Book Signing Photos

I thought you might like to see a couple of photos from the book signing at Barnes & Noble on the 6th. The staff at the store were wonderful to us! We had a lot of fun, met a lot of people, and sold some books too.

Since we were on Jen’s side of town, she packed the place out. Here is a photo of her with her pretty books. The second one is of me and Carol Batey. Carol and I shared a table, while Jen sat across the aisle from us. We were right by the door where we could tackle customers as they came into the store.

Well, what do you know!!! While I was waiting for the photos to upload—we’re on satellite, and it’s slow—I wandered over to Lori Benton’s blog to see what she’s been up to, and . . . she has pages!!!! When did that happen?! I quickly clicked back here and noticed a link that says Edit Pages. Aha!!!! I guess while I’ve been buried in the publishing side of this venture of mine, blogger decided to give us the capacity to add pages to our blogs. Now please don’t tell me that’s been available for the last several years! Good gravy—I’m behind the times!

Oh, fun!!! Another excuse to fiddle around with my blogs. Gotta squeeze some play time into my schedule . . . LOL! I’ve created a bio page, and I’ll get some more up asap. Hmmm . . . I need to make a list . . .

Book Signing Alert!

Life has been unusually crazy ever since the first of the year. I keep hoping things will slow down so I can spend more time writing, but so far things have gone in the other direction!

To catch up, Daughter of Liberty and Native Son did go live on Kindle shortly after my last post. I guess I was just too impatient—not that that’s typical of me!

I have another book signing coming up, this one at the Barnes and Noble at The Streets of Indian Lake, 300 Indian Lake Blvd, Hendersonville, Tennessee, on March 6. I’ll be signing copies of Wind of the Spirit from 2 to 4 p.m. with authors Jen Stephens and Carol S. Batey (yes, her name is spelled wrong on the sign!). Jen will sign copies of her new release from Sheaf House, The Heart’s Journey Home, and Carol will sign her release Poise for the Runway of Your Life. I also plan to have copies of Daughter of Liberty and Native Son on hand for readers who aren’t familiar with the series yet.

It’s always enjoyable when you can share a signing with other authors, and I’m looking forward to this event. We may just get a little wild and crazy! If you happen to be in the area, please drop by and join us for a bit of fun!

Series Update. I’m getting to the point where I really need to bear down on finishing the manuscript for Crucible of War. If we’re going to make the fall 2011 pub date, I'll have to have it finished by the end of the year. The battles of Trenton and Princeton are taking up my time right now. Writing battles is always intense, and these battles, which took place between Christmas 1776 and January 3, 1777, were particularly complex. The action starts off with Washington’s famous crossing of the Delaware.

In this volume I’m also going to have to include Saratoga, which was actually a series of battles, pivotal confrontations between the British and Americans that ultimately turned the tide of the war. Native Americans were involved at Saratoga, so Carleton, as White Eagle, is going to bring some members of his Shawnee clan along to join in the fight.

I’d like to get the military developments out of the way so I can focus on the juicy details of Carleton and Elizabeth’s and Andrews and Blue Sky’s lives. Naturally there’s going to be a lot of passion, politics, and peril too as Elizabeth faces off against British General William Howe. There will be more than a few twists along the way. I’ll share additional details on those later.

I’m going to try to be much more faithful about updating this blog in 2010, but then I’ve said that before. Life has a way of hijacking my time, and I suspect you all have the same experience!

Wind of the Spirit Finally Up on Amazon!

My distributor fixed the problem with Amazon, and Wind of the Spirit is finally available there too! This has been hung up for a long time, and it’s a huge relief to get things straightened out at last. There were times when it felt like the battle scene above. I’ll tell ya, Amazon is the 600 pound guerilla when it comes to making your book available to the public. Can’t live with ’em and can’t live without ’em!

Anyway, all’s well that end well. There’s minimal editorial information on the listing at the moment, but as soon as I have time, I’ll send them a more detailed description and the endorsements. If you’ve read this volume, I’d really appreciate it if you’d take the time to post a review on Amazon, and CBD and help spread the word!

