Tag Archives: #indiepublishing

The end of an unforgettable year.

We’ve all read the jokes and seen the memes about what a dumpster fire this year has been; heck, now that it’s December 12th, we’ve almost lived through it! So what else is there to say about 2020? It’s been hard. Just every last thing about it has been ridiculously challenging.

I know we’ve all been impacted by it in such different ways, and I feel like someone who is incredibly fortunate to have a job and my health (as well as that of my family), so all I can say is that it’s cast a pall over everything and that sometimes the days felt like we were swimming through thick mud. Fallen by the wayside were motivation, joy, and creativity, and I think we’ve all had to dig deep this time of year to pull forth the kind of holiday cheer that’s normally elicited by Christmas music or holiday traditions. For many of us (myself included) that meant putting up the tree and the lights way too early, but the glow of colorful lights glinting off gaudy ornaments is what’s keeping me going right now. That and my favorite Christmas songs on repeat.

As far as writing, that’s part of that “lack of creativity and motivation” I mentioned earlier. There were so many days I wanted to put my fingers on my keyboard and write. I tried. I looked at the early days of quarantine and the long summer as time to really roll up my sleeves and get stuff done, but there were days–soooo many days–when all I could do was pick up a book and read. Tie on my shoes and walk for miles. Watch reruns of The Golden Girls and drink coffee. But now that we’re wrapping up The Craziest Year of All Time, I’m looking back and thinking, “Wow. I managed to put out four books this year!” Granted, I wrote most of Year of the Rabbit about seven years ago, and just about all of Lights, Camera, Love before that, but still, adding four books to my published catalog this year is going to be something I look at as a win. And I wrote Hearts Ahoy entirely during quarantine, which sometimes felt like trying to get blood from a stone!

Not to mention that I just put out the 8th full-length book in the Christmas Key series this week–Dancing Barefoot. Every time I think about ending Christmas Key and moving on to something else, I realize that I’m not ready to let go yet. To me, the place is real. The people are real. Each time I sit down and start to write about the characters who live there, I’m transported and I realize that to say goodbye to them would be a loss for me, and frankly, I still need them. So there’ll be a book 9 (that’s a 100% guarantee, since the cover is already done and waiting for publication!) and there will also be more romance novels. At the beginning of 2020 I set the lofty goal of publishing 10 romance novels this year, but I’m okay with getting two out–I really am! I have the covers for the next two romances set in stone as well, so that keeps me moving forward. I’m not setting any goals for 2021 just yet because 2020 isn’t even done and who knows what the next 19 days will bring (Seriously! Remember how many days this year we all went, “And what fresh hell is THIS?”), but I’m feeling creative again! So get ready for more from me…lots more!

In the meantime, happy holidays to you and yours, and I wish you health, happiness, and only good things in 2021!

Stephanie

Putting out two books in one month (and what it’s really like to work as a mother-daughter team).

May was a busy month. I released Book 7 in the “Christmas Key” series–Polish the Stars–as well as Elizavetta, the third book in the “American Dream” series that I write with my daughter. That would actually be more impressive than it really is, except that it took us two years to put out our co-authored book. Yes, two years. We started that book in 2017 and worked on it in fits and starts between the time my baby girl was thirteen and still wearing braces, until now, as she nears the end of her drivers’ education course and the finish of her freshman year of high school.

Why did it take so long, you ask? WELL, let me tell you a few things about mothers and teenage daughters, the most important thing being that we don’t always get along. Nor do we always feel like doing the same thing at the same time. What started as a blissful project back in 2014 with Iris turned into a bit of a battle as we worked our way through Book 3. When we first wrote together, it was always sitting side-by-side, her head on my shoulder as we talked and typed out our ideas. Over the years, we’ve had times when we didn’t totally agree on the way things were going in a story and so it would bring us to a standstill, but we’ve also had times when we each found the other nearly impossible to work with.

