Who am I?

Today I'm posting from the RT Booklover's convention in Dallas, Texas. In the past couple of days I've danced at a number of parties, dressed in costumes, and attended several seminars on independent publishing. In general I've had a great time.

I've also introduced myself to a number of people I've never met before, which means I try to tell people who I am. They know I'm a writer because my badge says "published author" and I hand out promo cards that mention what books I've written. But is that all I am?

I am also:

A software engineer who works at a large company in Silicon Valley.

A wife and mother of two children who are now grown up.

An avid gamer who plays social games with people all over the world, many of whom are much younger than I am.

I love movies, good television, and books. Lots of books in lots of genres as I am a very wide reader. 

And that is only a part of who I am. I put a lot of me in all my books. My characters have been known to watch movies (albeit on a "holovid" rather than a DVD) and they make things that I have made myself. They play games and garden... I even have one character who is a romance author.

So that who I am. 

Who are you?

Cheers,

Janet Miller/Cricket Starr

Building a Box Set

Recently I’ve been trying something new in promotion, the multi-author box set. It started when Mark Coker came to visit my RWA group and told us about an Apple promotion that his company Smashwords was part of, where they were soliciting multiple author box sets, collections of books by several authors with a common theme to be offered for 99 cents. I’m sure anyone who is on a mailing list for Kindle, or any other kind of ebook, has seen ads for these collections. They frequently have a 3-D cover like this one, making it clear that it consists of multiple authors.

Obviously at 99 cents, particularly when split between large numbers of authors, this kind of project is not likely to result in a lot of money per person. What it is supposed to do is appeal to a large group of people, many, if not most of whom, are not familiar with your writing. In this way you should be able to pick up some number of new fans. Also there is the possibility of getting so many people to buy this bargain collection that you can actually get on one of the major best-seller lists, such as Amazon top 100, USA Today or even the New York Time Best-sellers list. Once that happens any author in the collection can legitimately add the title “New York Times Best-selling Author” to their cover. The last, of course, is the brass ring, and unless there are already a couple of NYT bestselling authors in the box set, the chances of it happening are pretty slim.  

The USA Today list is a little more likely. In fact I checked today and found at #133 a box set called “Ten Christmas Brides” by Ruth Cardello, Nina Bruhns, Donna Fasano, Rebecca York, Helen Scott Taylor, Patrice Wilton, Mona Risk, Annie Jones, Alicia Street, Mimi Barbour. I recognize more than a few of those names, but there are a few on there that I expect will now be adding that USA Today Best-seller label to their accomplishments.

This is the reasoning behind taking a novel you are already selling and packaging it for sale with other authors for a bargain price. There is a slim chance you will hit a best-seller list, but you are very likely to get more attention. And since box sets are intended to be bargains there isn’t the stigma of “giving your book away”. Does it make sense if you only have one title out to put that in the box set? Unless you are building a name and are going to release additional books in the near future, probably not. But it can make sense if you have multiple other titles in the same genre.

I’m currently in two such box sets. The first is the Apple promotion that I mentioned first. This was hastily assembled with two other authors who also had fantasy/paranormal romances. I added my futuristic romance, Promises To Keep, and we titled it “Rogues In Time” to link in that the stories take place in multiple time periods, the other two being distant past and modern day.

One of the other authors did the cover and formatted the stories together for Smashwords, I put together an author agreement to cover the length of time the box set was to be in existence, about three months, and we uploaded the book. It got into the Apple promotion, and we all tweeted out the news and mentioned it on Facebook. Sales are coming in, but our expectations at this point are pretty modest. Some of that is with three authors rather than 10 we aren’t quite as attractive as the other sets on the Apple page, and we got into the promotion somewhat later, missing the initial excitement. We’ll see where things are in January.

The second box set has been an interesting experience. First of all it is holiday themed, which is very timely. People buy Christmas and other holiday related stories at Christmas time. Always have, and very likely always will. This is a collection of 10 shorter works by members of my RWA chapter and some other local authors, primarily in the Bay area. I was taking a cover art class and used the box set as a class project so I needed a title to work with. The first title we picked was “West Coast Holidays” but we ultimately opted for Candy Cane Kisses as a more clever title. It got expanded to Candy Cane Kisses and Enchanted Embraces when we added several paranormal stories to the mix. I won’t go into a description of the discussions that were had over the title and ultimately the cover, other than it is interesting how ten different people can see the same project in so many ways. But we finally settled on the title and a cover that we could live with.

