It is time, once again, to honor book bloggers.

It's April, and that means my fellow indie author Terri Giuliano Long is sponsoring a little celebration of book bloggers.  The celebration only lasts through today, which is why this week's post is a day earlier than usual.

Long-time readers of this blog may recall my post on this subject sometime last year.  That is, you may recall it, and I certainly seem to recall writing it, but now I can't find it.  Maybe I posted it at the Indie Exchange.  Hmm.

Anyway, no harm, no foul.  Let's talk about book bloggers, and why they are crucial to the indie author ecosystem.

Traditional publishing wisdom asserts that one of the benefits authors get from signing with a publisher is help with promotion and marketing.  (It's not true, by the way, or it's not true of every trad-pubbed author; these days, only the mega-star authors get a marketing budget, and the rest have to bump along, doing their own promotional efforts, just like we indies do. Tell me again about the benefits of being trad-pubbed....  Sorry.  Off-topic.  Refocusing.)

Indie authors, however, don't even get that much (minimal) help.  No, we are stuck with making our own noise.  And besides personal appearances and chatting up all and sundry on social media, one of the best ways for us to get noticed is to be featured on someone's blog.  The blogger's audience becomes our captive audience, and if we can manage to be charming or entertaining or both, we might sell some books.  Those new readers, if we're very lucky, will become fans, and recommend our books to their friends, who may also become fans, and so on.  Indie authors are on a slow but steady career trajectory, and a lot of our growth wouldn't happen if it weren't for bloggers featuring us or our books.  My thanks must go here to the Cabin Goddess, who twice this year has let me visit with my characters in the Pipe Woman Chronicles in her Fourth-Wall Friday feature; and to Allison Bruning, whose virtual cruise stopped at both Naomi's condo and Swan Island last fall.

Many bloggers also review books, and their reviews can boost an author's visibility.  I am particularly grateful this year to my friends at Big Al's Books and Pals, Leanne Herrera, and Love of the Goddess for giving the Pipe Woman Chronicles such glowing reviews.

I'm sure I'm leaving some folks out, and for that, I apologize.  Dear blogger buddies, even if I didn't mention you by name, know that I am grateful for your help and support this year.  Thanks to all of you -- you rock!

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This week's news is mostly Camp NaNoWriMo-related.  The first draft of Annealed is proceeding apace; as of this writing, I am at 20,170 words of my 40,000-word camp goal, and 30,251 words for the whole book.  The first drafts for each preceding Pipe Woman Chronicles book have clocked in at somewhere around 52,000 words, so I'm comfortably past the halfway point.

No, I'm not going to tell you what's happening in the book right now.  Nice try, though.

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This moment of bloggy gratitude is brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Socked in.

My daughter Kitty took this at 4:00 p.m. today.

 

It's been an unusually foggy day here today.  We don't get fog all that often in the DC area, and when we do, it usually burns off by midday.  But this fog has stuck around for more than 24 hours.  It came in around dusk last night and it's still foggy out there right now.  It's like we've been transplanted to San Francisco, except without the cable cars and the $50 per day parking.

But the fog has brought us temperatures in the mid 50s.  In mid-January.  So really, I'm not going to complain.

As for my writing progress, it's not foggy at all.  (I know -- that segue was a long reach. Work with me.)  Here's what's happening:

• Tara at Love of the Goddess posted a great review of Seized today.  
• This coming Friday, the 18th, my week of stops as part of the Orangeberry Big Bang begins (check the Tour Dates page for the particulars), and a couple of those spots are for reviews of Tapped (here's hoping the reviewers are kind...).  
• Also on Friday, I'll once again be the guest on The Indie Exchange's Blog Talk Radio podcast.  The show will be live starting at 8:00 p.m. Eastern time, but if you miss it, you can use the same link to listen to it later.
• I'm in the midst of writing a series of posts for Indies Unlimited on how to do writerly-type stuff in Microsoft Word.  On Friday, I tackled Styles.  This coming Friday, I'll talk about how to design your own blank document template.  Let me know if you have any questions about how to do something in Word.  My employer has given me tons of Word training and I love to use it to help folks. 
• Rursday Reads went live this week -- and amazingly enough, I managed to review a book that I'd already reviewed on Goodreads.  No, really, I'm going to start making a dent in my to-be-reviewed pile this week.  Really, I am.  Honest.

Oh, wait.  I bet you wanted to know about the sweater, right?  I'm somewhat less than halfway done with the front.  The cable is working out okay, but I do have to concentrate.  Which means that knitting this sweater and karaoke, for instance, don't mix.  I had to keep ripping out my mistakes while Kitty was taking her turn.

What? Gravid?  Oh yeah, it's coming.  I started the first editing pass early last week.  That kind of stalled when I realized I was leaving way too many loose ends to tie up in book 5.  So I wrote a new chapter one night, and then yesterday morning I spent several hours shoehorning it in.  I think it makes sense, but I'm going to do at least one more pass before I send it over to my editor.  (How's Imbolc looking for you, Suzu?)

I also need to go through Gravid and make a list of all those loose ends, just to make sure I knit 'em all in in the final book.  And (speaking of foggy), I need to figure out exactly how I'm going to handle the Big Mediation Scene that's coming up in book 5, not that I've built up any anticipation for it or anything.  I'm looking forward to that about as much as Naomi is, I suspect -- but like Naomi, I'm kind of ready to just get it over with.

And here we go!  Have a great week, everyone.

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These moments of -- bloggy fogginess? Foggy blogginess? Anyway, whatever they are, they are brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.