THE most important question to ask: Is the book’s ISBN number distributable or does the book have a non-distributable ISBN? The number one reason for a bookstore to reject your book is because it has a non-distributable ISBN.

WHY WON’T THE BOOKSTORE CARRY MY BOOK?
Posted by Maura On March 20, 2023

WRITING TIPS
Posted by Maura On January 18, 2023
WRITING TIP 002: Annihilate Adjectives. Authors “show” by describing action. Get into the character’s senses — what do they hear, see, touch, smell, taste — by using action verbs instead of adjectives. But how can you make your character three dimensional?

WRITING TIPS
Posted by Maura On December 12, 2022
WRITING TIP 001: WRITE BADLY. Because most writing is actually revision, it doesn’t matter exactly what you get on the page to begin with, as long as there is enough content to edit later. But how do you get words on the page when you have writer’s block?

How to Serialize Your Novel
Posted by Maura On November 11, 2022
There are many serialization places with many different deals for authors. All will cost you something. You need to either have a finished book ready to serialize, or you will need to commit to a vigorous schedule to meet the demand of readers (up to 60,000 words per week.) There are some problems with serialization that have resulted in loss of its popularity of late. Here are a few:

AN AUTHOR’S HALLOWEEN NIGHTMARE: The Publisher disappears . . .
Posted by Maura On October 26, 2022
You worked for years on the manuscript. Polished it with the help of friends and family, Shopped it around to agents and publishers. You agonized over the cover and lost sleep when you found the type-o in the crisp, newly-printed final copy. Enormous effort and time has gone into creating that six by nine inch bundle of compressed paper — like mini plywood dreams you carry them forth into the future in order to connect your writing with others. So what happens when all that work just disappears?

5 REASONS TO ATTEND A BOOK FESTIVAL
Posted by Maura On July 22, 2022
Resilience. Authors need it. Book stores need it. Book festivals need it, too. We all need the buoyancy of reboundability! Like most other gatherings, book festivals across the US and abroad were hit hard by the pandemic. but many are returning to vibrancy as we head into the last half of 2022 and 2023.
The Harry Przewalski Mystery Series
Posted by Maura On March 16, 2022
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Hard-Boiled Detective Series Mixes Bones, Murder & History!
leonard krishtalka, author
In The Bone Field, the first in the series, Harry chases a missing museum paleontologist across 80 million years of death, from petrified dinosaur bones in the badlands of Wyoming to the skeletons in the bone rooms of the museum.
In Death Spoke, the murder of a a renowned archaeologist reveals webs of sexual blackmail, academic treachery, a horrific WWII atrocity, and archaeological fraud surrounding the most famous prehistoric cave art in France. Przewalski chases a killer to a diabolical plot hatched in the deepest recesses of the painted caves.
In the third Przewalski novel, The Camel Driver, the vandalism of a world-famous museum diorama immerses Harry in plundered graves for human exhibits, a lurid sexual trial, the mysterious remains of a child, and an archaeological bombshell worth killing for in a murderous race for scientific fame.
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Paleontologist turned pi Harry Przewalski
follows the grisley trail!
Pittsburgh private detective Harry Przewalski uncovers a tangle of sexual deceit, betrayal, and scientific fraud in this exciting new mystery series.
buy all three AND SAVE!
WHAT REVIEWERS SAY
The Bone Field
“Intriguing … astute … satisfyingly twisty.” —Publishers Weekly
“A fresh, intellectually lively, hard-boiled murder mystery.”—Kirkus Reviews
DEATH SPOKE
Gold medal, best novel, Fiction—Mystery/Thriller. —Midwest Book Awards
...intriguing and treacherous ... page turner ... twisty thriller ... a richly unique mystery.”
