E.M. Tippetts's Blog, page 11

Win a SIGNED copy of Just For Now by Abbi Glines

I had the pleasure of meeting Abbi Glines at the London Book Fair, and found out, much to my surprise, that she knows who I am. She and I had talked via email before (though she gets a ton of email, so I didn't expect her to remember.) In person, she is very sweet and personable. I just happened to catch her at the Fair when she didn't have hordes of fans clustered around so we even got to sit and chat a little.

And at this signing, where I had the picture taken, I had Abbi sign a copy of Just For Now with the British cover. So I know this giveaway's a little unusual, in that I'm celebrating my new, Okay Creations designed covers by giving away a book without an Okay Creations cover. Okay Creations designs Abbi's US covers. Consider this one a novelty!

For all my fans at the conservative end of the spectrum, note that this book has mature content. Please don't feel left out. I plan to give away a variety of books.


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Love in Darkness, Cover Reveal

I've loved Sarah Hansen's designs ever since I first found her when she designed a cover for a friend of mine, and I absolutely adore this cover:

Here's the full cover spread. She'll change the name on the spine to the stylized one:


And there you have the cover for my next novel! Ebook ARCs are ready and have gone out to reviewers. Shoot me a request if you want one. I'm putting together the paperback even as I type this.

Win a SIGNED copy of Falling Into You by Jasinda Wilder

Apologies upfront for covering two very disparate topics in one email. A terrible tragedy happened in my home country this week. I refer of course to the bombs planted at the Boston Marathon. As fate would have it, I got news of this as it occurred, which was also at the exact same time the auto-scheduled messages for my cover reveal and other celebrations were already starting to activate. I know a lot of people called time on all promotions in the wake of the bombings, and I appreciate and respect the spirit in which they did this. Please don't feel that my going ahead with the cover reveal was meant as any sort of snub of this observance. Rather, it was the result of the fact that the cover reveal was a coordinated effort, and many people had already scheduled the posts to go live.

 So, before we go into our happy celebration with another book giveaway, I did want to take a moment to say that I am heartbroken by this event. I can't fathom why anyone would be so sick and so cruel to kill and maim innocent people. I hope the perpetrators are found and brought to justice and that those still fighting for their lives, and those fighting to put their lives back together, prevail and are able to rise from this situation in due time. I am *not* dancing around my apartment, singing songs about cover reveals and new books coming out. I'm actually stressed out of my mind, but because a book launch is, as I said, a coordinated event, I will proceed in order to do my part and do right by the people who've promised me their time and promotional talents.

 Let me also say that I think times like this remind us of what the arts are for. Reality is what it is. I highly recommend living here, but not all the time. It'll break your heart. It'll let you down. We all need to escape and we all have this amazing ability to imagine and to dream, to live a hundred lifetimes and suffer others' experiences. We have to make our relationship with reality a good and healthy one, and I would advocate doing this by taking regular vacations to the land of dreams and make believe to digest and ponder and find what meaning we can before we open our eyes again, get to our feet, and live another day.

 See, now I can say stuff like this because it isn't my book I'm promoting. It's the Amazon, USA Today, and New York Times bestselling Falling Into You by Jasinda Wilder, a talented, prolific author who is also a very cool person. She's provided a SIGNED copy of this book to give away, along with some swag. So enter below! This giveaway will end Tuesday the 23rd. Here's the blurb:

I wasn't always in love with Colton Calloway; I was in love with his younger brother, Kyle, first. Kyle was my first one true love, my first in every way. 

Then, one stormy August night, he died, and the person I was died with him. 

Colton didn't teach me how to live. He didn't heal the pain. He didn't make it okay. He taught me how to hurt, how to not be okay, and, eventually, how to let go. 

*** 

Nell Hawthorne is in love with her life-long best friend, Kyle Calloway. Their young love is invincible and life is full of promise; then one night Kyle dies suddenly in a tragic accident and Nell is forever changed. She meets Kyle's older brother Colton for the first time at the funeral. They both struggle to move on with life as best they can. Years later, they meet again in New York City, and Colton realizes that Nell has never really gotten over Kyle's death. She seems to be harboring a deeply rooted pain, a heavy weight of guilt and regret. He knows he shouldn't get involved, but he can't help himself. Trust doesn't come easily for either of them, and they both have demons. Together, they learn the purpose of pain and the meaning of healing, and the importance of forgiveness.

