E-Book Thursday Guest Blogger -- Phoebe Conn

Please welcome Phoebe Conn! I remember reading Phoebe's wonderful fantasy books and meeting her years ago. So I'm very glad to have her here talking about her latest book.


DEFY THE WORLD TOMATOES

DEFY THE WORLD TOMATOES has just been released by Samhain Publishing. It’s a contemporary romance with a dash of suspense, and the provocative title catches everyone’s notice. When an author is able to pique a reader’s interest with her title, she can more easily lure her into reading the book.

Looking at my backlist, I have to laugh at some of my own titles, and some chosen by editors, or publishers. My first book, LOVE’S ELUSIVE FLAME, had a heroine named Flame, and I just had to use her name in the title. I’ll admit now it was more or less a spoof of romance titles, but it stuck. My editor chose SAVAGE FIRE for my second book because it had a Native American hero and at that time, Zebra used savage for those books whenever they could.

My editor also chose ECSTASY’S PARADISE for my third book. I complained it was nearly impossible to pronounce, but I was overruled. CAPTIVE HEART was my title for a Viking story that made the New York Times bestseller list. Several books then had editor’s picks, but I chose TENDER SAVAGE for a story about the Minnesota Sioux uprising in 1862. My agent cried, “It sounds as though he’s been parboiled!” Perhaps, but the book is still many fans’ favorite.

Roberta Grossman, the late publisher of Kensington Books, chose NO SWEETER ECSTASY, TEMPT ME WITH KISSES, and LOVE ME ‘TIL DAWN. I prefer titles related to the action in the story so the reader can remember it. Her titles were generic romance titles that could have gone on any book. She was a wonderfully enthusiastic publisher though, and I didn’t argue with her.

Just for fun, I came up with a title for my first futuristic Cinnamon Burke book, RAPTURE’S MIST, that said absolutely nothing about the content. It was more or less a private joke, but my editor at Leisure, Alicia Condon loved it! I learned my lesson right there and gave titles more serious thought before submitting them!

My second book with Samhain will be a June release, and my editor asked for a new title because they had already used the one I’d chosen. The heroine is rebuilding her life after being widowed and I got busy dreaming up titles that related to her success. My editor chose WHERE DREAMS BEGIN from my list and it’s a title I love. It frames the story beautifully, and has an appealing uplifting quality. Even better, the manuscript is already finished!

You’re probably still wondering how I came up with DEFY THE WORLD TOMATOES.
I’m still close with a childhood friend who owns a jewelry design studio. I’ve taught classes there and went with her when she did art fairs. At one fair, there was a man selling plaques with the colorful labels once used for produce crates. There was a company named Defy the World, and there was their label for tomatoes. “Defy the World Tomatoes!” I said, “That’s the best title I ever heard.” Then all I had to do was write the book. The plaque is in my kitchen, and will always have a place in my home. The book has gotten great reviews, and I’m proud the title inspired such a well-regarded book. It’s certainly a backwards approach to writing, but it worked.

Has a title ever caught your eye and enticed you to pick up a book? Have you ever found a title that misled you as to the book’s content? Have you ever found favorite books’ titles impossible to remember because they are so similar to other titles? If you could write a bestseller, what would your title be?

I’d love to hear your comments and will give a pdf copy of DEFY THE WORLD TOMATOES to someone with a dynamite title!

Please look for my books at www.SamhainPublishing.com
Dorchesterpub.com
AWritersWork.com and Backlistebooks.com
Phoebeconn.com

E-Book Monday -- Guest Blogger Jeffrey A. Carver

Please welcome today's guest blogger Jeffrey A. Carver!

I enjoy reading science fiction and so fun to have him here!

What's a science fiction writer doing in a place like this? he asks himself, looking around warily. Book lovers, from the appearance of the joint. Romance, okay. Seems friendly enough. They must be okay. They like books, and they asked me to come.

Well, hi—I'm Jeff. Jeffrey A. Carver, they call me on the book covers. The reason Linda and I know each other—though we've never met in person—is that we're both doing the same thing: bringing our out-of-print books back to life, self publishing them as ebooks. Self-repubbing, I call it. Ebooks are something I've been involved in for years, but this part is new to me.

My first ebook-reprints were released years ago through an outfit called E-reads, founded by my agent Richard Curtis. E-reads was on the cutting edge, so cutting that there really wasn't much audience for the product yet. I wasn't a fan of ebooks myself, to be honest—not until I started creating my own ebook reprints for free giveaway, and found that I love ebooks. Here's how that happened:

I've been working for years on an SF series called The Chaos Chronicles, published by Tor Books. The first three volumes, starting with Neptune Crossing, came out to a good reception. But, for a variety of reasons, there was a gap of a decade between those first three and Book Four, Sunborn. You want to guess the availability status of the first three by that point? Right. Coming out with a fourth novel in a series, when the first three were out of print, seemed like a recipe for disaster to me. So I decided to release those first three myself, for free download from my website. I did, and they did—download the books, that is—by the tens of thousands, over two years. I was building my audience, and many of them said thank-you with Paypal donations, and some said thank-you by going on to buy my other ebooks. Not in vast numbers, but enough to be encouraging. What it didn't do was drive paper sales. Those were in the doldrums, and stayed there.