—Booklife PrizeThe best this genre has to offer: a riveting exploration of a crime ... A deeply stirring examination of human nature ... an intellectual drama. A cinematically immersive murder mystery ... astonishing ... grippingly suspenseful. —Kirkus Reviews
THE CAMEL DRIVER
One of 14 Best Crime, Mystery, and Thriller Books.” —Mystery Tribune Magazine, November 2020
Any collection ... in historical mysteries or hard-boiled, noir detective pieces needs to include The Camel Driver in its holdings. Its tension, characterization, backdrop, and suspense components are simply outstanding. —Midwest Book Review
Fast-paced ... meticulously plotted ... refreshing ... original —The BookLife Prize
ANAMCARA PRESS LLC
PO Box 442072
Lawrence KS 66044-2072
https://anamcara-press.com
(785) 843-1849
Anamcara Press seeks to publish powerful voices that provoke, surprise, and inspire. Visit us at: https://anamcara-press.com
WE PUBLISH IN CELEBRATION OF ART, community, and the planet, and in support of authors and artists in their creative endeavors everywhere.
Born on the banks of the Kansas River in historic Lawrence, Kansas, Anamcara Press publishes select works including poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. We are a proud member of the Independent Book Publishers Association.
GUEST BLOGGER: Leonard Krishtalka
Posted by Maura On March 16, 2022
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A major theme I’ve explored in my novel, The Camel Driver, which was published in November 2020, is the initial role that anthropology, biology and natural history museums played in promoting systemic racism. This theme is manifest in the story—the sin and redemption of a taxidermist who robs the graves of indigenous people and prepares them—taxidermies them—for human exhibits in museums and salons in 1800s Europe.
The story weaves in and out of one of those exhibits, a world-famous diorama at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh formerly called Arab Courier Attacked by Lions. It depicts a North African drama: A “courier,” dressed in traditional clothing, is crossing the Sahara Desert on a dromedary camel, when they are suddenly set upon by two ferocious Barbary lions. The courier has managed to grab his single-shot rifle and kill the lioness, who had attacked from the front. The male lion has leapt onto the camel from the side, burying his claws into the camel’s foot and hump, slowly pulling him down. The courier has pulled out his dagger and is about to plunge it into the lion’s throat. At the same time, the lion has lunged at the courier and is about to bite off his arm. We don’t know who wins this epic struggle. As with art, the verdict is in the mind of the viewer.
Arab Courier, now renamed Lion Attacking a Dromedary, has recently generated enormous controversy. For the past 120 years, it has been the second most popular display at the Carnegie. A few years ago the Carnegie X-rayed the mount and was shocked to discover that under the courier’s head dress is his real skull and teeth. The museum promptly draped it from public view, because human remains in a museum exhibit denigrates the people and culture of that individual. It also implies that grave-robbing and human taxidermy are acceptable in our museum displays and in the exhibiting of science and art.Arab Courier Attacked by Lions. Photo by Leonard Krishtalka
Jules Verreaux, the French taxidermist who created Arab Courier, is infamous for this sort of museum work. He was a naturalist and wildlife merchant at his father’s natural history emporium in Paris, and later at France’s national museum of natural history. Verreaux likely obtained the skull and skeleton of the courier by robbing a grave in North Africa, perhaps in the same region where he collected the two Barbary lions for the exhibit. Then he taxidermied the human, the lions, and the camel, and mounted the dramatic scene of the attack over a bed of sand to simulate the desert landscape. He entered Arab Courier in the 1876 Paris Exposition. It won the gold medal.
Arab Courier is a creation of its time: in its makeup and history, it encompasses the racist ideas of the 1800s and 1900s that were broadcast to the world by European culture—by museums, zoos, and world fairs; by art, literature, theater and cinema; and by anthropology and biology taught in colleges and universities.
For example, fifty years earlier, in the 1826, during a wildlife collecting expedition to what is now Botswana, Verreaux and his brother, Eduoard, robbed the grave of a Botswanan chieftain who had died two days earlier. They skinned him, shipped his skin, skull and skeleton to their emporium in Paris, taxidermied him, and mounted him in a glass display case wearing an antelope cloth and clasping an orange shield and a barbed spear. They called the exhibit, “El Negro.”The El Negro display, a taxidermied Botswanan chief. USSlave.Blogspot.com
He was displayed throughout France, then at the 1888 Barcelona World’s Exposition, and then sold to a private museum in Banyoles, Spain, north of Barcelona, where he remained on exhibit until as late as 1990. Eventually, the Spanish government became concerned about international embarrassment over such a racist exhibit, but only because the 1992 Olympics were coming to Barcelona. So, against fervent protests from the mayor and townspeople of Banyoles, they forced repatriation of the chieftain to Botswana.