Of course, at the moment Barnes and Noble is out of stock, so naturally they’ve removed it from the title and authorname search. You can find it by searching on the ISBN, but I know most people don’t have that. Sigh. What a way to do business! There’s always a fly in the ointment, it seems. But to purchase or post a review there, just click here.

I have a book signing coming up on April 18 at the Perry Bookstore at 907 Carroll Street in downtown Perry, Georgia, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. If you’re in the Perry area, I’d love it if you’d drop by and say hello!

Delivery!!!

Wind of the Spirit is here! As you can see from the photo at left, I finally have this particular dream in my hot little hands, and I am one proud mama!!! Believe me, no matter how many books you publish, you still feel the same excitement when a new release arrives! And this book is GORGEOUS! It’s one thing to see the cover on my computer screen, but to see it in “real life” on the actual book is something else altogether. The interior is gorgeous too, with text that’s clear and easy to read.

I’ve even had my first book signing already!!! We picked up a couple of cartons of the books at the printer Friday afternoon for my own personal stash. Yesterday we had lunch with our Good Sam camping chapter, so naturally we brought copies along. Several of the members are following the series, and as the meeting broke up, Jay announced that they were available. I sold 11 copies, the first official sales! The only fly in the ointment is that I had a senior moment when I came back home from Georgia, and I left my beautiful bookmarks down at our winter digs in Perry. So I’ll have to mail them to those who bought a copy of the book when I get back down there.

Now I need to get busy finishing up several blog interviews I have scheduled for March. Yikes! This month is almost gone already and I seriously need to buckle down. I also need to prepare mentally for a radio interview I’m doing with Kelly Long on KREJ 101.7 FM in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, which serves southern Kansas and northern Oklahoma. In case you happen to be in that area on March 12, tune in at 8:20 a.m. We’ll be talking especially about One Holy Night and Vietnam, but we’ll touch on my series too. Radio is something I have no experience with, and my stomach clenches at the very thought. It sounded much less intimidating when I scheduled it several months ago, but that’s always the case for me with things like this. I’m much braver when the event is a bit of a distance in the future. So this should be interesting!

If my foray into radio turns out halfway decently, I’ll see if I can get a recording to post as a podcast on my Web site and blogs. I am soooo behind on all these technological bells and whistles everyone else has been using forever. There’s always something else to figure out, and my brain can only handle so much!

Also ahead: the big task of mailing out reviewer and influencer copies. And I need to open up WOTS for sale on the shopping cart, then have Sheaf House webmistress, Peg Phifer, put the link up on the Sheaf House site. No luck so far on getting it up on Amazon, though my distributor is working on that. Apparently there’s some kind of glitch in the system somewhere. But at least it’s available for pre-order on CBD and Barnes and Noble. CBD ordered their initial copies way back in November or December, and since they’re finally in the warehouse, the distributor should start fulfilling orders soon.

By the time I get back to Perry next week, I should also have delivery on the fabulous postcards for the series that Dineen Miller designed for me, so those will need to go out to libraries and retailers asap. I’ve got a pile of promo to do, plus I need carve out a block of inviolate writing time each week and get back to making progress on my own projects. As if that weren’t enough, Jay thinks we need to go to Christian Book Expo, so that’s suddenly popped up on the agenda for next month.

Peg mentioned that she needs a deadline to motivate her to write, and I’m the same way. So it occurred to me that I need to set a deadline to finish Northkill and another to complete Crucible. I’m hoping I can make great strides in finishing the first draft of Northkill this summer and have it ready for editing by the end of the year. Then I’ll be able to focus on Crucible. I’d like to put a pub date of 2011 on it, but more likely it’ll be early 2012—and that’s really not that far away. Time has a way of just zipping by.

I still have a considerable amount of research to do for book 4, and a bit more for Northkill as well. Thankfully the first quarter of that project is complete and in pretty good shape, and I hope it won’t take me too much longer to finish the rest. The challenge is to plug the dike against any leakage of other stuff into my writing time. But with my partner, Joy DeKok, handling all the advertising and promotion for Sheaf House now, that should open up a few hours each week to devote to my writing projects. I’ve been missing the discipline of putting words into that computer file, and I’m champing at the bit to get back at it!

