FREE BOOK! Okay, now that I've got your attention...

Join Scarsdale Publishing for their next Share and Tell Sunday October 25 7-9 PM of Whispers of a Killer by Jen Haeger. Readers who would like to read this edge-of-the-seat technothriller, can then join the author in a Facebook party Sunday, October 25th to meet the author.

Email them at scarsdale@scarsdalepublishing.com. to receive a FREE copy of the book. First come, first serve. The first ten readers to email will receive a complimentary copy of Whispers of a Killer.

Hope to see you there!

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!
Writing is Magic.
The First Rule of Write Club is You Talk About Write Club.
If You Aren't Writing, You Aren't a Writer.

Holy cow, where did September go?! Ahem, anyways, back to blogging with a friendly, public service announcement.

Want a writing workshop from the comfort of your own home to prepare for NaNoWriMo this year? Want that workshop to be free? Well, good news! The Writers of the Future folks over at Galaxy Press are hosting a FREE online workshop. The workshop includes 13 video presentations, 11 lessons with practical exercises, and a bunch of other "valuable tools for a writer of any skill." Register at WritersoftheFuture.com/writing-workshop.

And don't forget about the Writers of the Future Contest! Entry quarters are: Oct 1st- Dec 31st, Jan 1st - Mar 31st, Apr 1st - Jun 30th, and Jul 1st - Sep 30th. For more information, go to WritersoftheFuture.com.

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!
Writing is Magic.
The First Rule of Write Club is You Talk About Write Club.
If You Aren't Writing, You Aren't a Writer.

Whoops! Look like I missed a post or two, but I'm back with news. I will be hosting an all day Facebook Event on Thursday, September 10th with the High Society Book Club to talk about my detective techno-thriller series, WHISPs.

I'd love to tell you all the details, unfortunately, I'm not sure what they are. In any event, if you'd like to join me, please sign up to be a member of the High Society Book Club group on Facebook before September 10th, as your membership in the group must be approved. Hope to "see" you there!

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!
Writing is Magic.
The First Rule of Write Club is You Talk About Write Club.
If You Aren't Writing, You Aren't a Writer.

Free Promotion! Until Tuesday, August 11th, 2020, The Christmas Plague is free on Kindle!
Woohoo! Who doesn't like free?

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!
Writing is Magic.
The First Rule of Write Club is You Talk About Write Club.
If You Aren't Writing, You Aren't a Writer.

This is my new cover design! It cost me just over $60 on Fiverr. Notice the professional appearance vs the cover that I designed vs the standard KDP cover. I love the new cover! What do you think?

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!
Writing is Magic.
The First Rule of Write Club is You Talk About Write Club.
If You Aren't Writing, You Aren't a Writer.

Today I want to talk about the importance of a good book cover. News flash! Readers buy books based on the cover. If the cover appears photo-shopped and amateur, readers will assume the story inside is also amateur. I've had the benefit of my publishers coming up with beautiful and brilliant covers for me in the past, but with my self-published titles, I've struggled with the concept of paying for cover art. It really shouldn't be an issue for me because I'm no artist and I know how important a cover can be. Yet, I'm still resisting biting the bullet and actually shelling out the cash. WHY!? No idea. But, when I do finally cave, I'm doing the smart thing and going straight to Fiverr.com. This website provides artists and designers a place to show off what they can do and allows authors to choose how much they want to spend on cover design. I'll post the professionally designed cover for The Christmas Plague hopefully soon.

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!
Writing is Magic.
The First Rule of Write Club is You Talk About Write Club.
If You Aren't Writing, You Aren't a Writer.

I thought I'd blogged about this before, but I can't find that blog in the past six months of posts, so if I've already complained about this please forgive me. I'm having serious angst about my current project which is a memoir about my time in vet school. At first I was going to leave out all names and not even mention which vet school I attended, but more experience writer friends said, "No! You must name names!"

Maybe making everything anonymous made it seem more like a fictional story, but now I'm kinda freaking out about putting my actual, real life experiences out there for all to see. How could readers not judge me and my life decisions? In the book I often refer to myself during this time of my life as a "proto-human," but even so. I'm afraid that instead of the closure I wanted from this book, I'll get new scars (spoiler alert: vet school was emotionally scarring).

I'm also concerned about fallout from people and events mentioned in a less than rosy light, even with the preface that all events are to my personal recollection only and tainted by the corrupting influences of emotions and time. Oh well, maybe I should just stop whining and finish editing the thing. Who knows if it'll even get published anyway.

