AUTHOR INTERVIEW WITH APRIL L. HAMILTON
by Valya Dudycz Lupescu

April L. Hamilton is creating quite a bit of buzz in recent weeks with her Indie novels and her new Web site featuring the free downloads of IndieAuthor Guides. Despite the lack of backing from any major publisher, and with sales generated from word of mouth alone, the Kindle edition of her novel Adelaide Einstein has risen to the #10 spot in Amazon.com’s Kindle bestsellers list under the category of “Motherhood” and since its release on February 12, 2008, has ranked as high as #803 in Kindle bestsellers overall. We spoke with April L. Hamilton about her inspiration, process, and vision for the future.

Valya: Thank you for taking the time to answer a few questions for our ABNA Books audience. For our readers who have not yet read Snow Ball, please describe the novel for us.

April L. Hamilton: Snow Ball is a dark, comic mystery, similar in tone to the Coen brothers’ movie “Fargo”. The story centers on Cinder, a young woman whose husband Luke goes missing in a snowstorm just as she’s coming to grips with the idea that marrying him may have been a mistake. Cinder must confront her own guilty feelings while simultaneously trying to locate Luke. Meanwhile, everyone around Cinder sets about trying to use her and the unfortunate circumstances to advance their own agendas, to the point that it seems Cinder is the only one still hoping to find Luke alive.

Valya: What was your impulse to write Snow Ball? Did you do a lot of research in preparation?

Hamilton: Snow Ball was inspired by the Dilleys, a Midwestern couple who had a large-order birth some years ago. When the pregnancy first came to the attention of the media, the stories all focused on the health risks of multiple birth, the medical advances that would help bring the babies full-term, and so on. But very quickly, the attention shifted from the babies and pregnancy to the Dilleys themselves: how they looked, how articulate they were, and so forth. Pretty soon I was hearing only about Mrs. Dilley’s beauty makeover and the couple’s media deals with Discovery Health and 20/20---not about the babies or pregnancy at all anymore. This inspired me to write a story about a small town woman with a good heart and trusting nature suddenly thrust into the media limelight. It seemed like rich fodder for satirizing the media while also contrasting Cinder against a more high-powered, ambitious woman, and I liked the idea of writing a ‘caper’ type of story with a cast of bumblers and oddballs for the comedic potential.

I didn’t do much research outside of checking a few geographical locations and distances on maps. Many readers have commented on how well I captured the various characters’ regional accents, but that was easy for me because my mother’s family are all from the northern Midwest and I grew up listening to their speech.

Valya: Did you have a readership in mind when you wrote Adelaide Einstein? Do you think it properly falls into the genre of Chick Lit? Or perhaps Crone Lit?

Hamilton: I don’t have a specific readership in mind for anything I write, really. I’d say “Adelaide” is what’s called ‘hen-lit’ nowadays: comic fiction about a middle-aged woman having some kind of life-changing experience.

Valya: Even though Addie and Cinder are two very different characters, both women get “trapped” by their circumstances and have to find their way. In Adelaide Einstein, the protagonist starts out stifled by her life and strives to become more. In Snow Ball, Cinder is trapped by circumstantial evidence and the self-interests of her acquaintances. What was the inspiration for each of these characters?

Hamilton: My mother-in-law Susan was the inspiration for Addie, and in a sense, the whole novel. Having been raised by a working woman in the age of the feminist revolution, I had no idea very traditional, marriage-and-family-centered women like Susan still existed in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Meeting Susan was like seeing an extinct creature alive, in the flesh. I became fascinated by the question of what circumstances could possibly motivate a very traditional woman like Susan to substantially change herself and her life when the feminist revolution had not.

I cut Addie from the same traditional cloth I imagined Susan was, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end. For the sake of drama and comedy I made Addie a bit clumsy and naïve, and put her in an unhappy marriage, none of which reflect Susan or her life. But by the time the novel was finished, I’d gained a new respect for Susan through Addie, and had come to see the value of her traditional ways.

