers a taste or a smell for them so it's kind of like a cross wiring of your senses and I made my character have this disorder and I made it worse than than most I kind of exaggerated a little bit and he loved the idea and so a new series idea was born but there was one little problem at that point we were at like book four or five of the Maddie Winston series and they weren't sure yet how well that was going to go it takes a few books for a series to catch on so they didn't want to put annalize Ryan on the cover because annalize Ryan what happens if Maddie Winston tanks then your new series is also going to tank however what if this new series tanks and Maddie Winston is doing okay maybe tanking the new series will affect Manny Winston so we want you to come up with a new pseudonym so okay Allison K Abbott was born I put a little thinking into this one first of all I got strategic from a marketing standpoint if you walk into a bookstore you walk up to the mystery section eye level top shelf are all the a names I knew that from being Beth Amos because I was up there with that Andrews person VC who had the entire rest of the shelf and was dead at that point but still writing um so I I wanted to have that good marketing position so I thought I'm going to have a last name that starts with an a a b b even better so Abbott that's good and then I thought you know what I'm going to make this a little inside joke for me here and so I came up with a first name that started with an A and through that middle initial in there so that the initials were AKA also known as and I gave the name to my editor and he immediately emailed me back and he goes very clever and I love that about him he caught on to it so fast nobody else did but he did unfortunately he left Kensington after a while and I inherited a new editor and then she left and I inherited yet another editor but in the meantime the Max Bar series by Allison K Abbott went through six books it was sort of a planned ending for the six books which is nice it didn't just disappear and drop off at the end I think it's a great series I really love the stories they've been out now for I don't know it's been about six years I guess since the last one came out or maybe five years um anyway they're really good books if you can still find them that they're very available in ebook some of the paper ones are hard to find during all of this though of course now I've got marketing challenges even worse because now I have two pseudonyms plus my real name to try to keep track of with websites and Facebook pages and Twitter accounts and oh my God and then I would have book signings where sometimes I was signing books for both authors and I was like I would just ask everybody how do you want me to sign this and I actually had different signatures I made my A's different depending on who I was signing as just to try to keep myself straight anyway also during that time my editor my new editor middle editor at Kensington said um we're going to do we'd like to see a spin-off series for Maddie Winston because it's doing so good so I went ahead and created a character in one of the later books I think in dead of winter that became a spin-off character for her own series that ended up having two books come out excuse me um so I had a little bit of an identity crisis at this point because I really wasn't sure you know who I was from one day to the next who I was writing as and I was trying to produce at least two books a year or two which was a little bit of a strain on me and then um I get a phone call one day from my agent Jamie and she said hi I'm gonna quit agenting she says because I'm going to start writing my own books and today she's actually very successful women's fiction author she's done very well for herself but basically she quit the good news was that the one of her Partners at the agency was going to take me on so I didn't have to go hunting for a new agent I sort of inherited one right away and this new agent Adam is a very has a very extensive history dealing with movies and TV options he's all about the movie TV production kind of stuff and spends a lot of time out in La trying to negotiate things and so he actually got a couple of movie interests in the Maddie Winston series that we got excited about but then nothing happened and that's pretty much the way most of those things go but a lot of times they'll pay you money just for the right to be able to make something if they want to for like a year and they'll you get what you call an option and they'll say hey we'll pay you a thousand bucks if you let us just be the only people that can make something of this for the next year and it's like okay fine I don't have to write anything new I don't have to do anything they're just going to give me money that's great and I've learned not to tell people about those those potential deals because they they almost never happen well for me they never happen however there was a little bit of excitement because in 2019 we got interest from a production company that works a lot with Hallmark and the Hallmark has a lot of these mystery shows that they do that are based on other mystery novels and they were interested in doing a Maddie Winston mystery series and so we were all excited they had an actress tied to it they had a scriptwriter tied to it everything was looking really good and then covet hit so the production company went ahead and put everything on hold for the time being Hallmark wasn't doing anything for a little while the actress ended up moving on to something else the script writer never finished the script the option expired but they renewed it for a second year it was like we're still