Tag Archive | team indie

2013 Book #7 – The Ruth Valley Missing, by Amber West

Oh gosh. This is tough. I was given The Ruth Valley Missing, by Amber West in a special Valentine’s Day “blind date” book giveaway. I had a few exchanges with Amber in the process of being sent the book and I like her. She sounds like a really nice woman. That’s what makes this so hard. It’s doubly hard because I am a firm believer in author etiquette that says that you shouldn’t say bad things about your fellow Indie authors’ work. That being said and as gently as possible….

The Ruth Valley Missing is not ready for publication. It needs some serious developmental editing. Developmental editing is not the same thing as copyediting. Developmental editing is when a paid professional reads a novel looking for continuity errors, characterization flaws, plot holes, motivations that don’t ring true, research errors, and much, much more. A good developmental editor is the safety net you need to stop yourself from printing something that might make you cringe later.

Because I want to be as gentle as possible, I’m only going to talk about The Ruth Valley Missing in the context of the necessity of research when writing a novel.

From a research point of view, I’m probably the last person Amber would have wanted to read this book. I’m from Philadelphia (which has a large Catholic population) and went to mass and RCIA when I was in grad school at Villanova, I lived in the deep South for almost 3 years, I work in the insurance industry, I’ve both been in therapy and have friends that are psychologists and psychiatrists, my mom was a quilter, and my Granddad’s hobby was photography. Why does it matter that I have touched all these things? Because there is always going to be someone who knows more about any given skill, career, hobby, or demographic than you do who reads your book, and if you haven’t done you’re research, they’re going to catch you.

The town of Ruth Valley is located somewhere in rural North Carolina. It is apparently populated by every Southern stereotype you could imagine. Not the flattering ones. Stereotypes don’t make the best characters and tend to offend the people who live in the area you are trying to make assumptions about. That’s a problem.

A bigger problem is that the entire plot centers around the fact that the town of Ruth Valley is deeply Catholic. I’m sorry, but while the people in rural North Carolina are undoubtedly religious, demographically they are much, much more likely to be Protestant. In fact, a quick check on Wikipedia confirmed my suspicion that rural North Carolina is overwhelmingly Southern Baptist. Now, I’m not saying you couldn’t have a town that was mysteriously all Catholic. In fact, that would be a fascinating oddity that would help the plot. But you would have to discuss how unheard of it would be right up front. Otherwise it registers as a serious credibility error that makes the plot far-fetched.

Another bit of the plot involves the heroine, Jameson (cool name, by the way) finding an old camera bag at a rummage sale and sending the film in to be developed. I found my Granddad’s old camera bag once, complete with film, and attempted to have it sent in to be developed. I was quickly told that A) film left in a camera for more than a few months deteriorates to the point where it can’t be developed, and B) the chemicals used in film have changed in recent years so that old film can’t just be taken to your local photo place and developed. In fact, there is only one facility in the US that can process old film (if it even exists anymore) and it takes a long time and is extraordinarily expensive to do. That’s what I was told, but the facts about film might be something different. It’s another credibility problem that could be solved with a little research.

And then there’s insurance. Without going into too much spoilery detail, insurance companies are tight-wads with extreme measures in place to combat fraud. In order for someone to take a policy out on someone’s life, you have to prove that you have insurable interest, meaning a connection to the insured that would mean their death would cause a genuine loss to you. Insurance also has a contestability period. There are rules for beneficiaries too. I’m sure there would have been a way to work all of these provisions into the plot of the story … if a little research into insurance had been done.

And then the little things: Confession doesn’t work like that. There’s no way anyone would sell a handmade quilt for $60 at a rummage sale. A psychiatrist is someone with a medical degree who can prescribe medication and a psychologist is a counselor. People only give themselves stitches on TV and in movies. And pain just doesn’t work like that.

All of these problems could have been avoided by doing a little research. Granted, in some cases it would mean changing the course of the story, but it would be worth it. I think the whole Catholic thing would have worked better if the novel were set in rural New England, for example. And that would bring its own brand of local charm with it. But research the area first.

I wish that was it, but the research problems were only the tip of the iceberg. The story has potential, but it just isn’t ready yet.

