S.M. Butler's Blog, page 23

How not to be discouraged when other people are better than you

Writing is hard work. Promoting that writing is harder work. Staying positive while other people fly by you in the rankings is damn near crazy making. And yet, still possible. You hear stories of authors selling 10,000, 20,000, or even 40,000 books in a week or a month and you sit there wondering why it never happens for you.

Stories are told about the outliers, the breakout authors. Success stories like Bella Andre, or Amanda Hocking are all over the place. You have to understand one thing. Online news is just like any other news media. What shocks the public is interesting. It’s entertaining. Hearing about someone slow building their sales over three or five years… that’s not an interesting story.

Ever heard of a moderate news station? Yeah, no. There’s Fox News… or there’s CNN. There’s no in-between. They don’t get ratings if they don’t report something wow-inducing.

But here’s the good news, folks.

You can still be successful without being an outlier. You can still make a livable wage without making publishing waves. You don’t have to shoot up the charts. In fact, you probably don’t want to shoot up the charts anyway. Why? Because what goes up, must come down. What you want to change is your baseline. If you’re a new author and your sales shoot up, it’s a pretty sure bet that it’s going to crash just as hard. It’s the nature of retail.

Remember Tamagotchis? They were all the rage. I had a couple. I spent hours feeding it and exercising it. I even named them. You couldn’t find them in a store most of the time, because they would sell out so fast. They were HUGE… for about six months. And then they vanished. Why? Because people move on. If everyone has it in your social circle, then you don’t get the word of mouth build. It becomes a fad, and we all know, fads die.

I’m being a little cynical, aren’t I? I did say there was good news.

It’s okay that people are better than you.

Seriously.

You can make a seriously nice living without putting a book out every month. You can still focus on the important things like kids or your scrapbooking projects while still making a decent living from writing.

The slow build is where it’s at.

Patience isn’t something I was born with. If you look at my history, you’ll see, it’s usually my lack of patience that gets me into trouble. So while I say that patience is the way to go, please keep in mind that I didn’t follow my own advice. I jumped head first into a new writing business with no plan and no long term goals other than I needed money.

So, think about this before you decide that self-publishing is easy money: There is no easy money.

Seriously. If you think you’re going to be like that outlier, consider this: You could potentially sell 10,000 copies in your first month and walk away with $20,000… but what happens when the retailers tweak their algorithms (I’m looking at you, Amazon!) and your book plummets from #200 in the store to the 20k rankings where you’re selling 10-20 a day instead of 100-200? I’m telling you guys. It can be devastating to your state of mind.

What goes up really fast must come down really fast too.

So here’s what you do. You release book ONE, with your mailing list info in an easily accessible place to your readers. You push that mailing list like nobody’s business. Then you release book TWO, and announce it to all those people you slaved away to get. THEN… you release book THREE and announce THAT to the people who signed up for your mailing list. And for the record, this happens over MONTHS of writing, editing, ect.

Is that a really slow way to go?

Yeah.

But the slow climb up changes your baseline. It’s not a synthetic spike, like when you get a BookBub ad or pay for Facebook advertising. It’s an organic build. So instead of your baseline being in the 100k’s on Amazon, it goes up to the 50k mark and hangs out there, even when you don’t have a new release. There’s your new baseline. So, instead of selling 1-2 a day, you’re selling 5-10 a day. With every new release, your baseline will shift up a little. Why? Because you’re releasing regularly, and you’re gaining new subscribers and readers with each book. It’s a natural progression of your business growing.

So, now instead of one book in the thousands, you’ve got three hanging out at 10k-20k all the time. 20k roughly translates to 10-15 a day. At a $3.99 price tag, you’re getting roughly $2.79 per unit sold. 10 a day means $27.90 every day. That’s approximately $840 a month… on one book. But you have three, because you did the slow build. For three books all in that 20k range, you’re making about $2520 a month. That’s $30k a year.

But that other author is selling MORE. How do I do that?

