Blog Posts by Pump Up Your Book

Please, don't ask me who I am, where I come from and where my home is. Unless you're ready for a night full of stories, escapades and adventures. I have lived all around the world, I have many homes away from home, my family is spread all over the planet, and I have friends on every continent. I have spent a great deal of my years at airports, on planes and boats, in cars and on horseback. My little red suitcase is always packed and ready to go, and so is my soul. Chique Secrets of Dolce Vita

When you open my new book, Chique Secrets of Dolce Vita, you can see a heartfelt dedication that means so much to me: "This book is dedicated to my parents who raised me to love faraway journeys, gave me an open mind to discover new worlds, and taught me to respect the people that these worlds are created by." And so it is.

Traveling helps you see the world through different, much more open-minded eyes. You learn to understand and respect different cultures, religions and political systems. You become less judgmental and

Hugh Aaron, a native of Worcester, Massachusetts, received a Liberal Arts degree in the Humanities at The University of Chicago. For three years as a Seabee he served in the South Pacific during WWII. He was CEO of his own plastics manufacturing business for 20 years before selling it to write full time. Several of his short stories have been published in national magazines and 18 of his essays on business management have appeared in The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of Business Not as Usual: How to Win Managing a Company through Hard and Easy Times. Currently he's writing and producing plays.

His latest book is a short story collection, Stories From a Lifetime.

You can visit his website at www.stonespointbooks.com or his blog at www.businesswisdom.blogspot.com.

Stories from a Lifetime carries readers through a widely diverse series of life's

Ray Ellis' debut novel, N.H.I.: No Humans Involved, was released in March of this year, and we were fortunate enough to get him aside for an interview. Ray talks about his book and his writing life.

Thank you for this interview, Ray. Can you tell us briefly what your latest book, N.H.I.: No Humans Involved, is all about?

N.H.I. is really about one of the prejudices common to law enforcement, the 'us versus them' syndrome. The main character, Nate Richards, is assigned to solve a series of murders, but in the process a new street gang surfaces and Nate's girlfriend has been kidnapped. The question of who is a good guy and who is a bad guy is central to the story. The quandary Nate has to wrestle with is will he succumb to his instincts to take matters into his own hands and himself become part of the n.h.i.: No humans involved. It's about how we as police officers view the people in our communities and how we assess value to those people and their representative people

Patty Friedmann's two latest books are a YA novel called Taken Away [TSP 2010] and a literary e-novel titled Too Jewish [booksBnimble 2010]. She also is the author of six darkly comic literary novels set in New Orleans: The Exact Image of Mother [Viking Penguin 1991]; Eleanor Rushing [1998], Odds [2000], Secondhand Smoke [2002], Side Effects [2006], and A Little Bit Ruined [2007] [all hardback and paperback from Counterpoint except paper edition of Secondhand Smoke from Berkley Penguin]; as well as the humor book Too Smart to Be Rich [New Chapter Press 1988]. Her novels have been chosen as Discover Great New Writers, Original Voices, and Book Sense 76 selections, and her humor book was syndicated by the New York Times. She has published reviews, essays, and short stories in Publishers Weekly, Newsweek, Oxford American, Speakeasy, Horn Gallery, Short Story, LA LIT, Brightleaf, New Orleans Review, and The Times-Picayune and in anthologies The Great New American Writers Cookbook, Above

Get Published . . . Really!

You can do it . . . really. That's the good news. The bad news is . . . it's a lot of work. But let's start at the beginning.

You have a story to tell. If you don't, then go out and play golf, or fish, or something until you do. You must have a story you want to tell, the one story down deep that's aching to get out. I said one story, and that's important. You can't write a second book until you've written the first, so don't let your mind wander off in too many directions. Stay focused. the reader will know immediately if you're not.

Night of Flames was a story I wanted to tell. I can go into all kinds of reasons, but that's not the mission here (remember the part about staying focused). I had the story and so, I started to write. I would like to stress that at this point in my life I had never written one piece of fiction, not even a short story. I wrote the entire first draft of Night of Flames (140,000 words) on my own without showing it

Mitch Stephen has been a full time investor since March '96. He's flipped 1000+ properties and is author of the book, My Life & 1000 Houses. You may download the first 100 ages of his book at www.1000Houses.com. His autobiography is one of a high school graduate striving to find his place in the world. With over (70 ) 5 STAR REVIEWS, it is evident that this author has mastered the art of delivering inspiration and an educational value in a most entertaining way. In short, My Life & 1,000 Houses depicts the trails and tribulations of an amateur business man who stumbles upon the great, long standing revelations, of business, money, love and life while struggling to find his own financial freedom.

You can visit his website at www.1000Houses.com. Connect with him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/mitch_stephen or Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/#!/profile.php?id=1074602878 and http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/My-Life-1000-Houses/129994207021032.

Thank you for this interview,

A year ago my career was in trouble.

Godchild No, that's not right.

A year ago, my career no longer existed. For a career to be in trouble, it's got to at least exist in some shape or form. And for a period of about 5 years, I couldn't sell a novel if I threatened to set off a nuke in the middle of Times Square.

That's not to say I didn't have agents championing my cause. At one point Suzanne Gluck of the William Morris Agency was in my employ. Arguably one of the best, if not the best in the business, the brass knuckle toting Ms. Gluck was extremely enthusiastic about my new offering, Moonlight Falls. But even she couldn't sell me.

Why no sale?

Precisely because a few years before that, I had become a major literary success. Yes, that's not a typo. You're reading it right. I had become a rock star. My dreams answered, I'd scored a two book, hard and soft deal, with Delacorte Press for a quarter of a million dollars. My first novel, As Catch Can (now called The Innocent

Today we're interviewing John Ames, author of the coming of age story, Adventures in Nowhere. Besides writing, John has produced and acted in numerous short films and videos, including the cable TV series the "Tub Interviews," where all the interviewees were required to be in a bathtub. You have to have a good sense of humor to do that, right? Not only does John have a great sense of humor, but he's a terrific author, too.

Adventures in Nowhere is told from the wry perspective of ten-year-old Danny Ryan whose realm is 1950s Florida, long before theme parks crowded out the possibility of real magic. Danny refers to his neighborhood as Nowhere, because it seems trapped in time, some parts on the verge of rebirth and others slowly falling apart. Among the things falling apart is the Ryan family, which is dominated by a schizophrenic father who makes every day an adventure, yet Danny keeps his good humor, seeking escape on the nearby Hillsborough River or in the little community of