Today I have a guest on my blog! Jenna’s newest book is Off Leash, which looks like a really charming and fun read! It’s currently waiting for me on my to-read pile. I’ve read her first book, Healing Touch, and loved it. Today she’s here to tell us about some of her first publishing experiences, where she’s come from and where she is today.

Welcome Jenna!

A Look Back

Hi, Laura. Thanks so much for having me on your blog. I love hanging out with other authors and readers.

I thought I would talk a little bit about my self-publishing experience since you are on the cusp of putting out your first book. Wow – congrats!! To me it seems like a million years ago, but it was only a few years.

Healing Touch is my first title and it was released in October of 2009. A couple years later I finished Off Leash. If only I knew then what I knew now. Ha ha.

I remember uploading my ebook and instantly jumping over to my reports page. I thought for sure it would spin like an odometer. No, no it didn’t. Sales were slow in coming. Back then there weren’t any freebies to compete with, but still things were slow.

My title was one of approximately 400,000 available on Amazon US. I think the last time I checked there were over 1.3 million ebooks listed. Amazon UK didn’t even exist!

Sales were slow and I made some bad mistakes right out of the gate. I plugged my book in forums that didn’t allow it, sent goofy spam email to bloggers, and basically made a fool of myself. At the time there were only a handful of indie authors. Writers today have so many more resources – books, blogs, forums, and groups. Lucky you!

Despite the slow start and the mistakes, I had some great experiences in the last few years. I received nice feedback from readers on my work and made lots of wonderful online friends. Sometimes the smallest things sent me flying. A few months after Healing Touch was published, a reader contacted me through Goodreads and asked, “Where can I find your other books? I want to read them all.” You have no idea how thrilled that made me.

There are lots of ups and downs as well as hard work but the little flashes of excitement keep me going. This is an image of a moment I will cherish forever. It is a screen shot of the Amazon UK ebook ranking page. Note the title BELOW mine.

Sigh. If only it would last.

Good luck with your release, Laura. I’m sure it will do great. I hope you find as much pleasure with this experience as I have.

If readers want to find me on the web they can read about my titles here on my website.

I also have a book blog called The Book Snoop.

And if you really want more of me you can check me out on Twitter.

- Jenna Anderson

Best Song: “Someone Like You” by Adele

This was one of the “soundtrack” songs I played on repeat while I wrote Exactly Where They’d Fall this year, so maybe I have a more emotional reason for considering it my favorite. If anyone was ever curious to know how my book feels in song form – it feels like that. Ouch, huh?

Gorgeous song though. I couldn’t get enough of it, even as much as they splashed it all over the radio.

Best New Toy: my Canon Rebel t3i

Best Date: we didn’t have enough of them, but dinner along the Occoquan River on Not-Rapture day – do you remember Not-Rapture Day, lol! May 21st, 2011 – the air was abuzz with hilarity and we were child-free for four hours. 6:00pm rolled around and nobody dissipated into thin air. We wondered briefly if maybe we just didn’t make the list… but then it seemed nobody made the list.

Best TV Show: this was the year I fell in love with Shameless (UK version). It’s not new to most people, but it was new to me.

Best thing that would have been totally awesome had it actually panned out: I started to do an online boating course as novel research, with the plans to buy an actual boat this spring. After finding the info I needed for the book, I never did finish the course. I will though. Because I totally want a boat!

And yes, we’ll then own a boat before we own a house. But that’s okay. Maybe we’ll just live on the boat and float around the world and never have to pick a place to stay?

Best Movie: Biutiful. This is a 2010 film we rented on Netflix. OMG, bawl my eyes out!

Best Place We Visited: This was a close call. I went to some pretty amazing places for the first time this year – Bath, in England. Seeing the clouds sink down into the Shenandoah Valley! Truly spectacular places to see. But after all the hype I’ve been hearing from friends over the years, we finally made a trip up to Traverse City, MI.

Fell in love, people!

Nevermind the fact that it’s hours away from almost everything (or well, maybe that’s *why* it’s such a treasure?) The charming town, the oil and vinegar shop, the popcorn, the little-bitty-almost mountains, the forests, the breakfast shop with the awesome omelets and the good coffee creamers, the farmer’s markets, the earthy people – there’s a lady with a coffee shop who gave a cookie with every cup of coffee, and she gave Dylan a toy with his orange juice! OMG.

And the water! The warm sand, and hot sun, and that icy, icy cold, royal blue water.

