My guest today is Cheryl Kaye Tardif, the Canadian author of four best selling suspense novels. What do you do if you have a great idea hit you for a story but nowhere to write it down? You grab your iphone. Cheryl discusses the newest phase of iPhone novels.
It all started when I saw a commercial for Hershey’s Bliss chocolates in their individually wrapped foil packages. I saw the word BLISS on the TV and thought, “Wow, that would make a really neat girl’s name.” Almost instantly a picture came to mind of a teenaged girl with scraggly dirty-blond hair and torn jeans. Foster child, street child, pickpocket, and unwanted, unloved-the complete opposite of the word “bliss”. And Finding Bliss was born.
I didn’t want to lose any of my ideas for this novel, but I also didn’t want to stop watching the TV show that was on, so I grabbed my new iPhone 3G. There is a Notes application and this was the first time I used it. What was really great was that I was able to type in my notes on this new novel idea during the commercials and then email them to myself. Later, I went upstairs to my office, opened the email on my PC, copied and pasted the notes into a Word document and-voila! —I had started a new novel.
About 2 years ago, a writing craze swept across Japan; cell phone novels took the publishing world by storm in this small country. In the first six months of 2007, Goma Books and Maho i-Land published more cell phone novels than the major Japanese publishers did print books. And now, North America has its first English language cell phone novel platform through Textnovel.
I am very familiar with Textnovel. CEO Stan Soper heard about my iPhone novel Finding Bliss and he personally invited me to check out Textnovel. Since I always like to try new things, I submitted three short stories, serializing them over a period of time. You can find my novelette Remote Control there. Stan has shown great interest in Finding Bliss, and there is a possibility that my iPhone novel might show up on Textnovel in the future.
Recently, I was a guest blogger on Book Marketing Floozy and I talked about how authors have to “think outside the book”. Sometimes a book can be marketed even before it has been published, and once in a while even before it has been written. That’s what I’ve done with my iPhone novel Finding Bliss, a novel that has only 2 chapters written yet has already received much media attention.
To date, I have appeared on a number of television and radio interviews, and in newspapers, because I have chosen to write a novel in a completely different way. Another major company contacted me about Finding Bliss a month or so ago, and they too would like to be the first company to “release” this novel to the public. Let the bidding wars begin!
‘Finding Bliss’ will be an emotional, heartwarming story of a damaged teenage girl who must fight to survive in a world of abuse, lies and loss. As she struggles to find herself, Bliss will discover exactly where she belongs and she’ll learn that she is worthy of love after all.” [You can read the first chapter of this novel of Cheryl Kaye Tardif on her website.]
There is no publish date on this book as I have not finished writing it. Once I am done, it will be handed to my wonderful agent Jack Scovil to pitch to publishers.
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Cheryl Kaye Tardif is the bestselling author of Whale Song, The River, and Divine Intervention. She is currently working with a well respected producer interested taking the inspiring message in her novel Whale Song and making it into a movie. Her books are available on Amazon.com, canada.ca, and your favorite book store.
