Beth Groundwater's Blog, page 36
April 12, 2012
April Appearances
It also included a 6-city book tour.
Well, la-de-dah, I thought. Wouldn't it be nice if my publisher sent me on a 6-city book tour for the early May release of Wicked Eddies, the second book in my RM Outdoor Adventures mystery series. Then it struck me. I'm sending myself on one--and more! I'll be back east for a week visiting Hampton/Newport News, Virginia; Bethesda, Maryland; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Then I'll have book events in Colorado Springs and Denver, Colorado, as well as in many small communities throughout the state, including Frisco, Salida, and Monument. Finally, in October, I'll be at the Bouchercon mystery fan conference in Cleveland, Ohio.
I'd love to see some of my blog readers at these events. The Appearances page of my website is always the best place to check for up-to-date information on where I'll be when, but for my blog readers, I thought I'd let you know where you can find me in April and early May. Please come and say hello if you live nearby. Here goes:
Saturday, April 21, 2012
Colorado Springs Marriott Hotel
5580 Tech Center Drive, Colorado Springs, CO 80919
Wednesday, April 25, 2012, 5:30 – 8:30 PM
"Series Writing for the Organizationally Challenged"
Dinner Meeting of Chesapeake Bay Writers
Rivers Inn Restaurant
8106 Yacht Haven Rd, Gloucester Point, VA 23062
Friday-Sunday, April 27-29, 2012
Hyatt Regency Hotel
One Bethesda Metro Center (7400 Wisconsin Ave.),
Bethesda, MD 20814
Monday, April 30, 2012, 4 – 8 PM
Greek Orthodox Social Hall
12 Washington Ave, Oakmont, PA 15139
At both of the conferences and the festival, the bookstore is open to the public, as are the signing rooms. For instance, at the Pikes Peak Writers Conference, you can stop in the conference bookstore from 4:30 - 5:15 PM to catch me signing copies of my books there after my panel.
April 11, 2012
National Library Week
Today I'd like to join readers, authors, and librarians nationwide in celebrating National Library Week, a time to celebrate the contributions of our nation's libraries and librarians and to promote library use. Also, today is National Bookmobile Day! To find out more about what's happening for National Library week, I suggest you go to the American Library Association page about it or the @Your Library announcement, which includes a Twitter contest.
Contact your own local library to find out how they're celebrating the week. As for my library, the Summit County Library, they've organized quite a few events for this special week. Check out this Summit Daily News article about all of the events, including three today!
I'm a member of the Friends of the Summit County Library, and I'll be volunteering to help at bookfairs and the library information booth at the summer food market. Find out if your library has a volunteer organization that you can join! It's a great way to meet fellow bibliophiles and support your local library at the same time.
Also, if you need to downsize (as I did recently for my move to Breckenridge) and have to give up some of your book collection, donate it to your local library. If they can't use the books in their collection, it's likely that their volunteer organization will sell the books during a fundraiser to raise funds for the library. Hopefully some of those funds will be used to buy books for the library's collection, including those all-important children's books that help instill a love of reading in the next generation.
April 10, 2012
An Intriguing Interview!
April 9, 2012
Goodreads Giveaway
The official release date for Wicked Eddies, book 2 in my RM Outdoor Adventures mystery series is one month away, on May 8th. To celebrate this countdown milestone, I'm giving away a copy on Goodreads to a lucky winner of the giveaway contest there. If you're a Goodreads member, please enter the contest and good luck to you!
Also, if you're a Goodreads member, I'm opening up my Q&A group for discussion during the month prior to the release. Ask me any question you like! And if you aren't a member of the group, feel free to join. It's public.