Love. That is all. <3

(I also kept thinking, it’s because we’re in tourist season, isn’t it? Maybe they all turn into frozen vampires once September rolls around. I’d like to believe not though.)

Best Book: Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close

Best New Addiction: Tumblr. Tumblr is so fun! I started up about three of them in seven seconds, lol! Combine Tumblr and Sims and you get a Simblr = OMG indestructible. Many a great moment have been lost to Simblrs!

Best Hippie Idea: Coloring hair with henna. I’ve been meaning to try it for a long time, but only got around to it this year. It’s fun to read about how to mix different colors for dyes.

Best New Pipe-Dream: indie authordom, for sure!

(Narrowly beating out my whimsical 5-year plan to buy a house in Traverse City?)

Best Accomplishment: finishing a whole novel! Beginning, middle, end, finished! Not 40% of a book. Not 85% of a first draft, with notes for an ending. A whole book.

I can finish things, people! I can!

And then I finished two more drafts of revisions on it too!

Happy New Year everyone! Here’s to a super awesome 2012!

I made it outside a couple weeks ago just in time to snap a few fall pictures before the colors were gone for good. Now it’s December, and freezing outside, and we’ve put up our Christmas tree.

Wow, how did that happen?

A rhetorical question, of course, because I know how it happened – I’ve been working! I’ve been in my writing cave, revising up my third draft, and sending it happily on to my editor and another beta reader.

Oh, have I mentioned that I’ve hired a real and actual editor? Because I did! And I’m going to be setting up accounts with printers in these coming weeks. (I’m planning to use Lightning Source, for those curious.) And I’ve started an expense folder for my tax deductions. (I think I might need an actual accountant this year, rather than TurboTax.com, lol!) This is turning into a real operation here, folks!

I’ve also started work on my book cover. There’s a peek of the working draft of it – front and back – over on my FB author page. I’ve also made Exactly Where They’d Fall its own book page, and you can see a smaller peek of it there too. The final, official book cover image will not be very different from this – just some minor tweaks I want to make. But I’ll post it here, and make a very loud and official fuss over it when it’s finished!

I’m also planning a small refresh for this website – OMG, why didn’t anyone tell me how pink it was!?!

(No, I don’t mind the pink, sometimes, but I’m bored of it now.)

Also, every fall, somehow we always manage to get sick for the whole span of mid-September through mid-November. All those little kids and back-to-school germs, and before we know it, it’s December. It’s sort of shocking how short a time the fall colors last – just a couple weeks. We managed to sneak outside for a minute, in between colds and revisions, and see all the colors before they were over. Before they all turned brown and fell, to decompose and become worm food.

(click through for more fall pics, 6 in total)

So that’s what I’ve been doing. What have you guys been up to?

This was a really good post, by Jane Roper over at Grub Street Daily: What is women’s fiction, and what does it mean to be a “women’s fiction” writer?

This part struck the feminist in me particularly hard:

As best I can tell, Women’s Fiction refers to fiction that focuses on the relationships and emotional lives of women, and that is marketed to and read almost exclusively by women. The large majority of these books are also written by women, although there are some male authors of so-called women’s fiction (Nicholas Sparks comes to mind.)

Likewise, books that focus primarily on the relationships and emotional lives of men, whether written by men or women, are called Men’s Fiction.

Just kidding. They’re not. They’re called fiction. And they’re marketed to and read by both men and women.

As a soon-to-be indie author, I won’t get the freedom of letting someone make this decision for me. I don’t get to pass the “sell-out” buck to my publishers, and claim that “Oh, I hate the terminology too, but you know, my publishers get to make that decision.” Nope, I am my publisher. So whether my books are marketed as “women’s fiction” or “chick-lit” or something else is entirely my decision alone. I do have to say, there would be some strong advantages to having a clear-cut divide between the author’s personal ethics and the publisher’s need to market the book in the most effective way possible.

Because you know what? Dammit, women’s fiction and chick-lit SELLS! And it’s a clearly-defined market that I think my book would slot nicely into. As a feminist, this puts me in a sticky spot though. I could refuse the label (as I’ve often seen Nicholas Sparks do in interviews, lol!), but I don’t want my book to live in obscurity. Being an indie author, I’ll be obscure enough as it is. I’d love to use genre marketing to my advantage, but yes, it does make my skin crawl to call my book “chick-lit”. “Women’s fiction” is slightly better, though still not perfect.

