To book tour or not to book tour, that is the question.

Unless you sign with one of the big seven publishers, then you are promoting your own work. The conundrum is how much of your money should be spent to publicize your book. Before you pull out the checkbook, consider your tour company’s references. Trust me, on my first book tour I didn’t. I threw away two hundred dollars to a woman with an impressive website, but a horrible grasp on honesty and work ethic. My blogs I painstakingly wrote never showed because she had personal issues, and couldn’t handle the stress. I did learn a few things from this experience.

• Interested in a tour, follow someone who is on a tour with a possible company.

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In the spring of 2011, the topic at my local RWA meeting was how to use Facebook and Twitter. Although I already had profiles set up on those sites, I hadn’t done much with them. The speakers shared with us the ins and outs of using social media. They jokingly described it this way: “LinkedIn is for people you know; Facebook is for people you used to know; and Twitter is for people you want to know.”

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True confessions time: when I considered writing a historical romance, there was one aspect that bothered me. I could not see myself writing the graphic love scenes found in most romances today. I remembered how much mileage authors like Mary Stewart could get just from the moment their characters kissed. My favorite classics, including books by Jane Austen, managed to evoke lovely and sigh-inducing romances with even less.

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The Blake Snyder workshop turned out to be a major turning point in my life. It not only gave me tremendous confidence as a writer, but it became doubly precious to me when Blake died, far too young, the following year. If I had not dropped everything to get to that workshop in Charleston, I would never have met him. (Happily for other writers, his books, website, and workshops live on.)

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I think every writer’s work is informed by their experiences and the things they love (or hate!). Whether directly or indirectly, these things will affect their style of writing and subject matter. I’ve been an avid (and eclectic) reader for as long as I can remember. I love novels, biographies, and histories. My belief is that truth is often stranger than fiction, and I find in histories and biographies a gold mine of ideas for my own stories.

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Who hasn’t watched The Bachelor at least once? I wondered as a romantic fiction writer what could I learn from the show.

1.Every woman who signed up to participate believed she could fall in love and marry whatever man they chose for the show.

*I read the contestant application. The company requests info about relationship details, tattoo locations, current restraining orders, criminal incidents, and bankruptcies. They also want several pictures featuring your assets. They do ask if you’re okay with finding your husband on a television show. Sadly, they are looking for attractive people who are bad at relationships, and really do believe in fairy tales.

Promo is hard. For me, it’s right up there with editing: something I don’t particularly like doing, but a necessary part of the process.
Sometimes it seems really daunting. I mean, how do you make your book stand out without spamming your readers and annoying them? So, I thought I’d offer a few tips for relatively painless promotion.

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Relatively speaking, I’ve just started on this journey because I intend to be around for a long time to come, but being a writer has got to be the best job in the world. At least for me. And I should know. I’ve done a lot of others. Don’t tell my former colleagues in the IT industry, but being a writer is WAY more interesting. Why being a writer is so awesome:

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Oh, man. There’s nothing, nothing like the validation of what you’re trying to accomplish by landing an agent. I’ve heard it said that it’s more difficult to get the attention of an agent than it is to get the attention of an editor, and that’s ultimately who you’re trying to sell to! That might be right. My agent gets dozens of queries every day, yet she saw something in my writing.

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On Tuesday, June 29, 2010 I became a published author. I’m not sure what I really expected for that momentous day, but it ended up being anti-climatic in a way. Life went on. The kids still argued in the morning about what they were wearing (or not) to school. I still had to take my eldest to the orthodontist that afternoon. I still had boring but necessary errands to run. No one seemed to understand that I was a published author now dammit! LOL.

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So while I was working on my next novel (you know, the one after the first one was rejected at the query level), I was browsing the online submission guidelines of several epublishers. I did this on a regular basis, just to keep up to date with what digital publishers were looking for. Hey, it’s all research, right?

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For a successful business woman, I was somewhat naïve when I started this writing journey. And probably a bit arrogant. Okay…a LOT. I thought I could write a great story, send out a query and I’d be on my way to publication stardom. After all, I’d done the hard part. I’d actually written a book! I knew less than 3% of people who set out to write a book actually finished it. I was already way ahead of the game. Right?

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A funny thing happened when I started to write romance. I’d read romance across the board in terms of genre and heat level. If it was romance, I’d read it. I had my auto-buy authors and favorites, of course, but I enjoyed exploring the different nuances of all that the romance genre had to offer. And I’d go through binges—sometimes Scottish Highland historical, sometimes vampire paranormals, sometimes sexy, funny contemporaries and on and on. I also read the gamut of heat levels.