Jeffe Kennedy's Blog, page 187

Which Marketing Is Worth Paying For?

I’m over at Word Whores today, talking about my favorite free and paid marketing venues.

Cover Reveal for THE TALON OF THE HAWK

Look what appeared today!!

The cover for book 3 of The Twelve Kingdoms: The Talon of the Hawk.

It’s really just so perfect – exactly what I asked for. I particularly love the progression of the three covers, which capture so well my three sisters and their journeys.

 

 

Also, the tagline? “A different kind of battle.”

Spot on!

Serendipitously enough, I’m over at Shut Up & Read today, talking about how the three sisters are alike – and how they’re also very different.

Promo Pushes – The Good, The Bad and The Serendipitous

We continued our tour of New Mexico – and David’s ongoing quest for a good fishing spot – with a visit to Santa Rosa on Sunday. I, naturally, make an ideal fishing companion since all you have to do is park me in a chair and let me read. No fish were caught, but I did finish reading a book and started another.

I call it a win.

Today I’m over at Word Whores (yeah, the schedule got messed up), talking about my most successful planned and serendipitous promo pushes. I’m also at Books and Tales, where I talk about Graham Joyce, his recent passing and how much I liked him – both as a person and an author.

On a happier note, I’m also at Paranormal Romantics, following a reader suggestion and analyzing the number and variety of descriptors that Rogue uses for Gwynn in the Covenant of Thorns books. Like this one:Also – very fun! – there’s a Goodreads giveaway going on for The Tears of the Rose! This book, the second in my Twelve Kingdoms trilogy, comes out November 25, but you can get it early via this giveaway!

Party! Party!! Party!!!

A great big HAPPY BIRTHDAY goes out to my delightful friend and brilliant critique partner, Anne Calhoun!

Yes, she was born on September 11, which is a date shaded with bad feels now. In fact, 9/11/01 was a milestone birthday for her – and she was in Manhattan.

Right?

I think we can make THIS birthday a titch more fun!!

In one of those serendipitous co-occurrences of fortune, Anne and I have almost overlapping release dates this week, too. Rogue’s Paradise, book 3 in my Covenant of Thorns trilogy, came out on Monday, and Anne’s fabulously sexy Afternoon Delight, first in her new IRRESISTIBLE series (who can resist that??) comes out next Tuesday.

So many things worth celebrating at once that I just can’t even!

Therefore, I propose a game. For the next 24 hours, from midnight Central US time on September 11 up until the hands of the clock switch over to September 12, I want you to give Anne gifts.

Virtual ones.

Send her pictures of what you think she’d love. Tweet them to us, at @jeffekennedy and/or @annecalhoun – be sure to use the hashtag #annebday. Or paste them to our Facebook pages! Stick that #annebday hashtag on there and put them on https://www.facebook.com/Author.Jeffe.Kennedy and/or https://www.facebook.com/anne.calhoun. We’ll be picking our favorites, too, and sharing them. Be creative! Have FUN!

And….

Oh, yeah – we’ll be giving away books! I’ll be giving away two digital copies of Anne’s Afternoon Delight and Anne will give likewise two of my Rogue’s Paradise. International is okay, since these are digital!

We’ll also be giving away each other’s backlists. Watch our Facebook and Twitter feeds – especially that #annebday hashtag – for flash giveaways from us and our partygirl friends!

Can’t wait for this party to get started!

~runs off to chill champagne and heat up dancing boys~

Delicious Quotes and Reviews

I love how Carina Press puts together these quotes from the books for release week.

As part of the ongoing celebration of the culmination of Rogue and Gwynn’s adventures in the Covenant of Thorns, I’m at the Carina Press blog today, talking about the best way to end a series. I’m also over at Jen’s That’s What I’m Talking About blog with an excerpt from Rogue’s Paradise and there will be a review posted there later today. Speaking of reviews, the fabulous E and Has at The Bookpushers came out with their joint review of Rogue’s Paradise today – very fun to read!

Rogue’s Paradise Release Day!

Today marks the end of an odyssey for me – the release of Rogue’s Paradise – the third (and final?) book in my Covenant of Thorns series. So many feels about this. I’ll be in lots of places talking about it. For today, you can find an excerpt at the Contemporary Romance Cafe and join in a discussion about Fantasy Romance at Jill Archer’s blog. We’re looking for other recommendations, too!

Tracking Sales Without Losing Your Mind

I’m over at the Word Whores bordello today, talking about the release of Rogue’s Paradise tomorrow (!) and the ways I do and don’t track my book sales so that I don’t lose my mind.

Why I’m Running for the RWA National Board

 So, the ballots have gone out for elections for the RWA Board of Directors.

And I’m running for one of the Director at Large positions.

Surprise!

Yeah, it probably seems out of the blue to some of you (hi Mom!), but it’s something I’ve been pondering for a long time. Really, I’ve had in mind that I would do this someday since I joined RWA lo these six years ago. Back then I’d been working as a nonfiction writer for a long time and knew those circles well. I’d been part of a crit group that did mainly literary fiction and creative nonfiction, was on my state’s Arts Council roster and participated in book festivals, etc. However, as I branched into fiction and tried to shop my (what turned out to be) fantasy romance novel, I discovered I knew very little about the romance genres and had no connections in that community. And shopping my novel turned out to be much harder than I’d thought. I clearly needed help.

