Romance Trading Cards

You've all heard about Jeannie Lin's awesome idea of Romance Trading Cards by now, haven't ya?  If not, check out the great Romance Trading Card site produced by Amanda Berry, Jeannie Lin and Shawntelle Madison.

You can read all about 'em here:

Authors offer tantalizing, slick, business-card-sized collectible versions of their books, usually the book cover on one side and some delicious tidbits about the book, maybe a blurb or excerpt, on the back. Many authors have gone the Topps Baseball Card route, providing a character's stats on the back. In short...everything except the bubblegum!

So far, Romance Trading Cards have made an appearance at the recent Romantic Times convention in Los Angeles where, by all accounts, they proved a smashing and brilliant success.  They've been auctioned off for charity; and they will be again...at the Brenda Novak Annual On-Line Auction for Diabetes Research in which many Carina Press authors are taking part.

Anyway...I desperately wanted my own.  'Cause hell knows, I can't get enough of seeing Adam (my delectable swoon-worthy hero) and the cover of HEALING HEARTS plastered all over the place!

But since I am so artistically, graphically, computer techly and geekily challenged, I prevailed upon the fabulous Angela Waters, who designed  the HEALING HEARTS cover for Carina Press, to create some for me. Angela went to work and came up with designs for both HEALING HEARTS and  for  SLEEPY HOLLOW DREAMS, my erotic paranormal for The Wild Rose Press!

And here they are! 

      
  

Just when I thought Adam couldn't possibly get any more swoon-worthy...he did! Thank you, Angela. (And cover-model Jimmy Thomas)

And here's Emma:

            (She's most definitely Adam-worthy...don'tcha think?)

And...SLEEPY HOLLOW DREAMS,  based on the cover designed for The Wild Rose Press by Angela Anderson.

                                   

So what do you think?  Aren't they gorgeous? 

What do you think of the whole idea?  Personally, I think it's brilliant. For e-book authors, especially, we now have something to actually sign!

A reader who's already started collecting the cards saw me blabbing about mine on Facebook and asked for some!  (The internet is a truly amazing thing, isn't it?)

I've sent my first set off by snail mail to South Africa. (Unsigned, I'm afraid. I was so excited to send them off that I popped them in the mail before finding a snazzy Sharpie in gold-silver-bronze-metallic tones.)

So if you want some, give me a holler.

 I can't wait to hand 'em out at the RWA #11 National Conference in New York City in June.  See y'all there!

Empty nest

So here's the stuff they don't tell you...or the stuff you're not ready to listen to...when you're going to all those workshops and conferences, polishing those three-line elevator pitches, focusing on taking a machete to every instance of the word "that" or the word "was" because that's what they told you to do in your critique group...and sending out all those query letters to agents and submission packages to editors...hoping to one-day be PUBLISHED.

Publishing is, as you may have heard, a business. It's thrilling. And it's also kind of exhausting.  So much to do. So much that isn't...writing. (Like, right now I'm fiddling about, obsessed with Jeannnie Lin's clever idea of Romance Trading Cards. Which, huzzah! Angela Waters, the fabulous artist who created my gorgeous HEALING HEARTS cover, has agreed to design for me.)

And then there's all that larking about, here and there on various social media sites, hawking your, er, wares.

And then...there are reviews.

When SLEEPY HOLLOW DREAMS, my erotic paranormal for The Wild Rose Press came out, it was a hurried thing with a small window of opportunity, because the publisher, editor and I were all trying to get the book out in time for Halloween -- when it had only been contracted about two months before. There were few reviews. None in advance of the release. Mostly from my friends.

But for HEALING HEARTS, the reviews started coming out even before the book was released. People were reading it. People I didn't know were actually discussing it! Debating it, even! I felt like Goldilocks. People were telling me it was too short, too long, too hot, too cold, too hard, too soft, just right. They wished they were the heroine, Emma; they were in love with the hero, Adam.

(Oh, no. Wait. You can't have him. He's mine. Um, I mean...he's Emma's.)

So your baby is not exclusively your baby anymore. It's what you wanted, didn't you?  But...you kind of go through empty nest syndrome anyway. You've launched your newly-hatched (no matter how long the labor pains) chick out into the wide, wide world. And now it must flap its wings on its own. Sink or swim. You've done what you can.

It's time to step aside.  And move on.

No matter how tempting it is to keep wandering into its room (or its slot at CarinaPress.com or Amazon or Goodreads) and moon over its picture! (Or gorgeous cover.) Which you've become obsessed with making romance trading cards out of.