ETA: Books2Read link corrected.
Promotion
Blog entry
The collected skin-singer stories are now on their way to publication! I just pushed the buttons for the ebook and POD versions at Draft2Digital a few minutes ago. (I need to set up Kindle separately, so I haven't done that quite yet.) Official release date will be August 10 (assuming I did that correctly at the website).
This is my first professional (i.e., for-sale) self-published fiction, so I've been picking up a lot of new skills and experiences along the way. I worked with a fabulous cover artist: The Illustrated Page Book Design (Sarah Waites).
So when I learned I was a Hugo finalist for Best Related Work, and they (the Hugo management folks) were giving us a pep talk about leveraging our status for publicity, it occurred to me that Bayer's "human interest" feature in the site newsletter would be perfect for talking about how the "cliff" analysis was in many ways similar to my work on discrepancy investigations. So I pitched it to our communications person, and he linked me with their publicity person who interviewed me about it, and yesterday (you remember yesterday?
Not my usual sort of book post! Those who have followed this blog for a very long time may recall that I've been posted edited versions of the Civil War diaries of Abiel Teeple LaForge, my great-great-grandfather. Hidden Gems: Margaret Getchell LaForge by Stephaie Forshee is about the amazing and talented woman who later married him: Margaret Getchell (LaForge), who was a top executive of Macy's Department Store.
As part of the Great Twitter Migration, I'm doing several things.
You've been asking about this for years -- long before it was a glimmer of a project. But now it's out in the world. Daughter of Mystery has an audiobook from Tantor Media, narrated by Kitty Kelly. Here's the Books2Read link page with all the audio outlets I've tracked down and added so far.
I started listening to the first couple of chapters while making breakfast this morning and am loving it! (I'll probably add it into my sleep-listening rotation.)
A book release, along with all the anxiety and frenetic activity, means a chance to do things like appear on someone else's podcast to talk about my work. This week, I chatted with the folks at Writers Drinking Coffee (who also--ahem--happen to be personal friends) about The Language of Roses, fairy tale retellings, how the pandemic upended our writing routines, and other sorts of stuff.
People have been asking about the meanings of the various rose colors and flowers mentioned in The Language of Roses. I thought about doing a multi-part social media campaign, like I did with the lead-up to the book release, but then figured it made more sense to put it all in one place.
Happy book birthday to my thorny little fairy tale! I'm really enjoying seeing posts from readers as they devour their copies -- some have even gotten their hands on hard copies already, which is ahead of me! (I'm waiting to do my ceremonial post-release re-read until I have the physical copy and can enjoy the interior illustrations.) Most likely, if you're reading this blog, you're already a fan of some subset of my writing. So I'm going to do a big ask, even though I always feel very self-conscious about this sort of thing.
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