One of the ways I express gratitude to the readers who have joined my mailing list is to draw a name at random from the list whenever I have a new book published and give the winner an autographed copy. Of course, I do this well before the book is published so that the readers will know not to buy one (one year I was late and that’s exactly what happened, so I gave that winner an autographed copy of my next book).
This summer I published what had long been a pet project of mine, the contemporary romance Save The Best For Last. But then a strange thing happened: I had the damndest time giving a book away. The first winner did not respond to my email…nor did the second…nor did the third.
A few weeks back I had an email from a reader who chided me for the plot of my mainstream novel Nothing But Trouble (recently reissued in mass market), which she’d just read. She went on to tell me what she liked in a romance or, as she put it, “a semi-romance.”
The relationship between the writer and their agent is an intensely personal one. In addition to knowing the terms of a writer’s agreement with their publisher, agents often are privy to the intimate secrets of a writer’s life: the trying times of unemployment, marital failures, family illnesses and deaths; [...]
The weeks before Christmas are stressful for everyone. I thought I’d never find a suitable (I won’t say perfect; that simply isn’t possible) Christmas gift for my hard-to-buy-for 89-year-old mother, but I did. The holiday baking for the pre-holiday office snackfest got done. The laundry got done. The royalty checks got deposited. The food gifts [...]
I finally made up my mind. I’m going to write the story I’ve been putting off for years now. I’ve continually put it off because I’m feeling intimidated. I see this as a sweeping epic covering three generations of a family, a tale of greed, jealousy, and deception.