Um… keep writing. Chances are, that person is working hard and getting the books done and out there. You know those people who sit on a stool in the bar and talk to people all the time but never go home with anyone? Or maybe that writer who always is talking about that book they’re writing, yet you never actually see them writing? You’re never going to get to be that other author that people want to be when they grow up if you never close the deal.

And you do have to close the deal. Over and over again.

You want more?

Write more.

Otherwise… what are you really doing?

One of my new favorite things…

I’ve really been slacking off here on the blog. There’s been a lot going on, between prepping for Authors After Dark and finishing up production on Dying Commitment, and sending a kid to camp this week. It’s been nuts. I’m sending the other kid to camp next week, so who knows what that’s going to be like. But life is slowly getting back under control, so hopefully, I can start hanging out online again. I kinda miss y’all.

Anyway, I thought I’d share a little tidbit from Dying Commitment, since that’s coming up next month and that’s what I’ve been so consumed with the last few days.

“I don’t like talking.”

“I know. But I’m always here if you need to talk.” I paused. “That makes me sound really unmanly, doesn’t it?”

She chuckled. “A little.” She glanced down where our hands were joined, frowning. “Remember what I said… before I flipped out last night?”

“About fucking me professionally?” I grinned, hoping to get a smile out of her.

She giggled, an honest-to-God girlish giggle. I’d never heard such a noise from her before. And the smile was beautiful on her. “Yeah.”

“I could never forget it,” I replied. “It’s one of my new favorite things.”

Dying Commitment comes out August 12, 2014. You can go ahead and pre-order that bad boy at any time.

Amazon  |  Nook  |   iTunes US   |  iTunes Australia

When edits eat my brains…

I tend to stop blogging when I start edits. It’s hard to do both, and my focus just gets split and I can’t get anything done.  So, when I start editing a book, I disappear. Not that I don’t love you guys, but y’all are distracting and edits take more brainpower than simply letting the words flow.

Anyway, I thought I would stop by and share the first few paragraphs from Dying Commitment here as a consolation prize, since I’m still editing and the book is not done yet. I’ll be back online in a few days for sure.

Also? I miss you guys.

*As always, since I’m still editing, these passages are subject to change in the final draft.* 

Five years ago, my partner shot me and left me for dead. He took my weapons, my money, and I got a double tap to the chest for my trouble.

It wasn’t like I loved him, not like a romantic kind of love anyway. It was much worse than that. I trusted him.

Since then, I stayed away from close relationships. I kept everyone at a distance. I never allowed myself to enter into another partnership like that. Sex stayed shallow and meaningless. It was safer that way, you know? That way no one got hurt. I didn’t get shot. Life went on.

At least, that was how it was supposed to be.

Then I meet the Lucky Thirteen crew and now I had this Bambi-eyed kid following me around like a puppy. He was cute, really good in bed. But he didn’t understand, and I didn’t have the patience to teach him why relationships couldn’t happen.

Because feelings get you killed in our line of work.

Come see me at Authors After Dark!

Authors After Dark is one of the best conventions of the year, y’all. Seriously. I love this convention and I’m one of the Featured Authors this year, and I want to meet as many of you as I can. So. I did this contest on Facebook, but I didn’t get any takers so let’s try it here.

There’s two ways that you can go to Authors After Dark

I will give away FREE registration (a $250 value!) for you. The hotel is on you, and you do have to book the hotel room. You won’t get your registration until after your room is confirmed. So, it’s really important that you can afford the hotel room.
The other way is that you and a friend can go halfsies. Get together with a friend and buy a registration to AAD AND book the hotel room. Once your reservation is confirmed, you’ll get ANOTHER registration for FREE. Easy peasy.

This needs to be done in the next few days. The hotel is closing the room block on July 1, so we want to get to our attrition point before that happens or the con loses a lot of money.

I’ll be posting my schedule for Authors After Dark this weekend, so keep an eye out for that. I’m on a lot of panels, and a couple of the parties at night, and if there’s enough interest, I may host a get together in the bar so we can all have some fun.

And if you do take advantage of this offer, I’ll provide signed paperback copies of all three Lucky Thirteen books for you at Authors After Dark in August, as a special thank you for attending the convention.