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!
Writing is Magic.
The First Rule of Write Club is You Talk About Write Club.
If You Aren't Writing, You Aren't a Writer.

First things first. What is KENP? KENP stands for Kindle Edition Normalized Pages. Okay, so what are Kindle Edition Normalized Pages? These are free pages of your self-published, KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) book read by Amazon Prime customers through KindleUnlimited. Why should you care about it? Even though these pages are free for those prime members to read, you still get a tiny slice of royalty from it! Why did I use an exclamation mark? Well, this means that people don't even have to BUY your book for you to receive a PROFIT from your book! That's pretty darn exciting. How exciting? Exciting to the tune of about $20 a month for me, not including actual book sales. That might not seem like a lot, but if you consider the near billion (with a B) kindle books currently available on Amazon, I'm absolutely thrilled with my slice. It's better than readers  buying 3 paperback copies of my book every month. This is where the real royalties are with KDP.

Now, this is all new to me, but I'll tell you how I figured it out. Prior to this month when I self-published The Christmas Plague, I had one self-published title on Amazon, Miles From Manistique. Starting in March of this year I received a royalty check from KDP that was much higher than the usual $3 payments. I thought maybe I'd made a bunch of sales, but when I checked on Author Central, nope, not a single book sale. So then I checked my reports in KDP and WOW! People were reading Miles From Manistique like crazy through KindleUnlimited. Since August 2019, someone, somewhere has read at least 1 page of this book every single month, with a high of over 4,500 pages in April 2020. Not only that, but since March 28th, someone has read at least 1 page of my book every single day except one. Every single day!

Needless to say I'm thrilled and gobsmacked. MFM has been on Amazon for about 4 years, so I can't say it hasn't been a little bit of a wait to see it this popular, but then again, I'm now making a profit on work I did 4 years ago, so woohoo! I think this renewed interest in MFM must be cross-readers from my newly released sci-fi trilogy, WHISPs, through Scarsdale Publishing, so I've said it before and I'll say it again, keep writing! The more books you have, the more opportunities you have to catch a reader's eye, and the more pages you have available to read on KENP ;) $.

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!
Writing is Magic.
The First Rule of Write Club is You Talk About Write Club.
If You Aren't Writing, You Aren't a Writer.

Exciting news! The WHISPs trilogy is going to be translated into Spanish! This is my first novel translation and I am absolutely thrilled with Scarsdale Publishing's decision. I'll keep you updated. For now, here's a sneak peek.

Susurros de un Asesino
WHISPS
Libro Uno
 
En cada sombra, una sombra de muerte...
"Nosotros, el jurado, declaramos culpable a la acusada, Rachel Iris Chester." Con esas  palabras, la vida de Sylvia Harbinger como detective del departamento de policía de Nueva York ha terminado.
Sylvia ha terminado con asesinos en serie, ha terminado con terapia, y ha terminado con una ciudad de Nueva York que ahora a sido plagada de WHISPs—las sombras escalofriantes y grises de sus pesadillas. Ella y su esposo Ben tienen un trato. Ella se retira y ambos se mudan a Montana para escapar del fenómeno WHISP. Es la única manera de salvar su matrimonio después del caso Chester, aunque deje atrás a su hijo Lincoln que fue afectado por WHISP.

Luego suena el teléfono. Chester está en la cárcel, pero ha habido un asesinato imitador, y Sylvia no puede dejar ir el caso. Si ella se perdió algo la primera vez, esta sangre nueva está en sus manos. Ben le da un mes para trabajar en el caso, pero ¿puede su matrimonio sobrevivir tanto tiempo? Y mientras Sylvia investiga más profundo la fuente de su fobia, ¿cuánto tiempo sobrevivirá su cordura?

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!
Writing is Magic.
The First Rule of Write Club is You Talk About Write Club.
If You Aren't Writing, You Aren't a Writer.

Dragon's Roost Press has agreed to publish the reprint of the Moonlight Medicine trilogy! This second edition will feature brand new cover art and additional editing.

Check out the Dragon's Roost Press Website for more information: www.thedragonsroost.net/blog-2/.

I also have a short story in their anthology Monsters in Spaaaaaace!

Keep Writing and Edit On.
I Write, I Edit, I Write Again. Witness!
We're Making Better Words, All of Them, Better Words.
I Write to Burn Off the Crazy.
A Good Day Writing is a Day Writing.
It Puts the Words on the Page or it Gets the Hose Again.
Just keep writing...just keep writing...writing, writing, writing!
Writing is Magic.
The First Rule of Write Club is You Talk About Write Club.
If You Aren't Writing, You Aren't a Writer.