The Banyoles museum is now silent about their “El Negro” exhibit. It is not mentioned in any of their brochures and none of the employees will talk about it. “El Negro” was only one of hundreds such despicable exhibits of native peoples from the colonies depicted as savages, subhuman, and inferior to white Europeans.
In 1831, the Paris Colonial Exposition featured a “human zoo” of indigenous people, Melanesians from New Caledonia in the South Pacific. It attracted 24 million visitors over six months. The U.S. participated in these depraved racist displays. In 1904, six Mbuti natives from the Congo were purchased by an American businessman, Samuel Verner, and put on display at the St. Louis World’s Fair as living examples of an ape-like stage of human evolution. Five of them died of disease.
After the fair closed, the surviving Mbuti,named Ota Benga, was brought to New York and displayed as an African savage in the Hall of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History. In 1906 the Bronx Zoo in New York bought Ota Benga, shoved him in a cage with an orangutan, and hung up a sign that said: MISSING LINK. Ota Benga eventually committed suicide.
The last human zoo, advertised as Kongorama, was held at the 1958 Belgian World’s Fair. Remember that Emperor Leopold II owned the Congo, brutalized and enslaved its people, and mined its resources. Kongorama was a makeshift village of straw huts set in a tropical garden and encircled by a bamboo fence. Every day, Congolese families—women, men, children—forcibly imported from the Congo, were clothed in traditional dress and trotted out to do chores to the amusement of spectators, who tossed bananas and peanuts into the enclosure.
As the detective in The Camel Driver says, “Exhibits tell the bigotry of their time.” How did these racist ideas form and become incorporated into museums, zoos, world fairs, and other cultural media?
The origins of this racism––that whites were the superior race and all other peoples were inferior––goes back at least 250 years to the 1700s and early 1800 during the Enlightenment revolution in Europe. There’s two things to remember about the Enlightenment. One is the good, the other is ugly.
First, the good. The Enlightenment was a revolution that freed us from medieval thinking about who we are and how the Earth and its life arose. It replaced superstition and myth with our modern ideas of individual liberty, reason, democracy, free-will, and inquiry. Much of what we call science today was born then.
Now for the ugly. The heyday of the Enlightenment was also the heyday of European colonialism in Africa, Asia, Australia, India, and the Americas. When the European explorers, merchants and settlers encountered the native peoples in the colonies they were immediately judged to be primitive, savage, and subhuman, not capable of the liberty, reason, democracy and culture that defined European Enlightenment thinking. Being classified as subhuman, this justified the wholesale subjugation, enslavement, and killing of the native peoples by the European powers.
And anthropology and biology gave its scientific stamp of approval to this racism. Anthropology—the study and classification of humankind—became a full-blown theory of race and racial superiority. One of the Enlightenment’s heralded philosophers, Immanuel Kant, put it bluntly in his 1798 anthropological treatise:
“Humanity exists in its greatest perfection in the white race - The yellow [race] have a smaller amount of Talent. The Negroes are lower and the lowest are - the [Native] American peoples.”Tree of human races. Photo by Leonard Krishtalka
In effect, people’s skin color alone became the measure of intellectual capacity. People’s physical traits pointed to their assigned place on Nature’s “tree of life” between apes and European Caucasians—the white race—which constituted the ideal. They were followed in increasingly diminished biological and cultural development by “Mongolians, the yellow race,” “Malayans, the brown race,” “Ethiopians, the black race,” and “Americans, the red race.” This idea of racial ranking and superiority became the canon, thought to be humanity’s natural order
This racist virus became our cultural pandemic. It infected generation after generation through science, art, literature, history, education, entertainment, film, world’s fairs, zoos, and museums. It suffused society and our consciousness. It became systemic.
