Lady Luck
By Violet Moore
With the surname of Moore, I’m entitled – perhaps required – to wear a touch of green on Saint Patrick’s Day. I’ve adhered to that notion and sported a diminutive silver-bordered cloverleaf pin for many years hoping to redirect the luck of the Irish to me, a woman of French and English heritage. Somewhere between March leaping leprechauns and the jesters of April, Lady Luck stepped into my life. We met on the World Wide Web.
A search of my name brought hundreds of web results, so I narrowed the search to Violet Carr Moore. To omit the Irish Violet Moore dancer, the defamatory cartoonist Violet Moore, obituaries for the deceased Violets, and white pages for the living ones, I enclosed my full name in quotation marks. The first links that appeared on screen were my book website and my blogs. Past speaker events at Roseville Genealogical Society, blog posts to California Writers Club Tri-Valley Writers, and haiku poetry wins in local Bay Area newspapers mingled with Authors Den, AuthorNation, and LinkedIn profiles. Links to my inspirational articles and devotionals were there, too. The multiple newspaper sites that picked up my haiku cheese sandwich recipe in the San Francisco Examiner’s food section had been wiped out. Only the original post remained. Win some, lose some. Rules of the web.
Something new and suspicious scrolled into view. My Irish name was posted on a foreign not-so-Irish website. Dozens of excerpts about me were displayed between indecipherable foreign language advertisements as though authorized for that site. The English-language segments appeared to have been lifted from many of the websites I’d viewed earlier, clearly without permission, and by someone who did not comprehend the translated text. The most humorous was the restrictive copyright clause from my books, “All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form…” I stopped reading and sighed. Writer’s woes on the www. Except for that one theft, the other links all sprouted from my hard work. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was still far off. The shamrock rested in a box, and Lady Luck had not stepped onstage.
Amazon, always my last search of the day, had not reflected a single ray of sunshine, only cast shadows on my dreams. Undaunted, I clicked where independent publishers were epitomized as condemned trespassers on holy ground. New products, those not already displayed in the Amazon catalog, could only be sanctioned for the publisher with a hefty annual fee equal to half my auto insurance payment. I still hoped that my partner agreement with Google Books might prompt Amazon to deviate from that rule. My fingers keyed a search for In the Right Place. Dr. John’s music project surfaced, a reminder to limit my search to books category. I selected advanced search, added my subtitle, A Gallery of Treasured Moments and the ISBN. Click! A full-color book cover appeared. Not just any book. My book! I was so startled that I first thought my identity had been stolen, perhaps through those unauthorized foreign ads. Three popular Amazon sellers, two in California, one in Nevada, tooted the virtues of my independently published book. Their strong confidence was demonstrated by the used book prices that were only pennies less than my new book price, straight from the large box in my closet.
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In my excitement, I almost overlooked Lady Luck as she flew across the screen. She waved a magic wand like a Disney character as she escorted me through the door of my book cover. Quick as a magician pulling a bunny out of a hat, I stepped across the threshold to the Personal Seller room. I created a free account for Carr Twins & Co. and listed my book as new, signed by the author, shipped from the publisher – me. I jumped to my AuthorNation bookstore and linked it to my new Amazon site. When I returned, Lady Luck was gone and Prince Charming stood nearby. “Where’s Lady Luck?” I asked.
“She’s shopping at used book stores and yard sales to find your Moments of Meditation book,” P.C. replied. “Lady Luck will dance on the cover until it sparkles like the pot of gold at the end of the Irish rainbow. It’ll be in the Amazon catalog as soon as she dazzles a premium seller to add it as a new item. Just you wait and see.”
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Violet Carr Moore is the author of two books, In The Right Place, A Gallery of Treasured Moments and Moments of Meditation andcreator of Carr Twins & Co. independent publishing. Her nonfiction short story, Miracle on a Train, was published in Christmas Miracles, an anthology by Cecil Murphey (St. Martin’s Press, 2009). Fiction short stories were published in Las Positas College anthologies in 2008 and 2009. Violet is a featured devotional writer for More to Life women’s ministries. She is a member of Northern California Publishers and Authors. Violet is active in California Writer’s Club, Tri-Valley Writers branch where she serves as Vice President and writes a feature column about personal promotion on the web. Her latest work in progress takes a step into a new venture, a mystery novel. View books and scheduled events at:
View her blogs at: http://violetsvibes.blogspot.com and http://violetsvibes.wordpress.com.
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