To celebrate the launch of my Teagues of Texas trilogy from Harlequin American in January, I’m holding a contest. The Cowboy’s Secret Son kicks off the trilogy about three brothers whose family own and operate a guest ranch in the Hill Country of Texas. It will be followed by Cowboy to the Rescue in March and The Cowboy Sheriff in May. I have the first two covers, and they’re awesome!

Okay, on to the contest. All you have to do is send me a photo of yourself somewhere in Texas and tell me a bit about where you are in the photo. During the duration of the contest (end date Feb. 1), I’ll feature these photos here on the blog. The winner in a random drawing of all entrants will receive a signed copy of the entire trilogy.

Never been to Texas? Never fear! Just tell me where you’d most like to visit in Texas and why.

If you’d like to enter, send your photo or note about where you’d like to visit to parkfan89 AT yahoo DOT com. Include your name and where you are in the photo. Submission of a photo gives consent for it to be used on my blog in conjunction with this contest.

To kick us off, here’s a picture of me with bff MJ Fredrick at Luckenbach, Texas.

I have always loved stories where the women were strong and could kick butt right alongside the guys. So it’s no surprise that I wrote one. I’ve just released Out of Sight, the first in a series I’m planning called Project Athena. Here’s the blurb:

Jenna McCay is a street cop in Nashville when a secret government agency discovers her ability to make herself invisible and coerces her to come work for them in exchange for information on her missing father, a soldier who disappeared overseas when she was young. She’s thought him dead all these years, but this agency has information pointing to the possibility that he’s still alive. But she has to go undercover in the White House to get that information from them. Her job is to find out who inside the White House is sending threatening letters to the president from within the building. Jenna also has to deal with her attraction toward and suspicion of the agent assigned to her, Daniel Webster (and yes, that’s his name, a fact of which she makes fun). In the course of the investigation, she discovers she’s not the only person with her ability, and that it has something to do with the Project Athena experiments that were done on soldiers, her father among them.

Out of Sight can be downloaded from Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Smashwords.

Once upon a time I was focusing on writing romantic suspense. Though that’s not my main focus now, I still have to work at not putting too much suspense in my contemporary books for Harlequin. But when I was trying to sell into the romantic suspense market, I had good luck on the contest circuit with my manuscripts. One was Dangerous Kisses, which finaled in the Golden Heart sponsored by Romance Writers of America twice and won the coveted Golden Heart in 2004.

Recently, I pulled that book out again and gave it another read-through, making some tweaks as I went. And I still liked the story. So I decided to put it up for sale myself and see what happened. It’s set in Nashville, where I live, so it was fun putting in setting details from my neck of the woods.

If you like romantic suspense, I’d love for you to give it a try. There are buy links on the Books Page of this site.

Hello, Trish. Thanks for having me. I’ll start off by telling everyone about myself. I have been writing for 19 years. In that time, I joined RWA, finaled in the Golden Heart six times in three different categories, and wrote ten 400-page novels and too many proposals to count. My first love was writing romantic medieval time travels. If I had sold back then, I have a feeling I might still be writing medieval time travels.

Hoping to grab the interest of a NY publisher, though, I went on to write five romantic comedies, two romantic suspense novels, and one thriller. In February 2011, while I was waiting for my agent to read my most recent manuscript, Abducted (to be released soon), I asked my agent for permission to self-publish my two medieval time travels since these books had been gathering dust for far too long. I was given the thumbs up, so off I went to learn basic HTML coding. I began madly researching blogs and books on “how-to-format” for Kindle and Nook. After Return of the Rose and A Knight in Central Park were released on Amazon, B&N, and Smashwords, I was hoping to sell 10 ebooks, but was astonished to see my $.99 book (A Knight in Central Park) hit #65 on the Bestseller list on Amazon books after being mentioned on Pixel of Ink. For a while there I was selling 550 to 580 books a day! Although sales for that book have since leveled off to about 125 books a day, and AKICP is now ranked in the 300’s and #2 in Time Travel Romance, I am definitely enjoying the ride and I want to share what I have learned with anyone who might be interested in self-publishing.

FYI: In under ten weeks, I have sold 10,000 ebooks. In royalties, that means approximately $6,800.

$6,800 is about what I was hoping for in advance money had I gone the traditional route. I am very happy with my decision to self-publish. I must say that other self-published authors warned me that choosing to self-publish would take over my life.

And they were right.