Lastly, here are a few things that Goodreads members can do for me:
1. Befriend me or become a fan at my author page.
2. Add Wicked Eddies to your to-read list.
3. If you've read one of my other books, please rate and/or review it on Goodreads.
4. Send a book recommendation to your Goodreads friends suggesting that they read Wicked Eddies.
And, just in case you haven't had a chance to read the blurb for Wicked Eddies at my website or Amazon's or Barnes and Nobles's or Midnight Ink's or ... here it is to whet your appetite:
Fly fishing is dangerous? River ranger Mandy Tanner had no idea until days before a huge tournament in Salida, Colorado. True, the Arkansas River can be a man-eater, but the rapids weren't responsible for driving a hatchet into the neck of would-be competitor Howie Abbott―a secretive man who may have been cheating. While casting about for suspects, Mandy seeks clues from Abbott's family members, including her best friend, bartender Cynthia Abbott. But when Cynthia becomes the prime suspect, Mandy realizes she's wading into deeper, more hazardous waters than ever.
April 5, 2012
Lamenting the Closing of Another Independent Bookstore
April 4, 2012
Happy Delivery of WICKED EDDIES!
I received a lovely surprise package today--my author copies of Wicked Eddies, which will be released officially on May 8th. The countdown begins!
April 3, 2012
Celebrating the Delivery of a Manuscript
Hallelujah! I can back away from the keyboard that I've been bent over for months. On Sunday, April 1st, I delivered the manuscript for Cataract Canyon, the third book of my RM Outdoor Adventures series, to my acquisition editor at Midnight Ink. Yes, April 1st was the due date, and I was working on edits and prose polishing right up to minutes before I hit the Send button.
I'm proud of the book, and I feel that it unravels an interesting and intense mystery that stresses my characters. However, every time I read a chapter, I found something to improve or change, even though each of the chapters has gone through multiple edits.
And frankly, I'm going to continue to edit the manuscript after I turned it in. My critique group has yet to give me feedback on the last two chapters, and I'll incorporate their suggestions in the manuscript. After it rests for a couple of weeks, I'll read through it again, and I'm sure I'll find things to change. I'll fold these changes in with those that I will make as a result of my editor's feedback. In the meantime, I'm on pins & needles, hoping that she likes it and doesn't have too many changes for me. I'm sure she'll have some, though.
I just hope her feedback doesn't take the form of the above photo. Wish me luck, please!
March 29, 2012
Today's Author Guest: Jeffrey Marks
As promised yesterday, Jeffrey Marks is my guest today, talking about where to find the latest in mystery titles and releases. To read his bio and see his photo, please page down to yesterday's post. Above is the cover art for his extremely useful publication, Intent to Sell: Marketing the Genre Novel. It is the first and only how-to book on marketing and maximizing sales of genre novels, and I use my copy all the time.
From the early chapters of setting up a website and writing copy about your book to niche marketing, this book contains information necessary to navigate the quickly changing environment of bookselling. The fourth edition has a brand new chapter on social networking and how it can be used to sell more copies of your title. While specifically written for the mystery genre, the steps given can be applied to any genre. If you're an author and don't have a copy, get yours now! Here's Jeffrey's guest post:
Finding Information on Mysteries
I'm back again, celebrating the release of the 4th edition of Intent to Sell: Marketing the Genre Novel. Beth and I are having a bit of fun today, and instead of talking about marketing your own book, I'm going to talk to you about where to find the latest in mystery titles and releases.
My goal when I'm looking is not to find a group of authors who are promoting their own books, but to find sites that are mainly interested in listing new titles for me to read. In this manner, I can find the latest releases of my favorite authors, and occasionally I can find a new author to read. I'm always looking to read a book and these sites help make it easier for me to find them.
There are places that just list new titles for you. One of those places is The Blood-Stained Bookshelf, which lists by month new titles. It's a great place to see the newest books and what's soon to be released. The bookshelf is a wonder, if you know what you're looking for. I can easily find titles by authors I'm familiar with, but it doesn't help me to find a "new to me" author. Plus there aren't many reviews to guide me in deciding if I want to read the latest or not.
Many of the people I know who attend conferences use the Edgars' site to locate books by category. Again, this doesn't tell you anything about the books themselves. It just lists books by the major publishers in the current calendar year. It's not a review site. It was developed for authors to see if their book has been received, but I've found it to be a very handy site for looking up new titles.
