Book Launch Party and New England Author Expo

I know it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve written a post and I wanted to take a moment to talk about a few events that are coming up.

First off, I’m holding a book launch party for Secret Hunger this weekend, Saturday June 13th from 12 – 3 PM. It’s going to be held at Crave Bistro in Amesbury, MA and is free and open to the public.

If you are reading this post and anywhere in the area, feel free to stop by! There will be hors d’oeurves, cocktails, door raffle prizes – including a $50 dinner gift certificate – and, of course signed books available for sale.

This is my first book launch party and I’m happy and nervous in equal measure. I keep thinking up worst case scenarios. What if no one comes? What if way too many people come and I haven’t planned enough food? What on earth am I going to say? Should I read excerpts from my book? Oh geez, what passages should I read?

Don’t worry, I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes. I’m also planning on writing a future post about how I planned my book launch party, different elements I was aiming for,  photos from the event, as well as any tips and tricks I learned along the way for next time.

I’m also excited to announce that I will be attending the 2015 New England Author Expo at the Danversport Yacht Club on Wednesday, July 29th. This event highlights authors, illustrators, and publishers from the New England region. It’s free to the public from 4 – 9 PM and the location is absolutely beautiful.

I’m really looking forward to this! It will be the first event I’ll be participating in as an author. It should be a great chance to network with fellow writers, as well as a way to connect with new readers.

Before signing up, I had an opportunity to talk with the founder and coordinator of the event, Christopher Obert. Not only did I find him warm and supportive, but he took the time to answer all my questions and allay some of my new author fears.

He also gave me a little bit of history of the author expo.  It all started very organically and is truly a “grassroots” affair. That’s not to imply it’s insubstantial, however. Their first book event was in 2006, and they’ve been hosting something annually ever since! They began using the name “Author Expo” back in 2012. Last year they actually sold out space with over a hundred authors represented!

I’m also going to be doing an interview with science fiction author Aaron Hubble this Wednesday. I met Aaron while participating in a Facebook online book fair called “Spring” into Reading a couple of weeks ago. Through our conversations, we discovered that we had both published our debut novels on the same day. As we were comparing notes, he told me that he wanted to start a series of interviews featuring new authors and talking about various lessons they’d learned. It sounded like a great opportunity to review this past year and share perspectives with someone else who had been going through a similar process. I’ll be sure to let you know when it’s posted. In the meantime, if you are a fan of science fiction like me, you should go check out his new book, Ash: Farpointe Initiative Book One.

Lastly, I’ve also been planning a series of blog posts focusing on some of the lessons I’ve learned this past year as I’ve fumbled my way through my first book. My plan is to have them all written, and publish them once a week starting sometime mid-July. Some of the topics I plan on discussing are plotting vs. pantsing, how to craft a query e-mail to book bloggers, and what I would do differently for my second book. The series will be called BookBound: Lessons Learned While Writing My First Novel.

My plan going into this stage was to focus on promotion and marketing for the first month after my book was published, and then turning back to writing and focusing on my second book. I’ve read a lot of advice that cautions new authors not to spend so much time promoting that they lose sight of the fact that they’re an writer first and foremost. Now that it’s July, I’ve taken those words to heart and am once again spending hours at my local cafe plotting out Liz Harper’s story. Hopefully, the process will be a little smoother this next go-around. Or, barring that, hopefully I’ll find a whole bunch of new mistakes to make!