An Interview with Valerie Horowitz--January 2014
A life-long cookbook lover, Valerie Horowitz has always worked with books. She has sold out-of-print and rare books, was manager of a bookstore in New York’s Greenwich Village and held various marketing and editorial positions at trade and professional publishers. Currently she is the managing editor of a scholarly publishing company. She is an associate member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, and belongs to Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime. She lives in a house built in the 1750s with her husband, son, and cat in the bucolic northwestern New Jersey farm and horse country where Cinnamon Girl takes place. You can find her online at her Facebook author page:
www.Facebook.com/ValerieHorowitzAuthorPage
Interview with BWG member Carol L. Wright
BWG: Congratulations on independently publishing your first ever novel, Cinnamon Girl, a cozy mystery. Can you tell us a little about your book?
Valerie Horowitz: Thank you! It has been quite a journey to reach this point. I am in my fifties, and have been writing since childhood. While my poetry has been published in literary journals, this is my first published book.
Cinnamon Girl is set in a fictional town in northwest New Jersey, the bucolic part of the state the world does not know about when they think of New Jersey as home of The Sopranos and Real Housewives. While she is busy getting ready for her annual cooking contest/author event at her cookbook and cookware store, Bonnie Emerson, daughter of a former U.S. president, finds the body of a woman near a stream on her property. Filled with cooking and cookbook lore, Cinnamon Girl is the first in a series of Village Cooks mysteries.
BWG: Cozy mysteries often use a hook. Your book seems to have more than one. Your protagonist is a daughter of a past U.S. president and she is the owner of a cookbook store. What inspired you to make those choices?
V.H.: Long ago someone advised writers to “write what you want to read.” (Aha, you thought I was going to say “write what you know.” That's true too.) In the Village Cooks series I am writing about topics that interest me.
There are lots of culinary mysteries out there, and none set in a cookbook store. There is now one series set in a cookbook cafe, but that is different than Village Cooks, which sells cookbooks and cookware. I wanted to write a culinary cozy, but more than that, I wanted to honor my love of cookbooks, and bring them to the attention of my readers. Cookbook sales are still going strong in this digital age, but I groan inwardly whenever someone tells me they got a recipe off the Internet. I love curling up with a good cookbook and a cup of tea.
Ron Reagan came to the NYC bookstore I was working in when he first quit ballet and began writing, and happened to approach me to ask for books on writing. We developed a bit of a friendship over time, as he regularly came in to buy books on the subject. The only copy of the OED I ever sold was to him. He was such an interesting and engaging man, and I saw that his politics differed from his father’s. His situation intrigued me, and I have been appreciative of the circumstances of Presidential children ever since. I have had the good fortune to meet Amy and Jack Carter, Jimmy’s children, on separate occasions, and have met Jimmy Carter twice. I also knew Jimmy’s cousin, Hugh, professionally (he owns a printing company), and heard many wonderful behind-the-scenes tales of life in the White House from him. I am interested in politics myself, so I thought it would be fun to have Bonnie be the daughter of an ex-President, and have the ex-President make cameo appearances in the series. He'll appear at least once in each book. I believe that the political aspect adds spice to the storyline.
BWG: Why did you choose the cozy mystery genre? What cozy authors do you feel had an influence on your work? What other authors have influenced you?
V.H.: I was a literature major and creative writing minor in college, and have read many of the greats. Rather than tear my hair out trying to achieve unique heights of literary fiction, I chose to entertain myself by writing in a genre I enjoy, mysteries. Lea Wait’s antique print mysteries showed me that a mystery could reference intellectual topics. So many cozy mysteries are on the light side, and her books showed me that the genre can have more depth. I am naturally drawn to the homemaking aspects and the idea of a small town community as typified in cozies. Although not strictly cozy mysteries, I love and aspire to the richness of Peter Robinson’s DCI Banks novels, Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache novels, and Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels.
BWG: Could you tell us a little about your professional background in publishing?
V.H.: After college I answered an ad in the New York Times to work in a bookstore, and have worked in bookselling/publishing ever since. I started out at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich bookstore. That was the best job I ever had. I was hired to do the out-of-print book search, a service the store offered, but I was expected to leave my desk and work on the sales floor during lunchtime and busy periods, and on Saturdays. I loved it. The store was designed by Mr. Jovanovich and took up the first floor of the HBJ office building. It featured books of all publishers, not just Harcourt titles. The store consisted of adjacent circular rooms of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, with ladders that we rolled around the circle to reach titles on upper shelves. It was located at 47th Street and 3rd Avenue, near the UN and the offices of many literary agents, who often brought their authors in. The first person I ever waited on was Jacques Cousteau! He was killing time before going to receive an award at the UN, and he wanted to see if we had his books. I quietly told him it was my first day and I didn’t know for sure, but I knew where they would be. When we found them I was embarrassed that a few of the dust jackets were crumpled. He was kind and laughed about it. I met so many interesting people at HBJ Bookstore. One customer collected James Joyce and from time to time brought in his rare treasures to show us. Soupy Sales lived in the neighborhood and regularly stopped in to entertain us on his way for coffee on quiet Saturday mornings. Kurt Vonnegut often stopped in during his afternoon walks. Once several of us were in conversation with him, and the name Eugene Debs came up. I didn’t know who he was, so I asked, and was treated to Vonnegut’s lengthy and knowledgeable description of the early days of the US labor movement. A priceless moment. I had a million of them when I worked there.