I Love a Mystery Newsletter is another place to find new books. They do a great job of printing in depth reviews of recently released books and series. I tend to go to them if I'm unsure about a new title or series by an author. The reviewers are professional and share what I need to know without giving away spoilers.
Goodreads is another fun place to check out new mysteries. You can record books you've read or are reading and rate them both via a star-system and in reviews. I've found that most of the real book discussions take place in the groups, so look around for groups related to mysteries and many of them will discuss recent releases. There's some self-promotion by authors, but it doesn't drown out the collegial feel of the groups.
Another site that deals in books is Shelfari. This site lists the bestsellers lists in fiction and non-fiction, popular series, and recommended books. The site was acquired by Amazon in 2008, and it has some of the feel of that book-selling site. One of the features is a virtual bookshelf that allows others to see your books and vice versa, similar to Goodreads.
Library Thing is another similar site. I especially like the LT Newsletter that appears monthly. It has a number of suggestions on new authors and interviews with those authors.
Thanks, Jeffrey! Now, who has a comment or question for him?
March 28, 2012
Tomorrow's Guest: Jeffrey Marks
Tomorrow, author Jeffrey Marks will be a guest on my blog. He is a long-time mystery fan and freelancer. After numerous mystery author profiles, he chose to chronicle the short but full life of mystery writer Craig Rice.
That biography (Who Was That Lady?) encouraged him to write mystery fiction. His works include Atomic Renaissance: Women Mystery Writers of the 1940s/1950s, and a biography of mystery author and critic Anthony Boucher entitled Anthony Boucher. It was nominated for an Agatha and fittingly, won an Anthony.
He is the long-time moderator of MurderMustAdvertise, an on-line discussion group dedicated to book marketing and public relations, to which I belong and contribute to. Also, he is the author of Intent to Sell: Marketing the Genre Novel, the only how-to book for promoting genre fiction, and one which I use all the time.
His work has won a number of awards including the Barnes and Noble Prize and he was nominated for a Maxwell award (DWAA), an Edgar (MWA), three Agathas (Malice Domestic), two Macavity awards, and three Anthony awards (Bouchercon). Today, he writes from his home in Cincinnati, which he shares with his partner and two dogs.
In his post tomorrow, Jeffrey will share his expertise in where to find the latest in mystery titles and releases. I'm sure both mystery readers and authors will want to tune in and read that article! Also, he will be available to answer questions about his own books, the mystery genre in general, and marketing mystery novels, so feel free to ask him a question in a comment.
March 26, 2012
Reviewing Films
Recently my husband and I volunteered to review films for the Breckenridge Film Festival, to help the committee decide what films to show at the June festival. As a fiction author myself, I'm familiar with the structure of story-telling, and as a former Universal Studios guide and techie friend of Pixar programmers, my husband is interested in the technology of special effects. So, we felt like we had something to offer as reviewers.
Last week, we watched and evaluated about a half dozen films, from shorts to feature length, dramas to documentaries. We both rated each one on a 5 point scale, with 1 being "a horrible film" and 5 being "yes, definitely include it in the festival." We also both provided a paragraph of text explaining our rating. I've used all but one of the 5 categories so far. We'll be reviewing films for two more weeks.
It's been an interesting experience to be on the evaluation side of the review equation, rather than having my own books evaluated by reviewers and readers. I often find that looking at other people's stories with a critical eye helps me hone my skills in ferreting out negative aspects of my own writing that need fixing. My experience in judging writing contests and participating in critique groups has proven this to be true. And, I expect the same from my film reviewing experience.
It's also exposed me to some very interesting projects. My horizons have been expanded, and I expect that attending the festival itself will expand them even more. I admire the risks that these filmmakers are taking, even when those risks don't pan out. If you have the opportunity to attend and/or volunteer for a film festival near you, I suggest you do it! You'll get a lot out of it.
(Photo by: http://www.anna-OM-line.com)