Let me also add a mature content warning. Those of you who have followed me from my LDS fiction roots, make sure to take note of explicit content warnings on books such as this one. The genre I write in is very diverse, which is one thing I truly love about it. This book has mature content. It's cover is designed by Sarah Hansen, who just did the cover redesign for Castles.


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Castles on the Sand has a new cover!

A huge thank you to Sarah Hansen of Okay Creations for designing this beautiful cover for Castles on the Sand . The sequel, entitled Love in Darkness, will have it's cover revealed in one week! 
More fun stuff to come soon. Email followers of this blog, you'll notice this email comes to you in a different format. You'll soon be invited onto a special page of the site where you get an exclusive, sneak peek of Love in Darkness. Watch your inboxes for the link! Those of you not subscribed by email, feel free to do so.

The Indie Experiment: Defining my brand

Facebook friends and fans of mine will know I've been playing around with my banner images. I attended Indie ReCon this week and there were a lot of great posts. I especially appreciated Ali Cross's post on building an author brand, and after I read it I set out to create a brand for my own self.

Ali uses a little red haired ninja in all of her branding materials and has it on her blog, Facebook, Twitter, email signature, etc. I thought, okay, I'd like an avatar and I'd like it to be slightly more sophisticated, but only slightly. It occurred to me to make a semi-self portrait in the chick lit illustration style, so I got a bunch of images off Shutter Stock and created this:


People left comments about how it did kind of look like me and a lot of people liked it, but when I asked a friend of mine who is a graphic designer, she suggested we get together and talk, which I immediately knew meant that she would tell me, nicely, that I was going in the wrong direction in some way.
When I visited her today, she explained that I needed to stay consistent in my branding and all kinds of other things I thought I knew. When I explained that I wanted to make an avatar just to use for my online presence, she pressed me to establish a brand that would stay consistent in all my book covers too. At this point I felt a little hopeless. I only started selling novels as an indie author last year, and writing-wise I was still in "throw everything against the wall and see what sticks" mode, which means Paint Me True , Someone Else's Fairytale , and Castles on the Sand  are three very different books. Given Fairytale is what has sold best, I found myself in the position of having figure out a way to expand that franchise, and so I wrote Nobody's Damsel, which is less romance and more mystery, as a way to expand that concept into a series.
In other words, I'm quite aware that I'm all over the place, and I expect this to be a continued problem until I have enough books out that were of a consistent type to build up a brand. I couldn't think of one cover style that would work for all of them. My friend told me there are three elements to a cover (well, I did know this, and I'm sure you do too): the title, the image, and the author name. One of those has to be most prominent. They shouldn't fight with each other. So we looked at my book covers and I started to feel a little bit of despair. Again, I couldn't see a style that would work for all of my novels.
Until my ah-ha moment. She started pulling up other books on Amazon and telling me to look like my "competition" (which doesn't really exist in writing, as readers are generous and will buy from everyone who writes what they want). And then it hit me, the top selling authors are their brand. On their covers, their names are what are most prominent, often dwarfing the title. I had a little bit of branding in my name, always making it vertical, but that didn't convey much about the kind of books that I write. Also, I felt it was a little early to be making my name billboard sized on my novels so hadn't really thought about it much beyond that.
But here's the thing. The reason why I felt like it was too early was because I was in a traditional publishing frame of mind. If you sell books through a publisher, when you are early career, you get whatever cover they slap on it. Only after time and commercial success will they enlarge the font size on your name and make you the main attraction.
I don't have a publisher, and thus I already am my brand. Hence it's very silly of me to think of cover design the traditional way. As the old adage goes, dress for the job that you want, not the one that you have. In cover design/writing, brand yourself the way you want other people to see you, not based on where your sales and marketing are at right now. How often do I look at a book with the author name most prominent and have no idea who that author is? All the time. What do I think when I see it? "That's an author who's a success. They are their own brand."
When you're independent, you can't be any other brand than yourself. Soooo, I took a good look at my vertical name style, which you can see here on Castles on the Sand , and while there are things that I like about it, not the least of which is that it's prominent, it doesn't say anything about the book inside. This name style was developed by the wonderfully talented Jenn Reese. My alter ego, Emily Mah, is a science fiction writer and that's how I met Jenn, also a writer and a cover designer. Without knowing anything about me, she set up this branding that was distinctive, and given she knew nothing about my chick lit/women's fiction/YA writing, this was a great way to just make me different.
My task now, though, is to look like a prominent romance subgenre writer, so I went and pulled a ton of book covers of people who are way more successful than I am. What did I discover? Well, very much to my surprise, I found that the names were big, but not necessarily distinctive in any other way. Quite a few were just large and in a Trajan Pro type style. Now if I were with it, I'd post images, but I'm trying to type this before my kids act up again, so I don't dare take the time to grab any. A quick surf on Amazon, though, and you'll find much the same thing that I did. Even authors who had quirky names on some books didn't have them on all. It was the actual name, not the styling of the name, that made the brand.
Well, I'm indie. I want to style my name, so I got to playing around in Photoshop and discovered some very cool things about E.M. Tippetts. One is that the "E.M." can nest above the p's and e in "Tippetts". The last name nicely frames my initials. Another is that you can place the "E.M." in a way that the dot in the i of "Tippetts" and the periods line up. In randomly taking my married name and first initials, I actually got something that has some cool design potential.
In an exercise for myself, then, I tried to make a newly branded cover of one of my books. I have all the design materials for Fairytale , because I designed that cover. So I played around with it and did this:

My friend had told me to take out most of the gold curly-q's and things and, while I understand that they make the cover busy, I wanted it to look like a modernized leatherbound tome. Going with her advice, I made a chick lit cover with some leatherbound tome touches and my name front and center. Now, I'm not immediately going to run out and redo the covers of my series in this style. I need to play around more with my name and really think about what kind of brand I want, but I now feel like I've grasped something important. This looks more like a book from an author who's "made it" it in the traditional publishing world.
In indie writing, you have to be your brand. There's no point giving yourself covers that look like you're a midlister. You need to give yourself covers like you're the top earning author at your publisher, because you are. Your work is all you've got.
Over the next several weeks you'll see me start to alter this website accordingly as I pull together one consistent look and brand to be known by online. And I'll work on writing more of the type of books my readers want, but I don't need to wait until I'm done with my plot-style evolution before I start telling everyone with my typography and name style what kind of writer I want people to think I am. In fact, I have to start now. Most people have never heard of me, so I need to give them more than a name. Also, if I come up with a name style, that's only one annoying thing to give the cover designers I hire. I can therefore not be neurotic about every other aspect of the cover, only about the way my name looks, and I think that'll be better for everyone involved.
But don't worry, I'm still writing my next book as I figure all of this out ;-)

Come join me for a Q&A on Goodreads!

This weekend I'll be answering questions for the New Adult Book Club on Goodreads. If you're on Goodreads and you enjoy new adult fiction, join on up and come ask me anything you like (though the sillier the question, the sillier the answer - you've been warned!) Here's the intro post I wrote to kick things off:

My name's Emily Mah Tippetts, and I write new adult romance as E.M. Tippetts. My most recent books are Someone Else's Fairytale, its sequel, Nobody's Damsel, and Castles on the Sand, which is actually YA, but its sequel will be NA. To date, Fairytale - which is about a woman who has no time for fairytales, yet catches the eye of a Hollywood A-lister - has been my best seller and has even been as high as the top 100 Kindle books on Amazon.

I got my start in writing science fiction short stories, which I still write under the name Emily Mah, and am a graduate of the Clarion West Workshop for Science Fiction and Fantasy and the Viable Paradise workshop. For ten years I was also a member of Critical Mass, an invitation only writer's group in my home state of New Mexico.

In my old day job, I was a lawyer who specialized in real estate, contracts, and writing wills and trusts. Towards the end of that career I had a lot of writers as clients, so I drafted a lot of literary estate plans. While I don't currently keep an active license, my law school education is a major asset that allows me to evaluate my own contracts and draft contract forms for new types of publishing deals. The most striking example is the indi e translation agreement I developed with Michael Drecker, who then went on to translate Fairytale into German. As a result, the German Fairytale currently outsells the English one.

These days I live in London with my family and also design jewelry on the side. Feel free to ask me anything about my books, my jobs, or my life. I look forward to talking to everyone!

The link to the Q&A, again, is here. Come on over!

Blog Tour Dates

Last year at this time I had just over a hundred sales under my belt and did all my own arrangements for reviews, guest posts, and interviews. Now I'm able to afford a blog tour service (yay!) and have booked two tours with Chick Lit Plus Book Tours. The first is for Someone Else's Fairytale  and will be March 18-April 8.

