On this field trip, Gerald and Cheyenne take you to a meeting of the Independent Writers of Southern California (IWOSC) in beautiful downtown Culver City, across from the Sony movie lot. On that same day, the community center where we held the event also had a convention of bodybuilders. No fracas ensued, but we were inspired – to pump you up!
Hosted by IWOSC President Gary Young, we respond to wide-ranging questions and comments from writers and self-publishers who want to get to the next level in their careers:
- What book topics are hot in the marketplace, and which should I undertake?
- Do agents advise against self-publishing?
- Besides selling books, what other ways are there to derive income as an author?
- What’s the current market for memoir, including military-service stories?
- How is an emotional subplot essential to an action story?
- What drives the popularity of historical fiction? Why is it so valuable to our culture?
What’s the appeal of dystopian fiction? What elements does it need?
And on this episode, we add further balance to our team by introducing our Resident Curmudgeon, Thomas Page, author of the sci-fi novel The Hephaestus Plague, which became the B-movie cult classic Bug. Tom narrates a featurette from his collection of "132 Tough Guys."
GetPublished! announcer Bill Navarro quips that host Gerald Everett Jones has the answers – because he’s already made the mistakes himself. And calling him out for his gaffes is the show’s new, we’ll-see-about-that Millennial co-host, Cheyenne Cockrell.
Gerald serves on IWOSC’s board as director of outreach. After a decades-long career as a freelance writer doing more than thirty business and technical books for mainstream publishers, he self-published three nonfiction books (including How to Lie with Charts) and six novels (including Bonfire of the Vanderbilts). He is a recent winner of a WGA Diversity award for his screenplay Christmas Karma.
Cheyenne Cockrell is a voiceover talent and an operations manager of the DirecTV Audience channel. She holds a degree in journalism from Humboldt State.
Discover a wealth of resources for authors and publishers at the GetPublished! Radio website www.getpublished.guru. There’s more information about IWOSC membership and its activities at www.iwosc.org.
