I mentioned a while back that I had started working on something under a pen name, so that I could use all the knowledge I have picked up in random order over the past 7 years. 

That project is going well. It's actually going really well - I'm enjoying writing the books as much as I'm enjoying figuring out the business angle. 

For those interested, I'm starting a pen name for small town contemporary romance. When I decided to run this experiment, I wanted to choose a genre/niche that already had an established, easily found readership. My type of historical fiction definitely has readers, but Amazon does not make it easy for me to find them. I chose my new genre by looking through the Amazon categories. 

Which is not to say I don't enjoy it. I read plenty of romance. I read plenty of everything. I thought small town would be fun, because the location could be developed like another character. And for the authors I've read, it seems like most of their small towns are either New England, southern, or West Coast. There's almost always water involved, and it's generally an ocean. 

I've never lived on the coast. I've spent some time in New England, but the only time I've been south was for my recent Florida writing conference, and is Florida really the south? It's Florida. It's its own thing. 

I decided to go for something closer to home - a lake town in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains. My aunt and uncle had a place up there and I stayed with them as a kid. I remember the lake and the ferns and blueberry bushes that ran down to the edge. I remember the peace of rowing out to the center of the water and just sitting there, completely alone, listening to the birds and reading my book, in a complete introvert kid's paradise

The town is called Cedar Gap. It has 600 residents, a used bookstore, a coffee shop, a diner, an old lakeside hotel, and enough quirky residents to keep me busy for years. 

I'm currently in the middle of drafting the third book. The first two haven't been edited yet, because I wanted to finish a grouping to see how they stood together, and to go back and make any chronological or geographical changes that were required by later bright ideas. 

If you're at all interested in this latest project, my pen name is Kelly Jean Edwards. Right now, she only has a Facebook page, although I do have a newsletter sign up. I just don't have any subscribers because I haven't promoted it yet and because nothing will be happening before the end of the year. But if you want to click follow on that FB page, you'll be the first to know when anything else is happening. 

Library News

Portrait of an author about to tip over from tiredness

First off, I'm sorry for the inconsistent posting of late. The conference really threw me off, and then when I came home, I had an event at our local library which completely did me in. 

As in stick a fork in me, I was done.

For an introvert, I can extrovert really well, but only for short periods. Then I require plugging into the charger, which can be anything from my loveseat with wine or a cozy corner with coffee or a long walk with no people around. I was having a hard time getting any of that, so things short-circuited a bit.

The library talk went really well, however. I'd hoped to have video, even though I hate watching myself, but my friend who'd planned to do it was down with a migraine and I decided to not bother rather than try to find someone at the last minute and stress myself out further.

I did about 10 minutes on me generally and why I write historical fiction specifically, then read from the first chapter of Coming Apart, and ended with almost 30 minutes of question and answer. It was fun, and I just let them ask until they ran out of questions.

Then I came home and crashed so hard.

My ask today is also library-related. Do you have a card at your local library? I do, although I mostly use it for Libby and ebooks because my eyes will only take so much print-reading.

Our local children's library, currently unused
but soon to undergo renovation

The reason I'm asking is because between Amazon's reworking of the algorithm back in the spring and everyone's current economic difficulties, my sales have plummeted. To a point where they're making me nervous. 

And I hate chewing my fingernails, it's something I've been trying to break myself of since my teens.

So... those of you with library cards, how do you feel about asking your friendly neighborhood librarian to order one or more of my books? They're available in ebook, paperback, and hardcover, and the Tudor series is available in large print, as well. 

Ava & Claire (the first trilogy) are available in audio, and I just sold audio rights for the Tudor series, so I'm hoping that they'll be finished and available by spring.

Support your local library. (Support your local author by asking your local library to stock her - or any other author you might want to read and who isn'tt in the budget right now. Libraries like knowing what their patrons want to read, it saves them from guessing and from just buying the "big name" books that the library catalogs push at them.

Win/win?

I'm back!

Portrait of a writer
having unexpected
fun in the sun

In more ways than one. Yes, I've been a bit missing over the past few weeks, and now I'm just back from a writing conference in Florida, which was (a) amazing, (b) exhausting, (c) energizing, or (d) all of the above.

It's (d). 

I'm still trying to get my brain back online after getting home Sunday afternoon to go into work on Monday, but I'll leave you with some photos and a promise of more soon.

What else is new

Before I dive into what else I've got cooking, here's the final cover for Bright Spark. I absolutely love it.

The green is a callback to the first book - mother and youngest daughter - while the elements tie directly to the modern story. Once she added the glove in the upper right corner, my designer and I both thought that the tulips made the cover feel too crowded, so she went with a sprig of lavender. 

I like that very much, and it was certanly easier to use on the interior section pages than figuring out how to make tulips lie neatly across the page.

So the other project I hinted at: I'm working on a pen name, to see if everything I've learned over the years works when thrown at a different, more easily marketed genre.I love the books that I write, and I have no intention of stopping - though I do need a breather to figure out what's next.

