Again I am finding little time to write. It seems that all my spare time is either spent chasing my four kids around the house or marketing Seventh Earth. Again I am surprised at how much time and effort it takes to market a book. And again I can see why so many good books fail. I used to think that all I had to do was write a good book, get a few people to read and like it and sit back while word of mouth spread and sold my book like wildfire. That is so not the case. The massive efforts however are starting to pay off. Recently my book has been featured in three publications--The Willits News, The Meridian Magazine and the Bryan/College Station Eagle--you can see a link to these articles on my website at http://www.seventhearthseries.com/. This new publicity has thankfully lead to a decent increase in sales. However, I am far from being a bestseller, but I have my fingers crossed.
Next week I will be doing my first author visit at a school. I will be visiting Rudder High School in Bryan, Texas. I am both excited and nervous. I'm excited at the opportunity and nervous about the 1 in 3 chance that I might bore the kids to death. Yeah, that would make a great headline, "Local Author Bores Students To Death With His New Novel Seventh Earth--Authorities Beg Him Not To Finish The Sequel." I will be giving a one hour presentation about my book and my writing process, followed by a one hour writing workshop, followed by lunch. I am hoping that school lunches have improved since my time in high school. I seem to remember eating burgers that I swear contained less meat than a PETA board meeting, tater tots that were swimming in a thick mixture of aged cooking oil topped off with a brownie that tasted suspiciously like play dough and had the density of uranium. I'm sure it was all very healthy.
The success or failure of the author visit will be short lived as I will be doing a book signing at the local Hastings Bookstore in College Station the following Saturday. This prospect has my nerves on edge as well. I used to feel bad every time I went to a book store when an author was signing books. They always seemed to be stuck way in the back somewhere between the WWII and Home Improvement sections--back there all alone. I never understood why those two sections were near each other. Like some guy is going to be flipping through pictures of Omaha Beach on D-Day and then all of a sudden think, "Hey, I wonder how hard it would be to build a deck." Hopefully I will get a better location at Hastings. Right in front of the check-out stands would be nice.
