Ramping up the PR Machine

I learned at ballet class last night that two of the dancers in the production I saw grew up at my ballet school, including the "Aurora" in the production. If I get to class early next week, I'll have to check out the various Nutcracker photos on display to see if I can spot them as kids.

In book-type news, we settled on a lot of things about launching the new series. The first book in that series will be coming out December 3. That will be both print and e-book, and we're checking with Audible to see if the audio will be available at the same time. That's also around the time that Random House is supposedly going to do another limited-time 99 cent promo on the first Enchanted Inc. book and the time that the entire Enchanted Inc. series will be available on audio in hard copy (CDs, I guess). So, December will be a big month for me, and I'm hoping that brings about some synergy, with the boost from one thing boosting other things.

And we decided to keep it simple and call the new series by the first book title, since the first book is called A Fairy Tale, which fits the whole series. So it's the Fairy Tale series. The second book will be out early next year, but some of that depends on when the copyeditor can get to it. She's got a lot of projects coming, but some of them are late, so mine may be able to be squeezed in.

So, after next week's vacation, be prepared to start getting info about the new series as I ramp up the publicity machine. Or, the way I operate, force the publicity machine to sputter into some kind of life. You'd think I would be better at it, considering that was my day job career, but there's a reason I no longer have that job and was willing to spend years eking out a living rather than go back to it. Having to do that work again makes me twitchy, and it seems even worse doing it for myself. At least when I was working at the agency, it was like "Hey, here's this thing that people are paying me to promote." Now it's like "Like me! Like me! See, look what I did!" And that's rather uncomfortable. I need minions. Then they could go out and tell the world how awesome I am while I sit back and blush awkwardly.

I finished going over the page proofs for next summer's book, and now I need to finish proofreading book 2 in the Fairy Tale series. Then I need to tinker with the cover copy for the first book. And then I'll be getting ready to go into vacation mode. Because, of course, the vacation has its own to-do list.