At the moment I am helping my fourth child set off for college. Like most of you out there, I am BUSY. Who has time for blogging and tweets and writing?! Not me. I gave up television a long time ago. I have nothing left to give up. So I am trying to prioritize. Husband, kids, animals, gym, promotion/marketing, formatting, editing, writing, house cleaning. That’s pretty much the order in which I have prioritized since I self-published in March, 2011.

To keep this blog from becoming another 400-page book, I am going to condense. I hope Trish and visitors will add suggestions because I am very new to this self-publishing world and I don’t know much.

1. FIRST THINGS FIRST: Write a great book! This is the easy part. Ha!

2. I learned basic HTML so I could make sure my ebooks would have smart quotes and wonderful looking m-dashes. If you hire someone to format your books, you can skip this part. I do think it would be helpful to download some ebooks on your PC or Ereader so you can look at various formats that other author’s have used.

3. I learned a lot about self-publishing by reading Joe Konrath’s blog, A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing at http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/

4. I downloaded Derek Canyon’s, Format Your Ebook for Kindle in One-Hour at http://amzn.to/lKXIWP

If you DO NOT want to spend time formatting, there are lots of people who will do it for you. Here is one place you can go for Kindle and Nook formatting: http://design.lkcampbell.com/

Here is another: http://rikhall.com/

I haven’t worked with either of these people, so I have no idea who you should use to format your ebooks. Do some research before you choose. Send them an email and get a quote.

5. My husband downloaded HomeSite5 on my PC so I could make changes in HTML and see those changes as I made them. He already had this software, so this did not cost me any money. You don’t need to do this. Many people use Notepad or Word to format their books and save as HTML for Kindle and Nook.

6. While your book is being formatted, I suggest you ready your bio, backcover blurb, pricing, etc.

7. Once my book was formatted and ready to go, I registered at KDP (this is where you go to download your ebook on Amazon): https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help

8. I registered at PubIt (this is where you go to download your ebook on Barnes & Noble): http://pubit.barnesandnoble.com/

9. I registered at Smashwords.com. Smashwords distributes your ebook to the Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony Reader Store, Kobo and the Diesel eBook Store. I have a lot to learn about Smashwords. Formatting was time consuming, so I hired Bryan Coker to format my latest book (bryansformatting@gmail.com), but I haven’t had time to download it yet. Email Bryan and tell him you would like a quote on having your book formatted for Smashwords.

10. Promotion/Marketing: Use your blog! Help other writers! Send out e-mails to your friends and family. READ Zoe Winters’ Becoming an Indie Author at: http://tinyurl.com/5tcqac8 This book is informative and interesting. It does NOT tell you how to format, but Zoe Winters will tell you what to expect when you self-publish.

When you register with KDP, Pubit, and Smashwords, all of these places will provide you with lots of tips and advice on how to market your book.

11. Print on Demand. If you want to hold a book in your hand, you can set up POD books with amazon through CreateSpace. I plan to do this with all of my books before the end of the year. It’s FREE! Or you can go with their pro plan for $39. Read all about it right here: https://www.createspace.com/

That’s it for now. If you decide to self-publish, I wish you TONS of success!

If you have any questions at all, let me know and I will do my best to answer them.

Thanks for having me, Trish.

Here’s some additional, helpful info for people looking to self-publish.

Cover art:

If you’re looking for another option for a good cover artist, try Kim Killion. She’s done covers for, Trish (Living in Color), Colleen Gleason (except Siberian Treasure) and many others as well. www.hotdamndesigns.com

*Dara England for cover art. She makes custom covers and she’s fast: http://mycoverart.wordpress.com/

Miscellaneous:

For lots of informative posts on Ebooks vs. Traditional Publishing: http://kriswrites.com/ Kristine Kathryn Rusch

All About Copyrights by Amanda Brice:  http://bit.ly/k8VRvu

Formatting for Kindle and Nook:

*LK Campbell: http://design.lkcampbell.com/

*Rik Hall:  http://rikhall.com/

As expected, prior to the movie there were previews for other summer films. Two in particular I’m looking forward to are X-Men First Class and the remake of Conan the Barbarian with Jason Momoa (who was Ronon Dex on Stargate Atlantis). Check out the trailers below.

Q. The Last Soul is your first published novella. You describe it as a sexy paranormal romance. Tell us about this story and what paranormal element(s) you use.

