Where Have You Been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy

Six months without a post. Just sitting on Blogger's servers, dormant, silent...passwordless. Yes, it's true. I somehow got tangled up in the move to Google log in and I was lost. Now, Found!

I've been so busy, I doubt I'd have had much time to post anyway. POINT SURRENDER has kept me hopping, or rather, the marketing of said book. Booksignings, promotional materials, conferences, advertising, creating a web presence. It's all good. But very, very time consuming.

MySpace is a lot of fun, not sure yet it will return anything like the hours I've contributed to keeping it active. Lesser, Bebo.com and Authors Den. My own website is like a dinosaur to update, but I've gotten pretty good at it. Contests have been running, author spotlights, interviews on romance sites.

Still, sales are not what I'd hoped. There is tremendous, stupendous competition for book-buying dollars. I've come to realize that even if all efforts were equal, high-profile, high-concept books catch the eye best. Just like movies.

POINT SURRENDER is a mystery, with a love story. A romance, with a mystery. It is whatever I think will sell it at the moment. It is not Harry Potter or James Bond, it does not speculate about Mary Magdalene or the secret of life. It does entertain and is fully worth its $12.99 price tag. It has an attractive, not blockbuster, cover, and a connection to the romanticism of lighthouses. And it has me, and Karen, promoting it.

I recently followed a thread on the Sisters In Crime list where it was stated, with some confidence, that the majority of librarians won't even consider books that have not been reviewed by Kirkus, PW, Booklist or some other high-ranking review source. This was very disheartening as any author knows of the remoteness of obtaining such reviews. Newspapers are virtually non-existant now, as far as reviews go.

But we continue to try. Aside from my dream of selling through my print run, my bigger dream is to entertain people with my stories. Knowing that there are readers out there, right now, with POINT SURRENDER on their nightstands brings me back up a notch. Isn't that what it's all about?