So a few months ago, I decided to shift gears. Pull back on the freebies (not to none, but to less) and put the novels into the Kindle store and Smashwords for a few bucks each. That's what I've done, and in the process became part of a cross-genre collection of authors called Backlist eBooks, and related communities of traditionally published writers, all taking on the great experiment of self-repubbing their backlists. Right now, I have these three books: Neptune Crossing, Strange Attractors, and The Infinite Sea, out under my own imprint, Starstream Publications. I added new afterwords, reflecting a bit on the evolution of the series and what it was like to write the books.

In case you're wondering what the books are about, here are a few brief squibs:

Neptune Crossing Kindle Smashwords
When John Bandicut encounters an alien intelligence on Neptune's moon Triton, his life changes irrevocably. Urged by the alien quarx now sharing his mind, he accepts an audacious mission—to steal a ship and hurtle across the solar system in a desperate bid for Earth's survival.

Strange Attractors Kindle Smashwords
For John Bandicut, Earth is but a memory. Stranded outside the galaxy in a vast structure peopled by a thousand races, Bandicut finds unexpected friends—only to be caught up in a cascade of irresistible forces. Confronting an entity known as the boojum, Bandicut discovers that the Shipworld itself is in peril, and only he can intervene.

The Infinite Sea Kindle Smashwords
Flung to an alien ocean world, John Bandicut and his companions find themselves plunged into the deepsea realm of the Neri. What will they find in the Neri's failing undersea city, or in the terrifying object of the deep abyss? Book 3 of The Chaos Chronicles continues the hard-SF saga inspired by chaos theory—with an all-new Afterword by the Nebula-nominated author of Eternity's End.

You're all romance people here, right? The answer is yes, there is romance out among the stars, even when you're a lone human in the company of aliens.

Soon I hope to have one more book up: Eternity's End, part of my Star Rigger universe. That one was a Nebula Award finalist. I'm working with a cover designer, and when it's finished I want to go back and redo the covers for the Chaos books. Here's what Eternity's End looks like in its print edition:

This is all still a great experiment for me. Stay tuned, and we'll all see what happens. If you'd like to see my free samples, and even download a free copy of my TV tie-in, Battlestar Galactica: the Miniseries, please visit my downloads page. To see a complete listing of all my ebooks, visit my ebooks page or my Amazon Author page.

And by all means, drop in anytime at my blog, Pushing a Snake Up a Hill.

Say, is there any coffee around here?

—Jeffrey A. Carver

Guest Blogger -- Lizzie Leaf

Please welcome my good friend, Lizzie Leaf, talking about the fun stuff in her awesome books!


Humor is Good, Even in Bloodsuckers!

I like humor in my life. I like to read humor and to write it. So when approached to write a Halloween story, no surprise my mind went in the humor direction.
When I mentioned to a friend the possibility of a vampire story that wasn’t horror, she suggested making the heroine Jewish (which my friend is) and throw in Kosher (yet again, my friend’s food style) to add conflict to the drinking blood issue. I took the bull by the horns and off I went. Thus evolved Waking Up DEAD, where the heroine is a socialite whose grandmother, a Reform Jew, keeps a Kosher Kitchen.
Our gal, is a little on the wild side…think Paris Hilton…and a paparazzi darling. Her connection with the hot guy in a vampire costume at her Halloween party, leads to a life change she’s not too pleased about.
She wakes up smiling pine and discovers, thank to the helpful stranger lurking outside the mortuary, she’s not one of the living dead. And, her new main food supply is blood. Yuk! She doesn’t eat food that’s snuggled with blood, let alone drink the stuff.
Not to bore you with details, I finished the book and moved onto other work—my vampire days behind me—so I thought.
After Waking Up DEAD released, readers started to ask, “When’s the next book in the series?” Series? My mind hadn’t gone down that path, so what to write next? Then another friend said, “How about a vampire who faints at the sight of blood?”
Once she planted the seed, my mind wouldn’t leave the idea alone and DEAD Faint came to be and with that the DEAD series. After that came DEAD Hunter, about what else…a vampire hunter (or so she thinks…snicker).
My publisher, Aspen Mountain Press, strongly believed in the series and selected the first two for DEAD Done Right, as their rollout into the print arena at Amazon.
Vampires don’t always have to be blood thirsty beasts. They can have an attitude that will make you smile and love problems, too. Check out Mary Janice Davidson’s, Undead series (which I had not read until after Waking Up DEAD released and readers said I had a similar style, to which I say “thank you for the compliment,”) and you’ll find humor.
Are there more in my DEAD series? You bet! My publisher planted the seed for DEAD Memory that released October, 9th. Here we have a werewolf heroine who stumbles upon a nude male in her neighbor’s yard. Nursing him back to health proves interesting when he has no memory of who is, and she’s not too sure what he is. He doesn’t smell human, he’s definitely not were, but how can he be vampire with the cross around his neck?
People have to stop planting seeds in my head. Combined with all that appear on their own, I have a headache. I’m off to pop a couple of martin and write…which is the only true way I can purge the noise.

Lizzie