Hi Friends,
Wow – you are the best readers ever!
You emailed great suggestions for my first ever author event I did last week without any books due to an Amazon fail. Thanks!!
I wore my karate uniform (thanks, Steph!) which gave me a great ‘eccentric author’ vibe. 🙂 Can you tell those aren’t real books? And the papers to my left are my handwritten outlines of the Combat books. (No peeking for Book 5)
Thanks so much to. . .
Michele who suggested I be upfront about Amazon not getting my books there in time. Dan mentioned donuts, so I grabbed a bowl and filled it with Halloween candy. Kevin suggested something to hand out with shortlinks, so I made small bookmarks with my cover and a link on them.
I printed my covers on cardstock and assembled them into fake books. 🙂
Barrie and Elena suggested having a laptop available for sign-ups and purchases. Sara had the idea for autographed books. My local friend Holly even offered to bring over her own paperback copies of my books!
A bunch of you sent encouraging words that I really appreciated – thanks Deepak, Surekha, Charlotte, Crysania and Teresa (a friend I met on an airplane who signed up for my newsletter). 🙂
How did it go, you ask?
I got up and taught everyone a simple self-defense move to get out of a grab – mentioned in this post. Another local author was brave enough to come up and let me demonstrate on her. Then I gave a short summary of my book series and read the first half of chapter one to a small group of interested listeners. I had a handful of people sign-up for my email list and helped out a teen looking for advice on a writing career.
Funny story – my fake books looked real enough that someone picked one up and did a double take when it was squishy cardstock instead of a real book. I got to tell my Amazon story.
Second funny story?
As I left the library, boxes in hand, my husband comes running up with the single copy of Combat Origin I ordered with Prime shipping as a back-up in case the big box of books didn’t come – rofl!
It was a great first event despite all the hiccups. And I have some funny stories to boot – which is gold for an author. 🙂
My Writing Update:
I hit a big milestone as a new author this month – $100+ profit for the first month since I published August 1st. It’s not a huge number, by any means, but it’s a fun start. And when I think of how many books and pages read that represents . . it’s really cool to have that many people reading and enjoying my stories.
So, thanks!
I’m writing chapter 10 in Combat Shift, and Yabban, the martial arts gaming AI in Kiriai’s head is gleefully running Kiriai through her paces, making sure she unlocks and levels up a lot of the basic fighting principles she’s been neglecting.
I’m balancing the ‘boot camp’ flavored training with Yabban’s penchant for jokes and wise sayings she thinks will benefit her young apprentice.
Do you have a favorite goofy joke, pun, or wise saying that someone like Mr. Miyagi in Karate Kid would say?
Email them to me and you may just find it in my next book – with credit in the back for your contribution. 😀
Well, with only 500 works written today (I try to average 2k), I have to get back to work.
Have a great week and squeeze in some time for reading!
— Misty 🙂
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