Going on a Road Trip

This is going to be quite an experience. I'm going to Wordstock in Portland OR with my publisher. She's driving, I'm riding along. It will be one long trip--probably too long for this old author. I don't want her going alone.

What's Wordstock? Kind of like the L.A. Times Book Festival except inside. A two day affair all about books. Oak Tree Press is going to have a booth and showcase many of the books put out by its authors, including two of mine. Not sure which two at the moment, as I know covers attract readers--and buyers of books. I will take my latest Rocky Bluff P.D. but not sure which other one.

In the meantime, I'm going to be at the beginning of my blog tour for my Deputy Tempe Crabtree mystery, Spirit Shapes. Which means I'll be trying to find Wi Fi along the way so I can promote the blog I'm on each day and respond to those who comment. I also have to keep track of each person and how many times they comment because I'm running a contest that will be won by the person who comments on the most blogs.
(And to make things more interesting, Spirit Shapes is put out by a different publisher, so I won't be promoting it at Wordstock.)

Several of Oak Tree Press's authors are going to be in attendance, so I won't have to hang around our booth all the time, we won't have enough chairs for that anyway. Maybe I can sneak off and do some writing on the book I should be working on right now.

In terms of helping my writing career, this trip probably won't. I'll have to think of it was a mini vacation, though it won't feel like one.

Will report on it when I return.

Marilyn

An Unusual Development

I've been writing mysteries for years. However, my first published books were two historical family sagas. From there I started writing mysteries, but I also wrote some other genres and one romance with supernatural elements called Lingering Spirit.

That book was one of my first e-books published by a house I broke ties with a few years back.

Through the years, I've had some interesting experiences with publishers: two died, one never paid any royalties even though I knew books had sold, one I really liked decided to quit the publishing business, and early on, I had dealings with a couple of crooks--one skipped the country, the other landed in jail.

Oak Tree Press is now the publisher of my Rocky Bluff P.D. series, An Axe to Grind being the latest. The publisher put the two books on Kindle and asked if I had any other books that she could put on Kindle. Of course there were the previous books in that series and I had this romance, Lingering Spirits.

I sent it to her and she fell in love with the book and put it on Kindle. It's had moderate sales. Every time I ran into her at a conference, she told me, "I just love Lingering Spirits."

Now, she's decided to put it out as a regular book. That's kind of backwards from how it usually works--the book out first then the e-book (except for E-publishers who usually do both at the same time).

I just received the page proofs and went over them. The first few pages made me cry as I read them. Hopefully they'll affect other readers the same way.

Now my problem is, how do I promote this book? I'm so used to promoting mysteries, this is kind of a challenge.

Oh, I'll sell it right along with my mysteries when I do in-person events, but except for Facebook and Twitter, not sure how to approach the on-line promotion.

As I titled this blog, it is an unusual development.

Marilyn
http://fictionforyou.com