When a New Book Comes Out...

This week Always Yellow Roses, my historical romance with a paranormal twist, was released into the world. What should have been the first book in the Roses Series came out third in the sequence, so it can be read as a stand alone with no trouble.  Frankly, it was easier to write and sell The Convent Rose and A Wild Red Rose, short contemporaries, than this 100,000 work that required lots of research and spanned two time periods, antebellum Louisiana and the 1980's (yes, sadly that is now considered an historical era and I did have to do research on it even though I lived through those years of big hair and huge portable phones).  I knew Noreen and Rusty's story from the start, but writing it down was something else altogether.

Anyhow, by now I have updated my author pages to include this title, plugged it on both my blogs, mentioned it multiple times on FaceBook, sent tweets to my publisher's PR person who tweets for me since tweeting drives me nuts, dropped off promotional postcards at the local bookstore and thrust them into the hands of everyone I meet. I also posted the Wild Rose Press kickoff sale of the new title for $3.00, half price for the e-book good only this week. Prior to this frenzy of activity, I have steadily mentioned the new book every time I gave a talk and occasionally on FB when I got the new cover which comes out months before the actual book.  Yes, I could be doing more, but at some point I need to work on my WIP, a new Sinners sports romance book entitled She's a Sinner. Son of Sinner is at the publisher and will begin edits soon. Looks like 2015 will be a double Sinners year.

All this done, I now wait and hope to get reviews on the new book.  As I have discussed before, reviews don't come easy.  Too many books, too few people who feel comfortable reviewing them. I hope for the best, but live in dread of getting a bad review right out of the gate. Always Yellow Roses takes place in the antebellum South initially. The families are aristocratic, own plantations and numerous slaves. I once entered this story in a contest and literally got lots of zeros from one judge who informed me that my hero and heroine could not be good people because they owned slaves and that I hadn't portrayed the cruelties of slavery and so my work must be historically inaccurate. Ahem, the book is not about slavery, though I took pains to portray slaves as individuals. They are in the book because wealthy people who have plantations own slaves. Not to mention that I give tours at a sugar planter's home owned by the National Trust and my knowledge is pretty darn accurate and backed up by documentation. Another judge enjoyed the story and couldn't wait to read more, but with all those zeros of course it won no prizes. So, I am waiting for that shoe to drop.  Always Yellow Roses is a tale of young love and reincarnation that happens to take place in the old South. I hope you enjoy it.