Being an unknown writer poses numerous challenges these days, chief among them is getting people to read your books. One way of doing that is to enter contests, some of which review the book you enter. That is something. That my books usually make the finalists lists for their categories feeds my optimism that one of them will eventually win something. Even making the cut as a finalist gets the book some exposure, if only to other contestants and the reviewers. And there is always the hope a reviewer is someone important who might see the genius in the book that other, lesser, minds have missed.
When an email from Beach Book Festival arrived in my in-basket, I perked up. My Tookie books would be perfect beach reads. So, I entered the first one, the one Midwest Book Review* raved about, Only Tim Sent Flowers. Selecting a genre is always a challenge, especially since these contests don’t standardize the choices. I picked General Fiction, mostly as a default, and shifted my focus to other things.
Outlook has a nasty habit of shunting emails off to the spam folder almost randomly. This “feature” caused me to miss several important messages before I became aware of it. Now, I make a habit of checking the spam folder for good messages—except when I’m overloaded. While making a routine scan early this week, I was pleasantly surprised to find a message informing me that my book had made the winners’ list, meaning that it was either a winner, runner-up or honorable mention. A quick check of the BeachBookFestival.com revealed that Only Tim Sent Flowers came in second. Seeing eight other books listed as honorable mention gave me some consolation: my book was at least in the top 20%.
Contest officials wouldn’t tell me how many books were entered in my category but did say only 5% place. I chose to ignore the horse racing meaning of the term and interpreted place as meaning “getting placed on their winners’ list somewhere. That makes me feel better.
After posting my previous blog message on Facebook, complete with book cover image, I received a notification, to use Facebook jargon, to “boost” my message’s reach. I almost simultaneously received a ten-dollar bonus to be used toward my next Facebook ad. So, thinking it wasn’t going to cost me anything, I shot the entire wad on a 1-day ad to American women 30 or older.
Another review just came in for Finding Mr. Wrong. This one is from Patricia Hamill of I Read Too Much fame:
Last Saturday, even though Tookie wasn’t wearing green, her favorite color, probably due to her red hair, her publisher, Black Opal Books, released the second book in the series named after her. Finding Mr. Wrong picks up where Only Tim Sent Flowers left off. After being dumped unceremoniously by Isaac and convalescing with first boyfriend Tim, Tookie unwinds on a windjammer cruise unmolested (her satirical term for making out, an activity she thoroughly enjoyed) with girls from work.
How do we give the girl sperms a major edge over the boys? Men have little control over the proportion of female to male sperms they produce. They just produce a mix of about equal numbers of each. So, it’s up to the woman to take control.
This has been a productive week already and it’s far from over. Finding Mr. Wrong, the second book in the Tookie series, is moving rapidly toward release. The editor’s comments weren’t hard to accommodate and I didn’t find too many typos to correct, on this goround at least. So, I was able to submit the revised manuscript for final edits. Soon, PDFs will arrive in my inbox for me to review.