Guest Blog & Contest with Author Terry Spear

Just to keep you all on your toes, I have a second guest this week! Author Terry Spear is doing a bit of a blog tour to promote her new release 'Legend of the White Wolf'. Her newest book is the fourth part in her Werewolf Series and books 5 & 6 are also due to be released this year.

I hope you all enjoy Terry's guest blog and that it gives you a little idea of how book publishing works. Don't forget to enter the great contest she is running! You can find the details on how to enter at the bottom of the guest blog.

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The Good and the Bad of Publishing

Thanks so much to Amberkatze for having me here today! She asked me to speak on the good and bad of being published.

Well, I can tell you the bad part of being published is deadlines! :-) Once upon a time, long, long ago, I wrote at my own leisure. I wasn’t published, you see. And you thought there wasn’t anything good about not being published! But in those long years past, I could write, or not. I could start another story, if I got stumped on the other, and another, and another. I could have twenty unfinished manuscripts and it didn’t matter. That is the good thing about being unpublished. No deadlines.

Fast forward to today. The good thing about being published is deadlines. I know, I know, that’s also the bad thing about being published. But just think—with a deadline, it means you’ve sold. With a deadline, it means you’ll build up a fan base. With deadlines, it means you’ll quit procrastinating! And you’ll concentrate on writing that story that needs to be told.

Another bad thing about being published is that you can’t write exactly what you want to write. You brand yourself as you build up a fan base. At least until you’re really well established. Then some authors are able to leap into another genre and are able to pull it off. But in the beginning, you have to stick to something so that readers will begin to follow you, and expect that your writing will be funny, or romantic, or mysterious, or suspenseful, or out of this world. You can no longer just write anything for the fun of it. You have an obligation to your readers to write what they expect you to write.

The good thing about being published is that you can’t write exactly what you want to write. I know, I know, that’s also the bad thing about being published. But just think—by writing in a similar vein, you improve your story-telling because you’re no longer a jack-of-all writing ventures, but more of an expert. You develop a following, which means sales, which makes both your publisher happy and you happy, and your readers happy, and they all want more of the same.

Another bad thing about being published is that it is no longer possible to just write the book, sell it, and expect the publisher to sell it for you. Years ago, I remember an author saying how her children’s book was discontinued, and she tried everything to get the publisher to keep it in stock. But sales were just too poor and they wouldn’t do it. She didn’t realize she should have attempted to market it herself. She had the background, the ability, the contacts, but she just figured it was in the publisher’s court. She was done with it once she’d submitted it. She ended up begging another smaller company to reprint the book, and this time she made a monumental effort to market it herself, and it was quite successful. Authors complain that if they didn’t have to spend so much time marketing their books, they could write so much more. So yes, this can be a downside to being published.

The good thing about being published is that you can market your own book! You knew I was going to say that, right? Yep, I love visiting with fans, sharing my secrets as to why I wrote the books I did, enjoying comments, answering questions, expanding my pack when it’s way too small as it is. I worked hard to write the book, edit it, and edit it some more. I want to see that it’s successful, so though I can’t afford to spend a lot of money on the venture, I’m more than happy to write guest blogs, do interviews, and anything else I can to help promote the books. I never want to be in a situation where I have to find another publisher for a book I lovingly wrote because I hadn’t bothered to help market it. And I love when fans want to see more of other characters in new books. To me, this is the ultimate benefit from author marketing!

So those are some of the pitfalls and the great things about being published. Deadlines, branding your writing style, and marketing. And with four books in the werewolf series already out, four more to come, and more after that, I’d say the benefits outweigh the pitfalls any day!

I hope you’ll read the wolf series if you haven’t already! And thanks again to AmberKatze for having me as her guest today!

LEGEND OF THE WHITE WOLF—IN STORES FEBRUARY 2010

Award-Winning Author introduces the next installment of her paranormal romance series
A 2008 Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year Award Winner!
Night Owl Romance Reader Choice Award for Best Paranormal 2008

In this fourth in Spear's series, Private Eye Cameron MacPherson and Faith O'Mallery are both on quests that lead them into the world of magical wolves...

Cameron arrives in the Canadian Arctic to search for his partners in his P.I. business who are late returning from a hunting trip. Faith is there to discover what her father had seen in the same area years earlier that had made him lose touch with reality—man-wolves, he called them.

The two tumble into an icy world of enemies bent on destroying the lupus garou kind. As they turn into lupus garou themselves, and bond with the pack that only they can rescue from destruction, Cameron and Faith find their soul mates in each other.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves, Terry Spear has an MBA from Monmouth University. As an eclectic writer, she dabbles in the paranormal, historical and true life stories for both teen and adult audiences. She is the author of Winning the Highlander’s Heart and The Vampire in My Dreams (young adult). Spear lives in Crawford, Texas.

You can find Terry at the following places:

www.terryspear.com
http://www.wickedlyromantic.blogspot.com/
http://casablancaauthors.blogspot.com
http://fierceromance.blogspot.com
http://www.facebook.com/reqs.php#/home.php?ref=home
http://shapeshifterromance.wordpress.com

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Contest Time!

Terry is going to send two lucky winners a copy of Legend of the White Wolf. The 2 winners must be in the US or Canada (sorry!) so please don't enter if you don't have a mailing address in either of these countries.

How to enter!

Terry's books are all about magical wolves. So my question is, if you could be any magical animal, what would you be?

No Magical Animal = No entry!

Earn entries for each place you link this contest on the net. You can post on Facebook, Twitter & MySpace but make sure you add links here for me to confirm your entries!

You can also earn extra entries by emailing your friends about the contest. Just make sure you send a copy of your email or receipt to me at Amberkatzes_book_blog at gmx dot net.

The contest will stay open until Sunday 21st of February 2010 4pm CET and the winner will be picked by a randomizer. Entrants should check back to see if they have won. I do not hunt down winners and will pick new winners for any prizes not claimed within 7 days.

Good Luck!