There is one other thing I have to say. And I’m really sorry for this, Amber, but this is where I stop being nice. The Ruth Valley Missing has 28 5-star reviews and 5 4-star reviews on Amazon. In no way does the book in its current form warrant any of those reviews. Click on the reviewers and you can see that for a large number of them, this is the only book that person has ever reviewed. Clearly these are “friends and family” reviews. That’s just wrong. On so many levels.

Friends and family reviews and “sock puppet” reviews (reviews written by the author using fake accounts) are what give self-publishing a bad name. They piss me off. They will piss off other people who buy your book. It might seem like a good idea to get all of your buddies to give you 5-star reviews, but in the end it will back-fire. It’s false advertising. It’s unethical. If you’ve published something that wasn’t ready for publication, no amount of hollow reviews from your friends will make it better. You’re far, far better off having no reviews at all than hollow reviews. These kind of reviews will seriously damage your reputation as an author. Don’t succumb to the temptation to collect them.

Next up on my reading list, I think I need a palate cleanser. I have a novella by Eloisa James, a NYT Bestselling Romance novelist, that I think I’ll read. I have mixed feelings about Eloisa James’s style, so we’ll see what happens.

2013 Book #6 – Just This Once, by Rosalind James

Feb15

Without a doubt, the best part of my initiative to read as many books as possible in 2013 is the fact that every book I’ve read has either taught me important things about the craft of writing or provided itself as a great example of various craft elements. Just This Once, by Rosalind James is exactly the kind of book you can use to talk about elements of writing.

First of all, I downloaded Just This Once for free on Amazon. It was at #1 on the free list when I stumbled across it. I was drawn to it because it was set in New Zealand, and since I will soon be writing a contemporary romance set in Australia, I wanted to read something along the lines of what I plan to write. I am almost 100% sure this is a self-published novel.

On the one hand, Just This Once is probably the most well-written self-published novel I’ve ever read prose-wise. Ms. James writes with a clear, fast-moving style. She knows her grammar and how to construct an interesting sentence. That’s not something you see in self-published books every day, I’m sorry to say.

That being said, I only gave it three stars on Amazon. Why? I just said it was one of the most well-written self-published books I’ve ever read. Well, unfortunately, this novel lacked two basic essentials of storytelling: an external plot and an antagonist. In fact, while it was a sweet narrative of a man and a woman meeting and falling in love, that was all it was. At no point were the stakes any higher than they were when my coworker who had been living with her boyfriend for two years was wondering whether he was going to propose to her. Furthermore, the hero and heroine didn’t even fight or disagree until one scene about 7/8ths of the way through the book. Nothing happened.

Now, with all due respect to Ms. James, I’m sure she thinks that something did happen: the hero and heroine got together. The problem is, even in Romance, there has to be an external plot that impacts the internal or relationship plot. True, in Romance the internal plot takes precedence, but there has to be an external plot in which the internal plot takes place. Maybe it’s a hurricane or a hijacking, maybe it’s a village that needs to be saved or a treasure that needs to be found. The external plot could make the story a thriller or a comedy or a slice-of-life story, but it has to be there.

I haven’t read a lot of Contemporary Romance like this in years, but I used to read Nora Roberts religiously. I remember a series she did that involved keys. The whole series took place on an island, and each heroine in the series was just trying to navigate a relationship with her hero in the muddy waters of modern-day love. But the external plot of those keys and their significance, the mystery behind them and the forces working to get their hands on them, gave a context to everything that was happening to the hero and heroine as they fell in love.

Speaking of which, Just This Once had no antagonist. There was no identifiable person whose goals and motivation were in direct conflict with either the hero or the heroine who threatened either the central relationship or their external goals. This means that there was no one to drive the tension up, to raise the stakes, or to leave you with the question of would the hero and heroine get together. You could argue that in Just This Once the heroine’s past, losing her parents at an early age and having to more or less raise her brother and sister, and the hang-ups she had because of that were the antagonist. But if that’s what Ms. James was going for, she didn’t work hard enough for it. To me those issues – the exact same issues of independence that I personally have – seemed like more of an annoyance than a plot point.

I will say this though. Ms. James did an absolutely brilliant, fantastic, amazing job of capturing the “En Zed” lingo and culture. The hero of the novel, Drew, was supremely real in detail. I think I might have kept reading the book just to “listen” to him talk. That aspect of the novel was terrific. It also made me realize that I need to do some serious research about Aussie lingo in order to write the book I plan to write.