And now comes the promotion. It turns out that we have some very experienced people on the team who have run book campaigns in the past. Under their guidance a Facebook page was set up along with the designated hashtag #KissesEmbraces, which has been central in our promotion efforts. We have held a pre-order Facebook party, complete with prizes, we've created daily posts to the Facebook page for the box set, with themes like #MistletoeMonday and #FestiveFriday (the latter was my favorite because it was all recipes!). We even have a Grand Prize raffle that people can enter. Prizes are donated by the authors and we all chipped in some cash to cover the promotion costs.

This Monday, November 17^th, is the actual release of the box set, meaning the links that are at the moment pre-order will become order buttons, and everyone who already bought a copy will receive their books.  Once more, we are having a Facebook party from 4:00PM to 7:00PM (I'll be there at 6:30 until the end) to celebrate, again with prizes and a lot of fun, so be sure to check it out!

I check the Amazon rank of the set on a daily basis. At the moment is at #10,220 Paid, which isn’t bad.

Oh and here are the buy links:

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PDYT76Q
Barnes and Noble: http://bit.ly/1xdY7Ck
Google Play: http://bit.ly/1vaQ2xz

Apple: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/candy-cane-kisses-enchanted/id941247215

I’ll let you know more next month on how the box sets are doing, as well as tell you about my other Christmas books. Right now I have to put together a Facebook post for Monday’s release party and find a picture to use. Never a dull moment when promoting a box set.

Cheers,

Janet Miller

In search for the best book cover

For a number of reasons, including the fact I'm taking a cover art class this week, I've been thinking about book covers and what it takes for a cover to help make a sale. You always hear the expression "don't judge a book by its cover", but the truth is most people do look at a cover and decide if the book looks like it might be worth exploring.

The first thing someone sees is the cover, sometimes even before the title of a book. The cover is supposed to make a promise about the story. Is it humorous, serious, romantic, or suspenseful? Even before someone reads the blurb the cover should tell them something.

I have this one title that I wrote a long time ago, and have now published twice with two different publishers and have just put up for sale on preorder through Amazon and Apple. It is a contemporary romance novel called "Christmas With Sarah".

This is the blurb:

A family together at Christmastime—there couldn’t be a more perfect holiday scene. But for wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur Greg Wilcox and his daughter Sarah, one thing is missing—a woman to help wrap the gifts, bake the cookies and fill that emptiness in their hearts and home. Greg and Sarah both think Molly would be the perfect addition to their family, but they have to convince Molly first. 

Big Sur artist Molly Anders remembers the Christmases of her past, baking cookies and decorating a tree. More than anything she’d love to have a holiday like that with Sarah. Trouble is, she doesn’t want a man in her life as shiftless as Greg seems to be, especially as he stirs something in her that she isn’t sure she wants resurrected. 

Circumstances have pulled them together and led them into love but it will take trust and the spirit of the season for them to get what they really want for Christmas—a family.

So what do we know about this story? It has a little girl, a loving and probably sexy father, and a young woman who loves the child and is reluctant to get involved with the father. It is a holiday story and we can guess it has a happy ending. Something that isn't in the blurb is that the story is relatively light-hearted. Not quite a comedy but there is humor in it. That's something that it would be nice to see reflected in the cover.

So here are the two covers that this story had in the past.

The first cover was with Zumaya publishing. It featured a cute little girl and a Christmas tree, and over all wasn't a bad cover. I liked the blue background and the font used for the title and author name was very Christmasy. I'm not sure the cover said enough about the humor in the story though.

The next cover was with Cerridwen Press, which was an imprint of Ellora's Cave and what became their "Blush" line of non-erotic stories. Again we have the Christmas tree and this time I have a motorcycle helmet with Molly's name on it, something that shows up in the story. Again, not a bad cover, but the drab color of the cover always bothered me as it just didn't seem to scream light-hearted romance. 

So when I got the rights back to Christmas With Sarah, I wanted a cover that "popped" with color and that would make it clear this was a humorous romance. So after a chat with my favorite cover artist, this is what I got:

Okay, there is nothing drab about this. The green of her dress, the gold of the lettering, and warm colors of the background make me love this cover. And now I have her expression with its mischievous smile to provide that sense of humor that neither of the previous covers had. I had my artist dress my hero in his leather jacket as that provided a nice contrast with the fancy party dress, again hinting at some of the conflict in the story. This cover does a much better job of telling people about the story and it has one additional feature.