True Confession: I joined RWA entirely for mercenary purposes to begin with. I became a member, immediately applied for PRO status so I could have higher priority in picking appointments to meet with editors and agents at the 2009 National Conference. I’d been on a day job trip in Ohio, flew from there to San Francisco, wandered the conference all day Thursday, pitched on Friday and flew home that afternoon. I knew no one, talked to only a few people (I scorned my First Timer ribbon, alas) and didn’t expect much more than my very targeted goals.

Except I was totally blown away.

Every panel, workshop and speaker luncheon I attended was amazing. The people I did talk to were lovely. I saw Nora Roberts in the bar and rode in an elevator with Linda Howard. For the first time, I saw Jayne Ann Krentz and Susan Elizabeth Phillips give their Secrets of the Bestselling Sisterhood. (Something I try to see every year.) I couldn’t believe these mega-selling authors were mixing in with a wannabe like me. More, the friendships astounded me. The lit fiction world tends to be fraught with competition and cold shoulders rule. I loved seeing these authors who’d been friends for 20 or 30 years, telling their stories with affection. After my successful pitches (I thought then – believing having requested pages meant I was in), I sat at the bar and had a celebratory glass of champagne – by myself – looked around at all the hugs, laughter and intense conversations and thought, “I want to be part of this.”

I mean, some random woman took a picture of my shoes! I had clearly found my tribe.

I haven’t missed a National Conference since.

Even then, listening to the key note speaker – I think it was Nora that year – I was moved, inspired and knew that I wanted to come back for this conference every year that I could. I’d been on Boards before – sorority, Zonta, Association for Women in Science – and I believe in giving back to the organizations I belong to in that way. All along I figured one day I’d put my time in on the RWA Board.

And now feels like the right time.

My day job is less demanding. My fiction-writing career more steady. There are good incumbents for me to learn from and several people I admire and respect encouraged me to run.

Most important to me, the last year has seen several of my friends – stellar writers and amazing women – waver in their commitment to RWA. A lot of it comes from miscommunication and misunderstanding. Other pieces from policies that have led to them feeling alienated. Though it happened sooner than I thought, I realized that I needed to step up to do what I could to help preserve this organization that has meant so much to me.

So, that’s the long version of the short blurbs I put on the RWA Election ballot.

I’m happy to answer questions!

Getting Past Negativity Bias – the Beachy Way

I’m over at Word Whores discussing this week’s topic Measuring Success (and Failures): How, When, and Then What? Okay – I’m mainly talking about boogie boarding and why it’s more important to choose happiness, because success and failure are meaningless metrics.

On Not Writing in Pretty Journals

Last night, as I was getting ready for bed, I had a rush of ideas for a new story.

It’s partly Carolyn Crane‘s fault, because we were IMing and we started riffing on story ideas. Actually, to back up, she’d watched two episodes of Game of Thrones, hated that the dog died and wanted me to promise her nothing else bad would happen.

HA!

She’s so adorable. So I explained who was still alive of my last watching, we started talking about our favorite – female, naturally – characters and what made them heroic. And then we segued, as you do, into my heroines in The Twelve Kingdoms books and what would be a really awesome plotline for Dafne. My brain was still buzzing with it as I brushed my teeth and the opening scene for book 4 crystallized in my head. Now, I always think I’ll remember these things the next day, but sometimes the intervention of sleep and other dreams will muddle them. So I went back to my desk to write down some notes.

Any of you who follow me regularly are snickering, because you know my issues with the cryptic notes I leave myself

NEVERTHELESS.

One of my many issues along these lines is that I tend to grab a sticky note – which has the dual complication of being small enough to encourage even more crypticness (cryptnicity? crypniticism?) and can be easily lost. I have a bad habit of using what’s at hand. For example, the page of notes above are on the back side of the title page of my galley proofs of The Tears of the Rose, book 2 in the series. When I reviewed those galleys, I’d finished book 3, The Talon of the Hawk. As I was reading, all sorts of tweaks occurred to me that I needed to work in during edits. Thus the mess above.

You’ll also note the pretty notebook with my name on it.

Followed by three exclamation points.

This was a gift from Carolyn, meant to poke at me because I’m forever excising exclamation points from her manuscripts when I critique them. Every once in a while I let her keep one. NEVER multiples.

I have a number of adorable little notebooks like this – with pretty covers and enticingly blank pages within. Some have been gifts like this one. Some I’ve bought for myself. I keep them around and have for many years. When I first decided to become a writer, friends gave notebooks like this to me with encouraging messages in the front pages. I treasure them all. Many of them I never marked a word in, feeling like I needed to be worthy of those blank pages. Or I saved them only for the “good” stuff – carefully penned sentences and transcribed poems. Things I never look at.

So, last night, instead of grabbing a sticky note – let’s be honest, I couldn’t find one under the stacks of books – I opened the journal and used that to jot down the basics of that opening scene. And now I’ll have those in a place I can find them. Something to go back to someday, maybe even long after the book is on the shelf. Not careful or pretty or perfect.

But useful and real.

Which is what our notebooks should contain.