A Time For Everything

So-- I can now check out e-books from my local library. How about that?

There's a special website/application called OverDive that facilitates the overseeing of the files I guess and as long as your local library has a copy of the book and you have a library card, you can check out e-books and read them on various devices. All with the power of the Internet. You may not even have to leave your home!



I can read them on my PC or on my iPad in my  Kindle app.

My friend Nancy told me about it a few months ago, but I had trouble figuring things out. But Amazon has a tutorial that got me sorted and now I'm waiting for the notification that an e-copy of the book I want is available.

I'm well on my way to reaching that 26-book goal now!

Have you heard of this? Used it? What are your thoughts?

Alas, not an actual romance novel, novella, or short story despite the fact that I have a good dozen of them in various stages of completeness.

Now, some of my readers know this already, so please bear with me while I re-tell the tale.

A few months ago, August to be precise, I was reading JA Konrath's blog. For the self-pubbing author he has a lot of info he's willing to share, so if you don't read him, you may want to check him out.

Anyway, he shared a story about when he was a kid/teen and would write stories and have them printed and bound and then he'd give them away. All because he loved to tell his stories and share them with people. He went on to say that once you start publishing and caught up in the grind of revisions and deadlines, you tend to forget why you started writing in the first place: to share a story with people.

Then he went on to talk about a super secret experiment he conducted to see if he could re-capture some of that child-like enthusiasm by publishing a book in an hour. He ended up with four tongue in cheek tales, each written and published, including cover art, in an hour or less. He said he makes maybe $50 a month on them combined, but hey, it's $600 a year into perpetuity for a mere four hours worth of work.

He challenged his blog readers to do the same, and if they completed the challenge to contact him somehow or another and he would then feature everyone's creations in a subsequent blog post. Tons of people met the challenge--not me, though--but I was intrigued by the idea. I even mentioned it to at least one of my critique partners. She didn't follow the challenge to the letter, but did eventually get her two self-published novellas uploaded and published. Here's the original blog post, if you're so inclined. Scroll down a bit to find the relevant part of the post.

But back to me....

So the whole idea of throwing together a short book to sell at $.99 has stuck with me and, the other day, during a proofing job, an idea for the subject of such a book finally came to me. I hadn't really planned on taking up the challenge at this point, nor had I planned on non-fiction over fiction, but then I got a wild hair last weekend when we were iced in and I went for it. And The Romance Writer's Guide to Punctuation was written, edited, proofed, cover created and published. I might have exceeded the eight hours by a little bit, but it didn't matter. What mattered was that I finally finished a damn book and published it. Here's the listing at Amazon.com. And here's my cover. No, it's not much, but it gets the job done and that was also the point.


I have a couple more topics in mind for non-fiction, but I definitely do want to get some fiction out there as well. But with Sonshine's birthday, Christmas, and fireworks season upon us--not to mention a proof job--the chances of any of that happening until after the New Year are pretty slim.

But-- I DID IT!

Thanks to my writer friends, for your friendship and support. It means the world to me.

So Monday I shared where I get most of my books...

But with soooo many books out there, whether you pay for them or not, how do you choose?

For me it's a combo of the cover and the title. I still haven't decided which one will sway me more. I think it's a toss up, really. But there's some magical mixture that will induce me to click through and read the book description. Most of the time, say 90% to 100% of the time, I will download it.

I should add that the author sometimes plays a factor. Like I'll read just about anything from Deanne Gist or Dee Henderson or Joel Rosenberg.

You know--as I was searching through the covers on my iPad for a few examples to share, I determined that it's the title more than the cover that appeals to me. I'm not saying the cover image isn't important, but as I was looking through my books, I realized that a lot of the covers are just okay.

I realized that I like sounds. I remember people more by voices than faces. So if the title sounds appealing, then I'm more likely to click unless the cover image is a huge clue that I *don't* want to read what's inside. Interesting discovery!

A few more books on my to-be-read pile include:




And the one I started this past weekend was:



Not so much for title or the cover in this case, but because I read the first book by this author, Catching Jordan, and enjoyed her writing.

So...what draws you to a book?? Title, cover, author??