Almost Published

It's getting closer--my first book, Smuggled Rose, comes out May 3.
I'm trying not to get too excited about it though, because it will be months before I see anything like a royalty check and it's only out as an e-book for the first few months. Sigh. So I won't even have a paperback to hold in my hot little hands until the fall.

Anyway, so now I'm trying to decide what to do for promotion--how to get to the reading public. I mean, I doubt anyone is searching the Internet for Amy Corwin, books by Amy Corwin, or Smuggled Rose. It's interesting to me that most of the hits I do get are from folks looking for more information on...roses. Which is cool because for several years I was the newsletter editor for my local rose society. I'm thinking about writing a few articles about the history of roses, anyway, to put on my web site because some of the most frequent queries I see are "red roses" and "the history of red roses". It sort of dovetails with my book, anyway, because when we first meet Margaret Lane, the heroine, she's smuggling roses from France into England. Avid rose collectors will do anything to get new roses. Really.

In fact there are several documented cases of customers getting into fist fights at nurseries and/or auctions of new roses when there weren't enough roses to "go around" and someone really wanted that last bush.

Anyway, there are obviously still people out there interested in roses and I'm glad I already have some content related to that between my two sister sites.

The other thing I'm considering is developing a newsletter to go out quarterly. I want to make it a good newsletter, though, and not just "hey, I've just sold this manuscript and the book will be available for sale on blah, blah date". I don't generally subscribe to newsletters because frankly, I get enough sales chatter as it is.

No--what I want is to do a newsletter that somehow relates to what I write, which seem to be Regencies and Regency mysteries. So initially, I'm leaning toward content about the Regency period. I've got a lot of original source material that is way out of copyright and fallen into public domain, so maybe something like:

• Recipes from the Regency
• Articles about gardening in the Regency (and of course, ROSES)
• Regency Fashion tidbits
• Fun Regency Slang (a la Regency Word of the Day)
• And links to a serialized novel -- this last one would also be available if folks sign up for it as a weekly e-mail so by the end of, say, 25 weeks or so, you'd have the complete novel. A sort of freebie. After that, I may also do some short stories or other things like that.

Anyway, that's what I'm thinking. I want to make it something that folks would actually want to get. Even if they never read my book, I want to make this fun.

That's about it--I'm just brainstorming here and hoping for the best.

If you have ideas about what you'd love to get as a newsletter, I'm totally open to suggestion. :-)