Yes, it's Monday, the first day of the first annual .... drumroll ....Ebook Week! We're MAKING history here People! Excited much? Well, I am!
First, a huge THANK YOU to everybody who's read, commented, and followed WriterMason. You've done more to boost my self-confidence than three years of Oprah shows & magazines! Don't hesitate to contact me if I can lead you to answers to questions that will help you Start with YOUR Beginning, or find your Community. My goal is to make us all feel like Nike. This week's posts will be about Twittering, and I am no expert so if you are... jump in and teach us!
To follow up on Friday's Community post, today S.J.Wright joins us. Stephanie is a stay-at-home mom who's been blessed with two fantastic children. Her oldest is sixteen and her youngest is four and has spina bifida. She's been married for eight years to a great guy and lives in Little Elm, Texas.
The Vampire's Warden is her first published book. It is available on Amazon's Kindle, and it was ranked #36 this weekend on Amazon's vampire romance list. Go Nike Stephanie!
Besides Facebook, Stephanie can be found on vampireswarden.blogspot.com , kindlebooksbargainbag.blogspot.com, and onecrazywhitelady.blotspot.com.
This interview is the first of many we hope to see of this indomitable new author. Be sure to read all the way to the end, and Be INSPIRED by Nike Stephanie.
I remember at the beginning of this week you were totally bummed about your book sales. Did people on Hp Online Writers' page lift you up a little bit? What turned that around for you?
I’m finding a huge amount of support at the HP Facebook Page. At the beginning of this week, sales were really slow on The Vampire’s Warden. The writers on HP continued to encourage me. So I kept up with the blogging, asking questions of my readers and started getting some comments.
I know you worked hard to put yourself & your book out there. What did you do to raise your Amazon rank? How did you figure out how to do that???
On Wednesday night, I started going through Kindleboards and the Amazon Discussion forums. I completely rewrote my plug piece and started posting. But I think the real change occurred on Thursday when Greg from E-Reader News Today gave me a free blurb on the front page of his website. Before I knew it, the book was in the top 1,500 rankings on Amazon and was selling several copies every few minutes. I ended up selling 71 copies of the book on Thursday. It was amazing.
Now tell us about your book, The Vampire's Warden (cool premise) and the series you are developing.
The Vampire’s Warden started out with a completely different title, actually. It was going to be called “The Gatekeeper” but a few days before I finished it, I realized that someone else had released a book using that title at the end of January. I want to point out that signing up for Google Alerts is essential. I had set up a Google Alert to let me know if anything came across the web with either the name of my book or my pen name. I also set up an alert for “Amazon publishing” which kept me up-to-date with everything going on in digital publishing.
As for the story itself, it’s a paranormal romance that takes place in a little tourist town in Indiana. Sarah, a 23-year-old who has just lost her father, finds out that her mother is still alive. She’s grown up believing that her mother had died when she was just a little girl. So she has to process this huge discovery that leaves her feeling like she was totally abandoned by her mother. And Sarah has a passionate temper. She’s hard and direct. She loves her sister and the land that they’ve grown up on. To top off the new information about her mother, she is given a journal that her grandfather wrote that says that there are vampires on the property and it’s now Sarah’s job to make sure one of the vampires does not ever escape. It’s an emotional story, in particular for me because I was abandoned by my mother when I was five. It was hard to let my own walls down enough to give Sarah the full depth of emotion she needed. The rest of the series will concentrate much more on the vampires and I’m already writing the second book in the series, which will be called “The Vampire’s Curse”.
(I do have it on my Kindle, I bought it before you dropped the price! I thought it sounded very intriguing. But I'm not finished it yet, so no spoilers!)
So, last question: You must be a busy woman, but you are taking control of your career, and I admire that in anybody. What was the best advice that still rings true for you at this beginning point of your career ?
When I turned forty back in October, my sister Debbie flew from Indianapolis down to Dallas to spend a few days with me. While she was here, she gave me several miscellaneous Ziploc bags that all had forty pieces of something thing (candy, paper clips, matchbooks) in them. In one of the bags was forty pencils. And on the outside of the bag, one of my other sisters, Beth had written: Forty pencils so you never stop writing.