A. Faina, the heroine, has been dead for one hundred and fifty years, but she’s about to become human again. All she has to do is seduce Jace Blackmon, the most honest financier ever to grace the city of angels, into signing away his soul.

Jace Blackmon has fallen in love with his fantasy woman. But when he realizes she was tricked by a demon to bring about his ruin, including the revelation of a long-buried secret to the media, he must choose between his heart or life without her.

The paranormal element is the demon world interacting with the human world, but in a way that keeps the humans guessing. Faina takes true demon form only once in front of Jace, when they’re threatened by a man with a gun, and it’s so brief he questions his own senses. Then near the end of the story, Jace is confronted by three other demons, but by then he’s in love with Faina and is no longer freaked out.

Q. I love playing cast the movie. So, if The Last Soul were to be made into a movie, who do you see playing your main characters?

A. This is always so hard for me because I tend to think back to actors from Hollywood’s glory days! I could see Jennifer Ellison as Faina and Johnny Depp as Jace.

Q. How long have you been writing?

I’ve been writing stories since I could print. I was the geeky kid in junior high and high school who carried around a notebook and wrote stories in class, just for fun. My English teachers loved me. About ten years ago, I wrote three novels, but I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. It wasn’t until two years ago I joined RWA and began to get serious about my writing career.

Q. Tell us a bit about your writing process.

Once the idea for the story forms, I pick the hero and heroine. I decide what type of names they’ll have and research them until I find the right ones. Once I pick them, the characters come alive for me and take on faces, body types, hair and eye color, and personalities. Then I can write them. I’m a pantser. I have a general idea where the story is going, and I know the ending, but the rest takes shape as I let my characters talk to me.

Q. You actually had two sales very close together. Haunted Heart, a contemporary romance, is coming out from Etopia Press July 1. Tell us about that story.

Haunted Heart is the story of a woman who returns home after ten years of living in Hollywood to restore a century home left to her by her beloved great-aunt. The man she hires to restore it is the one who hurt her in high school. As Rowena and Van work out the rift that tore them apart as teens, they also uncover a plot to make Rowena think the house is haunted. The men behind this plot include a fake ghost hunter and one of Van’s own crew.

Q. What are you working on now?

I’m finishing up the sequel to The Last Soul, Hunted, another paranormal novella. The heroine in Hunted is Jahi, Faina’s best friend. She’s being hunted by a fallen angel, and the hero not only has to protect her, but has been hired to find this rogue fallen angel.

Q. Last year was your first RWA National Conference. What are the top three things you took away from the conference that you think have really helped with your writing career?

Nationals helped me see the big picture. I really got a sense of how tight the romance writing community is, and how much the authors rely on others for support. I learned persistence and patience are the keys. And, I figured out we have to know who we are as writers, and build from that place.

Thanks for being here today, Carolyn.

To learn more about Carolyn and her writing, visit her website. To buy Carolyn’s book, go here.

self-publish it to Kindle, Nook and other e-reading formats as a bit of an experiment to see how it goes. Living in Color is a women’s fiction story, a bit of a departure from my normal romance and young adult fiction but a story I think people will enjoy. It focuses much more on the relationship between a mother, newly widowed Ruby Bishop, and her grown daughter, Sabrina. The book is told from Sabrina’s point of view, but throughout this story of healing we get to see both women make discoveries about each other and themselves that they didn’t expect.

Downloading details can be found through the links on the Books or Home pages.

While I was gone, our muddy, weedy flowerbeds were transformed by landscapers. The new area that was created by the new driveway and front walk now looks like this.

You’ll notice some wilted daffodils throughout the landscaping. That’s because they were transplanted. Hopefully, they’ll come back pretty next spring. The area beside the driveway, which had an out-of-control bush of some sort now has azaleas and the monkey grass that hasn’t quite greened out this year yet.

In front of my office, there used to be some ugly bushes and a forsythia that had gotten so big that it was partially blocking the window. Much more attractive though.

The forsythia got moved to an area on the side of the house where a half-dead lilac bush was removed. And it stayed in bloom!

We still need to have the yard re-done because of the damage done by the cement truck when they poured the driveway (not to mention the amazing collection of weeds that we call a lawn and that gets mowed because it’s green), but that will have to wait until the fall. In the meantime, hubby and I are trying to smooth it out with new topsoil and grass seed.

Still, the place is looking better, and it makes me happy when I look out the front windows now.

Anyone else pulling on their gloves and diving into yard work?

I did manage to meet my newest fan because of the snow.