Three Ways for Authors to Pay It Forward

the talon of the hawkI just love this cover for book 3 in my Twelve Kingdoms series, with my warrior-princess, Ursula, looking all badass in The Talon of the Hawk. So it’s very cool that Addicted to Heroines has it up in round one of their Hottest Heroines Cover Contest. You can vote for it if you like!

I’m over at Word Whores, talking about good karma and how to help others.

A Great Big Thank You – and Giveback

B3UC_XVIYAAE9_II’m over at Here Be Magic, offering a very special Thank You giveaway. And being thankful in general for the whirlwind release day yesterday. You all are so wonderful – I’m overwhelmed.

Happy Thanksgiving to my U.S. cohort – and I hope the rest of you find some time to indulge in good food, better company and an excellent book!

Giving It a Go at Thanking Everyone

The Tears of the RoseThis week I’m looking forward to the release of the second book in my TWELVE KINGDOMS series, THE TEARS OF THE ROSE. (In fact, today you can read an excerpt over at That’s What I’m Talking About.) So it’s mete that this week’s topic over at Word Whores is giving thanks to all those who’ve helped us in our writing careers.

So Much to Give Thanks For

jeffekennedyseriesNext week should be a great one – US Thanksgiving AND the release of THE TEARS OF THE ROSE!

Do you know what this means? Yes – you can stuff yourself silly and then loll about and read! That’s definitely what I have in mind. Not my *own* books, mind you – but I have some yummy ones in the pile.

For those of you who haven’t read THE MARK OF THE TALA yet, RT Book Reviews – along with saying they love me truly, madly, deeply, which made me a little verklumpt with the smile for the movie reference – is hosting a giveaway of three bundles of both books!

There’s also some great reviews filling my feeds, which I just love to see. This one of THE MARK OF THE TALA at Reading Reality by Marlene Harris is really wonderful. She says all sorts of smart, insightful things about the book – *and*compares it to MALIFICENT, which I finally watched last week. The movie electrified me and blew me away. It it kind of uncanny, some of the story parallels. Now I want Angelina Jolie to play Salena.

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Also, Lisa A at I Smell Sheep gave THE TEARS OF THE ROSE five transforming sheep to celebrate the heroine’s tremendous character growth, which means a great deal to me also. And Gikany and Una at That’s What I’m Talking About said that TEARS is a gripping and exciting read as Ami explores her own potential and power growing from a spoiled immature princess and into a woman worthy to be a queen. She also discovers that a first love may not always be the only or the true love of your life.

Pumpkin pie (or dessert of your choice) for everyone!

Doing Right by Our Friends

boundbyinkHappy Release Day to Marcella Burnard with the newest in her Living Ink urban fantasy series, BOUND BY INK!!

This is such a cool series, with tattoos that capture demons and bind them to people. Marcella has been a friend for a long time, so seeing her books release is always fun for me. I met Marcella online through RWA’s Fantasy, Futuristic and Paranormal (FFP) chapter, back in… wow – 2009, I think. We used to “meet” every morning in the online water cooler and do writing sprints. Later, when I happened to be out in Olympia, Washington, she drove down to meet me for dinner. I’ve had a number of writing friends come and go over the years. This business seems to be particularly hard on friendships, with some people withdrawing as our careers and fortunes wax and wane.

Marcella, though, has been a steadfast friend to me throughout – something I’ve really come to value.

There’s a saw that friends are the family you choose and I think there’s a lot of truth to that. I have friends who go back most of my life, nearly as long as some of my family and some longer than the younger/newer family members. How closely in contact we are changes all the time, but the best friends are the ones where that doesn’t matter. I recently saw two college friends while I was out in Baltimore and it was lovely to visit with them, touch base with their lives.

The people who are our friends form the fabric of our lives, their threads interweaving with ours. Maybe part of one space of time, maybe running throughout the length. Their impact on us, and of us on them, can be profound.

This is on my mind because a friend of my mother’s died last week. They’d known each other for around thirty years. They shared a whole group of mutual friends, couples who spent lots of time together, partying, traveling, celebrating each others’ milestones. Her death came as a shock to most everyone in that more-dispersed circle. Largely because no one knew she’d fallen ill. All her friends knew was that they’d left messages that she hadn’t returned. Finally she didn’t return so many that one of them pinned down the husband. Turned out she’d not only been sick, but she’d gone comatose, was on life support and the family was meeting to make a decision. She died the following day and the service set for the end of the week.

None of them got to see her before she died.

Of course, by the time they knew, she was beyond communicating. But, while it’s understandable that a family in crisis will circle the wagons and not communicate such a terrible event, it hurt my mom and the woman’s other friends terribly not to be able to say their own goodbyes. They could have let her know one last time that they loved her. For themselves, they could have tied off that thread, instead of it hanging as a ragged edge.