At that time, I had nearly given up writing. I was terrified to send my writing out to anybody. But I started reading about the Kindle Publishing platform and I had an idea for a story. So I pushed ahead. Now I know for sure that I never will stop writing. I’m not afraid anymore.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Vampires-Warden-ebook/dp/B004NNVKAO/ref=zg_bs_16399311_32
I’m finding a huge amount of support at the HP Facebook Page. At the beginning of this week, sales were really slow on The Vampire’s Warden. The writers on HP continued to encourage me. So I kept up with the blogging, asking questions of my readers and started getting some comments.
I know you worked hard to put yourself & your book out there. What did you do to raise your Amazon rank? How did you figure out how to do that???
On Wednesday night, I started going through Kindleboards and the Amazon Discussion forums. I completely rewrote my plug piece and started posting. But I think the real change occurred on Thursday when Greg from E-Reader News Today gave me a free blurb on the front page of his website. Before I knew it, the book was in the top 1,500 rankings on Amazon and was selling several copies every few minutes. I ended up selling 71 copies of the book on Thursday. It was amazing.
Now tell us about your book, The Vampire's Warden (cool premise) and the series you are developing.
The Vampire’s Warden started out with a completely different title, actually. It was going to be called “The Gatekeeper” but a few days before I finished it, I realized that someone else had released a book using that title at the end of January. I want to point out that signing up for Google Alerts is essential. I had set up a Google Alert to let me know if anything came across the web with either the name of my book or my pen name. I also set up an alert for “Amazon publishing” which kept me up-to-date with everything going on in digital publishing.
As for the story itself, it’s a paranormal romance that takes place in a little tourist town in Indiana. Sarah, a 23-year-old who has just lost her father, finds out that her mother is still alive. She’s grown up believing that her mother had died when she was just a little girl. So she has to process this huge discovery that leaves her feeling like she was totally abandoned by her mother. And Sarah has a passionate temper. She’s hard and direct. She loves her sister and the land that they’ve grown up on. To top off the new information about her mother, she is given a journal that her grandfather wrote that says that there are vampires on the property and it’s now Sarah’s job to make sure one of the vampires does not ever escape. It’s an emotional story, in particular for me because I was abandoned by my mother when I was five. It was hard to let my own walls down enough to give Sarah the full depth of emotion she needed. The rest of the series will concentrate much more on the vampires and I’m already writing the second book in the series, which will be called “The Vampire’s Curse”.
(I do have it on my Kindle, I bought it before you dropped the price! I thought it sounded very intriguing. But I'm not finished it yet, so no spoilers!)
So, last question: You must be a busy woman, but you are taking control of your career, and I admire that in anybody. What was the best advice that still rings true for you at this beginning point of your career ?
When I turned forty back in October, my sister Debbie flew from Indianapolis down to Dallas to spend a few days with me. While she was here, she gave me several miscellaneous Ziploc bags that all had forty pieces of something thing (candy, paper clips, matchbooks) in them. In one of the bags was forty pencils. And on the outside of the bag, one of my other sisters, Beth had written: Forty pencils so you never stop writing.
At that time, I had nearly given up writing. I was terrified to send my writing out to anybody. But I started reading about the Kindle Publishing platform and I had an idea for a story. So I pushed ahead. Now I know for sure that I never will stop writing. I’m not afraid anymore.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Vampires-Warden-ebook/dp/B004NNVKAO/ref=zg_bs_16399311_32
I was the Warden. He was one of the damned. We were destined to be at odds. Enemies. Sarah Brightman, having just lost her father to cancer, is stunned to discover that the mother she thought was dead is actually still alive. She also finds out that the legacy her father left her is a lot more than
I am member of HP's group and am drinking coffee per your suggestion ;) while reading your blog. Good luck with it and congrats on the interview with SJ Wright. I bought the book on Amazon and can't wait to read it! Hope your blog does well and you have encouraged me to get off my lazy bum and work on mine.
ReplyDeleteYay HP'ers! Way to go S.J.! Thanks for sharing with us Pam.
ReplyDeleteThanks for buying the book, Trish! I hope you love it!
ReplyDeleteGreat interview. This will definitely be next on my reading list.Nothing, but indie author love here!
ReplyDeleteI have found so much support in the Hp group that I went from haiving written less than 10,000 words all of February to writing 12,000 words last week. I love this group of people and some of their books are amazing. The rest i haven't read yet. ;)
ReplyDeleteAmazing story, SJ and that must've been wonderful when you had those sales! Keep up the great work and readers better look out for this intriguing author.
ReplyDelete