The Tudor Fair Blog
How to Tell Your Story and Give Life to your Novel
I haven’t written much lately because Sideways and Backwards, my novel, went live on April 15, and I was furiously working up to that. Followed by a much-needed refresher break afterwards. While this wasn’t the first book I self published, it was the first one I did under my name, and the…
How to Give Away an Audiobook as a Preorder Freebie
The story of my novel release continues. This week I officially launched my Preorder Push. If you don’t know yet, preorders are useful because they all count towards your first week of sales at once, which can help push you into the charts. Obviously this isn’t a long term marketing strategy –…
Self Publishing and Blog Tours
I’m going on tour y’all! Blog tour, that is. I’ve ponied up the money to hire a blog tour coordinator. Later on in March I will be on a blog tour that’s being coordinated by Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tours. It’s a company that specializes in, as the name would…
From Draft to Shelf in 6 Weeks
A few weeks ago I was reading a book in the bathtub. This isn’t a new occurrence. Reading in the bathtub is one of my favorite luxuries. What happened during that particular bath, though, was kind of a big deal. I’ve been ruminating for a while on different projects I…
The Self Publishing Journey: Learning about Preorders
For the past 8-ish months I’ve been on a Writing and Publishing Journey where I’ve been taking all the things I’ve seen in my time in LibraryLand, am mixing it with courses I’ve been doing on my own (like Tribe Writers from Jeff Goins) and am coming up with the…
Writing about Writing: The Fiction #NaNoWriMo Quest
It’s been a while since I’ve written about writing. With my babyloss memoir, the NetGalley Marketing Experiment has about a month left in it, and I’m continuing to get really good feedback, which makes me feel validated, but hasn’t resulted in a lot of book sales yet. In fact, I…
Writing about Writing: The NaNoWriMo Edition
Every November as the leaves are blowing off the trees and the smells of autumn – spiced apples and pine needles – are wafting through the crisp air, our thoughts turn to the rituals of fall… No, not turkey and football, you silly people. National Novel Writing Month! Hundreds of thousands of people…
Writing about Writing: A newbie’s lessons from the Frankfurt Book Fair
A diversion from history for a moment: I’m in Frankfurt right now for the Frankfurt Book Fair, which is the world’s largest publishing trade show with 300,000 people in attendance. This is my first time at the fair. I’m incredibly fortunate in that my location right now – Spain –…
Writing about Writing: Publicly Opening Your Guts
I’m going a little bit off topic here, but I can do that; it’s my blog. Don’t worry, we’ll get back on schedule with history and music tomorrow. I’ve already cleared 5 hours of writing time tomorrow with my coparent (ie husband). But something has happened today which takes precedence…
Let’s Pause for a Moment, and Reflect
I’ve started working through the Jeff Goins TribeWriters and Intentional Blogging course in the past month. I’m about midway through TribeWriters, which is why you’re seeing some nifty changes around this blog – like a move towards being self-hosted, the newsletter sign up box, a more consistent blogging schedule (which I’m…
Writing About Reading and Writing: The Netgalley Experiment
I’ve posted before about my experiment with my own memoir, Fragile, and Perfectly Cracked, my story of giving birth to a stillborn son as well as dealing with subsequent infertility problems. It was a labor of love for me to get this out there. I’m currently working on my first novel,…
Writing about Reading: Heather’s (self) Publishing Journey so far…
Normally in these Writing about Reading segments I talk about industry specific eBook topics. And on that note, I did buy my ticket to the Frankfurt Book Fair in October today. Nearly 300,000 people and five days of book industry madness. I’m excited! But beyond that, I want to talk about…