I belong to two local chapters of Romance Writers of America, and this month the meetings fell as close together as they ever do, West Houston last Saturday morning and Houston Bay Area last night. Both meetings featured interesting speakers on topics that I have yet to tackle myself.
On Saturday, West Houston heard from Alyssa Goodnight, who showed us how she is using the combined impact of several social media channels to promote her new release, Austentatious. She has tied together input to Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Goodreads, Pinterest, and her website, and claims that it takes relatively little work to maintain her online presence. I could only watch in admiration–looks like a fulltime job to me. And I already have one of those.
Last night Joan Reeves gave Houston Bay Area a very interesting talk about some of the technical and legal challenges involved in independent publishing, including copyright laws and piracy problems. Check out Joan’s blog for a wealth of information on the field, and check out her popular ebook releases while you’re there.
This has been a busy month for West Houston authors, with a whole stack of new releases:
- Real Vampires Hate Skinny Jeans is the latest in Gerry Bartlett’s very popular Glory St. Clair series.
- How To Ravish a Rake, by Vicky Dreiling, is the third in a trilogy of charmingly funny Regency historicals.
- The Welcome Committee of Butternut Creek is the first in a new series by Jane Myers Perrine.
- The Quakers of New Garden anthology includes “New Garden’s Inspiration” by West Houston author Claire Sanders.
- Wanted: Undead or Alive is the latest installment in Kerrelyn Sparks’ NYT bestselling Love At Stake series.
- The Kingdom is the second in Amanda Stevens’ Graveyard Queen series, to be followed next month by The Prophet.
I bought books for myself, and an extra copy of Jane’s book as a thank you gift for my neighbor. Books make terrific, thoughtful, and affordable gifts. Go out and buy one for someone you’d like to say “thank you” to.
Kay Hudson 
Apr 19, 2012 @ 13:53:42
Hello, Kay! Great seeing you at Houston Bay Area RWA. Enjoyed speaking there because I always feel at home.
Best wishes,
Joan Reeves
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Apr 19, 2012 @ 17:29:25
We’re always delighted to see you, Joan. And I’m so impressed by your knowledge of the indie world. Your blog is a great resource.
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Apr 22, 2012 @ 12:38:10
Thank you so much for the mention of The Welcome Committee of Butternut Creek. I WISH I could have been at the meeting to sign! I do miss my Houston writing buddies.
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Apr 22, 2012 @ 20:05:35
Jane, I gave a copy of Welcome Committee to my neighbor while we were talking on her driveway, and she opened it and read the first page out loud. It’s at the top of my (overflowing) To Be Read stack. We miss you, too!
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Apr 23, 2012 @ 09:32:13
Thank you for sharing! Glad she laughed.
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Apr 24, 2012 @ 13:42:40
Hey, I’m pretty impressed with the technology it took to line up all those book covers! You’re so wonderfully supportive of your fellow writers.
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Apr 24, 2012 @ 13:53:58
There’s no way I could line them up like that using WordPress, but I use a terrific (and free!) program called Irfanview (http://www.irfanview.com/) that does practically anything you could want to do with pictures, including combining multiple book covers into one file.
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