Ready to Fall into a new book?

The first day of fall – it’s one of my favorite days.  I especially enjoyed the fact that we were provided with a bit of a show today to remind us of the season change.  Not only did we get some rain, there was a blustery wind which forced many more maple leaves to drop from their perch in the trees to land on the green grass below. 

The change in seasons has officially begun.

And there is no better day than today to mark the change in another season…the season of a new chapter in the life of my character, Jorja Matthews.  Best Kept Secrets, the latest book in the Jorja Matthews mystery series, is finally complete and is now waiting for a thumbs up by Amazon so that the eBook cover can be finalized and both the paperback and the eBook can officially be made available for sale. 

Finally! 

I can take a breath…but only until I hear all is well from the Amazon reviewers and that they found no issues with the files I have uploaded.

This means that once I receive word from the reviewers that the files all look good, that the manuscript has been successfully converted to an eBook and that my cover has also been converted to complete the eBook, I can click that little button to make the book available for sale.  The whole process should only take a couple of days, if I remember correctly from the first time I did this.  And it has been almost a year to the day since I published my first paperback.  I do remember how it felt the last time I had to click the mouse on that “publish” button…my heart was in my throat and I was more nervous than I thought was even possible. 

Have I learned a few things since then?  You bet.  Does that mean the process went smoother this time around?  Maybe, but it’s still a slow process.  I was just more prepared for that fact this time.  Do I still have more to learn?  Heck yeah.  That fact will never change whether I publish five books for fifty.

So now I move on to the third book in the series, which is tentatively titled Ties That Bind (see the tagline on No Mother of Mine and you’ll see why).  After you’ve read Best Kept Secrets, I’m pretty certain you’ll be asking me to write faster so that the third book will be released much sooner.  I’ll certainly do my best.  While I plan to spend much of October marketing the second book, with at least one book signing scheduled for October 12th (more details to come soon), I’ll probably join National Novel Writing Month again in November to get a jump start on my word count.  I’m also going to use what I’ve learned with the second book to do my best to get through the writing and editing much more smoothly and hopefully at a faster pace.  We’ll see how it goes so I won’t make any promises other than that I’ll do the best I can.

I’ll be updating my Facebook page and this blog over the next few days as I hear back from Amazon so you’ll know once I know when the book will officially be available for sale online.

Thanks for hanging in there with me!