The obvious question now is, what to do? The answer, I think, lies in how Verreaux achieved redemption in The Camel Driver. Through his own grave-robbing and taxidermy for human exhibits––the skinning and dissection and stuffing of the native individuals––he discovered that all he had been taught by scientific luminaries and society about native peoples and their alleged racial ranking and racial inferiority was complete BS. With this realization, he designs the Arab Courier exhibit to demonstrate racial equality in physical and mental traits.
This translates to the larger scale of the museum community and all other cultural media. First, they need to own up to and face their complicit past in the 1800s and 1900s. Second, biology, anthropology, and much of popular culture have since disproven, disowned, and repudiated any and all notions of race and racial superiority. Museums can and should deploy the very collections once used to broadcast racism to teach what we got wrong then, why we got it wrong, and what we now know to be right about native peoples and their cultures.
For example, at the Carnegie Museum, the Arab Courier diorama can be undraped to provide a powerful teaching moment about the Verreaux natural history emporium in Paris, why they created appalling exhibits of African native peoples, and what does current knowledge tell us about these peoples, their cultures, and their ways of life.
Museums have three powerful weapons to advance this agenda. They have the knowledge––the artifacts and exhibits for these teaching moments. They have the potency––hundreds of millions of visitors in their public galleries, and their online and social media platforms and community outreach programs. And they have the public trust: all polls show that people trust the information they get in museums more than from any other medium.
With these three weapons––knowledge, potency and trust––museums worldwide can help exorcise the systemic racist memes from our cultural consciousness.
Leonard Krishtalka is the author of award-winning essays, the acclaimed book, Dinosaur Plots, and the Harry Przewalski series of mystery novels, The Bone Field, Death Spoke, and The Camel Driver. As a paleontologist, he has explored the fossil-rich badlands of the American West, Canada, China, Patagonia, Kenya, and Ethiopia––inspirations for the intrigues of science and murder. His latest release, The Body on The Bed, is available now everywhere.leonard krishtalka, author
Leonard Krishtalka, author
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Paleontologist turned pi Harry Przewalski
follows the grisley trail!
Pittsburgh private detective Harry Przewalski uncovers a tangle of sexual deceit, betrayal, and scientific fraud in this exciting new mystery series.
buy all three AND SAVE!
ANAMCARA PRESS LLC
PO Box 442072
Lawrence KS 66044-2072
https://anamcara-press.com
(785) 843-1849
Anamcara Press seeks to publish powerful voices that provoke, surprise, and inspire. Visit us at: https://anamcara-press.com
WE PUBLISH IN CELEBRATION OF ART, community, and the planet, and in support of authors and artists in their creative endeavors everywhere.
Born on the banks of the Kansas River in historic Lawrence, Kansas, Anamcara Press publishes select works including poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. We are a proud member of the Independent Book Publishers Association.
GUEST BLOGGER: Margaret Kramar
Posted by Maura On March 3, 2022
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SEEDS
I touch the slick paper seed packets as I lay them out on the counter. Purple coneflower, bee balm, Black-Eyed Susan. I note the instructions printed on the back. Some will require stratification, or a period of cold storage, in order to break dormancy so that they can germinate. Others can be planted directly in the warm soil in the spring. Outside my window, snow blankets the lawn and drapes the branches of the trees. Below freezing temperatures again tonight.
I moisten paper towels and scatter some of the seeds into the white softness, because in addition to cold, they also require water, I roll up the towels, insert them in plastic bags, label the contents. I pause in front of the refrigerator with my hand remaining on the handle. I hope this will work. It should work. After all, the seeds are supposed to germinate.
He was supposed to marry me, because at seventeen when you are a cheerleader and your first love is the football team quarterback, he carves out a space in your heart that no one else will ever be able to fill. Yet the following fall after that first year of whirlwind romance, I sat alone in my dormitory room on a Saturday night as the rain pelted the windows. Across campus, under the same dark clouds, he confessed to his roommate, “I don’t love her.”