I’m now beginning work on my book’s cover, which I’m quite smitten with the idea of. There is no pink on it, no shoes or dresses or shopping bags either. Not even a cocktail glass. (Though there are definitely some cocktails in the book!) At one point, I thought there might be some hearts on the cover, but no, I’ve decided against it. What there is, if I might be cryptic: hand-made paper stick people and a watercolor painted sunrise. (Really, you’ll just have to see it, lol!) The cover is going to be quirky, a little bit dorky, a little bit more funny, charming (hopefully), and as an undertone, both romantic and deeply sad. And well, that actually captures the mood of the book quite perfectly!

I suppose I’m designing the cover to fall more in line with literary fiction titles, while keeping the fun and emotion-rich sense of women’s fiction. If I want to be honest with myself, the book is probably cross-genre anyway.

I do hope some men might read my book. (There’s no pink on the cover, and quite a lot of blue, so maybe they wouldn’t be too embarrassed to carry it around? And one of my three main POV characters is a man!) But I also imagine many more women will enjoy it. I am quite confident that women who read chick-lit and women’s fiction will *really* enjoy it. Perhaps I don’t agree with what the market has been named, but regardless, it’s one of the markets I’m writing for, a valid market that has a powerful fan base, and I’d be a fool to turn my nose up at them. Not only just a fool, I’d be denying both myself and my readers that special chance to connect with each other.

So, if you write relationship-based fiction, how do you feel about the label? What would you call it instead?

Please pardon my abrupt absence. I *officially and completely* finished the second draft of my novel a couple weeks ago (!!!), and then promptly ran off with my boys to northern Michigan for a week of fun! (more…)

This was a small series of photos I found within other larger landscape photos I took in England. Most of these I hadn’t even known were there until I super-zoomed in and found these little candid moments that I never would have caught otherwise. (more…)

This is going to be part rant on DRM, be warned, lol! (Other part on how I love my Nook, but I’m still a Amazon Kindle loyalist at heart! AKA how the Nook store sucks!)

On DRM (digital rights management):

I am in support of fair use of DRM-free ebooks. Meaning, if you purchase an ebook, you should be allowed to read it on whatever device you want. DRM on ebooks is like saying (in terms of paper books), even though you purchased your paperback, you’re only allowed to read it at home – not on the bus, not on the beach, not at the library, not at your friend’s house. That book has to stay at home, for the rest of your life, and well, if your home happens to be destroyed or you want to buy a better one, you’re shit out of luck!

DRM will not stop book piracy. I’ve been reading tutorials on removing DRM the past couple days, and let me tell you, while it is a hassle, it is not hard. It involves downloading freely accessible programs and scripts, and anyone who follows a tutorial can do it. Believe me, if someone was inclined to upload an ebook to the internet for the purposes of piracy, a pesky little thing like DRM is not going to stop them. They probably already have the tools at hand.

So not only does DRM *not* stop piracy (at all!), it only takes away the rights of paying, lawful customers. (more…)

I added a new toy to my collection yesterday!

My new NookColor (left) against my laptop (behind) and my phone (right). (more…)

There is no story for my photo this week. (And by the way, I’m sure anyone following this will have noticed that I’m hopelessly behind in my weeks, with little chance of ever catching up – and I don’t really care.)

Last Friday, I passed 50K on the second draft of my novel-in-progress, and just about as fast as I crossed that line, I promptly disappeared from the internet. Work-related anyway. I took an impromptu weekend off. I wasn’t supposed to be taking the weekend off, since I still need to plump and polish this draft by about another 18,000 words, and there’s this monumental and looming deadline to finish before my kid finishes school for the summer – self-imposed, but since I’m my own employer, I’m being kind of a hard-ass about it, lol! Oh, and we’re also simultaneously planning a trip to England in these same three weeks.

Yet even with all there is left to do, my brain spit out that 50,000th word, and shut down. It felt called for, felt necessary, and so it happened. (more…)

Be humble about how much you think you know. You never know as much as you think you know, and the universe has a way of proving that to you. The universe will rearrange itself to prove that to you. And you’ll only feel like an ass. Or maybe you won’t (that depends on your personality type). But believe me, the universe has made waves to show me what an ass I’ve been before, and it didn’t feel very good on my personality type.

By all means, know what you know (be proud of what you know), but just be humble about it.

And kindness is nothing to scoff at either. I’m not talking about fluffy white bunnies and rainbows kind of kindness – but basic respect and a little bit of grace. That’s all.