So, if you want to go, simply comment here and tell me why you’d like to go. As long as you’re able to book the hotel room, I’ll give away as many registrations as people as want to go.

Updates, TV binging, and more!

I’ve been soooo busy lately. Like crazy busy. I had a lot of graphic work to do, which I’m still doing and trying to catch up. RT really screwed up my timeline, and now I know to schedule downtime the week of RT. OMG. I’m so behind on everything. So, I’m going to touch on a little of everything in this post. I’m going to apologize ahead of time for the rambly nature of it.

I watch a lot of TV while I’m in editing mode. I don’t know why. I think it’s because I don’t watch TV while I’m writing because I’m so into the story, and watching other stories kind of ruins the flow. But that doesn’t happen when I edit. I don’t get it.

Anyway, I’m watching Arrow with the boys, because I want to open their eyes to more than cartoons, but also to good stories, and Arrow has this amazing story to it. And I love the structure it takes, because it’s in essence two different stories that converge together at points. It’s the story of Oliver’s time on the island in the past, and also of the present, after he’s home. And the past story, even as it remains continuous from previous episodes, still manages to be relevant to what Oliver is going through in the present.

I love it, because it’s crunchy, and fresh. You don’t know what’s going to happen, and the most unlikely things tend to crop up too. I won’t spoil anything but I’m really enjoying it. We’re about to finish season one and move on to season two.

The other show I just started watching is White Collar. I was kind of “meh” about the premise, but then I watched the first episode. It’s interesting. It’s not as crunchy as Arrow, and it’s not as dynamic as Leverage is (at least not yet. I’m only 4 episodes into White Collar) but it’s definitely worth the watch at the moment.

I started watching a lot of these shows to get the structure and pacing down, because these made for TV stories tend to make good books too. And I think there’s a lot of value in looking at different forms of storytelling to improve my own. The different ideas and the different approaches… not all of it would work in books, but I like putting the information away into my mind, because even if it doesn’t work for books, I think that it’s good to have that information. I might be able to draw from it in the future.

You know, this might make a good blog post… I should think about that.

Anyway, let’s do a little updating now, since I haven’t blogged in forever. I’m not even sure if any of you guys are even still there reading. LOL

And now for your not-really-regular-updates!
New Adult Rockstars

I have a lot of guest authors over at NAR, and I’m having a hard time keeping up with them. So, I recently made the decision that I need blogging help on New Adult Rockstars so I’ll be looking at potential blogging partners soon. I’ve been concentrating on building that blog because I do believe that NA is a viable category and will be growing over the next few years. Plus, I really love writing in that age range. It’s so much fun! But I just don’t have time to take care of both that site and this one on my own and I think if I had regular contributors there, that would free me up to do some other things, and start building that up.

So that’s what I’m working on there. I’m going to be inviting regular bloggers on board, and working on stabilizing that blog a little more. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun and I think it’s going to be an amazing time once I get some fresh voices on board.

Events and Appearances
Authors After Dark

I’m going to be in Charlotte, NC in August for Authors After Dark and I would LOVE to see you guys. My next newsletter will have my schedule for AAD in it, and all the panels that I’ll be on. Make sure you’re signed up so you’ll get it if you’re going to be there.

Readers ‘n Ritas

I’m also attending Readers ‘n Ritas this year. I’m going to have a nice basket and some other things to give away there. I’ll have more closer to the date on that. I’m still working out details on what I’m bringing as presents for readers.

The Books Update

So, I told you that Dying Commitment is in the edits. I really thought that this was the book that would wrap up the Lucky Thirteen trilogy, but it seems there are more books to write in this series, because some characters I hadn’t planned on writing want their own Happily Ever Afters. So that’s on my fall writing schedule. I’ll be writing more Lucky Thirteen to release in 2015, plus a new series that I haven’t talked about yet, but will as soon as I have details that I can talk about.

It’s been an experience writing these books, because they were so wildly different from my adult sports romance books. But I really feel like I hit on something really special with them too and I’m really happy to be getting back to them.

