ARCHIVE FOR Katrin Schumann

What's launching your book really like? 

By Katrin Schumann

Your first event is with a panel of authors in front of a crowd of 200 people. You buy new lipstick and pray your voice doesn’t quiver.

The alarm rings at 5am. The Uber doesn’t turn up. On the road late!

Within three days of your book launch, you catch a cold and lose your voice. It's so bad that you have to postpone your big radio interview.

When we think about launching our books, we dream of doing readings (among other things like catching sight of our books in airports, and, of course, getting on bestseller lists), but in this day and age why are readings still so important to us?

By Katrin Schumann

For a new author, are readings really all they're cracked up to be?

When writing the fiction of violence, Katrin Schumann finds that there are no easy answers about how to get it right. This article first appeared in CrimeReads.

Years ago in a writing workshop in San Francisco, a lanky middle-aged student sitting next to me held his pages in trembling fingers. He began to read aloud a story about a body found in the trunk of a car. As he read, we all listened attentively, drawn in at first by the obvious questions: who was this woman and what had happened to her? We were trying to learn to become better writers

Building a supportive network takes time and courage. Novelist Katrin Schumann argues that it’s worth starting to cultivate community early on, even if your instinct or your preference is to work alone. This post first appeared on JaneFriedman.com.

I’ve always found people who make movies to be awe-inspiring—in order to evoke a world and a story on screen, they need to work together with dozens of other professionals, from front-end people like actors and directors, to back-end people like sound editors

Katrin Schumann explores what it's really like for authors in the months before launching a new book into the marketplace.

A book launch is a prolonged, and frankly rather strange, experience. You've already been working for what seems like ages (and sometimes is ages) on a manuscript. Eons pass as you prepare that manuscript for the reality of a commercial marketplace: editing, cover design, interior design, more editing, acknowledgements, nightmares about who you've forgotten to acknowledge, and diving into promotional activities. Your book--it's themes, characters, the whole point of it--seems far away now. It's become a product, one ...