interested we still think they want to do it we're going to go ahead and renew that option and then all of the management people at Hallmark did some shuffling and the new people that came in didn't want to do it so the Hallmark mystery thing fell apart so that was a little bit of a disappointment because we came very close with that one and I thought that was the one that was really going to happen book 11 in the Maddie Winston series came out and typically they were doing a hard cover for me in one year and then they the following year when the next book would come out they'd do a paperback of the previous one and so book 11 had come out in hardcover and then the following spring when Book 12 came out I was looking for the paperback online and I couldn't find it listed anywhere and so I mentioned to my agent I said you know I don't see the paperback version for I can't remember now what the title is that's terrible um but it's supposed to come out the same time as dead even and he goes well let me call him and find out and we found out that what was going on was that Hallmark I mean Hallmark Kensington forgot to tell us that hey we're not going to do any more Maddie Winston books and we're not going to issue these in paperback either so once again I was without a publisher still had an agent though so I'm a little ahead of the game and with covet and everything everybody's staying at home so I had a year to just kind of do whatever I wanted so I spent that year I'm going to write something different I'm going to Branch out a little bit and I had this great idea for a novel that was kind of in the in the same field as as Gone Girl that kind of a suspense novel spend a year writing it I was super proud of it I was very excited about it I couldn't wait for my agent to read it I sent it out to him knowing that he was going to love it and that was his reaction to it so at that point I'm thinking oh geez all right my writing career is once again finished I'm done this is over I just can't take it anymore and at the same time I had to also deal with my mother who's never been an easy person to live with as I mentioned before she had a lot of mental health issues and and she proceeded to have a stroke and was living in Georgia at the time and my other three sisters are all ostracized from her and would have nothing to do with her and so I had to go down to Georgia get I had to bring her up to Wisconsin go down to Georgia sell her house pack it all up move it up here find her an assisted living Place she's physically capable but she has short-term memory loss and confusion so I was dealing with all of that and dealing with this rejection from my agent and how he hated my book that I just spent a whole year writing and I was feeling pretty down and my agent called me on the on the phone one day and I was you know talking to him and licking my wounds and saying you know I spent a whole year writing this how can you hate it and we started brainstorming a little bit and um we came up with a really good idea for a book I came up with a really good idea for a book and I pitched it to him and he said I like the sound of that he said can you give me 50 pages and a synopsis for it and I said I'll see what I can do so I banged that out in about two weeks and and sent it to him and he sent it to some editors at Berkeley and they really liked it but they wanted to do an interview with me on the phone and I ended up having to do this interview with them in the middle of trying to pack up and move my mother's house in Georgia at which point I also had to move I had to get her cat which was still in Georgia and bring it up to Wisconsin and drive her car up here I tried to medicate her cat before the trip and the cat bit me in the hand and this was the day before the interview was the day before so I was literally laying on a bed that had been torn apart ready for the movers to come trying to do this interview with these editors and sound all happy and excited about this new book that I was pitching it must have gone okay because Berkeley did contract for two books and that's how we get to this which think God is written as annalize Ryan so I don't have to come up with a new pseudonym they were happy to stick with annalize Ryan they actually liked the Maddie Winston books so this is um uh oh cat bite story let me finish that cat bite Story by the time I got drove all the way back up to Wisconsin listening to the cat Squall the entire time never did get the pill down it by the time I got up here I had red streaks running up my arm and so I went to the ER urgent care where I used to work I have since retired from there but they took one look at me and it's like yeah we're admitting you to the hospital so they admitted me upstairs just for some IV antibiotics I had a room a private room to myself I had a remote control TV I had a phone where I could call and order my food with no diet restrictions and they'd deliver it to my room it was the most peaceful 24 hours I had had in months I actually enjoyed my hospitalization sadly the next morning the doctor came around and said I think we can let you go home and switch you to oral antibiotics and I was like do you have to can I stay one more day anyway so I finished writing this book because we were able to contract with just the 50 pages that I'd submitted to them and it came out last week it's been out now for 10 days I think nine days something like that and the idea that I came up with was for a bookstore owner in Door County uh who's also a cryptozoologist and for those of you who may not know a cryptozoologist is somebody who hunts for Cryptids which are creatures rumored to exist but not proven so so