Today’s guest on the Morning Media Menu was author Paul Malmont, talking about his new novel and writing contest.
Malmont (pictured) will give one writer a chance to be published in the paperback edition of his novel, The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown. The author also shared book promotion tips for all the writers in the audience.

Interview excerpts follow below, but here’s more about the contest: “Finish the story begun by one of the characters in the new novel. Start your version with ‘The robot felt…’ Finish with ‘In the end, the robot felt nothing. He wasn’t programmed to.’ The up-to-2000 words in between are all yours.”

Malmont shared some promotional tips: “You’ve got to look around at the other tools that are out there. I’m using an app that was developed for Facebook in particular, it’s the Wildfire app. It makes it very easy to put together a contest like this. It allows for the social voting and everytime somebody votes or writes or submits, that gets broadcast out to their larger network. That will hopefully bring in people that hadn’t heard about the novel before.”

He continued: “When you turned in a book, the question they used to ask was ‘what book will you write next?’ I think that question is now ‘what are you doing to promote that book?’ The publishing companies have pulled way back on what they are doing. They aren’t sending people on tours, they found that people don’t really go to readings anymore … the cost/benefits of a tour don’t pay off the way they used to.”
Malmont concluded: “You can directly contact bookstores all around the country. I’ve been writing the booksellers that I’ve met that I’m not going to get to visit on this tour as I would have liked to. I’m working with them to try and set up other things like streaming video events or live chats.”
(Image by James M. Graham)