Next up, there will be a charity anthology coming out in August, with a short story from me in it. I’m also organizing it, so I’m really excited about getting it out there in the world. Lots of bestselling authors, and amazing writers yet to be discovered. It’ll be all genres of romance, so it’ll be a nice mix of things. A little bit of something for everyone.

I will also be releasing a Christmas novella this year, set in the Lucky Thirteen world. so if you need something to tie you over until more Lucky Thirteen comes out in 2015, that’ll be coming soon, and you’ll be getting more information as I figure out the logistics. It’ll be part of a Christmas bundle first, and then will be releasing as an individual title about a month or two later.

Did I forget anything?

Probably.

 

The results from my Thunderclap campaign

For this last release, I utilized a tool I found from the Self-Publishing Podcast called Thunderclap. It looked interesting and I decided to try a little experiment and run a Thunderclap campaign myself.

What is Thunderclap?

It is essentially crowd funding for social media. This is from Thunderclap: “Social media is an easy way to say something, but it’s a difficult way to be heard. Thunderclap is the first-ever crowdspeaking platform that helps people be heard by saying something together. It allows a single message to be mass-shared, flash mob-style, that rises above the noise of your social networks. By boosting the signal at the same time, Thunderclap helps a single person create action and change like never before.”

Obviously, I think that this particular tool is more suited to causes, and possibly non-fiction, but I think that it can be adapted for fiction as well. So I did run a campaign for Wounded Courage, my June release, to see how it would work. **

The process

Setting up Thunderclap is pretty easy. They even have this awesome guide to help you through it. You set a goal. You can choose between 100, 250, or 500. (minimum campaign is 100 supporters). I mentioned this to other authors, and they said they’d be happy with 20 or 50, but the more I thought about it, the more I considered that 100 is really a good low number. The point is to boost your signal. And if you’re only getting 20 or 50 people to boost the signal, it’s not growing exponentially. You’re not reaching people outside your sphere of influence, and that’s the point of the signal booster.

To track click throughs, I used Pretty Link, which is a WordPress plugin I installed that allows me to use redirects to track what people are looking at on my website. It’s like bit.ly or tiny url, except with these, I can change where these links point with a simple click.

When I set up the campaign, I set up the URL that would get sent out with the message as “http://suzanbutler.com/thunderclapit”. During the campaign it was set up to direct people to my book page. In hindsight, I’m thinking it might be a good idea to create a landing page for people clicking through before the campaign day. But this worked out well. I had well over a couple hundred clicks on that link before the campaign day. So even though I was campaigning for the campaign, people were still getting eyes on my book. The night before, I switched over the link so it would go to my blog post, which I’d specially written for the Thunderclap.

Now, I look at how busy the online world is and when. I checked through Facebook analytics to see when my fans were online. I know how busy Twitter gets at certain times of the day while they’re less busy at other times. It’s the nature of the publishing world. This is how I chose 10am. 8am, and I would miss the Pacific folks in the US by doing it too early. Any later than 10am and the UK people would be heading toward bed. And 10am for me is right around the middle of the night for the Aussie/Japan/New Zealand folks. Honestly, that was the best I could do. There would never be one time zone that would work for everyone.

I started the campaign with 38 days left on the countdown. Cue freakout (mainly because I didn’t realize I only had 38 days left to my release!)

The experience

Now, with 100 people, I actually had to find ways to reach outside my particular online network. I talked to people on email loops and asked them if they could share the campaign with their readers. I asked them to contribute to the campaign. I even talked to people in person and got a few of them to sign up for it. It was actually a lot more work than I expected.

And I’m not saying that it wasn’t worth it to do all that work. It was just more than I expected to need to do. And honestly, it makes me think about that Kickstarter I want to do someday, because really, that will be a ton more work because it’s much harder to crack open someone’s wallet than it is to get them to tweet a link for you.

Even though it was a lot of work, I think that it helped get me out of my shell a little, too. There were a few people that I knew had a rather large online readership that would like my type of book, so I asked a few of them if they’d consider signing up and asking their readers to sign up. I think the hardest part was explaining what Thunderclap was to people who didn’t know. It looks kind of confusing right off the bat, though it’s really not. But it got me talking, which I think is awesome, because sometimes, I think that I retreat into a shell when it comes to asking people for things.