Chick Lit Plus is holding a drawing for a $20.00 Amazon gift card. In order to enter, follow the instructions on my blog tour page. I am very much looking forward to this tour. It's so nice to be able to sit down and do all the interviews, guest posts, etc. over the course of one day rather than try to jam them in during the evenings. I think the quality of my materials will be better as a result.

Launched!

The day is finally here and Nobody's Damsel is live. Here's a list of links where you can buy it:

Amazon US Kindle
Amazon US Paperback
Amazon UK Kindle
Amazon UK Paperback
Amazon Canada
Amazon Germany
Amazon Italy
Amazon Spain

Kobo

Smashwords

Barnes & Noble is still processing, and the paperback should also appear there and in Book Depository.

Here are some early review quotes:

"E.M. Tippetts has a fantastic ability to write a great story. Nobody's Damsel made me smile and made me frown and upset me in some parts and it had suspense in others. Somehow, the author was able to get me to care about crime drama and life as a celebrity, two things that I wouldn't have considered appealing to read about, without me even realizing how it happened!"

"NOBODY'S DAMSEL blew me away. I had to write this review three days after I finished the book just to compile my thoughts and do this review justice."

"I couldn't stop reading and actually ended up finishing it in just a few hours! I'm looking forward to the next in the series and seeing where life takes Chloe and Jason next."

And this one from a real live reader who's already bought the book and reviewed it (the previous three are from book bloggers who had advance review copies):

"I loved the first book in this series, Someone Else's Fairytale. I bought this book as soon as it came out, thinking, I'll give it a try because I liked the first one, but I probably won't like this one because I usually HATE sequels. Boy, am I glad I bought this one. I procrastinated a lot of chores I should be doing this morning and read the entire book, I was so invested in the story and the characters."

A little about Dan, the dedicatee of Nobody's Damsel

To finish out this year, and to set up for the release of Nobody's Damsel, I'm going to share the dedication and afterword of the book.

I wrote this book:
for Daniel Pendergrass 

(29 January, 1976 – July, 2011) 

who once wrote: “Beauty is a single tear, shed for someone dearly missed.” 
Hope you found your happily ever after, old friend. As long as I can hold a pencil, I won’t let the world forget about you. 
And here's the afterword to the book:
Remembering Daniel Pendergrass, the Dedicatee
As you’ll note from the dedication, Daniel Pendergrass passed away last year. I don’t have the precise date because it was never published; only a short obituary came out in the papers that I ever saw. He was thirty-five and I hadn’t seen him in person since high school. Our only recent interaction had been through the wonders of the internet, messages back and forth on Facebook.

Rewind thirty years, though, and Dan was my very best friend. Every year we made a pilgrimage to the school counselor to discuss all the flack we got for being friends of shockingly opposite genders. I still think it’s sick that anyone made an issue of this when we were in first grade. I’m not sure what other people’s six and seven year olds got up to, but Dan and I shared a passion for biology and wildlife and liked to hunt lizards and drink the nectar out of Indian paintbrush flowers. We once spent an entire recess examining a spider of a species we’d never seen before, until our classmate (who may or may not have also been my neighbor, not to point fingers or anything…) stepped on it.

While it’s the norm to sing the praises of those who have left us, I’d rather just tell you about the kind of guy Dan was, because I that’s how I liked him: as he was. He was small for his age, awkward and uncoordinated, and so brilliant that he spent his childhood worrying about big social and environmental problems that we were far too little to solve. He was a voracious reader, toting around the Lord of the Rings books in second grade as he worked his way through, page by painstaking page, until he’d finish each one in a matter of months – remember, he was only seven. Back then I was still reading Beverly Cleary. He was fiercely competitive and hated to lose at anything, which made playing sports with him difficult because most of us were bigger and more agile. Even me, and I’ve always been the kind of person chosen last for teams in gym.

One day after school we hiked down the Red Dot Trail, which residents of White Rock, New Mexico, will know is much too far for two children to hike alone. It goes in switchbacks down one wall of White Rock Canyon all the way to the Rio Grande. You can imagine how tiny we looked, picking our way down the boulder strewn cliff, and to make the image even more ridiculous, you can insert his Irish Wolfhound, Tara, who was almost as tall as we were. She kept us safe and helped us get home again, even after we lost our way. (I’m not sure if I ever told my parents that little detail. Sorry if this is the first you’ve heard of it, Mom and Dad, but hey, I survived childhood, right?)