Time for a Bit of Celebration!

There are a couple of exciting developments to report. First, Wind of the Spirit went to the printer, the proof came and was sent back with approval, and the print run will happen any minute. We’re right on track for that March 2 publication date.

Second, a week or so ago, my account rep at Christian Book Distributors had several questions for me because they were interested in possibly including WOTS in their summer catalog. I played it cool and gave him a more info than he asked for to make sure he impressed the catalog folks. Today I got an e-mail from the lady who sends me their POs when they order from Sheaf House. She asked for a cover image of WOTS and noted that their catalog department needs it.

Wooooooo hoooooo!!!!!! I’m pretty confident that means WOTS is going to run in the summer CBD fiction catalog!!! It’s already on their site for preorder. Just click on the link above. It’s also available for preorder on Barnes and Noble, though not yet on Amazon. But things are hopping. As you can tell, I can hardly contain myself! LOL!

Okay, enough celebration. Back to work. I need to get busy finishing up the interviews I have scheduled for a number of blogs, starting this month, and preparing for a radio interview coming up in March—more details on those later—and digging into some serious promotion. Unless something else really fabulous shows up between now and then, I’ll update this blog again when I have those copies of WOTS finally in my hot little hands!

I just can’t stand the suspense!!

Almost Ready for the Printer!

We’re making great progress on getting Wind of the Spirit ready to go to press! The text has been flowed and the final edits completed. I’m really getting excited about finally seeing this puppy in print! I’ve even ordered some gorgeous bookmarks to hand out. Wait till you see those. LOL! I only have a pdf, which blogger doesn’t accept, or I’d post that too.

Take a look at the images at the left that show the chapter opening pages. We’re using the graphic shown on the first one for the chapters that take place with Elizabeth in New York. The second one is what the chapters set with White Eagle among the Shawnee will look like. Each graphic then also appears in the running heads and the breaks between scenes of those chapters to differentiate the two settings. Didn’t Marisa do a great job with this interior?

All I have left to do is to check through the pages one last time before I create the PDF for the printer. I want to make sure I caught and eliminated all the widows and orphans—the first or last line of a paragraph that flowed over onto the top or bottom of a page, where it sits all by its lonely self. I’ve read several books lately where the editor obviously didn’t know that you’re supposed to eliminate those.

I hate to say it, but I’m seeing a lot of sloppy editing lately—everything from grammar to punctuation to logic. I don’t know if younger editors simply aren’t properly educated and trained or if publishers are increasingly expecting their authors to pay freelancers to edit their books, with the to-be-expected uneven results. I know the economy is bad and everyone is trying to save money, which in a lot of cases means either letting old-timers who earn too much money go and hiring neophytes or transferring as much of the cost of production onto the author’s shoulders as possible. Whatever’s going on, quality, at least in the Christian marketplace, is plummeting in my humble opinion. I guess I’m one of those old-timers. I have every intention of making sure both the writing and the editing of all our books are stellar.

Design is another area that’s suffering. There are gorgeous covers, mediocre ones, and ones that make you wince, but that’s always been the case. But now so many of the current crop of fiction releases I’ve seen have interiors that look downright ugly to me—fonts that are harsh on the eyes, clumsily designed running heads and folios (page numbers) that are way too large, leading that is too tight or too loose. At Sheaf House, we’re going to make sure that both the cover and the interior are beautifully designed and that the text is attractive and easy to read.

Okay, enough qvetching, already! Wind of the Spirit will go to the printer by the 19th at the latest, with delivery to the warehouse by mid February. It’s set to officially publish March 2, but once it’s logged into the warehouse, it’ll start shipping to retailers and will also be open for orders on the Sheaf House shopping cart. It’s already available for pre-order on Barnes and Noble and CBD, though without the cover for some reason. I need to see what I can do about that asap and also contact Amazon, which so far hasn’t posted it.

Stay tuned for more news!