Resurrection!

Today I’m planning on reviving this blog from the land of the dead.

I know that I’ve fallen into bad blogging habits after November’s stunt with NaNoWriMo — which, incidentally, I failed horribly at — but I’m fully prepared to make up for it.

Lots of things are in the works for a revamp of The TECH Project.  I’ll be posting news later in the month regarding the novel, a website that’s being built as we speak, and the novella Dance, Dance, along with other information about different things.

As a side note: I hear that the New Moon film is coming out on November 20th of 2009.  I’ll talk more about my experience watching the Twilight film in the next post!

Well, Then… More Query Letters

As you can probably see from the blog post, I’m sending query letters today.  (Technically, four of them are going tomorrow, but I’m going through all the trouble to print them TODAY.)  It’s a record this time: a grand total of seven query letters.

For those of you who are keeping up… I still haven’t heard from that last agent.  I figured that I was sick of waiting on her.  Who knows – maybe she’s one of those agents that doesn’t reply unless interested.

Anyway, I’m pretty thrilled.  Some of the agents might be a really good fit for my book.  And the thrill of sending novel queries still hasn’t worn off yet!  I’m pretty happy and excited about it.

I probably won’t be excited when I get seven rejections back, but that’s okay.

Yawn… Stretch.

So I’m sitting at home, miserably, sick and tired and also hungry, at the computer, reading Stephenie Meyer’s website.  I decided to put a new page on the site.

I bet you all want to check it out.

Anyway, if you like it, drop a comment.  Heaven knows how few of those I get.  Thanks to the random people who’ve left them.  You give me reason to live!

…along with Oreos.  But we won’t go into that.

Well, I’ll tell you a bit about the new page.  It’s a playlist page.  On Stephenie Meyer’s website, she has a playlist for pretty much all of her books.  I’ve had a playlist sitting around on my laptop for months.  But I suppose that I can share it with you all.  Because “you all” is about five people per day.  But I love you, so it’s okay.

Heh.  Okay.  I’ll stopp sounding like a crazy stalker now.

Anyways, since I do have a couple readers, I’ll share the playlist, if only for your own envisioning purposes.  (That’s what I use it for.  Some of the genders in the songs don’t work with what’s going on.  Some of the LYRICS don’t really work, either.

And you’ll notice I have odd taste in music.  Well, my friends think so, anyways.  But they all seem to listen to Guns N’ Roses and Alice in Chains, which I don’t really like, so maybe it’s merely conflict of interests.

Although I must say that Cobra Starship’s Hollaback Boy is hilarious.

 

P.S. to Jaden: Sure.  That would be fun.  The first half is the only part fit for any human eyes to see, so I can send you that.  Leave an e-mail address or Facebook or something next time.

FOR YOUNG ADULT AUTHORS

Hey, guys. Just thought you may be interested in a new web ring I started today. (Bravenet is lovely.) It’s a ring for young adult novels and fan sites, if you have either of those.

http://pub25.bravenet.com/sitering/show.php?usernum=2140229626

Promotion Tips & Tricks

On promoting a book before it’s published:

For a little more than a week, I’ve been working on promoting The TECH Project in my city. Not that I live in a mammoth metropolis like Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York City. It’s a mid-sized town, with a decently-sixed University campus, a few libraries, and not such a high rate of reading test scores in the grade schools, junior highs, and high schools.

So far, I haven’t done any heavy-duty promotion yet. But one of the best articles about book promotion that I’ve come across so far is David Louis Edelman’s blog, which contains an article (and now a follow-up article, as well!) on promoting books.

There are plenty of great suggestions on the website of ways to promote books. Here are some of the ones I’ve tried:

• Designed a website (which hasn’t gone live yet, sorry guys)
• Started a blog before publishing of the novel (obviously)
• Created a MySpace profile (the link is on the sidebar; 29 friends and counting =])

Obviously, since Edelman has more than twenty promotion ideas in the original article, I’ve come nowhere near trying all of them out, not to mention the fact that I’ve only begun to lightly skim the possibilities of book promotion.

I have, however, started working on a new promo project that Edelman didn’t mention in his article: flyers.

Since I’m a student at my local university, I have access to free printers. For the past couple of days, my boyfriend and I have been printing them out: twenty pages at a time. (That’s the page printing limit in the computer lab we always use…) The two of us combined have given away about five or six flyers total, and I’ve given about ten or fifteen to two of my friends to pass out to people they know.

This particular attempt’s successfulness can be measured, since the page listed is the MySpace page for The TECH Project. If it’s successful, then I’ll definitely report it here and you’ll know for sure.

*Note: The TECH Project is a novel aimed towards teen and young adult readers. The MySpace page technique probably would not work for some audiences, such as that of children’s books.