C U @ 8 Giveaway on Goodreads

Goodreads Book Giveaway

C U @ 8

by Cindy Vine

Giveaway ends April 07, 2012.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Best-selling Author Eldon Taylor

Eldon Taylor is an award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of more than 300 books, audio, and video programs. He’s the inventor of the patented InnerTalk technology and the founder and president of Progressive Awareness Research. He has been called a “master of the mind” and has appeared as an expert witness on both hypnosis and subliminal communication.

Eldon was a practicing criminalist conducting investigations and lie-detection examinations for many years. He is listed in more than a dozen Who’s Who publications, including Who’s Who of Intellectuals and Who’s Who in Science and Engineering. He is a fellow in the American Psychotherapy Association and an internationally sought-after speaker. His books and audio-video materials have been translated into more than a dozen languages and have sold millions worldwide.  Eldon is the host of the popular radio show Provocative Enlightenment. He has interviewed some of the most interesting people on the planet. His shows are thought-provoking and always fresh in both their perspective and the exchange.

Announcing I Believe, the latest release

by New York Times best selling author,

Eldon Taylor.

Join the launch party for I Believe: When What You Believe Matters!

Hundreds of bonus gifts will be given away to everyone who participates. Plus, enter to win grand prizes worth over $5K from personalities such as Lindsay Wagner (Bionic Woman), James Van Praagh, Bob Doyle, Hay House, InnerTalk, Norman Shealy and Caroline Sutherland. For more information, visit http://progressiveawarenesspromotions.com/it/12c/indexB.html

 Q. Why did you write I Believe?

I have spent over thirty years investigating why people self-sabotage or limit themselves, thus experiencing so much less than their highest best!  What I have found is the reason rests solely in their beliefs—not their spiritual belief so much as their life beliefs.  I found this to be true when I was conducting lie detection tests and discovering criminality, and equally true when I worked with elite athletes, business executives, professionals and lay people alike.  The bottom line is this: What you believe always matters!  It’s like a web that fastens itself to belief-anchors, causing disheartening mediocrity in place of the glorious success we all seek.

I Believe spells out the power of belief and how it influences everything from our health and longevity to our success with relationships and life.  Astounding as it may seem, belief can (and has) defied our so-called laws of science and it has done so over and over again. As ordinary and trite as it may seem, belief nevertheless makes all the difference in success in all walks of life.  Knowing how we acquire our beliefs, and which beliefs serve us while others sabotage us, is critical to maximizing our individual potential.  I Believe: When What You Believe Matters! was written  to empower you with the roadmap to decipher and re-write the programming governing your life.

 Excerpt

Codependence

Among many people, there’s a certain attitude of codependence. This is often expressed in terms of a bargain, a contract, or a sort of quid pro quo. That is, we think, You should do this for me because I do this for you. If you loved me, you’d do x, y, and z. The notion implies a duty. For example, parents often assume codependent roles and expect their children to nearly kneel and worship them because of parental sacrifices. Building relationships on such patterns will almost always lead to resentment and disappointment.

Examining our motives is important. Where our closest, most intimate bonds are concerned, maintaining a realistic outlook is key. There will be many changes during a long-term personal relationship. The initial romance will wear off, the hormones will cool down, and the Cinderella nature of perfect love will curl up in a mature bonding, provided the connection isn’t built on false assumptions and immature, unrealistic notions taken from movies and television shows.

It’s estimated that approximately half the marriages in America will end in divorce. Further, this figure applies to first marriages versus later unions, since “67% of second and 74% of third marriages end in divorce, according to Jennifer Baker of the Forest Institute of Professional Psychology.”⁵

There are many reasons for the high divorce rate, including disappointment, selfishness, demanding too much, economic differences, pettiness, blaming, laziness, and differences in values or faith. Inherent in all of these factors are the underlying beliefs each partner brings to the marriage. Surprising to many is that the lowest proportion of divorce belongs to atheists and agnostics. Perhaps that is because the initial expectation is simply more pragmatic. For the atheist, the connection is all about here and now; for the religious person, there are both explicit and implicit assumptions about unions made in heaven.

The actual reasons for divorce are not my point here, however. This book is all about the role of belief in our lives. It’s easy to see that an unreasonable expectation will lead to a failed relationship. It’s equally obvious that our expectations are built upon our beliefs, and if we’re to enjoy our lives to the fullest, choosing what we believe and how and who we share those beliefs with is pivotal.

If you’re having difficulties with someone, take a look at your assumptions and then consciously choose your course of action. That said, never be afraid to let someone go if that’s what he or she wants. There’s an old saying that goes like this: “If you love someone, let them go. If they come back, they were always yours; and if they don’t, then they never were.”

Reflection

What do you see in your relationships? Are your expectations blinding you to the real attributes of the other person? Are you denying yourself in your attempt to be what someone else would like you to be? These questions are really two sides of the same coin, but they’re vital components to creating the kind of connection you want.

