Release Day

What I'm reading: Once a Cowboy, by Linda Warren; Night Magic, by Jennifer Lyon

Thanks to Kathryn Scannell for her fascinating and informative post yesterday. And don’t forget the big Smashwords sale from Backlist eBook authors. Details in the Deals and Steals tab. I'm also over at The Blood Red Pencil today, talking about "R.U.E."

Onto the fireworks – well, more or less. Today is the official release day for WHERE DANGER HIDES, the second book in my Blackthorne, Inc. series. This means that the publisher will begin filling orders. If you ordered the book from Amazon or Barnes and Noble, the books have to arrive there from the publisher, and then they’ll go out to you. The projected “real” release date is closer to June 8th.

The publisher targets the library market, and I’m a firm believer in libraries. I know that the hard cover price of the book might be a bit steep for some in today’s economy, so another way to help out is to request the book from your own library system. The information they’re likely to ask for:

Title: Where Danger Hides
Author: Terry Odell
Publisher: Five Star / Gale Cengage
ISBN 10: 1432825127
ISBN 13: 978-1432825126

What else can you do? If you have an Amazon account, log in and go to the book’s page:

Click the “like” button near the top, and/or scroll down to the product tags and click the boxes. Doesn’t cost you anything, and helps the ranking, which can help sales.

Of course, if you want to buy the book, that’s fine with me, too.



And, as a ‘gift’ for you, I’ve shared the original starting point for the book on my website. It’s an addition to my “From the Cutting Room Floor” section. I hope you’ll look at it. And then you can go to the final first chapter and compare. I think this will help show how it’s more important to get something on the page, and worry about whether it works later. In this scene, Miri was beginning to be fleshed out, and some of her goals and motivations are there, but she underwent some major transformations, as did her first appearance in the final book. As so often happens, these first “running starts” are there for the author, as a way for us to get to know the characters. And, they’re also heavy into back story for the same reason.

The business of writing doesn’t happen in nice, neat blocks of time. While copies of WHERE DANGER HIDES are starting to roll out, I’ve been busy with the next book, ROOTED IN DANGER. I finished my first round of edits, and am very pleased with my new editor. She was happy with my changes based on her suggestions, and accepted my reasoning in places where she had questions. Because (as I’ve warned you to do) I went through the entire manuscript rather than simply dealing with her markups, I found a few more places where I thought tweaks might help, and we arrived at a “ready for the next step” product.

Next up. The “Ancillary Materials Form” the publisher requires. This is all the marketing stuff—with this publisher, authors are expected to provide all the copy that goes on the cover. And since these are hard cover books with full dust jackets, which means there’s a front cover, and a back cover, of course. But there are also those cover flaps that wrap around the cover. In addition, the publisher puts out a catalog which it sends to libraries, and there’s copy we have to write for that as well.

From my viewpoint, I could probably write five chapters with less effort and hair-pulling than writing marketing prose.

Also on my plate: updating my website to reflect all the new pages for Where Danger Hides, and to add Rooted in Danger to the Coming Soon page, as well as getting a new ebook ready to upload, and working on another book for my Pine Hills Police series.