Giveaway: Kindle Kisses of Day of Sacrifice

Today I have 5 copies of the Kindle edition of Day of Sacrifice by Stacey Wallace Benefiel, the author of the Zellie Wells trilogy that starts with Glimpse.

Note: Although this is the Kindle edition, it is DRM-free, and so can be converted with a program like Calibre to be enjoyed on a variety of devices.

With only three days left until her twenty-first birthday, her Day of Sacrifice, Flora Hamilton should be living it up. But when another Supernatural family puts a hit on her she’s forced to go into hiding with Julian, her gorgeous new Guardian Angel. Sometimes running for your life isn’t so bad.

Day of Sacrifice is a short story of approximately 15,000 words. It is intended for adults due to language and sexual situations.

I’ll be using Random.org to choose 5 winners from amongst the entries. To enter:

Step 1: Copy and Tweet the following statement:

I want to read Day of Sacrifice by S.W. Benefiel http://amzn.to/e1kch0  #books #kindle @Momjeans1975 @susan_bischoff

Feel free to use the tweet button below and replace the suggested text.

Don’t tweet? You can also make a status update for Facebook, or add the book on Goodreads and leave this statement as a temporary review.

Whichever you do, get the links to the Tweet, Facebook update, or Goodreads review, and…

Step 2: Leave your links in the comments.

You’ll get one chance for the comment (no addition promo necessary) and one chance per link; limited to one prize per person. Comments made after 9am on December 15th will be excluded. The prizes will be sent out tomorrow morning using Amazon’s Gift as a Gift feature and the email address associated with each winner’s comment.

P.S. To get the link for your tweet, click its timestamp. A new window should open that displays the single tweet. Copy the address from your browser’s address bar.

P.P.S. Helen Smith is trying to get the word out about a BUNCH of giveaways she’s doing on her blog this week. If you’d like to score some free reads, why not check it out? And if you’re blogging this week and have some space to spare, tell your friends. I understand that if you send her email and tell her you blogged about it, you’ll be entered to win an Amazon gift card.

P.P.P.S. Sorry, the post-scripts are getting ridiculous. But this morning I read a fabulous article by author Holly Lisle. Especially for those of you waiting to get your hands on Kristen’s social media book (see yesterday’s post), many will enjoy this article on “Your Online Presence” and the theories behind how Holly works to create one of the most engaging fiction sites out there. It’s a long article, but it’s all worth reading.

Giveaway: My favorite book marketing how-to guide

ETA: Read on for more about this very helpful book, but please note that this giveaway is over and comments have been closed.

My daughter’s scheduled outpatient surgery (getting a bunch of gum-chewing teeth taken care of because she tried to sock the dentist, even with laughing gas), was canceled due to snow. It’s certainly not a ton of snow by our standards, but for this part of the country, everything has to shut down. I hate snow, I really do, and my daughter told me, “If you hate snow, you hate Christmas.”

But, I really don’t. I’ve “Bah Humbug”ed more than once already, and I’ll do it again, but underneath this stress-ed out exterior, I really do love Christmas. And to prove it, I wanted to give away something I’ve found very useful this year.

Yep, I’m talking about We Are Not Alone: A Writer’s Guide to Social Media by Kristen Lamb. I talked about this book when I was reading it back in September, but I just got around to writing an Amazon review yesterday. Bad Susan.

I’d like to believe you all hang on my every word and that, when I mention a book, you all run right out and buy it. But hey, you don’t, and this one’s 8 bucks for the Kindle version! And we’re all starving artists, aren’t we? But thanks to the magic of Amazon’s Gift as a Gift button (how much does that rock?) (and my magical Amazon credit card), I can easily offer you this book that I found so helpful, encouraging, and entertaining.

Note that this is the Kindle edition, and is DRM’d, so you’ll have to read it on a Kindle-compatible device or on your computer.

It would be lovely if you’d use the sharing buttons below to mention this to your friends and get more people to check out Kristen’s book, but I’m keeping this simple and all that’s required is that you leave a comment, saying that you’d like to win the book (to distinguish you from the other people who have to comment to gush about how great Kristen is). Let’s have an end to entries at 9am Eastern on Friday, since I’ll have another 1-day giveaway for you on Thursday. That should jog my memory to, you know, pay up. Then I’ll choose one random winner from among the entries. (ETA: it looks like I’ll be doing that other giveaway tomorrow, FYI. Doesn’t affect anything for this one, though, except my ability to remember to hand out a prize.)

And if you already read this book, will you please drop by Amazon and leave a review? Just your 5-star rating (I assume) with the line “I found this book really helpful” or “Great introduction to social media for authors” or something like that. It doesn’t have to be a big deal, but ratings really help. In a world of corporate-branding For Dummies and Idiot’s Guide how-to books, let’s help out one of the little guys who deserves it.

This, That, Stuff, and Things

I used to have this social studies teacher who absolutely hated “stuff and things.” Use either of those words in an essay question at your peril. So now I often say them, just to say them, because I’m just ornery like that.

I’m also constantly behind. Everything’s just late, crazy, and overdue.

Take the 1000 Sales Giveaway. I was supposed to draw that on Monday. Just did it now.

It has been such a week. Sales started a random upswing over the weekend and then just exploded. It was all very exciting, finally slowing back down again, but I’ve been so obnoxious this week that I’m lucky I have any friends left at all, and you’re all lucky I forgot to blog.

So I’m not going to bore you with a play by play, but I’ll just record that my highest rank in the Kindle store was #327, and at B&N, where there is less competition right now, I think the highest I got was #140. Don’t know how that happened, and I think I’m pretty much going to have to retire from trying to figure this stuff out because I haven’t got a clue.

Ok, I know, tell us the winner already. I’m just messing with you. The winner of the signed paperback of Hush Money is Marta! Because Random.org thought to itself: which number feels like international postage?? Hahaha. That’s awesome, though, and Marta, I am very excited to send this to you.

Speaking of contests, I think Robin and I have settled on a cover concept and images for Heroes ‘Til Curfew. Last night I sent her a bunch of spew, descriptions of Dylan, some recurrent themes and imagery from the new book, that kind of crap. What she came up with is pretty awesome on the first try.

It’s not ready yet. I have to buy the stock images, she has to play with the color and make some adjustments, and I apologize for just teasing you like this with nothing to show. But I’m sure we’ll have it ready for you soon. I already feel so much pressure about this sequel that, to be honest, I’m sort of afraid of the cover reveal. Because I just think Robin’s work is so awesome it’s going to make a mob come to my house and chain me to this machine until I finish the story to go with it.

Which Kait suggested might not be a bad thing.

Smartass.

Anyway, I asked Robin if she was inspired by any of the responses in the Find My Dylan contest, and it seemed that her image selection came mainly from what I told her about the story. We agreed that it’s probably best to go with random selection on that too. So when we’re 100% on everything, and ready to reveal the cover, I’ll announce the winner on that as well. Thanks to everyone who helped look for Dylan.

In other news, my husband and I celebrated our 19th wedding anniversary on Tuesday. I’ve now been married half my life. Whew.

NaNoWriMo is going pretty slowly. November is always a bear for me. Just in this week I had my attention sucked away by the awesome upswing of sales, our anniversary, election day means a day of no school, I should have had my knitting day but got sick, then doll club with my mom today, and tomorrow I have a bazillion errands and a social commitment I should honor. So that’s all interfering a bit with my whole BICHOK program, but most of what interferes with that program is me. I got 1230 words today of what is mainly note-form to be turned into proper prose later (well, as proper as we get in the Talent Chronicles), which brought me up just over 4100, I guess. I forget, but I updated it at the website, so it’s probably in the sidebar. The stats tell me I’m behind. Big surprise.

How is everyone else doing?

Contest: Help Me Find My Dylan- sticky

This is a sticky post. Please scroll down for newer posts.

Know what part of cover design takes the longest? Finding the right images. Robin and I spent a long time combing through images before Kait (who loves browsing stock photos, btw, but you didn’t hear it from me) came up with the perfect one.

I would like Dylan to be on the cover of Heroes ‘Til Curfew if at all possible. I have lousy GoogleFu, and it’s a deficiency that carries across all searches. While spending time browsing photos of cute boys is tempting, I really should be spending time on other things–like writing the book.

So I was thinking that maybe some of you would like to hunt for Dylan. You’ve read Hush Money (right?), so you have a sense of who he is. My current Dylanish Muse is Hunter Parrish. Here are some pics. He plays the part of Silas, the older son, in Weeds. From the earlier seasons, the longer hair look is probably more what I’m thinking. Just to give you an idea what’s in my head.

Robin prefers to work with images from Shutterstock, and she has her reasons, so images from there would have a better chance of being chosen from a practicality standpoint. But we might possibly go elsewhere if the price and conditions are ok.

Please leave links to images in the comments to this post. Enter as often as you like. If I chose one of the images for the cover, the commenter who linked to it will receive Heroes ‘Til Curfew in paperback and ebook (when they become available), and get the bragging rights to say that they “discovered” Dylan.

This contest will run until I finalize a cover design. If none of the images is chosen, I will give one entry to each individual commenter and select a winner at random for the giveaway. Sound fair? Have fun.

(and feel free to hit the tweet button on your way home)

Five little bits on a Saturday morning

Reason number one for this post: I’m still really excited about my new book cover!

Other than that, excuses for this Saturday morning post are as follows:

2. To check and see if I’ve fixed my NetworkedBlogs stuff that got broken when I did some domain-forwarding stuff.

3. To make sure you’ve heard about this contest to win the Mortal Instruments books in hardcover, and remind you that it’s the last day to enter.

4. To mention that I’ve recently finished reading Portal and Glimpse and really enjoyed both.

5. To remind you that today’s the last day of the sale at Smashwords. The two links above are Amazon, but both those reads are available at Smashwords.