Slow Progress

Here's where I'm at: the galley. I'm just waiting for that to arrive so I can go through it several times with a fine-toothed comb, a hatchet, and a red pen.

Ya see, when I lost my book files from the tornado storm, I had to convert my novel from a PDF to a doc I could manipulate, and when I did that, it randomly stripped out words, punctuation marks, numbers, etc. Oh joy. Right. Insanely annoying, especially for a perfectionist like me.

I uploaded my eBooks at Amazon, B&N and Smashwords on July 5th, but I've done at least three updates since because I keep finding these weird, random errors. (Soooorrry if you've bought my YA novel Kings & Queens and it keeps changing on your Kindle. :( I'm not finished either. One more round should do it.)

So, once I have my paperback book file and eBook file ready, I'll re-upload and send the final to the publisher and get to organizing another blog tour. Because I keep having one unforeseen delay after another with this novel, I wanna wait until my book is up everywhere so perked people won't have to wait for its availability.

I just wrapped up a Giveaway at LibraryThing. Three more people have requested my eBook in exchange for a review, which is cool with me. If you didn't win a copy and would like one for FREE, just let me know. I'm giving out Smashword coupons and my eBook is available in all eBook formats expect plain text.

Publishing a book is exhausting and this is just the easy part. Then I'll have to kickoff my big marketing phase and simultaneously finish up my second novel, StarStruck, which I hope to have out before Christmas. My plan is to offer that eBook for free. When you have a FREE eBook, you end up listed on all these sites that list free Kindle books, and that's free exposure and might just generate sales for Kings & Queens.

For marketing, beyond the blog tour, I may do another giveaway at Goodreads. I'm creating flyers, bookmarks and a press kit with a press release. I'll send the kit out with copies of my book (that I'll get for free with ecards I've gotten through swagbucks) to major newspapers, I may try click advertising at Goodreads for a month and try to land as many eBook of the day spots as I can across the web, like on Kindle Daily Nation. That's just to start. If you have any other inexpensive or free marketing ideas, please share. Thanks.

So that's where I'm at.

~ Signing off and sending out cyber hugs.