Reading · Screenwriting Tricks for Authors

I don’t usually post something this personally focused on the Screenwriting Tricks for Authors Substack - I save that for my still-in-beta Writing Life Substack.

But this week Craig & I are embarked on our epic and possibly ill-advised RV road trip launch tour for The Grapevine.

Epic and possibly ill advised could also describe the whole venture of writing a book - I mean a series! - together to begin with. I’ve said it before, but I don’t advise anyone else try this at home. We swore in our actual wedding vows that we would never do it, because we knew it wasn’t worth the risk. Writing a book is a very solitary, intimate thing to do, at least for that first crucial draft, and we had both been writing professionally for so long that we were… “set in our ways” is putting it mildly!

Plus, as I always have to point out, he’s Scottish.

But we’ve now made it through the writing of two books in the series, and Book 2 really was exponentially easier. Every book and series is its own learning curve, right? So we felt confident enough to try another huge risky adventure.

The Grapevine follows Lou Gomersall, a take-no-prisoners, middle-aged mom who takes the family RV out onto the highways and byways of California to search for her missing teenage daughter.

So our launch plan for it was to do a Lou: take an RV out on the road and trace her journey all over California.

We would start in LA, and drive to various locations from the book, camping out at the beaches and RV parks that Lou camps in, shooting videos and taking photos and posting about the trip. It would be excellent research for Books 2 & 3.

Read the initial plan

Every published author will tell you how important it is to find organic and personal and thematic ways to talk about your book, to get readers interested enough to give it a try without doing the internet equivalent of shouting BUY MY BOOK into the wind.

And that’s the actual assignment for this post for you writers! Whatever stage of your book you’re in, give yourself some time to think:

That requires giving your readers and potential readers something of value with your promotion.

So what are the unique experiences of your book?

One of the experiences Craig and I promise for readers of The Grapevine is a chance to vicariously live out the van life/RV life, and go to amazing and often hard to get to locations in California. It’s a key hook. So why not take that promise even bigger and take our readers along with us on a road trip to some key locations from the book?

Our publishers were excited. We were excited. Readers were excited for us. And on paper, we had the perfect plan.

But when we dreamed up our epic book launch RV trip across California, it turns out we really were dreaming!! All those plans of the places we’d go, the bookstores we’d hit, the filming we’d do, the regular updates from the road…

Guess what?

We’ve cut our itinerary to the bone. The main thing on our TO DO list now is – Stay alive. Everything else is gravy.

But everything has also been research gold. A partial list of things that we are going to detail waaaaaaay better in Book 2:

Parking is an ongoing issue. Target is our friend… huge lots where you can take two spaces. Barnes & Noble has been great that way, too – so accessible, and of course, great staff!
We need to work in many more scenes of just the everyday difficulties of hookups (the electric and water kind), backing into a space, leveling the vehicle, doing laundry, and the general griminess of it all. It’s camping, so you’re not going to be seeing any glamor shots of us on our trip. Hopefully the stunning scenery will make up for it!
What looked like a breezy two-hour drive when we Googled it in Scotland turned into five hours on the road from LA to the Grapevine RV resort (it reminded me so much of all those Thanksgiving breaks when I was at Berkeley, bumper-to-bumper traffic from the Bay Area down to LA.)
We were late leaving this morning because the earthquake that hit Santa Cruz jammed our bathroom door closed and our photographer friend had to trick it open! You really can’t make that kind of thing up.

And I’m just getting started! Those regular updates from the road I promised have turned into more like a promise for a retrospective starting next week when we’re back, because, see rule number 1: we’re staying alive.

But the locations we picked are worth waiting for, I promise! We’ll be doing our writing and posting photos and videos over the next month.

It’s all being a harrowing sort of adventure, but what could two thriller authors really expect?

—Alex

Oh, and lest I forget….

Here’s where to BUY THE BOOK!

The Grapevine is out now in hardcover, e book, and on Audible: more audiobook versions to come in September, and paperback soon!