Also, like a Kickstarter, a huge chunk of my supporters came in the last forty eight hours of the campaign. Do you know how nerve wracking that is? I was 22 people from goal on Saturday morning. I called in two favors, and promo’d the hell out of it the last two days, and squeaked in #100 at eleven o’clock at night. Right around 11 hours out from go time. I went to bed and woke up to one more supporter for a total of 101.

Bonus points

I got to make jokes about the Clap. Yeah, tasteless, but still funny. Like fart jokes.

The Results

So, now we come to the fun part, right? Was it worth it? During the 38 day campaign I managed to get over 550 unique individuals to click through my promotions to the Thunderclap campaign page. The actual page views were much higher, a little over 600. So the way I see this is that these people were clicking through to the campaign and even if they weren’t contributing, they were seeing my book.

Why do I say that?

Because I ended up with 101 supporters. So less than a fifth of these people visiting decided to pledge a tweet, Facebook or Tumblr post. That’s actually a much better conversion rate than I expected. 20% visited my link and decided to give me their social media support? That’s awesome. If only I could get that kind of conversion rate when i tweet book links. LOL.

So the campaign went off at 10 am. I watched the clicks on the link explode from zero to over 330 unique hits in about three hours. Not bad. I guess when your social reach is over 250k, 330 hits isn’t too bad at all.

So how many sales did I have from the campaign specifically?

I set up an affiliate for each retailer to track clicks and buys. The link from the campaign went to the blog post, which had all the major retailers buy links on it. These are the click throughs for each retailer. ***

iTunes – 19 clicks
Kobo – 53 clicks
Barnes and Noble – 97 clicks
Amazon – 129 clicks

This actually surprised me, because I have a very strong iBooks readership. More than half of my income comes from iBooks. This probably means that social media is not where that readership comes from. I’m connecting with them in some other way, possibly organically through iBooks the platform. I don’t know. I don’t really have enough data to analyze that. That… is possibly a project that I don’t have time to do.

So, next up, is what did these click throughs generate in terms of sales?

What was the conversion rate?

Now, I’m not really priced for impulse buys. My books are $3.99. I’m almost tempted to try this again with a sale book, just to compare the difference, because I do think that the higher price might be a deterrent for some folks, especially folks that have never read my books.  There’s so many variables with this I’m just not sure that I can portray an accurate picture, you know?

Okay, so keeping in mind the click throughs from above to the various retailers, here’s what the affiliate dashboards tell me I sold through the campaign. And keep in mind, these are JUST numbers for Wounded Courage. There are sales for other things involved, particularly Amazon, because people go on to buy other things and my affiliate code is still attached (BTW, that person who bought all that health stuff? Thank you for that. Your patronage is appreciated!)

iTunes – 0
Kobo – 0
Barnes and Noble – 0
Amazon – 13 (though I did sell a few of my other books, like Killing Honor, and No Strings Attached. Those are not counted here)

Seeing that this is a relatively new pen name, only two books out under it (now three), the lower conversion numbers actually doesn’t surprise me.  Now, I had a lot more sales than this shows, but those were all organic sales through the retailers and through my newsletter, which are tracked differently.

Is it worth it for 13 copies? Maybe? I know because of a friend’s tweet, one of their fans was turned on to my books and glommed it on the spot. Honestly, I’m almost tempted to say it was worth it just for that, because that tweet exchange made my day yesterday. But how many other new fans did my Thunderclap expose me to? I have no way of knowing.

Would I do it again?

That’s a tough one, because I’m already seeing more Thunderclaps pop up in the book world. And if everyone is begging people to join their Thunderclap, it becomes white noise. The effectiveness diminishes.

It was a fun experiment. It was a lot of work, too. In fact, it was enough work that I’m rethinking my future Kickstarter ideas. Not saying that I won’t do them, but my eyes are opened to this crowd funding way of marketing, and it’s a completely different beast from normal marketing.