For information on the book launch, please visit http://progressiveawarenesspromotions.com/it/12c/indexB.html

Enter the Goodreads Giveaway

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Defective

by Cindy Vine

Giveaway ends April 05, 2012.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Bookbuzzr offers great technology for authors

If you are an author and looking for ways to market your books, you have to go to Bookbuzzr.com.  In a few minutes you can set up a QuickQuiz which will market your book to potential readers.

Or you can get a book widget which you can embed on your blog or website, which will enable potential readers to read excerpts from your book.

You can also put your cover in their Book Cover Match Game, or advertise your book through their Hangman Game.  Bookbuzzr is definitely something to include in your marketing plan.
http://www.amazon.com/C-U-8-ebook/dp/B007N60QAI/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1332831982&sr=1-1

The best laid plans...

This is the first school holiday in almost three years that we are staying home.  And I feel like a kid in a candy store!  Usually holidays are spent traveling, sight-seeing, shopping, exploring, visiting family.  One huge rush to do as much as is humanly possible in a relatively small amount of time.  What a relief to wake up knowing I don’t have to do anything or go anywhere.  I can devote my holiday to working on my new book and do some marketing of my others.

During term time I only get to work on my writing over weekends.  During the week I am just too exhausted by the time I get home, so that also means for the past couple of years marketing has been on the back-burner and a bit of an afterthought.  But this holiday, as I am not going anywhere, I can spend almost three weeks marketing and writing to my heart’s content.  Herein lies the problem.  Remember the kid in the candy store?  What should I work on first?  Decisions, decisions.  And of course I do want to slot in an exercise program as well.  Gosh this is getting hard.  Maybe I should have gone away for the holiday after all!

The holiday did get off to a poor start with a terrible head cold knocking me sideways for the first three days.  However, today I am motivated, working on character sketches for my next novel, Hush Baby, as well as thinking about this Guide to living with Dementia I want to write as well.  About seven years ago I worked nights and weekends at a Dementia Care Unit.  It was one of the saddest experiences of my life.  Intelligent, previously active people, who had regressed to diapers and baby-talk.  Very few family members ever came to visit them, I guess it was just too hard to see their loved ones like that.  The patients or clients at the unit seemed to spend their waking moments waiting.  Waiting for meals, to be dressed, for their medication, for the TV to be switched on, or just generally waiting for something, anything to happen.  My Dementia Guide is going to be called Waiting for the Angels.

C U @ 8 was released recently and is now available on Amazon as a Kindle edition and as a paperback.  Sigh, I guess I’d better start marketing.  This is the problem us Indie authors face.  Your writing time is limited, and you have to use some of it for marketing.  Very frustrating.  But hey, I have an almost three week holiday to get some of it done!  What should I start with first?  Maybe I need to make a plan…
http://www.amazon.com/C-U-8-ebook/dp/B007N60QAI/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1332756700&sr=1-1

Learning from reviews

Reviews are important to an author.  A good review boosts your self-esteem and makes you think you did something right.  A bad review can knock you back and demotivate you.  What you have to do as an author is take the good and the bad, and realise that it is okay that not everyone will like your work.  We are not all the same, have different likes and dislikes.  That's just the way it is.
M.C.V. Egan is a new author who shares her thoughts on reviews on my blog.

The Bridge of Deaths has received editorial, blogger and personal reviews from a wide variety of sources. Every single review has been an amazing surprise and learning experience, some very uplifting and one in particular a bit heartbreaking. I feel very honored and humbled by all my reviews, by some more honored and by others more humbled. In the next few paragraphs I’d like to share a little taste of what I have learned.

My first review came out of the paranormal realm from a psychic up North whom I have never met but have recently started following her radio show The Psychic Switch with Beckah Boyd. I was so surprised by words that have since been repeated by numerous reviews; “M.C.V. Egan twists truth and fiction making it difficult to distinguish one from the other”.  Well imagine my surprise that I who included 200+ footnotes to point out sources and truth felt reading that.  The fact is I found that fascinating and as it has been echoed by many a reviewer I realized that I am pretty good at twisting fact and fiction in an entertaining and legible manner. In that review as well I got a “spot on” for all the paranormal, which was indeed a nice feeling as I wanted to be as fair to the use of psychics as I was to the use of archives.

My worst review which earned me a sad lonely one star stated something to the fact that the book had potential but was a bore. I learned that would be reviewers needed to be aware that TBOD was primarily historical and a thinking book.  I thought I had prepared myself to be criticized and I must admit it hurt. Of course everyone is entitled to their opinion and I put myself out there to complete unknowns so I can only guess that it will not be the ‘only’ bad review I get, nor do I expect it to get any easier.

As the reviews started flowing I discovered that I had written a cross-genre piece and that I had the elements of Historical, Paranormal, Mystery and Romance. Amazing you might think an author who was un-aware what her book’s genre was. I honestly thought it was Historical Fiction, but the reviews kept on pouring in about how clever it was to combine all these elements.

I also discovered that my words have touched readers in a very wide variety of ways; I get comments about how they either relate to a character or know someone who reminds them of a character. I get feedback on curiosity about hypnosis and past-life regressions.  I had one reviewer call the book cozy.