This looks like a romance cover.

I'm really happy with my new cover and the fact that once again Christmas With Sarah will be available for this upcoming holiday season. 

It is currently available for preorder at Apple and Amazon and will be released everywhere on October 25. I've got it priced at $2.99 for the next couple of weeks.

Tell me what you think about these covers.

Cheers, Janet

Resurrecting old works

Recently I've been spending a little time going through my file directory of writing projects looking for works that for one reason or another were abandoned without ever being completed. The reason for this is looking for additional material to publish without the strain of creating something from scratch.

These stories aren't bad. In some cases it is like seeing an old friend, one that I really liked but that I fell out of touch with. Mostly this was because the story and I ended up not seeing eye-to-eye on how the it was going to proceed. 

A big reason for abandonment was that I was mostly writing as Cricket Starr at the time... that's my erotic romance pen name and a Cricket book required a great deal of sexual situations. Not all stories lend themselves to that level of erotism so unless the story fit into one of the selling series I had such as the Futuristic Gaian stories or the Paranormal Hollywood After Dark, I didn't have a good place to market it.

One such story is "Dancing the Knight Away." Originally this was supposed to be an erotic novella about a young romance author at her first romance convention and her sexual adventures with a hot cover model. But a funny thing happened... the heroine turned out to be a really sweet lady and the hero a nice older guy who makes a bet with his roommate that he can get her to dance with him before the end of the convention. It was fun and a little sexy, but there wasn't nearly enough reason for these two to be warming a bed together when he couldn't even get her out on the dance floor. 

So a Cricket book it wasn't going to be and I didn't have a good market for it any place else. Rather than spend the time working on a story that I couldn't sell to one of my current houses and was too short to be sent to a publishing house I wasn't associated with. It was contemporary, there weren't any paranormal elements, and while I loved the characters, they just weren't going to cooperate with me as far as the sex was concerned.

So I abandoned my knight in costume armor and lady author to work on more profitable projects. 

But thanks to Indie publishing I no longer need to be concerned about simply adding this nice little novella to my list of publications. I can go back, finish off the rough edges of the manuscript, and put it out as one of my contemporary romances. I've already got the rights back to a story I had with Ellora's Cave from their Blush line that was mis-authored as Cricket Starr. I say mis-authored because it was originally a Janet Miller book at Cerridwen and I never changed its sex level to that of the Cricket level of erotism when Ellora's Cave folded the Cerridwen books into their erotic line. So there has been much confusion about that book over the years.

My intent is to launch Christmas With Sarah next month once final proof-reading is done, and have Dancing the Knight Away ready to go a week or so later. Then if I can find a third book to release... well you get the idea. I want to see if I can't build some momentum for these contemporary stories that I really like... even if there isn't a fang or spaceship to be found in them.

Cheers,

Janet Miller

Are conventions worth it?

Having returned last month from the RT Book Lovers convention in New Orleans, and finished entering my costs for the convention into my expense tracking software, I’m evaluating if and how much the convention has affected my sales.

The answer isn’t heartening.

I love conventions, particularly RT Book Lovers which is so much fun. I got to wear costumes, interact with readers, bond with my fellow authors, and in general have a great time. When you consider that I even missed one day of the convention due to illness (I picked up a nasty bug and ended up in bed all day Friday, only returning to the convention the next day for the book signing) and still consider the time I spent there a success in many ways.

But the cold hard facts are that going to a convention does not automatically result in the sale of additional books, at least not of books that have been released for some time.

I have a diagram here that demonstrates this:

This is hard data, the sales graph off of Kindle Digital Publishing for one of the titles that I promoted the most at the convention. About a third of the items I gave out had a business card of this book, and it's cover was the poster I used for my bin on promo lane which I suspect most of the attendees of the convention passed by at one time or another. So if any book should show a rise in sales due to exposure at the convention, it should be this one.

The convention period is shown as a rectangle placed over the graph. If conventioneers were so entranced by my cover or promotional material to buy the book you would expect to see a rise of sales during the convention or at least in the two to three weeks following... and it is true that Saturday was a pretty good day. But overall number of sales before and after the convention for that one title remains fairly flat. If my giveaways were generating additional sales, you would expect to see some change and there is none. The rest of my titles show the same thing... exposure at the convention shows no effect on sales.