It’s something to think about – if we suddenly fall ill, is there a list of who to contact? For many of us, a phone call to one or two friends will set in motion a chain of communication. It’s probably worth it to make that list. Just in case.

If not for ourselves, then for our friends who love us.

The Value of Being Flexible

Jeffe Kennedy & Connor GoldsmithHere’s my agent, Connor Goldsmith of Fuse Literary, and I at World Fantasy Con. In the bar, of course. He tweeted this as “the beautiful people” and, as this was the very beginning of the conference, that was pretty accurate.

LOL

 I recently ran across a post on an Indie Author loop where a writer I didn’t know, in a piece of advice on an unrelated topic, offhandedly mentioned that she changed the pen name on her books five times until she found one that sold well. That absolutely fascinated me. First, it never occurred to me to think of my author name as a sales tool. Then the fact that she had such a totally different frame of mind, a business-minded detached approach to the question, that it took me aback.

I’m very attached to my name. Arguably it’s my brand now, but even during my brief flirtation with a pseudonym, I didn’t like it not being ME.

I think this is a way that Indie authors have an advantage over authors like me. I tend to get bound up with my books being my art and an extension of myself. She seemed to have a greater level of detachment where it didn’t matter which name she published a story under, except that it be one that sold well. Finally, she also exhibited what I consider to be an enviable quality of mixing up what she’s doing and trying again.

A while back – I was going to say a couple of year ago, but it was omg 2011 – I wrote a blog post about The Guy in the Pink Suit. It’s still one of my favorite posts and something I refer to fairly frequently. It probably worth reading, but I’ll summarize so as not to max out your TLDR threshold.

The Guy in the Pink Suit trolled the sidewalk in Las Vegas for a good two hours while we ate lunch. Over and over he’d approach people, shake their hands, be charming. Sometimes they’d take pictures with him, less often they’d give him a tip. We thought he might be pimping a show because the cash intake didn’t seem to justify the effort. Regardless, I learned a great deal from him about handing rejection. Nothing dissuaded or discouraged this guy.

At least, that was my take-home message then. And it’s still an important one.

But this Indie author who changed her pen name five times to find the one that sold best made me think of him. Instead of the message being about persevering in the face of rejection, however, I realized there’s also value in mixing things up, trying a lot of different approaches until you find one that works.

A writer friend of mine recently told me about a Twitter conversation she saw between two other writers. Those two bemoaned that they were slow writers, comparing themselves to elephants with enormously long gestation periods. (We writers love our analogies.) In comparison, they described faster writers as sea turtles – who lay lots of eggs and abandon them on the beach in the hopes that  few might make it to the water and survive.

Yeah, it irritated my friend, the fast writer. Understandably so. Though that’s not my point here.

The slow writers were unhappy, saying that their slow production rate might condemn them to extinction while the sea turtles presumably take over the world. Of course, the analogy breaks down immediately at this point, as anyone with a passing understanding of biology will point out that elephants and sea turtles don’t occupy the same ecological niches. There’s room for both in the world. But, more important, I think what these slow-gestation writers see as careless abandonment of huge batches of books is actually a willingness to diversify. Yes, being a faster writer lets us produce more books. (I’ve already meditated on the perception that faster means lower quality, so I won’t go into that here.) Producing books faster also lets a writer try more different things. New ideas, upside-down tropes, maybe some riskier heroes and heroines.

Those of you who paid attention in biology will recall that more variety – heterogeneity – creates stronger individuals who are more likely to find a niche they can survive in. The more specialized an organism, the narrower its ecological niche, the more vulnerable it is. Thus we lose Spotted Owls when we lose old growth timber. But the species that are flexibly, that can move into many changing niches – like the coyote – are the ones that thrive through change.

Flexibility means survival. Not a bad quality in a publishing market that sends authors and genres into extinction faster than global climate change ever could.

RT Reviewers Choice Nominations!

themarkofthetala_300The Tears of the RoseYesterday I flew back from World Fantasy Con – there’s a post all about it on the RMFW blog today – and when I landed to change planes in Dallas, I found out this amazing news about my girls.

The RT Reviewers Choice Awards Nominees were announced and THE TEARS OF THE ROSE has been nominated for best Fantasy Romance and THE MARK OF THE TALA for Book of the Year.

WOW.

I’m just thrilled and verklumpt.

It’s such a huge honor to have both books in this series nominated. And everyone has been so excited for me that I’m feeling surrounded by love and all the warm fuzzies.

~throws confetti~