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!

Kindle Links at Last—Maybe

Well . . . Amazon finally released Daughter of Liberty and Native Son for Kindle . . . but for some reason, the price isn’t available. And they’re not showing up on a search of the Kindle store, though they do show up on a search on my name.

As I promised, here are the direct links.

Daughter of Liberty

Native Son

I’m really curious to know whether it’s possible to download these books to the Kindle even though the price doesn’t show, but obviously readers are going to want to know what they’re paying. They’re $8.99, just so you know. If you try to download either of them, I’d appreciate your feedback. In the meantime, looks like I need to get in touch with Amazon once again to see if it’s possible to get those prices up there.

Kindle Crisis

I was hoping I’d have better news by now, but we’re making progress, folks, really we are! I uploaded the Kindle version of both Daughter of Liberty and Native Son a couple of weeks ago. But because they were previously published by Zondervan, the good folks at Amazon, conscientious as the darlin’s are, dropped them into the dreaded—and apparently endless—review process.

Thanks to John McClure, our expert at Signalman Publishing who transforms our books into the Kindle format and who is the repository of all knowledge Kindlewise (thank you muchly, John!!), I obtained the highly guarded, eyes-only e-mail addy for the dtp support staff. I assured them I do indeed hold the publishing rights, and they responded with a request for Zondervan’s return of rights letter a short time ago. I immediately scanned the letter and sent it to them.

Hopefully we’re finally on track now to get those titles up and running on Kindle within the next few days. As soon as they’re available, I’ll post the direct links here.

In my next post, I promise to bring you up to date on my progress on Crucible of War. Alas, however, that’s going to have to wait until I get through the yearly tax travail. Sigh. If all goes well and I survive, I should have that mess off my desk sometime next week. Can you tell this is just my favorite time of the year?!

Going Electronic

After getting requests for the Kindle version of Daughter of Liberty and Native Son, I decided to go ahead and have books 1 and 2 converted since Wind of the Spirit is already available in that format. It’s sold a few copies, and e-books are grabbing an increasingly larger market share, so now is a good time to make the first books available too.

I finally finished the updates of both books—and rediscovered how much I love this story in the process! Releasing the electronic version will get them out there early for fans of the series who have a Kindle. If you’ve already read the books, you won’t notice much difference in the new versions. The changes are pretty subtle. Of course, the printed books will be the same larger trim size as Wind of the Spirit and will have covers that have a consistent look.

For the Kindle version, I’m going to have to use the same old Zondervan covers that I was never happy with from the start. If I had a budget and time in the schedule to produce new covers for these books, I’d do it, but the existing ones will have to do for now.

The books will be up on Kindle sometime around the middle of the month, and as soon as they’re available, I’ll make an announcement here with a link so you can go directly to them. So if you’re eager for the electronic versions, be sure to check this blog regularly.