As for Cinder, I modeled her on the Mrs. Dilley I remember seeing back when all that media coverage began: a kind, open-hearted and trusting woman, caught like a deer in the headlights.

Valya: Are you more like Addie or Cinder? Or are you like neither one?

Hamilton: I’d like to think I’m more like the Addie who emerges at the end of Adelaide Einstein: confident and capable, but above all compassionate and generous of spirit. If I’m going to be brutally honest though, I’d have to admit I’m more like Addie’s daughter Patty: a little more smart than I am wise, and self-sufficient to a fault. I share Cinder’s horror of being the center of attention in public situations, but don’t have much else in common with her.

Valya: Both of your novels have strong dialogue that almost reads like a play or screenplay. I'm curious about your process. How is writing dialogue different for you from writing narrative?

Hamilton: I’m trying a different approach with one of my works in progress, but every other novel, short story or screenplay I’ve ever written has followed the same process. I begin with a protagonist and a general challenge or life situation. Next I think about the likely people who would populate the protagonist’s world: family members, friends, co-workers and so on. It sounds kind of goofy to say, but from there I just let the characters do and say what they “want” to, based on who I’ve made them out to be. All I have to do is sit back and write down all the most interesting things they do and say.

I think my novels always seem dialogue-heavy because they’re very light on exposition. My books probably have no more dialogue in them than similar novels currently in print, but the ratio of dialogue to everything else is probably a little higher in my work. This is both a stylistic choice on my part, and a simple matter of taste as a reader. I don’t enjoy reading lengthy passages of description or internal monologue, so I don’t write them either.

Valya: Your books are garnering large numbers of positive reviews on Amazon. Your novel Snow Ball, was even ranked #5 in Mysteries in Amazon’s Kindle bestseller list. What steps are you taking to promote your books, and what would you ultimately like to see happen with your novels?

Hamilton: It would be easier to tell you the things I’m not doing! In a nutshell, since the internet is my primary sales channel I’m doing everything I can think of to leverage the power of the web. I’m blogging, both on Amazon and at Blogger.com, I’ve got an author website set up, I’ve got a CafePress shop set up, I’ve joined a number of writers’ groups, I’ve reached out to local, independent booksellers, I’m posting to discussion groups whenever I’ve got something relevant to say, I’m putting out press releases…I could go on and on, but much of this is covered in my upcoming IndieAuthor Guide to Promotion and IndieAuthor Guide to Establishing Your Brand, both of which I hope to have available on my website in the coming weeks.

As for what I’d ultimately like to see happen…I’m not aiming for bestseller status. I’d just like to see quality, independently-published books like mine achieving the same level of sales and success as those of yestyear's midlist.

Valya: As a self-proclaimed indie author, what do you hope will happen in with the Indie Author Movement? How does this compare with the indie film and music scenes?

Hamilton: I dream of a day when indie authors are taken every bit as seriously as indie musicians and filmmakers, when their books are being read and reviewed with the same frequency, and through the same channels, as their mainstream counterparts.

I see many parallels between today’s indie authors and the indie filmmakers and musicians of the past. In music and film, when consolidations resulted in an industry dominated by a handful of bottom-line-focused, risk-averse media megaconglomerates, legions of artists and their fans were left out in the cold. The ‘smaller’ films and albums, those that had a loyal following but a following not quite large enough to fit the megaconglomerates’ business model, stopped being released by the mainstream. But as soon as quality, affordable tools and technologies became available, filmmakers and musicians jumped at the chance to produce, release and distribute their own work. Now authors have the same opportunity, thanks to ebook and print-on-demand technologies. In fact, our window of opportunity may even be a bit wider since we have the power of the web at our disposal for marketing and promotion right here on the ground floor of the movement.

Valya: How do you see eBooks and Kindle changing the way we read and write in the future?

