A Funny Thing Happened – Miller Mosaic LLC

At the end of December 2007 I took the plunge and started the process of self-publishing my novel MRS. LIEUTENANT through BookSurge, which was then owned by Amazon and later folded into Amazon’s CreateSpace. It was a story I had been wanting to tell since May of 1970, when I accompanied by new husband to Ft. Knox, Kentucky, for him to go on active duty with the U.S. Army.

About the same time I entered the manuscript in the first Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition. MRS. LIEUTENANT was selected as a semifinalist — and each of us semifinalists were given a page on Amazon with the beginning of our book. As I recall we were suppose to get people to vote for our entry. But at that time I had no online contacts.

All semifinalists got a review of their book — and the reviews were rather strange. Many of the reviews appeared to be written by people who had not actually read the manuscript. And so semifinalists started complaining on a discussion thread.

I had never participated on a discussion thread, but I looked at this one because the review for MRS. LIEUTENANT was also off. And that is when I discovered that someone had something I did not have — a blog. In fact, I did not even know what a blog was.

Let me step back for a moment. Being on Amazon was not so exciting for me because the Jewish holiday book SEASONS FOR CELEBRATION that I wrote with Rabbi Karen L. Fox had been on Amazon probably from the beginning as the book was first published in 1992 by Perigee.

But a blog — the ability to write about MRS. LIEUTENANT without getting permission from anyone — that was huge. I had been a journalist for many years, and I was accustomed to having to wait for an editor to say yes before my work could be published.

That epiphany was the beginning of the road to forming Miller Mosaic LLC in May of 2008 with my younger daughter, Yael K. Miller, and our company building WordPress websites for ourselves and clients.

And now a funny thing has happened.

Yael and I have so many projects and websites besides our Miller Mosaic one that juggling these different sites has become somewhat unwieldy.

We have decided that we will each have a site in our own name as the center of the spokes of a wheel for our individual writing and project websites.

Currently I am in the midst of a nonfiction ebook project that I hope to announce soon. And I am also working on the novel CIA FALL GUY, whose book cover designed by Yael is on this post.

These and other writing projects will have a home here, and I hope you will check back to see what is new.

P.S. If you’re a fiction author, you might like to check out the site www.FictionMarketing.com from me and author Carolyn Howard-Johnson. And also check out the LinkedIn Book Marketing open group I manage.

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) has a B.A. in Journalism from Michigan State University and an M.B.A. in Finance from The Wharton School. She is the co-founder of the marketing company Miller Mosaic LLC. Check out her Google+ profile.