Crunch time.
Life is playing hockey with me right now, and I spent the better part of Labor Day weekend shopping for a car, buying a car, finding a way to pick up my bought car (and return my rental car) which isn’t as easy as you think when you’re a single person with no family anywhere around you.
I also got the notes from my editor on my 2nd YA book – and a deadline for that which only turned the thumbscrews tighter. Continue reading
Book Marketing. What a pain.
Believe me, I know. I blog/Tweet/Facebook/Instagram on three different platforms (all while holding down a full time job to pay the bills and writing when I can find time around all that) and developing and executing a marketing strategy for each book can make you mental.
And make you feel like you’re out in the middle of a lake on a rowboat, screaming about your book only to hear it echo through the surrounding hills.
So here today are a few articles I found helpful when crafting my marketing strategies: Continue reading
Guess what isn’t launching tomorrow?
Yep. No bookee for you!
Please be assured that this is NOT because you are undeserving of the third installment of my Elemental Series.
Wait – that’s not entirely true. You’re not deserving of a rushed out, might-have-forgotten-something version of that book. And the truth is, I just came off of a slammin’ good vacation and I really wasn’t in the headspace to finish this thing up. I had some major writer’s block centered around a certain plot point, and powering through it wasn’t working the way I wanted it to.
That’s right! I finally decided to expand my platform to Wattpad! For right now, I’m copying over my Fanfics just to generate some buzz, but I plan on copying over all of my free short stories, and expanding into some new short story titles as well.
I figure it’ll open my stuff up to a wider audience, and I really like what Wattpad has going on. The fans are rabid (I love that!) and the platform encourages all sorts of creativity. In short, I like the vibe.
I’ll be copying over one fanfic and one short story a week until I get caught up (more if I can find the time), and then I plan to grow from there.
I was all set last week for this to be a countdown post to the launch of Earthsinger – which is set for Monday.
It’s already a month behind schedule due to some mad scrambling on book two of my YA series (under my alternate moniker). I feel really crappy about that, but the YA books are a major big deal since they’re being traditionally published, so they get priority. Continue reading
I was a slug this weekend.
And by slug I mean I didn’t hit my word counts. Now, mind you, they might have been over-ambitious as I’m working on three (count ’em!) three different books in three (count ’em again!) different genres, so I might have been overly-ambitious.
I didn’t do it. I limped along on one, ignored another, and barely got an outline on the third. Ugh. Continue reading
Research for a novel can be a double-edged sword. One the one hand, you can really get in-depth about the history and applicability of something or someplace, which helps shape your characters and the events happening around them.
On the other hand, you can get sucked down a research rabbit hole and lose a whole lot of writing time searching for tidbits.
Good research can really make a book, and it’s a fine line between really knowing the history of a person or place and getting bogged down on what’s essentially a small tidbit of information. So here are three research strategies that can help you get the job done: Continue reading
I came across a really helpful spreadsheet tool based in Excel (courtesy of Julian Ionescu at FantasyScroll.com), for charting and outlining your novel. Here’s the link to the page explaining it in depth, but the instructions are right on the sheet as well.
If you struggle with getting the bones of your story in place before fleshing it out, this thing can be a godsend. Check it out!
In the last 45 days I have:
Believe me, it’s been sucksville around here for a while. But I’ve also been using my favorite form of therapy to deal with it: I write. Continue reading
Book 2 of my YA series is in the hands of my editor, and while they peruse and read and pass around and deconstruct and ready their notes for me, that gives me a window of time to knuckle down and finish up Earthsinger! Whoo Hooo!
So look for a cover reveal in the very near future, and let’s get back to the Elemental Destinies – there’s still a lot of story to tell!!
Earthsinger is coming SOON!
Britt DeLaney 