Why Authors and Readers RULE the publishing world.

A short story in my tween fantasy series The Mall Fairies, released September 14. If you pre-order here, then it's only 79 cents! Cheap!

Yes, I just had to crow a little about this new release! However, it slips into my main subject of this post. Since several of my stories are being released from several different publishers in the next couple of months I've been going promo mad. Then I saw a post on an authors'  facebook group where another author asked, (I'm paraphrasing), "Isn't all this promo to other authors just belly button gazing? Does any of it reach the readers?"

And my answer is threefold.

First, authors are readers. I find all my reading off of social media now. And I read a lot.

Second, readers also follow a lot of this social media by authors. Why? For the simple reason that readers are fascinated by authors. I know I'm fascinated by other author's lives. 

And this brings me to the third point. It used to be that the only author's lives we could know about was the famous ones, and only read/buy a current release--but now authors and readers rule the publishing world! They can find out all about, everything (like a story being on sale if pre-ordered). 

I love this world of TMI. I've found lots of great reads! What about you, dear reader? What do you think? Do you love or hate this new world?

Colors Like Memories, A Review and Being God

Colors Like Memories is by Meradeth Houston, a YA fantasy about a member of the Sari, which are angels made up of babies born who never breathed before death. Julie, the Sari, struggles with her own overwhelming grief as she tries to keep a teen from suicide.

I read Colors Like Memories as a great break while I was prepping my workshop "Being God" for the Fandemonium conference. And reading it helped tremendously with the prep. Meradeth creates an excellent fantasy world with the right balance between the elements of the "real" world and the fantastic. Julie has abilities (and wings, I love wings) but she also has to eat and sleep--and has other human failings that are more important, the primary of which is that she's stuck in grief. Another excellent balance in the novel: the world was created with just enough back story and details for it to come alive, and not so much it bogged down this wonderful tale.

Reading Colors Like Memories reminded me to teach that one of the most important guidelines for being a god and creating your own world was to only provide necessary information at the point where the reader needs to know that information.This is true with whatever style of fiction you're writing.

Plus, it was an excellent read.

So, dear writers, what other ways can we be good gods (and goddesses) of our worlds?