Which is why I don’t look to this kind of convention to sell existing books. I might possibly do better by putting the money into Facebook ads where the immediacy of sales is possible. Viewer sees title, cover, and blurb that interest them... they click a button and the book downloads onto their phone. 

That’s the real way books sell these days.

So I don't really go to RT Book Lovers to sell books. I go because I have fun and if I didn’t when would I have a chance to wear a halo? And at these conventions I get a chance to interact with fellow authors in ways I rarely can online. People will tell you to your face things they won't say in an email and a lot of what I've learned has done me well later on.

As for sales? I do what I feel comfortable doing for give-aways and hope for the best. For those who went to the convention, did you see any rise in sales as a result? If so, what did you do at the convention that I didn't?

Cheers,

Janet

Awards and free books

Today's post may seem a little disjointed but I have several cool things to talk about.

Now FREE at Amazon!

The first is that I have a book that's free today (Sunday, June 16). This is one of my older titles, Fangs For The Memories, which is part of my Hollywood After Dark vampire series. It's about a female vampire whose been in hiding for years until she's spotted by a man who not only knows who she is but has had a crush on her for years. When she runs out on him after a single night of near bliss, he chases her down and kidnaps her so that she's forced to listen to him.

It was a lot of fun to write and well received by the critics back when I wrote it, garnering several four and five star reviews, as well as being a Romantic Times Magazine Top Pick and nominee for their reviewers choice award. So if you haven't read it, pick it up for FREE.

Or if you are reading this on Monday you can still get it for the seriously low price of $1.49. How can you lose?

PRISM nominee for
Best Futuristic 2013

The other thing I wanted to talk about is my Samhain title Beloved Stranger, which is up for an award at this upcoming RWA Convention. I entered it into the FF&P PRISM contest (no relationship to the NSA program!) and it finalled about a month ago. I'm up against two other great books, The Marann by Christie Meierz, and Heart Secret by the amazing Robin Owens. This is terrific because even if I lose, I lost to one of these great writers, and there is no shame in that.

Plus I get a new pin for my badge and I love my little PRISM pins. I have nine of them already, and they are the coolest, shiniest things.

I'll be signing Beloved Stranger at the RWA convention as well, actual print copies! Samhain sent a few copies to me already and they are so nice looking, full trade-paperback sized books.

Free July 1st
for two weeks

The final thing I wanted to mention was that July 1st I have another story that will be free at ebook retailers everywhere. That is my story Darkpilot's Bride which is one of the six stories in the Ellora's Cavemen anthology: Legendary Tails 1.

As you can see from the cover, this book has some other great authors in it as well as me: Elizabeth Lapthorne, Lynn LaFleur, B.J. McCall, Callista Arman, and Charlotte Boyett-Compo. The stories were all great and we got a number of good reviews and awards.

My story was based on a joke I once made when the anthology was first announced. They said they particularly wanted stories with heavyset heroines, vampires, futuristic, and bondage, so I said I would write a story about a futuristic vampire who lands on a planet and finds the heavyset heroine tied to a tree.

I wrote it and it was accepted into the anthology. So now everyone can pick up a copy of this book when it goes free on Amazon, and all those other electronic book sellers. Be sure to check out the adventures of Dimitri, Josia, and Arthur, Dimitri's fussy computer.

That's all from me for this month. See you in July where I'll be posting from the RWA convention.

Cheers,

Janet Miller aka Cricket Starr

The 30th RT Booklovers Convention

A couple weeks ago I attended the RT Booklovers convention, which celebrated its 30th year of existence. It was a grand party over the five days I was there, with parties every night, sometimes more than one, and seminars during the day. I met readers, fellow writers, a few publishing professionals, and basically had a great time.

Every year I go to this convention I ask myself: "Is it really worth the money?"

The cost isn't cheap. Between the the hotel, travel expenses, the convention fee, the promotional items I bought and gave away, not to mention my meals, I spent a lot of money. Will I make that up in extra sales? Hard to say, but I think it's unlikely. I did raise awareness of my brand and my books, and I did find some information at the convention that will help me manage my writing career, as well as get the latest information on what industry professionals think. Every year I learn more about about how the business is going and get useful information.