I’m still evaluating the long term effectiveness. I did notice a lot of new followers on Twitter, and I think that’s a side effect from the Thunderclap. Also, I noticed that people RT’d the Thunderclap tweets, which brought my social reach up even more. I reached over a quarter of a million people yesterday in some fashion. I think I’m going to have to hang back and see how effective it really was in the long term.

And now I have to go write, because Gillian Archer guilted me… and she’s right. But don’t tell her, okay?

Notes:

** I noticed this morning that the social reach is different today than what ran yesterday. I don’t know what that’s about, but I have screenshots, so I’m good.

*** This is not purchases. This is just the user clicking the buy link and going to the retailer website.

It’s Wounded Courage’s Release Day!!!

*throws confetti*

Wounded Courage is out in the wild, wild land of booksellers!

You guys, this book was such a labor of love. It was a bear, and not the cute and cuddly kind. I think this is largely because Murphy was the original reason I wrote any of the Lucky Thirteen books. He was the first character to come to my head. I love him so much that if he was a real person, I’d be leaping into his arms and never letting him go. You know, I think there’s a thing where authors say that they can’t choose a favorite among their “babies”… Out of all my characters so far, Murphy is mine.

I wrote 25k of his story before I realized that there was a book that needed to be written before it. So I wrote Brody and Devyn’s story. Maybe that made Murphy’s book harder? I don’t know. But Murphy will always have a special place in my heart.

There would be no Lucky Thirteen without him.

Anyway, I’m getting all mushy now, so I’ll shut up! Wounded Courage out now, so go forth and buy, my friends!

Buy at your favorite major retailer:

Amazon Nook Kobo Books iBooks

My thunder is stolen and I’m okay with that

I had this really elaborate post planned to write about the whole #YesAllWomen thing. Because it’s an important topic, one that I’ve discussed with my children more than once this week. I needed to get the words out.

And the first time I came to write the post, I ended up not, because I found this post by Chuck Wendig far more encompassing of my own damn feelings than anything I could have written. So I left it at that, but things were still bubbling up in me. I have things I want to say, but I don’t feel like I need to because there’s 8 billion other people on the internet saying the things I wanted to say.

And then I see Chuck wrote this post about the MRA, and again, he’s encompassed everything I wanted to say, in such a fucking rockstar sort of way that I’m blown to pieces.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this, about the way society is, and the way I see things. And I realized that I’m guilty of marginalizing my own harassments, because that’s the way it’s done. We’re so fucking used to being on guard we don’t even realize that we do it. Hell, when I walk down the street and get catcalled, it’s happening then, because it only happens when I’m alone, or with other women. If I was walking with a dude, they would never do it. And I put on blinders and keep on going, because if I do say anything, it only makes it worse.

It takes a long time to undo centuries of misogyny. Women have been marginalized and deemed chattel for so long that it’s ingrained in our very culture. We don’t even realize it’s happening sometimes, and if we do realize it, we don’t stand up for ourselves, because that only feeds the beast and what we want is just to get away from it.

Change is slow, especially for something so long-ingrained in cultures around the world. But that doesn’t make it impossible or improbable. It doesn’t make it easy either. And sadly, sometimes women need to be made aware that some things aren’t okay, and that we shouldn’t let it be okay.

We are all entitled to being treated like a human being. That’s why I love those two posts by Chuck Wendig so much. Because he stole my thunder, said it better than I ever could, and I loved it.

A funny thing happened on the way to the photo shoot…

So, yesterday, the Monsters and I headed out to get our family pictures done. We always have some interesting conversations in the car, but this one made me laugh for like, an hour.

I don’t know how but we got on the subject of names. Both my kids have names that are because of certain actors that I had a big time fangirl crush on. One is Elijah Wood and the other is Christian Slater. Well, I’ve told my kids this before, but I guess they’re getting to that teenage “WTF?” stage, because everything I do embarrasses them, which of course, is HILARIOUS to me.

Neither one of them actually knew the name of either actor, so I had to tell them what roles they played.

So angry!

So for Christian Slater, I told them he was Will Scarlett in the Prince of Thieves. I probably could have found a better role, but I was driving and didn’t have access to IMDB to mention more and I was having a serious brain fart.