Later, after HBJ moved to San Diego and closed the bookstore, I worked at B. Dalton in the Village, and freelanced reading unsolicited manuscripts for Tor Books, at that time a new fantasy and science fiction publisher. My roommate was an editor there, and brought the manuscripts home for me to read. I got paid $20. to read each one and write a “reader’s report.” I rarely recommended any for publishing, I'm sorry to say. I eventually left the bookstore and took a job as an assistant production editor at a company that handled the editorial production needs of Tor, Carroll & Graf, Baen Books and Mysterious Press. From there I went to various divisions of Prentice-Hall including their law and textbook divisions, in both marketing and editorial production.
In the late 90's I started working at the Lawbook Exchange, an antiquarian book dealer and publisher. I started out as the rare book cataloguer but eventually became the managing editor of the publications arm of the company, Talbot Publishing. I enjoy it, and have a flexible schedule, which I need at this point of my life with a school-age child at home.
BWG: How did this background help you when it came to publishing your book?
V.H.: It helped in every possible way. What I do all day at work, I do for my own books. For Cinnamon Girl I used what I knew about design, layout, cover art, and cover copy, etc. to present what I hope is a professional-looking book. From my marketing days at Prentice-Hall I knew how to write a press release.
BWG: Publishing can be expensive. Did you find any ways to keep costs down that you can share for the aspiring author with a small budget?
V.H.: I was fortunate to have two experienced friends line-edit the book for me, and a bank of friends and family who read the manuscript and offered feedback. My husband read every draft, and proofread the final version. For the production, I did everything myself except the cover design. So my only costs were for the setup of the publishing business, the ISBNs and the cover. And the printing of course. I carefully set the quantity of my first print run, and am using an on-demand printer.
BWG: Which aspects of the process are definitely worth the extra costs, even if they are a little pricey?
V.H.: I recommend hiring an experienced cover designer. It is well worth the expense. And if you don’t know any experienced editors willing to line-edit and proofread the book for you, hire them too.
BWG: Have you found promoting your work to be daunting? What kinds of promotion have your found to be most effective?
V.H.: In a word, yes. There are two aspects to marketing—promotion and distribution. I believe I have distribution almost covered: The paperback print version of Cinnamon Girl is on Amazon all over the world, on BarnesandNoble.com, and is also available from my publishing company, Annabel Publishing (named after Annabel Lee, the Edgar Allen Poe poem). I say “almost” because I have not yet created the e-book version for Kindle and tablet readers.
I deliberately published the book in October, the month in which the book is set. I was lucky to receive some wonderful local press promoting the book launch party, which I held in the party room of a local bakery in a quaint town near mine that is similar to the fictional town in the book. I launched the book the weekend before Halloween because the book includes some recipes from published cookbooks, and I was fortunate to receive permission to include a banana nut bread recipe from my all-time favorite cookbook, Mary and Vincent Price’s Treasury of Great Recipes. At the launch party I served the banana nut bread and other goodies found in the book, and raffled a gift basket containing Price’s highly collectible cookbook and the tools to make banana nut bread. I featured photos of the horror legend himself on signs for the banana nut bread and the gift basket. It was a lot of fun pulling all of that together, but also a lot of work.
I was a guest author at one cozy mystery blog, and gave away a free copy. I am currently doing a Goodreads giveaway (it ends January 17, 2014). I have an author blog, a Facebook author page, and occasionally tweet. I plan to contact local librarians, cookbook bookstores and cookware stores. I continue to seek ways to promote the book and the series.
BWG: Authors with print-on-demand titles often find it next to impossible to get bookstores to stock their books. Have you found a way to crack that market?
V.H.: The thing to do is to bring 5 or so books to a bookstore and ask them to stock them, give them a 40% standard discount, and allow for returns. I have not done this yet, but probably will.
BWG: Did you have many surprises along the path to publishing your own work?
V.H.: The biggest surprise I have had is now that the book is published, it has been difficult to get the word out to the cozy reader community. There is a system set up for traditional publishers, but it is harder for small self publishers like me to access those readers.
BWG: What plans do you have for future work?
V.H.: I have 3 more books planned in the Village Cooks series. I am currently writing #2, Tangled Up in Bleu. #3, Mad About Saffron, is fully outlined. Untitled #4 is still in the planning stages, but I have a rough idea of where I’m going with it. I am not sure if #4 will end the series, or if there will be more.
BWG: Will you self-publish again?
V.H.: Yes. The process of finding an agent and getting published traditionally simply takes too long. I want to get my books out there. If a publisher knocked at my door tomorrow, however, I would consider their offer.
BWG: Do you have any suggestions or cautionary tales for those inexperienced with publishing who are considering trying to self-publish?
V.H.: Look at other books that have been professionally produced and do everything you can to match their typeface sizes and overall look. Develop your own style in terms of display font, but mimic their proportions, text typeface and leading. Have it proofread several times.
We all know how important the cover is. Make sure your cover looks like some attention was paid to the presentation. A photo with any old title font slapped above it is a dead give-away of an unprofessional, self-published title. Make it colorful, and make the title itself legible when the cover is reduced to a 2” x 3” size, which can go that small for marketing and online sales presentation.