Howdy! I'm Biff. Here's the background that was used by The Writers Chatroom where I recently gave a chat on using the Internet for marketing books:
I was born in Toronto about a thousand years ago. After surviving street gangs and 50's mediocrity, I moved to Winnipeg where I immediately died from exposure to wide-open-spaces. I woke up in my next life in Germany where I was making more than my father's military pay by selling duty free cigarettes, coffee and booze on the Black Market. My father was posted back to Canada just before a group of Spanish gangsters was going to kill my brother and I for ripping them off for 10,000 Deutsche Marks. Hey; we were kids. Bad kids.
We came to New Brunswick which, me being from Toronto, I always thought was a part of the USA. It's not. It's a province in Canada and it's a beautiful place. Lot's of canoeing rivers, trees, parks and the biggest potholes in the world, so big that entire Snow Bird convoys have been lost in the roads of New Brunswick.
Before leaving Germany, I spent all my hard-earned ill-gotten cash on Mod clothing...giant lushly-colored bell bottoms, flaring flowery shirts, paisley ties...all the latest in European fashion cuisine. Back in Canada, I walked into a school where Mod fashion was a white shirt with big red polka dots. I walked into the school with red, white and blue bell bottoms, a black flared sleeve and collar shirt with tiny pink and blue flowers, and a black tie with tiny pink flowers. I was laughed at wherever I went. After two days, I made the ultimate fashion statement, I dropped out of school.
After two years of mucking about with half-finished novels, paintings, a few itchy poems, and a lot of booze and wild women, I went back to school. By this time, I'd worn out my Mod clothing and was beginning to look more like the indigenous wildlife. They even let me be editor of the school newspaper.
I went to college in 1970. Somehow, through all the drugs and partying, I emerged at the other end of the university assembly line with an honors degree in English literature. To this day, I can barely remember a damn thing that happened during those four years. Except Gail. I remember you, Gail. And you too Denise. And...
...oh, the good old days.
After college it's all a big rush. Trips across the continent, jobs in universities, governments, software companies, radio stations, newspapers, and bars. I excelled at bartending by getting drunker than any of my customers and still being able to stand up and pour drinks, and I excelled at bouncing by using my martial arts skills to put trouble-makers out the door so gently that many of them asked if I could please tell them a story and tuck them into the cab. It was during those six years in the bar that I made thousands of pages of notes on people from all walks of life after seeing them, year-after-year, at their best and at their worst.
Those notes were crucial to my first novel, Heavy Load (available at eBookAd
http://www.ebookad.com and CyberRead (
http://www.cyberread.com/cr2/).
For the last 10 years, I've been working in the Information Technology industry, which inspired my second and third novels (Team Player...a spoof on the computer industry...available from Double Dragon Publishing in 2006 and The War Bug...a cyberthriller in which a man has hours to find his virtual family before the Internet collapses 200 years in the future...available in ebook format from Double Dragon and coming to bookstores throughout North America in June 2005).
Those thousands of pages of notes also inspired a volume of short stories and two books of poetry, all of which are available free on my web site at
http://www.biffmitchell.com (and some in PDA format at Memoware.com
http://www.memoware.com).
For the last five years, I've been working in marketing and sales in the IT industry. Believe me, these days IT is a hard sell. Almost as hard as selling a book. In both areas, I've tried a lot of things that have either worked well or been a complete bust.
As Gansheng Barto said: "No great product was ever greater than its marketing."
I have a free ebook called eMarketing Tools for Writers on my web site. You're welcome to download it.
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