However, that being said, nowhere in the book was there anything about the author. Nothing. I consider this a major faux pas for a self-published writer. First of all, I wanted to know where she lived. Is she a Kiwi? Has she lived in New Zealand? Australia? Why is it that she’s so awesome with painting a vivid picture of NZ and how does she know so much about rugby? As a reader, I want to know all these things. [I did look her up after writing this and discovered that she’s older than I thought she was and she spent 15 months living and working in Aussie and NZ! That’s the kind of stuff readers want to know!]

So all-in-all, I did not waste my time by reading Just This Once. But I can’t say I loved it.

Up next, a blind date of a book! And it looks like it’s a suspense/mystery, which I don’t usually read. Should be interesting!

Writers Should Not Be Writers

Sep4

Writing is serious hard work. It requires patience, dedication, focus, a commitment to learning the necessary skills, practice, and, if you’re published or planning to publish, time spent marketing. Non-writers may have a hard time understanding this. Beginning writers may not understand it either. And nine times out of ten, hard-core writers just don’t get it either. Why? Because writers are some of the most ill-equipped people to be writers out there.

What on earth do I mean by that? Writers are writers, right? They’re the ones that write books and stories and poems. How could they be ill-suited to doing what they do?

I once heard a brilliant quote: A writer is someone for whom the act of writing is particularly difficult. And yep, I believe that. I can’t tell you how many times in my own writing world the spirit has been willing but the fingers won’t move. Whether it’s a bout of writer’s block or distraction and procrastination or that damn day job getting in the way, writing is more difficult than any of my beloved non-writer friends could believe. Here are a few reasons why….

Writers are Dreamers. I have an overactive imagination. I have always had an overactive imagination. As far back as I can remember I would entertain myself with daydreams and stories. Sitting in a hammock in my back yard on a summer’s day, falling asleep at night, while at a party where no one was talking to me, in class as a student, in traffic on the road, while doing busywork a my day job; the number of times I’ve found myself off in la-la land where my imagination runs wild have taken up more time in my life when I’ve been paying attention.Guess what? This doesn’t necessarily help you write. Sure, it helps you come up with ideas and it helps you work through them and develop them. But writing? The actual writing takes a lot more focus than that.

Those of us with a writer’s nature tend not to be the most focused people out there. We’ve got our heads in the clouds when, in fact, writing takes discipline. We come up with a thousand fantasies and then torture ourselves by sitting still for hours on end bleeding into a computer. It doesn’t come naturally, this drive to work. It’s a huge effort to tie a creative spirit to a chair for hours a day and make it do something other than dream.

Writers are Impatient. When I have a story in my head I want to write it down NOW. It pulses just under the surface. It talks incessantly. The characters squeeze their way into my everyday thoughts, begging me to get them out and tell their stories. The urgency that I feel when I have a new idea is comparable to being on a long car trip and seeing a sign that says “Next Rest Stop 50 Miles”. It’s agony!But the fact of the matter is that it takes a long time to write a novel. I’ve managed to throw out some crappy first drafts within a month and a half, but those are just first drafts. It takes months to revise and edit, and that’s not counting the time that a novel needs to sit before you regain your perspective. And that’s just my process. If you take the traditional publishing route, or even if you do the self-publishing route right, it could take months or years of percolating while editors look over your work and artists design your cover. You can finish a book and not see it for sale for years!

Torture! The whole reason we had to write the story in the first place was because we were dying to write it. And then we have to wait. It’s enough to drive us crazy (if we’re not already crazy). But that’s just the beginning. It takes time for a book to sell. It takes time for a career to take off. It takes time to build a back list. The whole thing takes serious, serious time.

Writers are Sensitive. When we write a book we put our whole soul into it. The well-known phrase “bleeding onto the page” is incredibly apt. I identify so much of myself from my writing that it’s hard to keep things in perspective sometimes. And that’s before sending my work to beta readers and editors. No novel is perfect the first time. In order to write something really good you first have to have someone tell you it’s really bad. You have to have an educated set of independent eyes look at it and point out the warts.As much as it hurts to have your work critiqued, that is nothing compared to the sting of the bad review. They come like thieves in the night, after you’ve bled on paper, after you’ve had an expert tell you what you did wrong, after you struggle to stay focused enough to revise and perfect, after you’ve exhausted yourself and your writerly resources making your novel the best it could be. That’s when some troll comes along and pans it. Or worse still, when some very intelligent reviewer doesn’t get it.