things like Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot and her bookstore is not your ordinary everyday bookstore it's called odds and ends because she sells mystery books which is the ends because somebody always dies in a mystery book but the odds are The Oddities that she and her parents who were also cryptozoologists have collected over the years so she sells the bizarre things in her store skulls and and insects you know in lucite and you know ancient tarot card decks and Ouija boards and things like that and she has a mummified mascot that she keeps by the front door also so it's not your typical store I thought it was a pretty bizarre pitch but hey they liked it so and I'm working on the second book um in fact I'm almost done with the second book now which will be taking place actually in in Bayfield Wisconsin and will feature a Bigfoot this one's got a Loch Ness monster in case you hadn't guessed from the cover but um so we're actually headed up to Bayfield when we leave here to do just a little last bit of research so that's how I've gotten to where I am today in my life these days is pretty much spent researching stuff that I'm pretty sure has me on a watch list or two we actually had our garbage stolen a few years ago so I'm pretty sure I'm on a watch list or two I was walking at the dog park one day A couple of years ago and often underneath the trees I saw this rounded white thing laying on the ground and it was had a few dirt marks on it and I got all excited because I thought it was a skull I thought I'd found a body it was actually a giant puffball mushroom but I went home and I told my husband I said I think there's something wrong with me because I got really excited thinking that I had just seen a skull my mind continues making up stories I tell a lot of my friends and family that that I'm basically a vampire if you hang around me long enough I'm gonna suck some of your character traits off of you and use them in my characters and my books all the characters in my books are kind of Dr Frankenstein Creations just bits and pieces that I take from people I meet and patients I've had and stories that I've encountered and and I use them to to create the people in my books so in conclusion that's what successes looked like for me you know this is what success looks like for most people but what it's really been like for me obviously is this little kind of uh Hoodwinked um crisscrossed two steps forward one step back kind of thing and I'm hoping that I can continue to write until the day I die and uh maybe even after that who knows and I do like Paranormal stuff um I think that this is I'm very proud of this book I think it's one of the best ones that I've written I think that over the years I've honed my writing talents through all of the classes and books and practice sessions and rejections and things that I've done um so I I hope people will enjoy it it doesn't have quite the same level of humor in it that the Maddie Winston Mysteries do the Maddie Winston Mysteries are are quite funny actually if you enjoy a good laugh with your Mysteries then you should try some of those because Maddie Winston is a very very cynical um sometimes dark and twisted person as most nurses that I know are and doctors anybody that works in the medical field or EMS or police or fire all those kind of emergency people tend to be that way and uh the human I think I have I think I have a good sense of humor in general I've kind of again that class clown practice and telling lies is I kind of hone that over the years you learn to make people laugh it helps you fit in a little bit better so there is some humor in this one but it's not quite as funny as the Maddie Winston books it's a little more serious and that's all I have to say so any questions I tried I tried to quit and I just can't I can't I can't not write I don't know there's something about it's just it's just something I actually sent my very first story out trying to get it published when I was 17 and I sent it to Highlights magazine they rejected it very quickly but that was the start of my career so I'm I've all through school if that if we were signed essay tests or or book reports or anything that had to do with writing I was like yes this I can do I was good at math too but I liked the writing part better so it's just something I've always I just can't not do it I had a diary when I was very young but I also had three sisters who were younger than me and they learned how to pick the lock pretty quickly and then they read it and then they squealed on me and so I quit doing that so I've always been writing I just don't know how to not write that's a good question there you go that would have been embarrassing if they weren't any other questions so I got her so self-publishing self-publishing within the digital age has really taken on a life of its own um and there's there's all kinds of companies out there now that it's sort of hybrid Publishers where they actually contract with a writer to share the costs of developing the book and putting it out there um some people are going that route some people completely self-publish Amazon now you can put your own book out there I have two self-published books myself actually those two books that I wrote in the past that never got published I decided to self-publish them and they're out there they don't they hardly ever sell I think I made two dollars and ninety cents in royalties last month on across from four books across all the platforms they're on so um five books because I republished all of the harpercollins ones too um the problem with self-publishing is that it costs a lot of money up front if you want to do it