Months have gone by where she would ask me to write and I’d be tired or just not in the right frame of mind, or I’d ask her and she’d say “I’m busy now–maybe later,” which roughly translates to “I’m watching some crappy show on Netflix and I’m enjoying it too much to shut it off and be creative.” And that’s fine–of course it’s fine! We both have to be in the right mood to work on a story, and when we’re not, we’re just not. We have the right to be individual humans.

I’ve also accused her of not wanting to write with me anymore (melodramatic Mom Moments where I’m like, “But you used to love to write with me! Maybe you just don’t want to be my writing partner anymore!”), and she’s accused me of enjoying my other series more than ours (“You’d rather work on your Christmas Key stories than on ours!”) It’s difficult to write with someone else–I’ll admit that freely–but the rewards are amazing. I’ve done it now with two different writing partners, and to be fair, the same thing happened both times: sometimes one of us wants to write, and sometimes the other person does. But not both at the same time. And that’s okay! When the magic happens, it really happens. And that’s worth waiting for.

But ultimately, the beauty of writing with my teenage daughter is knowing that–even when she doesn’t feel like talking to me about other things–if the stars align just so, she might still put her head on my shoulder and disappear into a fictional world for a while where we make all the rules. She might want to talk about the characters we’ve created together, and we might finish a project and get that same feeling of satisfaction we’ve gotten before, just knowing that we did something special together. And–if I’m really lucky–we might get to do it again. Possibly even this summer, which is mere weeks away.

So maybe two books in a month is impressive after all, given that one of them flowed freely from my fingertips from first words to publication in three months, and the other took faith, cajoling, patience, and partnership over the course of two years to finish. If you’re so inclined, I hope you’ll check them out!

Happy reading!

New Year’s resolutions for 2019 (and how much I made from my books in 2018).

My only resolutions this year have to do with writing. (That’s a lie–I also want to lose ten pounds, read fifty books, sleep enough, and be amazing at everything. But the need to focus is forcing me to be a bit more realistic!)

I want to treat this like a business and not a hobby. It won’t take away the fun of writing, because that’s an escape that will always bring me joy, but it will force me to learn the dreaded part of being an indie author: marketing and sales. Sure, there are stories about people who write, release their books, and become best sellers, but for most of us, there’s a whole other side of the process that we’re not so good at, and that’s crunching numbers, learning algorithms, and promoting ourselves. I need to embrace that stuff far more than I do.

I want to write more consistently. A couple of years ago I started waking up during the 5 o’clock hour on work days just by my own internal clock. I’m back at it again this year, and when I get up, get the coffee going, and put my fingers to the keyboard, I can easily get 2,000 words written before work. I don’t get writer’s block, I’m never in-between projects and stuck without ideas, and I can fall into writing and lose myself anytime and anyplace, much like people who can fall asleep on airplanes or in cars (lucky bastards!) So it’s just a matter of getting up and doing it consistently. Every single day.

I have several things in the works for this year, and I’d like to surpass my own goals. Up next for release is Book 3 in the American Dream series I write with my daughter (there needs to be a whole other post on why THAT book has taken so long, but we’re close!); a standalone title that I’m working on with my other writing partner, Omar; another novella and another full-length title in the Christmas Key series (novella #3 and book #7!), and whatever else I decide to work on.

I want it to be a productive and prolific year. I’ve been immersing myself in writing-related podcasts in the car and at the gym, and I’m going to absorb the lingo and the ideas to the point that I understand it all and know what needs to be done. Last year with just a little advertising I made $18,000 from my books. I know that qualifies pretty firmly as a part-time side hustle, but I think with a bit more know-how, I can double that and start coming closer to what I consider a “wow–impressive!” amount of money. So here’s to 2019 and all the opportunities it will bring. And here’s to thousands and thousands of new words and lots of joyful writing time!

Happy New Year!

When ‘Christmas Key’ comes to the Big Screen.

**insert laughing emoji face with tears streaming**

I mean, a girl has to dream, right? Because whether I’m reading or writing a book, the characters and places come to life in my head, and at a certain point it really is like watching a movie, isn’t it? This has been a busy month so far, with school starting up again (our school district decided high school needed to start an hour later, so not only is our schedule bumped back, but I took on an extra class at the end of the day, which means I’m now getting home at 5:00…not exactly teacher’s hours anymore!), and I also managed to get Book 2 in my Christmas Key series, Wild Tropics, published and out into the world. I’m really proud of being in the middle of an actual series now, and I’m currently working on a novella about Jake–one of the main characters–that will give some background information about how he ended up on a tropical island in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.

But as I work on my stories, of course I have ideas about who the characters are, and who they look like. So, without further ado, allow me to cast the Hollywood version of Christmas Key:

Holly Baxter, Christmas Key’s 30-year-old mayor: I see her as sort of a blue-eyed Keira Knightly. Pretty, but kind of serious. A little quirky. Embed from Getty Images

Jake Zavaroni, Christmas Key’s only police officer and Holly’s ex-boyfriend: Jake Gyllenhaal. Good-looking. Honest eyes. Looks like he’d be a tough but good-hearted cop. Embed from Getty Images

Bonnie Lane, Holly’s assistant at the B&B: 50-ish, a Southern belle who loves men. A real saucepot–like a Golden Girls era Rue McClanahan, with a thick accent and a Blanche Devereaux sense of humor. Embed from Getty Images

River O’Leary, Holly’s love interest who visits the island from Oregon: 30-ish, tall, good sense of humor, ex-pro baseball player for the Mets. Paul Walker–no question. Embed from Getty Images

Maria Agnelli, the island’s resident cantankerous octogenarian: 86, a widow with a sharp tongue and a kooky streak. This is where my love of the Golden Girls becomes obvious (okay: we can call it an obsession)–Maria Agnelli is 100% Sophia Petrillo. Embed from Getty Images

Cap Duncan, owner of North Star Cigars: looks like a pirate who walks around with a parrot on his shoulder. A little grumpy with a lot of secrets. I picture him as Donald Sutherland with slightly longer hair and a gold hoop earring. Embed from Getty Images

Leo Buckhunter and Dr. Fiona Potts, Holly’s uncle and his girlfriend, Fiona, who is both the island’s only doctor and Holly’s best friend: Buckhunter is a grizzled, tattooed Matthew McConaughey in my mind, and that never wavers. Fiona is a petite, smart, funny woman in her 40s, and although I think of her with more strawberry blonde hair, she’s definitely a Reese Witherspoon. Embed from Getty Images

Coco Baxter, Holly’s mother: late 40s. Self-involved, self-centered, self-serving. She and Holly aren’t close, and while she doesn’t technically live on the island, she visits all the time and her negative presence is always felt. I see her as a crisp (though not British) Kristin Scott Thomas. Remote and with an attitude, but beautiful. Embed from Getty Images

I’ll be sure to let you know when the movie premiere is so you can be there! **insert another laughing/crying emoji again here**

Happy fall!

RRBC Book and Blog Party 2016!

Blog Party 1

Welcome to this stop on the blog tour! This is our first time participating, and we’re really excited to join you from Vancouver, Washington. We’ll have two winners today here at Redbirds & Rabbits, and all you need to do to enter is comment on this blog post. Our two prizes today (both randomly drawn by the RRBC team) are:

  • One $25 gift card to Old Navy (perfect for back-to-school shopping!)
  • One paperback copy of There’s Always a Catch, the first book in my Christmas Key women’s fiction series. Along with the book, I’ll send you some “book swag” like a magnet and my own homemade soundtrack of songs inspired by There’s Always a Catch and the forthcoming Wild Tropics, which is book #2 of the series!

It’s exciting to have you join us from wherever you are on this beautiful planet, and we’d love to tell you a little bit more about ourselves. My name is Stephanie, and I’m the mom. Holland is my 12-year-old daughter, and we’re the co-authors of a series that Holland dreamed up two summers ago. From her original idea, we decided to write books about what it might feel like for young girls to move to America. Each book is about a girl from a different country, and the main character’s story follows her as she moves to our country and gets assimilated. We published our first book, Iris, about a year ago, and we’re incredibly excited to announce that we just put out our second book, Mai, a few days ago.

Iris-FINAL.jpg          Mai-f

In addition to the books I write with my daughter, I also pen a women’s series based on a fictional island off the coast of Florida called “Christmas Key.” The main character, Holly Baxter, is the 30-year-old mayor of a tropical island where the only traffic comes from slow-moving golf carts driven by retirees; the commute to work involves getting sand between your toes; and happy hour means salty margaritas with a view of the ocean. The only drawback for Holly is the lack of romantic options on Christmas Key! Book one, There’s Always a Catch, came out in the spring, and book two of the series, Wild Tropics, will be out in September.

TAAC-CK-BK-ONE-f          WildTropics-TAAC-f

And finally (as if two series and being a full-time teacher wasn’t enough!) I write YA under the pen name Reed Hall. My first YA book, @Robertopancake, came out last year, and it was a book that I absolutely loved writing. The whole thing was inspired by an exchange about music that I had with a kid on Twitter back when the site first became popular, and it moved me to write this book from the perspective of a teenage boy. The real @Robertopancake kindly gave me permission to take his (often hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking) teenage boy tweets out of context and use them in my own fictional tale. The result is a book that I’m still incredibly proud of, and the main character is someone I love as if he’s a real, live boy (and many of my readers have said they wished he was real!).

Robertopancake - High Resolution

Thank you for stopping by today–we’ve loved being a part of the Rave Reviews Book Club the past few months, and this blog tour has been a great example of what a wonderful, supportive community it is. Happy reading and writing, everyone!

~Stephanie & Holland

And now we can officially call it a series.


Mai-f

It feels like it’s taken an eternity, but we finally hit ‘publish’ today on the second book of our middle grade series. I’ve gone into writing both the American Dream Series and the Christmas Key Series with the understanding that they would be multi-book ventures, and I’m constantly working on one or the other. But at a certain point, time starts to drag on and it feels like those who know me best are wondering whether I’ve just given up on publishing more. I have not.

The journey from idea to actual finished product is a long one, and the edits alone are enough to make a sane person crazy (how many times can you actually re-read the same scenes before you start dreaming about your characters like they’re real people? How many times can you tweak and re-tweak your dialogue and description? Doing it several times more probably wouldn’t hurt the final version, but it does start to hurt your brain!), however, the excitement of getting something completed and sending it out into the world never gets old.

And so we now present to you the story of Mai Nakahara, a Japanese girl who moves from Tokyo to Honolulu with her family. By the time Mai’s family moves to America to help run her aunt and uncle’s restaurant in Hawaii, she’s pretty much gotten used to living without the arm she lost to cancer. But life in Honolulu presents its own challenges: a giant ocean she’s too afraid to swim in, mean girls to ignore, and horrible sports to play in gym class. Fortunately, there are also some good things about Mai’s new home, and with the help of her cousin, her new friends, and a famous one-armed surfer named Chloe Hayes, Mai discovers that the only real obstacle to her own happiness is believing in herself.

You can check out Mai: The American Dream Series Book Two on Amazon.

The magic of words.

We all know by now that I’m on this writing journey with my pre-teen daughter, and I can confirm to you all that it’s been one of the best things I’ve done in my life. My girl turns 13 this year, and we’ve just spent the summer together doing a variety of things (which, I’ll admit, includes a fair amount of time spent re-viewing Gilmore Girls on Netflix), but most importantly, we’ve sat together and finished our first draft of the second book in our American Dream series. It took us a year to get that done (those are the realities of working with a hormonal adolescent who would sometimes rather watch Barbie furniture building how-to videos on YouTube than read through a section of a manuscript again to get it just right), but last night, as we sat in her bed under the Christmas lights that she has draped around her room, we emailed the edited draft out to our beta-readers, and it felt AMAZING to say we’d completed this project.

And by “completed” I mean we’ve written it and taken turns reading the chapters out loud, making our changes and haggling over word choice and description (the final editing will be mine to do once we get feedback). But that’s the magic, really: the words. The ones we wrote together, the ones I listen to her read, and the ones we debate over. They’ve kept us working together, side-by-side, like glue. They’ve kept us from drifting into a land where she holes up alone in her room like a typical teen, keeping her words to herself or only sharing them with friends. Instead, she shares them with me. As we write, we talk about other “stuff”–boys, mean girls, fashion, music. I mean, we talk a lot anyway, but this gives us a safe place to make silly jokes and to apply the situations we write about to real life. This book we’ve just finished gives us the chance to talk about what mean girls are like in middle school in 2016, and lets us ponder what sort of messages we want each book to impart. (For the record, she talked it through as I listened, and we ultimately decided that this book is about believing in yourself and overcoming whatever obstacles or limitations life throws in your path.)

Writing also gave us something to talk about on our road trips this summer. We sat next to pools in Buffalo, Wyoming and talked about our next book: who will our main character be? Where should she be from? (Russia, we’ve decided.) What state will she move to in America? (While driving to an abandoned gold-mining town outside of Bozeman, Montana, we determined that she’d definitely be moving to a horse ranch in the “Treasure State”.) And as we power-walked through a pool in Spokane, Washington like a couple of middle-aged retirees on a water aerobics mission, we even got to daydream about a time when we had enough books published that we could go on an indie bookstore tour, setting up tables and autographing books for our rabid fans. (Hey, a girl can dream, right?)

I know there are a few more weeks of summer and I shouldn’t be mourning its end just yet, but teachers go back to work three weeks from today, so…the end is near. I have some final editing to do on my own book, and I’m hoping to have both of our books out in early September (it always takes longer than you think it will!) The covers are done, the drafts are written and in their final stages, and–as always–I’m eternally grateful for the magic of words.

My Christmas Key soundtrack.

There’s almost nothing I do without music, except maybe sleep. I put Pandora on as soon as I start getting ready for work in the morning, I listen to music as I drive (preferably Sirius XM’s First Wave station), and I play it all day long in my classroom during the school year while my students are working. There’s more music while I work out at the gym in the evenings, and of course I listen to it non-stop as I write. A mellow Pandora station that fits the mood of my story and doesn’t distract usually works well, so for my Christmas Key books, a combination of Tropical Holidays and Caribbean Jazz are pretty much my go-to stations.

For me, music sets the mood and the tone of not just writing, but life. Certain songs can instantly transport you to a time and place (anything that came out in 1997–Chumbawumba’s Tubthumping, the New Radicals You Get What You Give,  Sarah Mclachlan’s Building a Mystery–are like a time machine to the fall of that year, a trip back to me driving around Miami as a 22-year-old newlywed in a beat-up car with no air-conditioning, trying to make it as a model on South Beach). Road trips are intimately tied to the music I listen to as I take in the small towns, the wide vistas, and the mottled skies, and I also find that songs are interwoven with the humans who recommended them to me, as one of my favorite students did this year when he made excellent suggestions for a handful of cool songs I’d never heard before. From this point on, those songs will always be the ones that Grayson gave me.

Music is such a big part of my life that it’s no surprise to me when I go back to revise and edit to find that I’ve name-checked several songs in every book. After finishing There’s Always a Catch and the forthcoming Wild Tropics, I had to go and buy the songs I didn’t already have in my iTunes library, and now I have a handy Christmas Key playlist to listen to whenever I need to get my head back into the game with drafting or revising. So without further ado, here are the songs mentioned in the first two books in the Christmas Key series. (I’m giving away two copies of my soundtrack on CD, so if you live in the U.S., leave a comment on this post and tell me which island on this beautiful planet is your favorite, and why–I’ll choose 2 winners on July 31st!)

  1. Let’s Stay Together–Al Green
  2. God Only Knows–The Beach Boys
  3. Trouble–Coldplay
  4. Hotel California (Live)–Eagles
  5. Brilliant Disguise–Bruce Springsteen
  6. Just Like Heaven–The Cure
  7. Jamming–Bob Marley
  8. Witchcraft–Frank Sinatra
  9. Thriller–Michael Jackson
  10. Somebody Else–The 1975
  11. Jingle Bell Rock–Bobby Helms
  12. Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!–Ella Fitzgerald
  13. Santa Baby–Eartha Kitt

 

Christmas Key Book 2 cover reveal…

I have to keep reminding myself that it’s only June 28 and school’s been out for exactly 11 days, because I already feel like I’m behind with my summer writing (not to mention my reading)! In those 11 days, we’ve already traveled through six states, seen a slew of national parks and historic monuments, and I’ve been up early every morning, sitting in the hotel breakfast rooms working on my revisions and writing. I’ve even gotten past the car sickness that goes with reading while I ride shotgun so that I can make progress while we’re on the road!

Right now my beta readers have a draft in their hands to read (as time allows–no pressure, guys!), and Holly and I are working on our second book as we travel. I have covers done for both books, and I thought now would be a good time to reveal the cover for Wild Tropics, the second book in my Christmas Key series. With editing and the work I still have to do, I’m aiming for an early August release date, and I hope that Holly and I will publish the second book in our co-authored series before the end of the summer as well.

Wild Tropics picks up where There’s Always a Catch left off. Christmas Key’s intrepid mayor, Holly Baxter, is hosting a reality show on the island, and not everyone is a fan of the idea. What could be a successful way of boosting the island’s visibility is fast becoming a point of contention. Cap Duncan made no bones about his objections during the summer village council meeting, and now he’s taking Holly to task by challenging her for her seat as mayor. But worst of all, the producers of the reality show have invited Jake to participate as a competitor, and they’ve got plans to manufacture a made-for-TV romance between Holly’s ex and a buxom glamazon named Bridget. Now, with River’s return to the island for a Christmas-time visit, Holly’s mother demanding her stake in the island be bought out, and Cap’s annoying campaign slogans, Holly’s patience is growing thin. Will the islanders survive life under the spotlight, or will secrets and bad feelings push everyone to the brink?

I’m stoked to get this out there and to keep writing and working on other projects. Happy summer!

Turning your e-book into a print copy.

The whole point of going digital and publishing a manuscript as an e-book is to keep up with the fast-paced world of indie publishing. Publishing your work as an e-book means you can jump back in, make changes, and re-upload it at any time. On the flip side of the coin, there’s quite a bit more involved in getting your book ready for print if you want to hold a paperback copy in your hands.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s cool to open the Kindle app and find your book there with its pretty cover and your name splashed across the front, but there’s still something missing (and there’s an empty spot on your bookshelf where that book would just look so good…) To remedy that, I decided to use Createspace (the print-on-demand service associated with Amazon) so that my books can be ordered as paperbacks instead of offered only via Kindle. All you have to do is click on Iris or There’s Always a Catch on Amazon, and you now have the choice to order them either way, which I think is pretty much the bee’s knees. Of course, it costs more to put a tangible book in your hands than it does for the book fairies to stitch together some pixels and send it zinging and pinging through outerspace, so the price is a tad higher, but I’m told some people still read physical books and don’t mind the inflated price, so…there you go! I have no expectation that I’ll sell tons of hard copies, but  am looking forward to having some on hand to give away (through Goodreads, in particular) and I’m going to use my hard copies on Instagram, which has a pretty active community of book lovers and bookstagrammers (yep–that’s a thing).

Speaking of giveaways, my printed copies are coming in the mail as we speak, and I’d love to share them. If you’ve read either Iris or There’s Always a Catch and you haven’t had a chance to leave a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads, then I’d love it if you would! To say thanks, if you post a review and then shoot me an email at redbirdsandrabbits@gmail.com to let me know you did, I’ll put you in my drawing to win a free copy of either book. And, hey–if you’ve already read it, no big deal…you can just pass it on to someone else who might like it, because when it comes to books, chocolate, or wine, sharing is caring!