Writers are not the sort of people who can take criticism easily, and yet it’s an integral part of what we do. We are the kids who would burst into tears when one of the mean girls called us “ugly” in third grade … and yet we voluntarily put our soul out in public. We are just not the sort who are capable of receiving a one-star review without flopping on the couch with a box of wine and a gallon of ice cream. But we continue to do it. We continue to subject ourselves to torture.

So why do we do this? Why do we, the sensitive, impatient dreamers, continually force ourselves to focus and subject ourselves to criticism?

Because we have to. We can’t escape from it. The only reason we do what we do is because we could no more stop writing than we could stop breathing. Because the oxymoron of our existence is that we thrive on all of the things that are not natural to us. Man, we’re weird! But aren’t you glad we are?

The Promo That Changed Everything

Aug15

Yes! The numbers are (mostly) in at last and I can tell you all the story of the most nail-bitingly terrifying and outrageously successful book promo that I’ve ever done! This was the big one, folks. This was the one that changed everything, hopefully permanently. Here’s what happened….

So for my birthday I decided to run a little promo. I had read months ago in The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success, by Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords that a good free promotion should last at least a week. I had done a mini free promo of the first book in my medieval romance series, The Loyal Heart, over Easter weekend and saw a handful of extra sales. Cool! So taking what I knew from the book I planned to extend that a little more.

On about July 14th I set the price of The Loyal Heart at free on Smashwords. Yay! In the next couple of days I saw some downloads. Twenty, fifty, up over a hundred. Awesome! I was pleased. Sometime at the beginning of the week the book went free on iBooks. Now, because I distribute through Smashwords I couldn’t see the exact number of free books I was giving away, but I did notice that I was suddenly getting more star ratings. A handful a day as opposed to one every month or so. Okay, that must be good. A day or so later, The Loyal Heart went free on B&N. Still hard to tell exactly how many copies were being downloaded, but my rankings were inching up, so that was nice.Then came my birthday. I had been getting a lot of star ratings on iBooks, so I went onto my iTunes product page to see what the specifics were. Well, a LOT of the ratings were 5 stars. A couple were one or two stars. Sweet! Bad ratings mean legitimacy! Then I went looking for my ranking. Lo and behold, I was in the top five books for What’s Hot in Historical Romance! These are not just free books either. It was ALL Historical Romance. On Saturday I was at number one. I then spent the next week hovering around on that list in various spots. Very, very cool. But I still had no idea what the numbers were.

Then it all blew up. I awoke on Tuesday morning, July 24th to notice that The Loyal Heart was suddenly free on Amazon through price-matching. Yes, you don’t have to be a part of KDP Select to have a free book on Amazon. The thing with Amazon, however, is that you can see your book sales/downloads in real time. When I first looked at the page it said 151 free downloads. I clicked over to Facebook and about a minute later I went back to Amazon. The number was at 163. I blinked. 12 copies of my book had been downloaded in one minute? I clicked refresh. The number jumped to 169.

By lunchtime it was at 1200. The next morning it was over 3000. By the weekend it was at 20,000. By Monday it was 36,000. I hit number two on Amazon’s list of free Historical Romance downloads, number one in Historical, and I topped out at number 9 on Amazon’s top 100 Free Kindle Books. During the time The Loyal Heart was free on Amazon I averaged at around number 20 on the list of Top 100 Free Kindle Books. That’s for all genres combined.

I kinda felt like this
© Kiankhoon | Dreamstime.com

Fantastic, right? Well, sort of. The problem was that I had no idea when it was going to stop. No control whatsoever. The numbers were so mind-blowing that I became obsessed with checking them. Every hour or so I would feel the insane pull to look online. It wasn’t comfortable at all. It was all a little like being in a runaway train and not knowing when it was going to jump the tracks or fall off the bridge. And then came The Bad Review. Because the thing about having a popular free book is that people download and read it who don’t actually like the genre or the premise. They’re just reading it for free. Whether they “get” it or not is another story. And still the book continued to be free. Even though I was ready for it to stop. For the love of God, STOP already!I set the price back to normal on Smashwords on Saturday, July 21st. By the end of the next weekend Smashwords’ price distribution engines had finally gotten the message across to iBooks and B&N. The book returned to its regular price of $2.99. It took about two or three days to have it switched from regular price to free, but it took over a week to have it switched from free to regular price, about three times as long. But it was still free on Amazon.