We were supposed to be best friends and stay in touch forever, because she was a bridesmaid when I married and we shored each other up through all the intrigues of office politics. I leaned on her as a wise older sister, but when she moved to Washington, she could not persuade me to sympathize with her decision. Now I send her Christmas cards with messages she does not answer. I do not ever hear from her.
He was supposed to outlive me, because parents should never have to bury their children. He smiles at me from the gallery of pictures hanging on the wall. The baby, the toddler, the pre-schooler, the Cub Scout, the third grader. There is no picture of him in the fourth grade, because he died.
A few weeks later, I take the seeds from the refrigerator. I pry open the tops of the Ziplock bags, and slowly unroll the paper towels. Some seeds have swollen, and others have even sprouted filigree roots. But some of the seeds show no growth, lost to betrayal, estrangement, separation and distances that no satellite can reach.
I finger the delicate seeds and bury them just underneath the potting soil, the next step of their development. Whether or not they are supposed to, most.will grow, and display their brightly-colored faces to pollinators such as bees and butterflies as they wave in the wind. They will flourish in the sunlight throughout the spring, summer, and fall, and after a temporary absence, will emerge again the following spring.
margaret kramar
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Margaret Kramar is an educator and taught English at the University of Kansas where she completed her PhD in the areas of modernism, autobiography and disability studies. Kramar’s creative nonfiction has most recently appeared in Joy Interrupted: An Anthology on Motherhood and Loss and Echoes from the Prairie. She and her family live on a farm in northeast Kansas where they produce organically grown fruits, vegetables, and free-range eggs.
buy SEARCHING FOR SPENSER
Interview with author Margaret Kramar
ANAMCARA PRESS LLC
PO Box 442072
Lawrence KS 66044-2072
https://anamcara-press.com
(785) 843-1849
Anamcara Press seeks to publish powerful voices that provoke, surprise, and inspire. Visit us at: https://anamcara-press.com
WE PUBLISH IN CELEBRATION OF ART, community, and the planet, and in support of authors and artists in their creative endeavors everywhere.
Born on the banks of the Kansas River in historic Lawrence, Kansas, Anamcara Press publishes select works including poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. We are a proud member of the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA).
Searching for Spenser, by Margaret Kramar
Posted by Maura On March 3, 2022
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Through her grief journey, a mother questions whether we can ever truly know our children until after they are gone. .
margaret kramar, author
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Parenting can be a struggle; especially parenting a disabled child. In this flawlessly written memoir, Kramar describes championing her son, diagnosed with Sotos syndrome, through his short life. She examines the experience of loving and losing a child and reminds us that there is a way forward through the grief. Kramar’s memoir offers guidance, wisdom and inspiration. An amazing story of redemption and hope.
Winner of the National Indie Excellence Award 2019
WHAT REVIEWERS SAY
With crisp, unsentimental prose, Kramar draws the reader into her overturned world after her second-born son is diagnosed with Sotos syndrome ... Kramar becomes his steadfast champion. After he begins school and gets involved with theater, she is only one of his many fans.
-- Laura Moriarty, American Heart
Kramer gives voice to feelings and thoughts that many would be to scared to acknowledge. Searching for Spenser follows her through her journey dealing with the struggles of a developmentally delayed child along with the rough twists and turns of life. We get to follow Spenser and learn from him how to focus on living in the here and now and the impact that he had on those around him.
—Billie Christensen, NetGalley Reviewer
Dealing with a special needs child it is a tough situation, and even tougher to explain to people how you feel ... props for writing this book.
—Kelly Smith, NetGalley Reviewer
An Interview with Margaret Kramar, Author
ANAMCARA PRESS LLC
PO Box 442072
Lawrence KS 66044-2072
https://anamcara-press.com
(785) 843-1849
Anamcara Press seeks to publish powerful voices that provoke, surprise, and inspire. Visit us at: https://anamcara-press.com
WE PUBLISH IN CELEBRATION OF ART, community, and the planet, and in support of authors and artists in their creative endeavors everywhere.
Born on the banks of the Kansas River in historic Lawrence, Kansas, Anamcara Press publishes select works including poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. We are a proud member of the Independent Book Publishers Association.