Author Events and Other Things

This weekend, I have my first author event of 2024: I was invited back to a bookstore where I signed and sold copies of A Kiss of Glass last year, to sign and sell more. I’m excited because this time, I will have copies of A Kiss of Glass and The Duke of Ithaca, which has me extremely excited. The Duke of Ithaca is much slower to take off (because I have no idea how to market a Regency romance, but I have some ideas brewing since I’ve been researching), so I’m hoping I can interest some readers this weekend as I meet them and talk about my books. Especially since the sequel is coming out in October, I’d like to start building up the hype.

I have another author event next month at this same book store, which also has me extremely excited. I will still only have A Kiss of Glass and The Duke of Ithaca to sell, but by that point, my prequel novella to A Kiss of Glass, A Hold of Spectres, will be on preorder, so I will be showing off its cover as well as some quotes from the book in hopes that people will be interested in preordering from either me directly, or Amazon. I’m excited to meet with more readers and talk to them about my books. It’s one of my absolute most favorite things.

I’m also hoping to have at least one author event in September, so that I can sell all three books (A Kiss of Glass, The Duke of Ithaca, and A Hold of Spectres), but that may or may not happen. One thing I’m hoping to do is keep track of any book/author events in the Portland area so that I can have more opportunities throughout the year to sell my books. I’m hoping to attend the Rose City Book Festival this year, but the cost of having a table to yourself is extremely expensive, so I’d likely have to find another author willing to split the cost. I will also be attending OryCon again this year; even though it was definitely a difficult experience last year, I’m hopeful that I can sell more books this time around. By then, I will have those three books published with the sequel to The Duke of Ithaca on the way, as well as A Shift of Crimson only a couple of months away from publication.

Those are the events I am currently looking at for this year, and I hope I can add more to the list.

Another idea that I am playing around with is hosting a TikTok live author event with myself and a few other women indie authors I know to discuss our books, our writing process, our inspirations, etc. This idea is still in the works, but I’d like to try something like this every quarter, just to get our faces and our books out there to all of our following lists. All industries are harder for women, but I’ve found that within the indie author community, the standards are much higher for women than for men. I’ve seen male indie authors with wretched covers on their books and horrible blurbs making 200-300 sales in a matter of a couple of weeks. Consistently. Whereas women will have incredible covers, blurbs that they spent months on and that are genre-accurate, they market themselves extensively, and they still struggle to find readers.

I want to try and change that for fellow women authors as much as I can. So that’s what the above idea is for.

As for the writing I’m currently working on, draft 3 of A Shift of Crimson is complete and back with beta readers, which means I am focusing on revising A Hold of Spectres. For all of June and July, I will be revising this novella extensively to make it ready to publish. I will also be drafting the sequel to The Duke of Ithaca. Then, about halfway through August, A Hold of Spectres will be sent to my designer and formatter. In August I will also be completing the second draft of the sequel to The Duke of Ithaca. At the end of July, I will be getting back draft 3 of A Shift of Crimson from my beat readers, and I will start working on the fourth draft. In September, the sequel to The Duke of Ithaca is going to be with my beta readers, which means I will be focusing on the fifth draft of A Shift of Crimson. Once I get feedback from my beta readers, I will be starting the final draft of the sequel to The Duke of Ithaca, and it will be released near the end of October. Then, I will be focusing entirely on the last two drafts of A Shift of Crimson, and it will be released in December.

I will then be taking the entirety of December off from writing anything but poetry.

In January, I will start working on another prequel novella for A Kiss of Glass.

That’s the rest of 2024 in a nutshell. We will see if I can keep to it, especially as we go into fall and I’m revising so many books at once. I am determined to keep to it as much as I can, though. I want the rest of these books to be published before 2025, so I will do what I must to make it happen.