I read my reviews several times, and I try to learn for future writing and maybe even if I decided to work on a different, simplified version of TBOD.

The most important thing that I have learned from my reviews is that everyone has a voice and that all voices are important. I feel that so many of my reviewers have beautiful prose and are such good writer’s themselves, that it is truly an honor to be reviewed by them.

M.C.V. Egan was born in Mexico City, moved to the USA at the age of 12, and then to Sweden when she got married.  She has always been interested in paranormal mysteries and past life regression.  She has used these interests to write her first Historical/Paranormal/Romance/Mystery.  As you can see, her book has it all!  The Bridge of Deaths can be purchased from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Are book covers important?

As a reader it is the cover that initially grabs my attention, then the back blurb.  If they don't grab me and pull me in, then I might very easily miss out on a great book, as there is only a very slight chance that I will read them.  Janet McNulty has written a guest post on my blog about the importance of having a good book cover.  Janet is the author of the paranormal mystery thriller, Sugar and Spice and Not so Nice.

"As an author the only thing I really think about when it comes to books is writing them, or reading them.  I never bothered to think about a cover.  But after I finished a few books and decided to publish them, that is when I was forced to consider an appropriate cover for them.  I had to ask myself if a cover was really necessary.  The answer is, yes. 

When I browse a bookstore, or even look for eBooks to download on my Nook, I tend to pay very close attention to the cover image.  It isn’t just a title that captures my attention, but the cover art does too.  Often, I pick up a book because I find the cover interesting.  That is when I read the description on the back and decide if I wish to purchase it. 

Since I tend to be attracted to a book by its cover, I figured the same would hold true for any who wished to read my book.  But, there is a problem.  I cannot draw.  The most I’ve been able to produce in the world of art is stick figures.  So illustrating a cover myself was out of the question, though that did not stop me from trying.

When I published my first novel I decided to be cheap and forgo having a professional cover made.  The result was disastrous.  The cover was basic and lacked character.  Character is something your book needs on the outside as well as within the pages.   People are very visual and tend to judge things by their appearance first. 

After the abysmal first attempt at a cover illustration, I hired a freelancer to do a professional one.  He included one for the paperback version of my novel as well as images I could use to promote the eBook version of my book.  This worked out quite well.  Not only did I get a cover illustration to make my book look more professional, but it would also attract a person’s attention from a distance.

Some believe that in the age of eBooks covers are becoming outdated.  It is true that eBooks do not use a typical book cover.  Mostly, they just have a cover image that only shows up in black and white unless you happen to have a tablet.  But I disagree with the notion that book covers are no longer needed.  Many people still like having the traditional book.  Some prefer to have both the hard copy as well as the digital copy.  Here is one thing to keep in mind: when searching for eBooks on a website many people look at the image associated with the title.

Book covers do two things for your book.  1) They give it a professional look that is still needed for promotion.  2) They give your book character and serve as a way to let potential readers know what you book is about.  Covers serve as an attention getter.

A professional look is always important when publishing.  Not only does the interior of your work need to look polished, but so does the exterior.  Slapping a title and author’s name on the cover does little to pique a reader’s interest.  Most people will not touch a book that looks shoddy.  Having a cover gives your novel that “I know my craft” look.  You want your audience to know that you are an expert in your job as a writer.

As mentioned before, a cover gives your book character.  It makes it come alive.  This is important in promotions.  People judge books by their covers.  If your cover illustration is boring, most will walk right past your book.  But if you have a cover that snatches a person’s attention, they will at least pick it up.  Most people spend seconds deciding if they will look at a book.  An excellent cover can achieve that instant “I want to look it”.

Even if you publish your work as eBooks, you will still want a cover image for the product sales page and for advertising.  This is especially important for self-published authors.  Most self-published authors, especially new ones, have difficulty selling themselves as professionals.  A book cover helps them achieve that.  Cover illustrations demonstrate that the author takes pride in their work by showcasing the book.

But how do you get a book cover if you cannot draw?  Hire a freelancer.  When I needed a cover for my first novel, I went to Guru.com.  There I was able to find an accomplished artist who was willing to do a cover for my novel in all formats and he has done every book of mine since.  Most freelancers will do a cover for you for about $200-$300 dollars and you can always negotiate.  If you have a specific look in mind for your book, tell your illustrator.  Just make certain that they are ok with giving up any copywrite claim to their artwork, but list them as the illustrator on your book. 

So, are book covers needed?  Yes.  Even in our digital age.  They are easy to come by and you do not need to go to some fancy company.  Besides, nothing beats holding your first book for the first time.  So, doesn’t it make sense to give it the proper look?"  Janet McNulty

Janet McNulty currently resides in West Virginia where she moved after receiving her B.A. in History. She lives with her three cats who keep her on task.

Ms. McNulty has also recently published a novel, Legends Lost: Amborese, under the pen name Nova Rose. She is currently working on the second novel in the series called Legends Lost Tesnayr, but also has another nonfiction book in the works, that is untitled at this point.