One day during school something upset me so much that I cried during recess, only Dan kept distracting me by reading sections of James and the Giant Peach in silly voices. To this day, I don’t remember what had me so down, but I still remember his rendition of those pages. People who know me know it’s not easy to get me out of a bad mood once it’s moved me to tears.

As you can probably tell from the tenor of the dedication, though, my friend’s story had a lot of sad chapters. He was a very lonely person much of the time and had several serious health issues, including epilepsy, malformed hip joints, and an underdeveloped nervous system that affected his spatial awareness and balance. He was the first person I ever knew who wore a Medic Alert bracelet and his ungainly, jerky walk made him the target of mockery and abuse.

During middle school and high school he had various surgical procedures that required him to be in a body cast from the waist down, and it was after one of these that I heard about his first suicide attempt. I don’t know how often he tried to take his life, only that he succeeded last July. There was no memorial service to attend, and all I have left from this time are his Facebook messages, congratulating me on my writing sales and asking for advice on how to get an agent for his children’s books. Unfortunately, I don’t even know what became of his manuscripts.

He left an indelible mark on my life, though. Whenever I pick up a fantasy novel, I think of Dan toting around Lord of the Rings. I doubt it’s a coincidence that I began my writing career in speculative fiction. While I grew up without any brothers, many if not most of my close friends over the years have been male. Nowadays this seems to be acceptable, but for a couple of decades I was definitely the oddball, the girl who’d just walk up and talk to boys as if they were people (and a good percentage of them are, I can attest). I’ve endured a lot of dagger stares from jealous girls and fielded a lot of rumors about being in relationships. The flipside to this is that whenever a guy friend wants advice about women, I’m useless. I don’t get them either.

Dan taught me how cruel people can be to those who are different, and what it’s like to step outside of the box society puts each of us in. In short, it’s terrifying, isolating, and even painful, but the views are incredible. He taught me how hard work doesn’t always yield the desired reward. Despite his dreams of becoming a scientist and his many awards in school science fairs, his health precluded him from making this a reality. He taught me that loneliness isn’t all in the mind. Some people really don’t have anyone to turn to.

In one of his last messages to me, he was upbeat, telling me his epilepsy was under control and his medication had been reduced, but sometime between then and last July, things took a turn for the worse. He felt he couldn’t endure any longer and overdosed on his pills. There’s no bright side to this picture, really. It’s pure tragedy through and through. He died alone, after setting out extra food and water for his dog. He was an animal person to the end.

There’s nothing I can do to bring my old friend back, so instead I choose to tell the world that he was here. Nobody, after all, deserves to be forgotten. And if you’ve never gone up to say hello to someone while the whole rest of the room covers their mouths to keep from laughing, you’re missing out. Not because you’d be doing a great act of charity, but because it’s only when we step outside of our comfort zone that we stop skating through life and start living it in all its terrifying glory. Like I said, it can be painful, but the views are simply incredible.

E.M. Tippetts December 4, 2012___
Hope everyone has a Happy New Year's, a good time to reflect on endings and new beginnings.

Someone Else's Fairytale cracks the top 100 Kindle Books on Amazon

Someone Else's Fairytale is now officially a bestseller after it made the top 100 in the Kindle store this morning. The story behind this goes as follows:

Yesterday I noticed a sales spike and wondered what was going on out in the world of reviewers and publicity to cause this.

A fan on Facebook told me my book was in the BookBub daily email, but I probably knew that. I did not know that, and didn't know BookBub. A quick Google showed me that they are a very high powered ad service and I thought it was really cool they'd featured me.

A friend then asked me why I didn't know I was in the daily email. Didn't I remember paying BookBub? It turns out BookBub ads cost quite a bit of money. I thought, wait a minute, I didn't pay them. Who paid them?

An hour or so later, I get an email from BookBub telling me they gave me the slot for free, in the hopes that I would have "a good experience" and buy adspace from them in the future.

Early this morning, UK time, I checked my rankings and saw that Fairytale  was 55th in the Kindle store. I think this qualifies as "a good experience". All in all, it's one of the best Christmas presents I've ever received.

So, yes, if you have a book with a good review profile, I daresay BookBub is an ad service you should look into. I know I'll be buying from them in the future!

Buy now
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