Fiveish Books Still On My Mind

Being the Saturday poster, I can bend the guidelines a tad, right? Because I may have more than five book titles to sprinkle like snowflakes into this post...

These are in no particular order...(I feel like a game show host, issuing caveats.)

Heart of Obsidian and Shield of Winter by Nalini Singh, in her Psy-Changeling series. I've been rereading the entire series this month, from the first book to the most recent, which is Shield. It's been an amazing course in writing a series, putting in multiple small details and events along the way which don't pay off until many volumes later, but then are immensely satisfying to the reader - I'm always in awe of her. I think Heart was the most gut wrenchingly emotional read for me, but I keep going back to Shield because I love the main characters so much. (But Judd Lauren from Caressed by Ice is still my all time favorite in the series.)

So you can see how I might end up with more than five books named in this column, right? Sorry! (Not sorry.)

The Twelve Kingdoms - The Tears of the Rose by my fellow Word Whore Jeffe Kennedy. (The pretty cover is in the sidebar to the right.) She took  Princess Amelia, the main character, on an amazing arc from where she was at the start of the novel, until the person she's become at the end. Just wow. And it's the middle book in a series, which presents its own challenges to do well, but Tears advances the entire story and was extremely satisfying in its own right. Love the worldbuilding here.

Rachel Bach's The Paradox Series has become one of my all time favorite science fiction adventure series.  Honor's Knight and Heaven's Queen, the second and the third novels in this three book series, were issued in 2014 and oh yes, I devoured them.

Featuring mercenary Devi Morris,  THE most kickass heroine after Ripley of "Aliens" fame,  the series has mystery, romance, a very subtle nod to an Egyptian goddess - a complete package of goodness.

The fourth book on my list is something completely different. Still Alice by Lisa Genova is the heartbreaking story of a woman who has it all...including, sadly, early onset Alzheimer's. It came out in 2009 but I just read it recently and if you've ever forgotten where your keys were, this book will impact you. Years ago I had a dear friend at work who developed early onset Alzheimer's and the two or three years he struggled to remain at work, to stay himself, were just heart rending as the disease progressed. We both used to come in early, he usually arriving half an hour before me. One day I got there at 5:30AM to find him sitting in his car, which was still running. Worried, I knocked on the car window and he said he'd been waiting for me because he literally couldn't remember how to turn the car off and didn't know what else to do but wait. This novel by Ms. Genova is full of such true-to-life incidents as experienced by her character....

And to finish on a happier note, every year at this time one of my favorite books is The Wild Christmas Reindeer by Jan Brett. Filled with her astoundingly detailed illustrations, the book is a nice variation on the story of the elves at the North Pole and Santa's sleigh. We would read it as a family at Christmas Eve and I still keep the book on my shelf and pull it out in December to enjoy all over again. Another book that's an absolute must-read for my family every year is Tosca's Christmas by Matthew Sturgis and Anne Mortimer.

Happy Holidays to you!!!

Promotional Mojo

I would LOVE to tell you stories about the lovely, amazing serendipitous promotional things that have happened to me - save I'm not entirely sure I promoted much of anything except that I got to flail around doing my 'FANGIRL' dance. See. Just before my first book came out, one of my favorite authors in the world, Nalini Singh, asked me to guest blog for her. After I'd stared at her name in my in-box and tried not to pass out, I jumped at the chance. She and her readers both were so gracious and kind to me. I'd really like to be in a position to return the favor some day. In case the Gods are listening.

I've done blog tours since, but maybe it is the curse of the pathetically geeky and vaguely socially awkward. Being charming in blog posts (some people will say 'ever') is maybe not my strength. I'm also hampered by the fact that I find it dreadfully difficult to track any kind of meaningful result back to a blog tour. In my search for promotional mojo that doesn't annoy an entire Twitterverse full of people, I've had a marketing folks tell me that material THINGS were the only way to go from a promotional standpoint. I've had other people laugh and say, "Oh, honey. Don't waste your time or money on things! It's all about (insert social media shtick du jour)." I've been told to be my geek-tastic self. I've been told to forget that in favor of building a platform based on things I don't do particularly well - interacting with people like the whole of the internet might not be looking on, judging me while I'm talking without the safety-net of a script. (Yes, some of us became actors because we're desperate to be told the right things to say when. We're super invested in always knowing our lines.)

I have had two things happen that I didn't consider promotions at the time, but which both brought Twitter followers out of the woodwork: Anthologies. The first was Tales from the SFR Brigade. The second was Thunder on the Battlefield: Sword. Note that I can't say I saw any boost to book sales from either. The only bumps I noticed were to the number of people willing to hang with me on Twitter, but you know? I'll take it because I've since gotten to talk with a few of those people and discovered they're geeks, too. My tribe. 

So maybe the advice that your best promotional tool is your next book really has some merit. Which means I should get back to that.