right you really need to put in the money to have a much better cover than what I had on the vicarious liver that cover was just hideously awful but I was too stupid to know it at the time and I have no artistic taste or talent and that kind of stuff at all um and you need to have the ability to write really well and there's a lot of people out there who don't have the the ability to write they just want to see their name on a book they want to see a book with their name on it and they don't care how bad their writing is they just want to publish it and so they've all putting them out there now and the markets just flooded with self-published books some of which are quite good most of which are god-awful they're just frankly terrible I mean I've randomly sampled self-published books periodically you can go into Amazon and do the read inside thing and read some of the stuff and they have no no concept of grammar there's misspelled words there's incomplete sentences rambling sentences I mean it's just really really horrible bad stuff and the problem is that the really good self-published writers don't there's no good way for them right now to rise above you know to become the cream on top of the Kurds down below I don't even know if that's how I'm in cheese country I should know better than that but um there's just no way for them to get noticed you know with traditional publishing going through like harpercollins or Berkeley or Kensington there's at least a gatekeeping system there's you know there's editors there's agents and people who are screening these things and so in theory only the good stuff gets through I mean there's still direct that gets traditionally published I know there is 50 Shades of Gray but um which actually was self-published I think first but anyway if you write porn you can do anything but if you're writing anything else or soft porn if you're writing anything else you're probably going to have a struggle ahead of you with the self-publishing route it's not easy the traditional route either I mean the industry is really struggling these days it's struggling to figure out what what is what it wants to be you know when when Harper Collins dropped me that was when ebooks were really starting to become a thing and that was one of the reasons why they decided to do away with their paper I gotta quit doing that paperback division the problem is that I never quite understood why they dumped all their own paperbacks and then bought Avon paperbacks I wasn't sure what the logic of that was but I didn't ask um and back then a lot of the big New York Publishers were kind of merging and buying up the littler companies and a lot of stuff was happening a lot of changes were occurring and they still are they're still going on right now there's five you know major Publishers in New York City if you count Kensington which is a family-owned smaller company six but there's not a lot of companies out there to get traditionally published with they all have their little subsets so like Berkeley has penguin and they have um and I can't think of what the other titles are now but they have other other imprints that they publish under so it looks like a lot of Publishers but it's actually just one big company with self-publishing people don't have to wait as long to get their books out you know I write a book I turn it in my editor reads it and if you know they want changes they send it back to me once it's approved by my main editor it goes to a copy editor who then looks it over and fixes like all the commas that I put in that I wasn't supposed to and you know if I have a continuity error somewhere they try to catch that stuff then they send it back to me to read over their suggested changes and either approve or Nix those then it goes into page production and then you get some months later you get what they call galleys or page proofs which is printed out pages that show what the actual book page will look like and it's your last chance to go through and read and make any changes or Corrections that you want to make and then eventually the book comes out but that process takes a year or more from the time that you finish writing the book so you figure you write the book and if that takes you six months to a year you turn it in and it's another year before it comes out and don't even get me started on how payment is made through the traditional Publishers because the way they pay their royalties out you do get in advance hopefully an advance against royalty so they pay you some money up front but then you have to sell a certain number of copies in order to make back the money that they've already paid you before you ever see another Cent and they pay you for for instance I will get a check at on December around December 1st I'll get a check from Kensington that will be for sales that happen during the first six months of this year so there's like a six month lag time from when you sell the stuff to when you actually get the check and on top of that they hold a certain number of the books that they print and send out in what they call reserves because bookstores basically still all operate on a consignment level you know the bookstores will buy books from the publisher they'll put them on the shelves they can keep them there for a month for a year for three years those books don't sell they can send them back to the publisher for a full refund so yep so if the publisher is paying me for books that they think have sold and then you know a year later that book comes back to them and hasn't sold and they want to recoup their money so they hold a certain number of the sales in reserves and they don't they kind of slowly let that money