And that's where she comes in. I'm not keeping the name super-secret, but I also don't want to announce it widely this early on. My historical/women's fiction readers may not read my new genre, and curious browsers might confuse the Amazon algorithm, which is confused enough without any help from outside.

If you are curious, please drop a comment and I'll be happy to email you details.

More soon. It's been hot again over the last few days; I'm feeling betrayed by autumn and overwhelmed by my garden, which is very pleased with the continuing heat.

Bright Spark Cover

I've been so caught up in gardening and ending phases (crafting) that I haven't talked about an ongoing and possibly new-at-tne-same-time phase: writing.

First off, I'm waiting for my designer to get back to me with the final cover for Bright Spark. What I've posted here are two of the final options. What she generally does is send me a first attempt (which is 85-90% there) and then we tweak colors or a few small elements. This time, she sent me the draft cover with 5 different background colors to choose from. 

Some were easy to eliminate. Red was just godawful, and charcoal gray was too close to the blue of the previous book. Another was too light. But the golden brown and spring green... I had to send that one back to her and ask her to do more final work and show it to me with both colors.

I've made my final choice but haven't received it yet. Which of the two do you like better?

Pre-orders for Bright Spark are going well. If you haven't ordered your copy yet, you can do so here. 

My brain hasn't pitched any new ideas recently, so I've been getting a lot of writing done on a side project that will be published under a pen name. Not for secrecy purposes, necessarily, but because it's a different genre and the readership will be different enough that cross-pollination might not be helpful. If you're interested, I'll post more about it later, but for now, I'm just getting words down and lining up all my ducks. 

The part of this project that's really interesting to me is that I've learned so much over 7 years of publishing that would have been more useful to have learned before certain other things happened. So this is both a writing project and a science experiment, to see if what I've learned in this time is truly effective when planned from the ground up, rather than inserted into an existing career.

Not a me problem

Had a few comments on last week's post, and a surprising number of emails, all of them kind/understanding. Thank you. Not that I'm second-guessing myself in the slightest, but I have the productive person's dislike of being thought of as a slacker. 

Once I made the announcement, I went into my handmade Etsy shop and put it on vacation. I'll be back at some point, even if it's only for custom orders at the holidays, because I do have repeat customers and doing those few orders isn't the same as the madness of prepping for a holiday craft show.

Of course, once the shop was on vacation, it couldn't be accessed without unlocking things. And that's when I got a Facebook message from a neighbor, inquiring about custom bears. I sent her the two stock photos I had on hand, with approximate measurements (I wasn't around to access my desktop over the weekend). 

She wanted exact measurements, and barring that, she asked if I could simply alter the patterns to the exact measurements she wanted. I said that the patterns were the patterns - sorry, but I'm not reducing the business to then start micromeasuring teddy bears - and I would get back to her on Monday. 

In the meantime, I did a google search for me/the business, because I know I'd mentioned in multiple places what the sizes of the bears were. Figured I might find something.

What I found made me equally furious and extremely glad that I made the decision that I did. The attached photo is a screenshot from a local newspaper back in 2017 (and of which I was thankfully unaware at the time). 

First off, the prices aren't accurate - my lowest priced pieces then were $10 and the highest were $35. I still don't charge $45 for a bear made strictly for a show, because it's my fabrics, my choice. Custom work costs more. And the word exorbitant made me want to track the dude down and beat him with one of those bears. Can you tell he's probably someone who's never bought a baby/kid gift in his life?

You may not be able to afford a $40 teddy bear, but that handmade teddy bear, with care in the making, years of experience, the thought behind fabric choices, trim, etc., is absolutely worth $40. That's not a me problem, that's a him problem.

Change is gonna come

I've been feeling something brewing lately. Not sure what. 

And it's hard to tell - it feels like the whole world is holding its breath for a shoe to drop or a pandemic ora a war or some other everyday horror. So I just felt the feeling and accepted it.

It's nothing earthshaking, as it turns out, except to me.

I decided that I'm no longer going to do craft shows. I still had two on the books - farmers markets - and I was able to give those back. The biggest fall shows I hadn't applied for yet (deliberately?), and I'm not going to.

It's not that I don't enjoy them, but I'm not sewing the way that I used to and every time a show approaches, I panic because I just fulfilled a shop order and I don't have enough merchandise. Cue the frantic sewing of things that don't sell at the show - because something else does and then I have none of that. The pressure was taking the joy out of it entirely.

Once I got the idea into my head, it didn't even really take much thinking about. I thought I'd regret it, but as soon as I made the decision and emailed the people who needed to know, I felt nothing but the most enormous relief.

So I'm going to back away, look for a few more stockists in and around Philadelphia and Delaware Counties, and concentrate on my writing. That's what I want to do, it brings in more income than crafting these days, and that way I can still sew and not dread it because of deadlines.

It's the deadlines, isn't it? 

It is.