That’s when I started noticing sales of the second book in the series, The Faithful Heart. Free books are one thing. People forking over $4.99, yes, $4.99, not $2.99, for the sequel is another thing entirely. That was the true test. It started with a sale here or there. Then those sales picked up to high single digits per day. Then they moved into double digits per day. Something was definitely catching on.

After eight days of being free on Amazon because of price-matching, The Loyal Heart finally returned to regular price. So what was my total free download number on Amazon? Just over 42,000. Total free downloads on B&N was about 2000. Apple hasn’t reported free downloads yet, but I’m going to make some assumptions and estimates based on where it was in the sales ranking all that time and say that I probably had over 50,000 copies of The Loyal Heart downloaded across various retailers during this promo.

What about residual sales, you ask? Everything I’ve heard from my fellow Indie authors who have done a free promo in recent months suggested to me that the moment the promo was over the numbers for The Loyal Heart would drop back to what they had been before. Yeah, that’s not what happened. Since the book went back to full price on Amazon on August 1st, I have sold for real cash money well over 200 copies. Since the start of the promotion I’ve sold over 400 copies of The Faithful Heart on Amazon and over 100 between iBooks and B&N. Oh yeah, and several copies of Our Little Secrets on all three of those platforms as well. I keep waiting for the momentum to slow down. It hasn’t yet. It might at some point. Or maybe it won’t.

To all this I have but one thing to say: WHAT THE HECK????? What did I DO????

And you may be asking yourself, what did you do that I can do too?

The truth is, I have no earthly idea what I did. I can tell you this much, I did several guest blog posts in July, The Loyal Heart was reviewed in In’Dtale Magazine right before the promo and was featured on Romcon.Inc during the promo, and as soon as it went free in all its different locations I posted the link on Twitter and to all of the Facebook groups I’m a part of. But that’s it really. I don’t think I did anything drastically different than anyone else. Maybe I somehow pleased the algorithm gods?

I will tell you one thing that I did do. I wrote the best book I could. I had it professionally edited and I had a professional cover design created for me. Never underestimate the power of professionals to do what they do best.

But I will say this too: Not knowing how long the promo was going to run or how many bad reviews I would get out of it was absolutely terrifying. I do not enjoy being out of control like that. It was incredibly stressful. So was my temporary addiction to checking numbers and reviews. It reminded me of my days suffering from anxiety disorders.

So would I do it again? No and yes. I don’t think I will ever offer The Loyal Heart or any of the Noble Hearts trilogy for free again. But once I have all four of the books in my Montana Romance series published I do believe I will offer Our Little Secrets for free. But I will expect it to be free for about two weeks. Also note, I won’t do it until the entire series is finished. Why? Because as fantastic as my sales have been this month, I’m kicking myself for not waiting until The Courageous Heart was published as well. Then readers who got hooked on the first book could have bought the entire series instead of having to wait. Lesson learned.

So the moral of the story is that free sells. Oxymoron, I know, but it’s true. Did I devalue my work by offering The Loyal Heart for free as many of my fellow Indie authors (who I absolutely respect to pieces) like to argue? I don’t see how when hundreds of people have been willing to pay $4.99 for the second book in the series and hopefully the third when it’s out.

And maybe it was luck that put me in exactly the right place at exactly the right time across three different platforms, but that’s the kind of luck I will take any day. Well, I’ll take the luck and I’ll take the royalty checks that I will be getting this fall.

UPDATE: A wonderful writer friend of mine shared with me today after reading this post how she had posted the link to a review she had done of TLH all over Twitter via Triberr and on a Reddit message board for free book links. I believe that this really helped the initial download spike, which probably seriously helped the algorithm and enabled the book to get such a high ranking so soon. So when and if you do your free promo, be sure to post the links to your book on as many free book sites, message boards, and Facebook pages as you can!

Five Reasons Why You Should Be Reading Indie Authors

Jul5

Ooo! The world of books is just so exciting these days! Everything is changing and change means fun. Granted, it also means stress, uncertainty, and violent mood-swings. … Or maybe that’s just me. But really, in the end the changes can only lead to a better world of reading for all of us.