And Christian Slater was totally hot in the Prince of Thieves. He had that brooding, angry look going for him. Of course that’s the one I remember.

Seriously, I had such a crush on this kid back then.

Anyway, of course, for Elijah Wood, I had to mention Frodo from Lord of the Rings, even though the very first movie I’d ever seen him in was Huck Finn and I was like, ten or so when that came out. Maybe twelve.

Yes, I’ve adored Elijah Wood since the early nineties. I grew up loving that guy, and he’s the same age, so it’s like he grew up with me. LOL.

Remember how I said I like to embarrass my kids? Yeah. So, I was talking about Frodo and Sam and how they were so close they were like brothers, and then I had a moment of awesome… and I decided, because I thought it would be cool, to tell them I was going to call them Frodo and Sam from now on.

So yeah. My kids officially are now known as Frodo and Sam. They hate it. I love it. It’s awesome.

Just a reminder, don’t forget about the Wounded Courage Release Day campaign. Everyone who supports it gets a shot at a $25 iTunes gift card that I’ll give away. I need to have a minimum of 100 supporters in order for the campaign to go live, so please, consider donating a tweet, a Facebook post, or a Tumblr post to the campaign.

I really appreciate your support.

Support the Wounded Courage Thunderclap

Back home from the RT Booklovers insanity

You know, if anyone had told me what a whirlwind RT would be, I would have never believed them. I knew it was a big con, but man, I was so not expecting the crazy of it. It was nuts, it was a blast, it was absolutely insane.

So we got there on Monday, so we had a couple of days to soak in the NOLA atmosphere. We walked around the French Quarter, got lost a little. We had breakfast at Cafe Beignet, which was AMAZING. I had the most flakiest, yummiest croissant bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich ever, and then we had beignets and they were AWESOME.

And yes, I’m probably using a lot of caps to talk about things, but I really had a great time.

So, Tuesday night, I went to the New Adult Sleepover party. I got to fangirl over Nichole Chase, who wrote Suddenly Royal, which I LOVED. And I got to see Sophie Jordan again, and I met Jennifer Armentrout, and saw Roni Loren, and I left with a stack of books. Honestly, I don’t read print so it’s likely those might go into a New Adult Rockstars giveaway later.

Wednesday was the Mardi Gras Carnivale thing at Mardi Gras World. Were you ever that kid that went to Chucky Cheese and peeked under the stage curtain to see the inanimate “band” between sets? Because I did that as a kid, and I was totally creeped out by them not moving and it being kind of dark. Well, that’s what happened at Mardi Gras World. We went through this not really well lit warehouse that had dozens of Mardi Gras floats and stuff. Everything from Woody from Toy Story to Harry Potter to a bloody guillotine that I’m not sure where it fits in…

Thursday was super busy. I went to a lot of the self-pub workshops and one on romantic suspense, and a couple of NA panels and I pretty much was going from the time I woke up to really late. Honestly, here’s about the time things began to blur for me. I was all over the place. I met authors I’ll probably forget, and then feel super guilty about later.

Friday was my panel day. I was a moron, and forgot the right notebook, so I kinda winged my section of the presentation. But I think it went well, though. I mean, no one told me to my face that I was stupid and didn’t know what I was talking about. WIN.

And then we come to Saturday. The Giant Book Fair day.

You guys. I don’t know what I expected, but this wasn’t it. Such an overwhelming experience for me. Two ballrooms FULL of authors. Readers bouncing from table to table. My voice was HOARSE by the end of it. I sounded like a dude. BUT… it was a LOT of fun. I met a ton of people. I even took pictures with a couple fans. It was awesome.

Anyway, we drove back on Sunday, and we made record time. Ever notice your foot gets heavier on the gas medal when you’re tired and ready to be home? Yeah. That.

And of course, the best part of RT is having dinner with amazing, talented writers and getting strangers to take our picture so we could all be in it together.

Dinner with Awesome.
C.A. Szarek, JoAnna Grace, River Jaymes, me, and Jennifer Probst.

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