Writing Wednesday: Candy Hearts Sale and the Art of Promotion

A year ago, I was celebrating the release of my Candy Hearts series novella, SAY YES. I was part of a two-month long release party and push to get our sweet and sassy Valentine stories out there into the hands of the public. I personally reviewed the other 40 books in the series and posted them on the blog for all of January and February. It was a lot of reading and reviewing, none of which I regret as they were all pretty good stories... but I feel like my own little story got a bit lost in the shuffle.

SAY YES sounds like it should be a wedding story, but it's not. It's a second chance at romance story, the kind I totally favor to read and write. Set on Cape Cod during a snowy winter, a painter is trying to reinvent his career after the death of his wife changed his perspective on the world. A new gallery owner is looking to mend fences with her family and avoid the mistakes she's made in the past by dating tortured artists. In the end, the heated tension between them and the one sizzling sex scene at the end were not enough to sell Valentine novellas - I think readers were looking for a little more bang for their buck (or $1.99 in this case.)

Anyway, I held out hope that my publisher, The Wild Rose Press, would put together a few anthology volumes with these stories so that they'd have a renewed shot, but that's not happening this year. They are putting the stories on sale for the month, right through Valentine's Day, but only at their website.

 

For all the hoopla and promo that the authors banded together for last year, there's been very little this year. At least very little collaborative effort. And while I've posted the graphic here on my blog and on my Facebook page, I'm on deadline for another book and headed to California for a week-long sales conference for my day job... but I did sign up to be part of a Valentine promo party at a local library in February. And will be reading from my story-- the moderator said to bring either a sweet or spicy excerpt, that there will be a mix of passages read.

So do I go sweet  -- I love the first kiss under the streetlights in the snow scene -- or do I abandon my Valentine story and read a spicier sex scene from another of my books? Or even read the one sex scene from this book - even though it's the climax (no pun intended) of the entire novella?

Author dilemmas with no easy answers. There's probably a right answer, but I'm not sure how to decide. Except that I know sex sells.

All thoughts are welcome - and happy writing!