come out so you get paid you get paid in these weird increments over long periods of time and you never know how much you're going to get until you actually get the check so it's kind of a an awkward payment system self-publishing you can put that book up there as soon as you want to you can start collecting money right away but it's probably not going to be a lot of money because nobody's going to buy your book nobody's going to know what's out there they're not going to see it just takes a while to build up any kind of a platform if you get a lot of good reviews that can help you but if nobody knows your books out there and nobody reads it how are you going to get the reviews and a lot of the you know Publishers Weekly and those kind of places that do standard book reviews they won't review self-published books kirkus will now review self-published books but you have to pay to have them review it so you're paying somebody to review your book am I going to trust the review from a company that's getting paid to write that review they say that they'll be honest and if they don't like the book they'll say so but I'm a little skeptical so it's a very complicated industry and there's just tons of books out there now I mean you can find a book on just about anything I think that the fantasy and science fiction World tends to favor the self-publishing writers a little more than some of the other genres do but that's just from what I've read online from other other authors and stuff so I don't know if that really answers your question but it's kind of it's complicated industry it's not as straightforward as nursing you know I can look at somebody if they're blue I know what to do any other questions that's a good question that's a good question you know when when ebooks came out people were saying that print books were going to die out we were going to have many more they were going to disappear that hasn't happened and actually print books are now becoming more popular I still most of the royalties that I get from my Manny Winston books are on e-book sales but that's primarily because the Publishers quit printing them it cost them money to print them it cost them nothing to do the e-books once they've paid the initial setup price you know but the good news about that is that I get a higher royalty on on the e-books just because it doesn't cost them as much money to produce the books so you know I I don't think print books will ever disappear they'll be around forever and I think they're going to see a comeback I hope so because I love I love the look of them the feel of them the smell of them to this day every time I get my box of of author copies of a book it still doesn't get old 26 books into this to open that book open that box up and see those books for the first time and the first thing I do is take them out and smell them oh I know I yeah yeah yeah and they're not all buying Nooks yes they all are well except the harpercollins books because they're they're only available as ebooks because they went out of print with Harper and I I re-issued them but only a z books so because I self-published them but yes all the others are available on Audible all right I actually I confess that I almost all of my reading these days is done on audibles because I I spend pretty much every morning taking my dog and my grand puppy to the dog park and walking a couple of miles three four miles every day and listening to books that's my primary reading time so a really good well done audible book is is quite entertaining I really enjoy them so and I think they're all done very well actually I'm listening actually to this one myself right now I just got a death and Door County as an audible and I've been listening to it just to see how because this is a new new narrator for me Maddie Winston books are all done by the same person on the audible books so but this is a new person so I just wanted to see how to do it she's doing a great job it's also fun though I mean it's frustrating but it's fun you know most most writers have when Dean Koontz became famous it was back in the 70s and 80s it was a little easier for authors to hit it big then because publishing was a different industry and it was only print books and people were buying books a lot you know the generations that are coming up are not book readers they're they're digital they're used to digital stuff they want to see a screen their phones their computers their tablets you know they're not used to the whole book thing and so I think that's part of why the industry is is Shifting but there's still some some old souls out there that you know are reading the books it's just a completely different world right now than it was when Dean Koontz hit it big so and if you're a dog lover I have there's dogs I think in every one of my books any other questions great well um somebody was asking about books for sale I did bring some of my author copies along because I had some I was going to give away to some folks up in Bayfield but I can mail them books later so if any of you want to purchase one of those books then the money that for the book will just be donated to the library so I had my husband bring over a few from the hotel room so if you're interested we could do that and then that's all I got so thank you very much for coming tonight I appreciate it at least I didn't have a complete um stand up and I thanks I have learned that when I do a book signing in a bookstore the first thing I need to do is find out where the bathrooms are because most of the people that come up to the table that's what they want they don't want your book they want to know where the bathroom is little tricks of the trade