As I Tiptoe Onto the Minefield

I am back!

My kids are now in school.  I've created and emailed contracts to the faculty of our 4-state Wild Wild Midwest SCBWI Conference in 2013. And my book was "officially" released September 1!

So now is the time to promote it, right? Hooray!

And by "hooray" I mean: holy yikes.

I feel like I'm stepping onto a minefield. And I don't even mean because of the contents or title of my book, which is another thing all together. I mean this world of reviewers and authors and animosity and misinterpretation spooks me.

But I'm going to try my best for the sake of my publisher, my career and mostly for anybody out there that Rape Girl may possibly help. I just hope I can do it with only very minor explosions.

Anyone stepping out there with me? How do you feel about it?  

Goodreads Giveaway Tips--Don't Learn the Hard Way

I just posted my first book giveaway on Goodreads and already discovered 2 things I'll do differently next time.  Please remember these if you plan to set up your own Goodreads contest in the future.

1. Give yourself a couple days of lead time. I didn't realize until I'd filled out my giveaway form, and hit submit, that a Goodreads Librarian has to approve all giveaways before they go live which can take a day or two. This is a problem because you might lose a couple of days of your contest while waiting for approval, and more importantly, giveaways appear in order of start date--most recent first--so mine went up just this morning but was already buried by giveaways with a June 8 start date.

2. Those tags they make you enter are IMPORTANT. I just came up with some that seemed appropriate to my book. What I should have done was looked at how the book giveaways were set up. If you look at the sidebar of the giveaway page, it shows a list under "Brows By Tag" that you can click through to find books you might be interested in.  Luckily I included "young-adult" as a tag on mine, so my contest is listed under that link, but I failed to include "ya" or "teen" or "family" which would have helped make my book more visible.

I hope these tips help some of you!  Don't make the same mistakes I did. Of course, this may be common knowledge and I simply missed the memo, but if I'm not the only one who did please consider this your memo. :)

And I will say, despite the mistakes on my part,  I've seen a big jump in interest this morning with dozens of people adding my book to their "to-be-read" and other shelves. High-fives to everyone who did!

If you'd like a chance to win a signed hardcover of RAPE GIRL, please enter via this link:

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Rape Girl

by Alina Klein

Giveaway ends July 07, 2012.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Thanks, as always, for your support. <3