An opportunity

There's an interesting site, Best Book Editors, and I won the spin of a wheel there, so that my book One Woman's Voice is the Book of the Month, and I get to hawk it all month. I'm not sure if I will get any sales or downloads off of this, but the moderator of the site downloaded it right off the bat and others will hopefully follow. There is a reward for downloading, reviewing, and proving you did these, and that is the possibility that you too will be chosen for a book of the month. It's how I got it.

My strategy is to engage the authors on the site in conversation. I've really come to value friendship more than the pure reads. Most of these folks are busy, writing and reading for other purposes, as I was, and I don't expect them to read mine just for a chance at a gamble. But I've also reached the point where the read-marketing game on the other sites has reached a point of limited returns, so if I could get enough true exchanges (you read mine, I'll read yours) on this site it would keep me busy and be more than enough. I am no longer even particular about what of mine they read, as if ten read this book, and none read any other, how is that different from distributing it? Not so different, a read is a read. And I'm equally eager to push all my work but actually enjoy people choosing what they want to read.

Besides, I have questions that only authors can answer. They are a unique audience in many senses. On this particular site many are really good. The site has a lot of things going on and reading each other's work is a pretty high priority.

It's good news here, bear with me. I'll work it out, and use the site appropriately.

Bogged down...I signed up for several books; I'm reading three full ones at once, plus another I promised to do for a friend. Two are not bad; the third is ok too except hard to follow. What I really need for that third is an entire evening to concentrate on it, and not keep leaving it out of frustration for having it be hard to follow. It's taught me to always make my books easy to follow. Characters, easy to picture. Action coming from previous action. A direction where it's going.

Forgive the sentence fragments; they are a product of frustration. Really, the grammar I'm dealing with at the moment is much better. I've learned to pick up bad-grammar signals from the blurbs themselves, and, if someone can put bad grammar in a blurb, know that it's not going to get better in the book itself. I no longer hold out hope for books that sound ok in the blurb but show signs of a writer's lack of purpose, or lack of attention to basic sentence structure.

Aside from that, my main frustration with this read-marketing biz is that I can't seem to do enough of it. I try to make time for it at night and in the morning, but I try to make time to write also, and haven't done enough of that. And the writing has two kinds, the organizing (which includes the research), and the writing itself. In novels, the organizing is my weak point. If I don't know what's going to happen, I can't sit there staring at the page; I get blocked. With the biography, I have to go out of my way to find the kind of thing that's appropriate to read.

I'm working on my general writing pattern, trying to find a balance, and do enough of each. It could take a while. Meanwhile it's a cold February, and there isn't much else to do. The afternoon sun comes in my window now. I think warmly of my author friends around the globe, who are struggling with the same issues.