New Release Anxiety!

Okay, so here we are, mid-February and it has begun; the pre-launch marketing hooplah for the new book, "Ever After".  I'm not going to lie to you, I really enjoy getting the word out and seeing people share it but this is the first time that I've ever done it PRE release!

When I wrote "Jordan's Return", I sort of just published and waited.  Not a good plan.  Clearly you have to market and promote your book in order for it to sell.  Then with "The Christmas Cottage", it wasn't supposed to be anything but a way to keep my name out there until I possibly heard from the agent in New York on a full-length novel I had written.  My assistant was AMAZING in getting the word out on it and we sold 15,000 copies of it in the e-book format!

Not too shabby!

So now here we are with "Ever After".  The release date is February 25th and we want to hit the marketing bandwagon hard so that we generate excitement and get people ready to purchase.  I am not going to lie to you, I would LOVE to match the number of sales that we had with "The Christmas Cottage" and even surpass them.  Realistically?  I'm not sure that lightning will strike twice.

So what's a writer to do?

Well, we keep moving forward.  Each book is it's own entity.  I have learned that sometimes even your favorite author - whose work you love - can sometimes put out a book that is less than stellar.  I can name a few right now but I'm not going to.  That just wouldn't be right.  I'm not here to bash anyone, I'm just saying that even the best writers can't put out books that are awesome all of the time.  All I can do is sit and wait and pray that people will enjoy it.

We're hitting the Samantha Chase fan page hard; I'm hitting my own personal Facebook page hard.  I will be blogging, I will be using Twitter.  My son is making me a Tumblr page and basically, anywhere and everywhere that I can get the word out about "Ever After", the better.  You know where I CAN'T promote the book right now??  Amazon!  The one place that will be primarily selling the book will not let me do any pre-launch, pre-release stuff on it!  How wrong is that??

Won't you help spread the word too?  Tell your friends!  Share the links!  Share this post!!  Send them to the Facebook fan page.  Let's make the week of February 25th a huge success!!