What changes am I talking about? Why, the dawn and rise of Indie Authors, of course!

For those who are unaware, with the introduction of new options such as Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), Barnes & Noble’s Pub-it, and now a slew of other self-publishing and distributing platforms such as Smashwords, anyone who has a computer and an idea can publish a book.

No, really. It’s that easy. It’s also vastly complex, but that’s a blog post for a different day.

What does this mean for you, the reader? It means that you have many times the choices that you once had. So why should you choose to read a book by an author you’ve never heard of? Why, let me tell you….

1. Discover new authors before everyone else does - In the olden days, authors generally had to jump through years’ worth of hoops in order to put a book in your hands. This involved finding an agent who was willing to represent them and having that agent sell the book to a publisher who was willing to print it. As you can imagine, a tiny fraction of the writers who set out on this epic journey ever reached the finish.

That’s all changed. Time and time again you hear stories about Indie Authors who were rejected for years before finally setting out on their own to publish their book. And they succeeded. Big time. Several hundred thousand copies of a book later you can hear the collective thwack of hundreds of agents and publishers smacking their foreheads for not representing that author. For not representing that author sooner, that is. Today’s Indie Phenomenon is tomorrow’s New York Times bestseller. And you can say you knew them when.

2. Become the Gatekeeper yourself – I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “agents and publishers are the gatekeeper of quality writing”. It’s true to a certain extent. Historically agents and publishers have weeded out the problem children of the literary world and ensured that only high quality books end up in your hands. But as I hinted above, a lot of wonderful novels were delayed from getting into the hands of avid readers by this process.

Yep, there are a lot of under-edited, problematic self-published novels on the market. But how cool is it that you get to be the one who decides which of those have merit and promise and which ones need to go back to the drawing board? There is a whole world of unusual themes and unconventional ideas that are just waiting for YOU to be the one to decide if they sink or swim.

Which brings me to the next point….

3. Indie Authors take risks – It’s a well-known fact that publishers are wary of taking chances on concepts and themes outside of what they know sells. My first novel, The Loyal Heart, was rejected by a couple of agents who told me that they thought it was very good but wouldn’t represent it because they didn’t think it would sell. It’s Medieval Romance, you see, and in the Romance world right now if it’s not Regency of Georgian publishers are hesitant.

The same is true of other genres. I don’t blame publishers for sticking with what they know sells and being less certain about anything unusual, but there are a lot of unusual people out there. If you eat your cereal with a fork, Indie books might be for you. Indie Authors don’t have anyone telling them to color inside the lines.

4. Your money will go to a good cause – I don’t know what most of the world believes about what writers get paid, but unless your name is J.K. Rowling, Nora Roberts, or John Grisham it ain’t a lot. Very few writers can make a living off of writing alone in today’s world. On average, in the world of traditional publishing all but pennies of the cost that you pay for a book goes to the publishing company, book distributors, and agents.

Indie Authors generally collect anywhere from 30% to 70% of the profit off of every book they sell. Sounds good, right? It is. Although if you take into account that the most commonly accepted price for an Indie book is $2.99, when it’s not being sold at 99 cents, that is, it’s not as much as you’d imagine. Add to that the fact that professional editing can easily run more than $1,000 and a professional cover design can be upwards of $300, and you can see that publishing isn’t cheap.

But Indie Authors shell out the big bucks anyhow. Why? Because they are passionate about what they do. We write because our souls need to breathe.

5. Indie Authors love you – Personally, I feel like this is the best reason of all. All authors, J.K. Rowling too, love their readers. But for an Indie Author YOU are the difference between the angst of wondering if it’s all worth it and knowing that it is. Just one special fan, one person who says that your books get them through the long, cold winters (Katie, I’m looking at you!) or go with them on vacation, make everything worthwhile.

And there you have it. Indie Authors offer you more than just a book to read. They offer you a new relationship, a place of honor, and a level of respect that brings the world of creativity down to eye-level. Reading Indie books puts you in the driver’s seat and unfolds exciting new experiences for both you, the reader, and us, the author.

So what is your favorite Indie book? What has your experience of testing these new waters been like, as both a reader and a writer?

Merry Farmer

An Historical Romance