These days, I’m researching independent publishers for my new novel. What I’ve learned so far is that publishers generally require a query letter with an elevator pitch, a brief summary, and a bio. Sometimes they want the full manuscript. Sometimes they prefer the first fifty pages. Some also want chapter summaries, publicity plans, at least three recent comparative midlist titles (published within the last three to five years) and the answer to this question:

Who is the audience for this book?

I get it. Publishers want to make sure someone will buy the book before they agree to print it. and bookstores like to have an idea where a new book might fit on their shelf. I, of course, prefer to believe that my books are unicorns. Incomparable. Nothing in the world quite like them.

I’d love to say this new book is a cross between the dark humor of Flannery O’Connor’s 1955 short story collection A Good Man is Hard to Find, the romance of rock and roll in Cameron Crowe’s 2000 movie Almost Famous, and the horror story of Brandon Jacob-Jenkins 2011 Tony award-winning play Appropriate.

Except, despite being many decades too old, these references sound quite pretentious.

So, wish me luck finding something more relevant.

We didn’t have any luck getting tickets for the Late Show when we went to New York City last month. Stephen Colbert is going off the air next month and everyone wants to see him. Even Oprah.

This week we caught a recording of his conversation with Ms. Winfrey. She made him switch places and in typical Oprah fashion, although she didn’t make him cry, she did ask him real questions.

“What will you miss?” she asked. He said interviewing people, his band, his crew, but mostly he will miss his audience. Here’s what he said to Oprah:

“When you and I are talking to each other, there’s a third person in the conversation and it’s the audience right there. And they are actually doing their job better than you and I can, because they know what their job is and they’re very committed to their job, which is to listen to what’s going on and having a reaction to it. The audience is very pure in their engagement in our conversation. And if you stay tuned to them, you know where the conversation is going.”

I never have any idea how the audience is reacting to my words because I have to take off my glasses in order to read. My spectacles are for distance. I can’t see past the page I’m reading without them.

I’m so glad someone got behind me at the recent Five Women Over Fifty reading at the Santa Ana Art Walk so I could see the faces.

Some of them were even smiling, including my husband.

Of course, there’s always some guy in the back looking at his phone, but the other folks seem entertained. I read the first chapter in my new novel, and it apparently was well received.

I’ve been in the audience many times for each of the three other women pictured above.

• Victoria Patterson is commonly described as the Edith Wharton of Orange County. I heard her speak at my first Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference and bought a copy of her novel The Little Brother which inspired the troubled character Kevin in The Lockhart Women. Victoria also blurbed my second novel Those People Behind Us.

• I first heard Lisa Alvarez speak many years ago at Literary Orange and then took her creative writing class at Irvine Valley College. She’s encouraged me ever since, to apply to the Community of Writers, to read a short story in front of people for the first time, to submit a poem or a story to a journal, and to read something new out loud in front of people.

• Dana Johnson is Professor of English at USC. I’ve been in her audience multiple times at the LA Times Book Festival. Dana’s novel and short story collections illustrate life in Southern California. Break Any Woman Down published in 2012 won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. She’s also teaching an online short story writing class on April 20th. Check it out here and sign up! I did.

It’s unbelievable to me that I now get to sit facing the audience with these women next to me. Come to our Litfest in the Dena panel on May 1st, 6:30 p.m., at the Pasadena Presbyterian Church for our panel, spearheaded by Victoria Patterson, on Story Telling as a Political Force.

Anyone heading to the LA Times Festival of Books this year? It’s next weekend, April 18-19th at USC.

This year I’m on the fence about going. The drive. The parking. The crowds. The overwhelm of realizing how many folks are trying to do the same thing I am.

Write back and convince me why or why not I should make the trek, and I’ll enter you in a drawing (US only) to win a free signed copy of either one of my paperbacks. Or you can purchase them on my website, at LibroMobile, or wherever you like to buy books.