Follow-up: Local Authors Festival in Westerville, Ohio

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My 1/2 table at the Book Fair

As anticipated, the Local Author Book Festival at the Westerville Public Library went well. While the table area available to each author was small, it was balanced by the ability of the library to host a large number of authors. That enabled them to better meet the expectations of the library's visitors and patrons. It proved to be a well-organized event, with a friendly and helpful library staff.

Stephen Hines & Michelle Houts

In addition, I met a lot of readers (and got to talk books and authors), some new authors (and some I've crossed paths with a number of times--including Stephen Hines and Michelle Houts), participated on an interesting panel discussing Adult Fantasy & Science Fiction, and signed a few books.

Also, pretty neat was that I ran into Scott Poe, reviewer for the Indie Book Blog. He's reviewed most of my books over the years--and enjoyed them :)

Me and Christine Griffin

Finally, I got to meet in person Christine Griffin, the artist who has created the cover art for all of my novels thus far.

Very cool, if you ask me (and hopefully her)!

Saturday, June 6th: Local Author Book Festival in Westerville, Ohio

Here's where I will be this Saturday:

I will be participating on the panel discussing Writing and Reading Adult Science Fiction & Fantasy from 2:15 to 3:00 pm.

For details and exact location here's the link: Westerville Library Local Author Festival

Hope to see you there!

ConCarolinas 2015 Wrap-up

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It's taken me a few days longer than I hoped to get this post together...you know, mowing, trimming bushes, Village Council and Planning Commission meetings, and more.

Kathy Goofing Around

Anyway, ConCarolinas 2015 was a great time! Met a lot of interesting people, new readers and some awesome authors.

Even better, I got to share the experience with my wife! Kathleen watched my table while I was away participating on panels.

Creating a Series (panel) Left to Right:
(Editor) Jim Minz, (Authors) Chris Kennedy, Me,
Susan & Clay Griffith, J.F. Lewis

 My Panels:
* Writing for the Next Generation
* Creating a Series
* The Short of It (Short Stories)
* Raising Scientifically Literate Children
* What Genre is This?

In any case, below are some folks in costumes that stopped by my table:

Flank Hawk: Ebook for Free, Audiobook for $1.99

Readers,

My publisher has discounted Flank Hawk for Free Through Thursday (June 4th -- ends sometime Friday). It's available via Kindle, Kobo, iTunes, Smashwords and more.

Also, if you obtain the ebook (Kindle) version, you can get the audiobook for $1.99 through Audible (retail is $24.95).

Already over the weekend, Flank Hawk reached #90 overall in Free books and #1 in Historical and #1 in Epic Fantasy.

Here's a screen shot (below). I wasn't able to really follow the progress as I was attending ConCarolinas as an author guest this weekend, so it may have been even lower (better). I'll post more about ConCarolinas 2015 tomorrow.

Direct Links where you can find Flank Hawk discounted:
Kindle USA
iTunes
Kobo
Smashwords
Nook
Audible

All (or at least Most) Good Things Come to an End

Got notification the other day that the writers' forum Authors by Design will be closing up.

Authors by Design emerged after the shutting down of My Writer Buddy forum, which ended oddly and somewhat abruptly. AbD had a couple owners/managers over the years, but with the advent of twitter and Facebook and more, it wasn't able to keep up. And running a forum takes a lot of time and commitment, and I appreciate those that stepped forward to keep it up and running.

What I especially appreciated was that AbD supported private crit groups--online crit groups whose forum section was only accessible to the specific crit group members (and AbD's admin team). This allowed the works to be 'unpublished' as they were not viewable to the public, including regular members of the forum.

It was where I moderated Planet Ink, a SF/Fantasy based crit group for four years, and was a member of and eventually moderated Elysian Fields for over ten years.  Good times, good memories, great people and many fond memories.

The community of AbD was always friendly and supportive, even if small by many writer forum standards.

It'll be missed by not so many, but the intensity of the felt absence will make up some for that, I am sure.

Anyway, like everything...one will have to move forward, but keep those writing lessons and memories stored away...or at least I will.

Ranking of Pop-Tarts

Okay, I am a fan of Pop-Tarts and when I stumbled across this article on Yahoo, I figured I'd take a look at it.

After scanning and seeing that my favorite flavor of all 27 came in 26th. and the justification for it, I decided to look a little further.

I was figuring on some sort of survey--not necessarily scientific. At least it said, "We" as the article is titled: "We Ate and Ranked All 27 Pop-Tart Flavors". But it turns out it was just one person's opinion.

Okay, must've been a slow opinion news day. Very disappointing for a even a fluff piece, even if the individual had selected my favorite nearer the top.


Here's a link to the article, if you might want to see where your favorite ranks as compared to this individual's favorite: We Ate and Ranked All 27 Pop-Tart Flavors
 

Authorcast: Building Self-Confidence as a Writer

I usually check in on the Authorcast podcast by David Wood and Alan Baxter.

They're friendly, humorous, and offer insight into the publishing industry (self, small press, and large press) and writing, promoting and more.

Here's their most recent podcast release: 119- Building Self-Confidence as a Writer