But all that is not why I go to the convention. I go because I have a good time. After all, where else could I get away with something like this:

Yes that's me, wearing a safari outfit and carrying a toy elephant. The Samhain Safari was one of the parties and since my latest Gaian novel, Beloved Stranger is published with Samhain, I decided that when on safari it was important to bring your own elephant. Which is to say that I visited a local toy store and bought the cutest elephant I could find before the party, then decorated him with a flashing light on his trunk. One thing about it, if you carry around an elephant with a flashing light on his trunk, you will get attention. I talked to a lot of readers at the party who all said they liked "Blinky", my elephant.

And that is part of this convention, getting the attention of readers. Did it sell any more books? Maybe not but today I have a nice new elephant and a big smile remembering how much fun I had. Some days that can be enough.

Does anyone else have any convention stories?

Cheers,
Janet Miller
The second Gaian novel, Beloved Enemy - now on sale at Amazon, Nook, and Kobo.
See more at http://www.cricketstarr.com

More cover mania

Last month I talked about covers and getting the perfect one for a book. This month I want to continue this theme in talking about the covers for the Gaian books I'm re-releasing next month. The books are Beloved Enemy and Beloved Traveler, and I wanted to make sure the new covers both enticed people to investigate the books and accurately reflected the contents as well.

When working with a cover artist it is very important that you spend a little time deciding what kind of cover you want. In this case I wanted covers that made it obvious these were science fiction romances, with space-themed backgrounds and couples that looked like the characters in the books. Knowing what I wanted made the process much easier.

For example if the characters are young, as in Beloved Enemy, you want them to look young. Since the heroine is spaceship pilot who has been stranded on a deserted planet for a while, then I wanted her cover image to not be wearing a lot of makeup. To me, this cover reflects well both the characters of Meagan and Kavath, but also says something about their relationship. He's reluctant to get into a relationship with her while she's a bit sassy about the whole thing. You can see that by the way they are posed.

For the second book, Beloved Traveler, the characters are older, and the images my cover artist picked showed that. Jack and Meagan have been through a lot in their lives and are reluctant to become involved, but can't resist the pull they feel towards each other. The passion they find is obvious in this cover. Again I think this cover reflects well who these characters are and their relationship.

In both covers the science fiction aspects are obvious, a strange planet in the first cover, a space ship control deck in the second.

In the cover for Promises To Keep,  the book I currently have for sale, the space theme is shown by the planet, stars, and space ship in the background.

To make the books all seem within the same series, the fonts are the same, my name is at the top, and the series name is in large letters at the bottom. There is no mistaking that these three books are related to each other.

Maybe you can't always judge a book by its cover, but if the cover is any good, it should be able to say something about the book.

So, anyone else have any covers to share?

Cheers,
Janet Miller

Series are an author’s best friend

I’ve written a number of series so far, four to be exact, and I love all of them. There are some that are more popular than others like the Gaian Story series which is science fiction romance about men who are looking for the woman that matches them to marry, and Hollywood After Dark, which is vampires and werewolves looking for their mates. But I’ve never been sorry to write a series.

The Girl In The Box - Free!

For one thing readers like series. If they like the world and the characters of a book, they want to read more about them. Even if the characters of the first book only show up as minor characters in a second one, I find that readers like to see how things are going for them. And sometimes a minor character in a book is so charismatic that they end up staring in a future book.

Why do I know this? Well, for one thing, I love to read series books myself. There are a number of authors whose books I read because I picked up a copy of one of them, and then proceeded to buy all of the books in the series before and after the book I read. I’ve also found that I tend to hear from readers about the books I write, particularly things like “when is so-and-so going to get their book?”

When you hear something like that, it is very hard to decide to write something else. After all, I want to make my readers happy.

However, there are some challenges to writing a series. For one thing when you are writing a series set in a particular world with continuing characters you have to keep the world constant. If you establish that someone is blond and blue-eyed in one book, they have to stay blond and blue-eyed in the next... unless you want to fit them with contacts and dye their hair. Age is harder to work around. A 100-year-old vampire can’t turn out to be 200 years old in the next book. This can lead to challenges when you have a series with as many books as I have. I bought a copy of Scrivener to see if I couldn’t keep track of things that way and in writing this last Gaian story it helped a lot. Now I have a common nomenclature for the electronic gismos in my world that I didn't have before.

How does everyone else track details of a world? Spreadsheets, word documents, or are there other writing tools people use? That’s a good topic for discussion. What do the other writers here use to keep their world details straight?

Cheers,

Janet Miller/Cricket Starr

NaNoWriMo update

It is the middle of November which means that I should be just about hitting the 25K mark on my WIP over at NaNoWriMo. And I am... just under 22 thousand words. Actually 21760 to be exact. So as you can see from the below graph I'm a bit behind.



The reason I'm behind is that for the past couple of days I've had some interrupts to my writing time (those are the red days). For example last night we went to the opera in San Francisco and that meant no writing in the evening after work. The day job keeps me from working on my manuscript during the day, and I'm also in rehearsal for The Nutcracker in which I'm playing both Grandmother in the first act and Mother Ginger in the second, so I have two sets of rehearsals to be at during the week and weekend. Tonight is Party Scene rehearsal so today may also be red. That's life during NaNoWriMo.

But this weekend I'm going to crack the whip and get caught back up again. I'm just about two days behind at this point but I've done this three times before and was able to come up from behind each time. The whole point of NaNo is to remind the writer that creating a novel isn't a sprint, it is a marathon and a bad day shouldn't take you out of the race.

I'm going to see if I can't get 500K words done before I head into work this morning and write some more this evening after rehearsal, and then write extra Saturday and Sunday to not only get to where I should have been, but even ahead so that when the Thanksgiving holiday hits I've got some breathing room.

If you want to follow my progress, my NaNo handle is janetmfoo and you can see my stats here:
The Girl Unboxed

The big question will be not when I get this book done but when I'll get it on the bookshelves over at Amazon, edited, formatted, and for sale. I'm hoping for just after Christmas so keep your fingers crossed. Mine will by typing madly away.

Cheers,
Janet/Cricket
WIP The Girl Unboxed
Falling in love was just the beginning of the story.

The new publishing paradigm

A couple weeks ago I was present at the RWA convention when Stephanie Laurens made her amazing keynote address on the changing of the publishing world. In case you missed it, she’s put the text and the slides up here: http://www.stephanielaurens.com/rwa12keynote.html To summarize what Ms. Laurens said, the publishing world is changing but our role in it stays the same with respect to writing the best book we can. We just have a lot more options now when it comes to publishing and can choose to take advantage of pieces of the publishing world rather than contract with a publisher.

Since pretty much anyone can take their written material and put it up on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or some other online store, the question is why trade the 60+% of the profits of a book for what a publishing house can give you? This is question a lot of authors are asking right now, and with good reason. I don’t have experience with the traditional publishing world, but I can tell you in the small-press world it is a really big question.

I see a publishing house offering three things of importance: good editing, good distribution, and a name for quality. A do-it-yourselfer can hire a good freelance editor, and contract cover art that, if not the best in the world, at least they have control over. And the distribution isn’t that hard to manage with KDP for Amazon, Pubit! for Barnes and Noble, Kobo’s Writer’s Life, and Smashwords for everything else. But the last item, the reputation of the publishing house to attract readers, that is something a lot more difficult for an individual author to manage.

If you have a big name already, you might be able to just throw up your work on Amazon and most likely your fans will find you. Price your book a dollar or so below your traditionally published titles and your voracious readers will snap it up as a bargain.

If you don’t have a massive fan base, then you need to have some way to get the reader’s attention. There are so many books released at online book vendors every day, if not every hour, that it is easy to overlook yours. If a publishing house has a reputation then people flock to it on release day to shop for new books and even if they don’t buy the book on the publisher’s website, they will look it up on the various online ebook stores associated with their favorite ebook reader and buy it there. The publisher’s website becomes the virtual bookstore to browse through.

I have a new title coming out today (8/14/2012), Beloved Stranger, which has already been preselling at Samhain, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble for the past couple of months. It is part of my Gaian science fiction romance series and is about a young woman sneaking into a Gaian prison colony to find her sisters by marrying one of the prisoners. It is a sequel to Beloved Traveler where we first meet Sonja Deems. She was so kick-ass as a character I decided I had to use her in another book, hence this one.

I’m very excited because this is my first title with Samhain and so far I’ve been very impressed with the editing, the covers, and the overall professionalism of the company and the people I've dealt with. I’m looking forward to seeing how sales are and if my publishing a book with Samhain gives me more profits than self-publishing.

Anyone else thinking about these things? How is the new publishing paradigm effecting you?