Hamilton: I don’t imagine paper books will disappear entirely for a very long time, and certainly not in my lifetime. These sorts of fundamental shifts in media require a new generation of early-adopters, people who can’t remember a time when a given technology wasn’t part of their life’s landscape. I’m old enough to recall all the early resistance to ATM cash machines, but anyone aged 30 or younger accepts them without question because ATMs have been a lifestyle fixture for as long as those people have been alive. For them, it’s hard to even imagine having to go to a teller window during banking hours every time you need to get some cash. The same precedent will likely drive the future of electronic print media: if you were raised reading books and periodicals in electronic format, you’ll accept that format more readily than ink on paper.

Valya: You’ve written several IndieAuthor Guides. Can you tell us a little about them and how you went about compiling that information?

Hamilton: I’m a retired software engineer, and in that career I did a great deal of technical writing. I had to document the programs I designed, and I also had to write non-technical user manuals, policies and procedures. I started out as an English major in college, and I’ve been writing prose for as long as I’ve been able to string together complete sentences, so all that writing came much easier to me than most of my engineering peers.

The habit of documenting my work is now completely ingrained in me, to the point that it seems a terrible waste for me to learn a new skill or process without documenting it for the benefit of others. So naturally, as I went about learning how to publish my work via print-on-demand and ebook technologies, I documented everything in the form of my IndieAuthor Guides. The services I’ve used to publish, CreateSpace and Amazon’s Digital Text Platform, have their own how-to guides and the like, and my IndieAuthor Guides recommend starting with a thorough read of those resources. Still, like most vendor-supplied user guides and technical manuals, those documents tend to leave out all the little ‘gotchas’ and unexpected details you only learn about the hard way: while you’re following all the steps involved in actually publishing your work. My Guides aim to fill in those blanks, while also making the whole process more user-friendly with non-technical language and illustrations.

My first four IndieAuthor Guides are available for free download from my author website, at www.aprillhamilton.com, and more are on the way. When the whole series is done I intend to compile them into a single volume for publication as a book for sale, but the individual Guides will remain on my site as free resources for writers, indie and otherwise.

Valya: What would you recommend as first steps for authors who want to become a part of the Indie Author Movement?

Hamilton: The most important thing is also the most primary thing: the work. The indie author movement will only succeed when there’s a critical mass of quality work being published independently. A lot of mudslinging going on as we speak is based in the misguided notion that independently-published work is necessarily inferior work, that if it couldn’t find a home with a big publisher then that’s proof enough it’s no good.

This may have been true before industry consolidations completely reshaped the publishing trade, but now there’s lots of really great work being rejected regardless of how good it is, merely because big publishers don’t foresee enough dollar signs in its future. Nevertheless, we indies are fighting an uphill battle in trying to overcome this bias, and that’s why job one for indie authors must be creating the best work of which they’re capable, and publishing only when it’s every bit as polished and professional as any mainstream-published book. I cover some of that process in my IndieAuthor Guide to Editing. An indie author must strive to ensure his or her book is virtually indistinguishable from mainstream books in terms of how it looks as well, and to that end I’ve written a Guide on the topic of creating your own cover art, and another on formatting for print-on-demand publication with CreateSpace.

When the work is as good as it can possibly be, the next step is to download and read all my IndieAuthor Guides, or buy the book if it’s available by then. Next comes publication, and then the part that’s actually more challenging than anything that came before: actually doing all the marketing and promotion you’ve learned about to get your career started and keep it alive. It may help to remember that when it comes to this last part, indies and non-bestselling mainstream authors are in the same boat. Getting the book out there is only half the battle: getting the word out about it is the rest.

April L. Hamilton's books Adelaide Einstein and Snow Ball can be purchased on ABNA Books, as well as through Amazon.com and April's website, www.aprillhamilton.com

April L. Hamilton lives in Southern California with her husband, two children, and entirely too many pets. When she's not writing, kid-wrangling or pursuing her grandiose and hopeless dream of a neat and orderly household, she can generally be found reading, reclaiming the domestic arts (aka "crafting") or taking in a movie. Learn more about April, her work and her IndieAuthor campaign at http://www.aprillhamilton.com.

Tags: April L. Hamilton, Snow Ball, Adelaide Einstein, Interview, IndieAuthor Guides, Indie Author Movement, abna