This week I had a ton of fun chatting with Booktastik’s Dione Lister. You’ll find my book special listed there under New Releases, along with a lot of other great deals. And today the podcast of my author interview is live. I talk about my latest book, my last book, my next book, and about my writing process. As well as other things, like inspiration, process, community and cats.
Check it out here!
I promised you food as part of my All-Italian blog week to celebrate the launch of The Art of Enchantment. And I woke up this morning with a serious craving for biscotti.
When I want biscotti, my go-to recipe is always by Christine Cushing. No need to re-invent the wheel here. If you are a biscotti fan, this is the BEST!
Lately I’ve seen a trend in coffee shops to monster-sized biscotti of strangely ubiquitous consistency and no discernible flavor. Be careful not to break your teeth.
This is not that.
The recipe is quick and easy. I laid out my ingredients first, since I just moved this week and I wanted to know that I could find everything. There are other versions, with hazelnuts, chocolate or whatever you like best, but today I wanted dried cherries and almonds. In my opinion, the secret ingredient that makes these cookies so good is the grape seed oil. Don’t substitute anything else for that. And don’t leave out the lemon zest or anise because the flavor is so Italy.
Basically I mix up the dry ingredients in one bowl, blend up the wet ingredients in the mixer, stir them together and presto!
Then I pour/drop/shape the sticky dough into two long, rather narrow logs on buttered parchment. Bake for about 20 minutes. It gets quite golden brown, but it’s still a bit soft inside.
After the first-baked slabs cool for fifteen minutes, slice on the diagonal into 3/4″ slices, lay them on their sides and bake again until crispy and dry. Yum. You can dip them in your caffe latte if you like them soft, but they are just as delicious eaten straight off the pan all by themselves. Buon appetito!
1 1/2 cups and 2 tbsp. all purpose flour (405ml)
2 tsp baking powder (10 ml)
1 tsp ground anise seed (5 ml)
pinch salt
grated zest of 2 lemons
1 cup sugar (250 ml)
1/3 cup grape seed oil (75 ml)
3 eggs
1 cup toasted whole almonds, skin on (250 ml)
1/2 cup dried cherries, coarsely chopped (125 ml)
butter, for brushing baking tray
Note: I used my new convection oven for the first time, so I adjusted the times down about 5 minutes per stage.
Let me know if you try the recipe and if you agree they are the best biscotti ever.
I hope you make yourself a nice coffee, sit down with a biscotti or two turn on your soundtrack and settle in to a good read, once you pick up your copy of my new release, The Art of Enchantment, on special this week for only .99. Ciao!
IT’S PARTY TIME!The timing couldn’t be better for Tuesday’s Women’s Fiction online FaceBook Book Launch Party hosted by the Women’s Fiction Writer’s Association.
I’m thrilled to be one of eight authors with new releases scheduled to participate on the WFWA Facebook page on Tuesday, August 16th **Noon – 4pm EDT** (That’s 9am – 1pm PDT for us West Coasters!)
Here’s the line up:
12:00 Kerry Lonsdale – Everything We Keep
12:30 Ella Joy Olsen – Root, Petal, Thorn
1:00 Tracy Stopler – The Ropes That Bind
1:30 Crystal Klimavicz – This Side of Perfect
2:00 Susan Schild – Sweet Carolina Morning
2:30 Kathy Nickerson – Rose Hill Cottage
3:00 Louise Miller – The City Baker’s Guide to Country Living
And at 3:30 Yours truly, answering questions and talking about my debut release – Reconcilable Differences. I hope you’ll come and join in the conversation.
After a roller coaster ride of preparation, setbacks and leaps forward during the first half of 2016, I’m excited to have this book ready for release this week.
My last post focused on my experimental Kindle Scout campaign. To sum up that experience, I learned a lot, worked like mad to get the word out, using a few platforms I hadn’t before, such as Headtalker and networking through Kindleboards, but sadly it wasn’t nearly enough to garner a publishing deal with Amazon.
A lot of speculation goes on behind the scenes trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Only Amazon knows. But clearly having a pre-existing following, or a book with a hook, will help to generate popularity, which in the end does matter. Nevertheless it was a valuable experience that will help with the marketing of Reconcilable Differences now and in the future.
So much more has happened this year. I received critique and beta reader feedback, which let to a penultimate round of revisions. More than I was planning to do, but I think it’s a better book for having taken the extra time and effort.
I also embarked on the process of having a professionally designed cover. After a couple of false starts, and a few wasted month faffing around, I connected with the talented Gabrielle Prendergast, author of Audacious and other YA novels, and also brilliant book cover designer. I’m so happy with my new cover for Reconcilable Differences and the style and theme of the entire Having It All series of WF novels. It makes me want to get cracking and finish the second in the series, Coming About.
I’m also so lucky to have in my circle of supportive writers the multi-talented Crystal Stranaghan and her team at Crystal Clear Solutions designing the book interior. The print book will be ready to go in just a couple more weeks and it’s going to be gorgeous!
This business of being a published author is complicated. These days, no matter how you publish, you have to embrace the role of entrepreneur as well. Even big house published authors are expected to create and maintain an online author profile, and stay active on various social media sites to connect with their audience. Then there is the multitude of book marketing strategies that experts recommend. And without these efforts, your book languishes out there in the ether with millions of other undiscovered titles, making all those years of learning your craft and sweating over the creation of your babies pointless as you’ll never sell any books or have any readers.
So in addition to getting my book ready, I’ve been trying to get organized with all these other things. I had an online author profile evaluation, and read some books and a lot of articles. To keep all this straight I created a Mindmap, that I thought would help me visualize and keep track of all the elements. All it did was help me see that I can’t possibly learn and do all these things: website clean up and redesign, email list sign up, Facebook author page, Amazon author page, Goodreads author page, incentives and bonuses, contests and giveaways, reader discussion questions, bios and blurbs, book trailers and author interviews, etcetera, and linking all these things and my social media addresses together so they all work in tandem.
EPIPHANY
Finally I realized that I don’t have to! I mean if you can do it yourself, go ahead. But for me, it was getting so onerous and stressful that my brain was seizing up. There are so many smart and talented people out there who already know how to do these things that I struggle with. So my big epiphany this last while is that I need help! And in just a couple of weeks I’ve managed to move so much farther and faster with assistance from the right people, including the savvy Amanda Hagarty at Mandy’s Media who’s already been a huge help. And I’m getting there. I really feel that I’m getting there.
So let’s not let all this author platform work go to waste! Join my street team by doing one or more of these things right now: