What's New With Something Like Bliss

Hola again!

Hope your holiday was crispy and crunchy, but now after the little reprieve it's time to get cracking. With a little over month until the release of my story collection, "Something Like Bliss," there is still a lot of ground to cover. I'm getting a lot of great feedback and a few offers, here and there, to share snippets from the collection. Some interviews and whatnot will be forthcoming as well. To tell you the truth, I prefer interviewing other authors rather than dishing out about myself, but that's just me.

Overall it's very exciting, but also a bit nerve-racking. Add to that all the anxieties of the New Year and it can get kind of hairy. It is forcing me to get more focused and detail-oriented. I find that deadlines are the perfect catnip for us scribes. Without them, I probably would be curled up with another book rather than planning and plotting out how to chalk up fresh marketing ideas.

I'm happy to say that there will be a few blog tours on the horizon and I may be doing more of these than I had done for my first two books Shades of Luz and Disposable Heroes. Don't get me wrong, I love doing live readings and events, but in today's social media-dominated landscape it is imperative to add blog tours to the author arsenal. It's all about reader engagement. Blog Tours, if done properly, can amplify an author's outreach by creating a slew of hyperlinks and active followers. There is huge boon to shaking hands with real people, learning about them and sharing little nuggets about yourself while you're shooting the breeze during a book signing, but it's terribly costly to travel all over the country let alone all over the world. Blog Tours are more efficient. They streamline for the author and let you tap into areas you might not have gotten to if you had solely relied on bus tickets and cramped coach seats.

Recently, I've seen an uptick in both my Goodreads and Twitter followers. I will be using both outlets to engage with readers and to share author news. I will also couple this with some new projects I am working on.

Thanks for dropping by and please feel free to reply to my posts and remember that if you are an author or have contacts with other authors, I am also actively looking to interview writers ans artists on my other blog, Papercut.

See you on campus
JG