New Release

Trouble Down the Road, the new book from author Bettye Griffin and follow-up to The People Next Door, hits bookstores today. Trouble Down the Road is filled with the passions and drama of Suzanne Betancourt, married to her former boss Bradley Betancourt, whose life is made complicated by Lisa, her next-door neighbor and Bradley's ex-wife, and Micheline Trent, who Suzanne suspects has set her sights on Bradley, not to mention the neighbors down the street whose son jumps into a quickie marriage with Suzanne's newly pregnant sister. Publisher's Weekly calls "a tart and torrid tempest." Read more about the book here, and check it out.

Guest Blog: Bettye Griffin

It's always a fun change-of-pace to welcome guest bloggers to the keyboard, and today we welcome Bettye Griffin. Her new title, Trouble Down the Road, will be released from Kensington/Dafina on April 27th. Without further ado:

One of the most challenging aspects of writing for today’s audience is that readers don’t want “The End” to really mean, well, the end. Even with a story that ties up all loose ends (and in my opinion a good story should, unless another installment is going to follow in a month or two), the question is almost inevitable: When will the sequel be out?

I received many such requests following the publication of my debut work of women’s fiction, The People Next Door, in 2005. I resisted the idea at first—I wanted to move on to other storylines and characters—but then an idea began to form, and before I knew it I had an entire storyline to update readers on what those initial characters are doing now. That story is being published under the title Trouble Down the Road and will be available to consumers on April 27th.

Readers have been emailing me as they’ve learned that my new book features characters from The People Next Door as well as my sophomore women’s fiction effort, Nothing But Trouble. It’s really a compliment to a writer when readers ask for a sequel, for it shows that they’ve made a connection with the characters the writer created and want to know, and then what happened? But, just as Trouble Down The Road was written five years after the publication of The People Next Door, the action also takes place five years later. That’s the type of sequel that works best for me…one that allows both myself and the characters to grow. The long time lapse also means it’s not a requirement for readers to pick up copies of The People Next Door (although I wouldn’t mind it, of course). The actions of the past are touched on sufficiently to bring new readers up to speed about what they need to know about the characters’ pasts.

How do you like your sequels?

Happy News of Reviews

On the topic of brief-good-news-items-for-a-Monday, Bettye Griffin's title A New Kind of Bliss earned a spot in Urban-Reviews.com's Best Reviewed Books of 2009 list for garnering a Top Shelf rating--5 stars. Additionally, Save the Best for Last (which Elaine blogged about here) earned an Honorable Mention from Urban-Reviews.com for its 4-1/2 star rating. Congratulations, Bettye!

self-publishing

It seems like every conference, panel, or presentation I attend, someone asks about self-publishing. Will I hurt my chances to have a trade house pick up my project if I go ahead and self-publish? {in some cases, yes, unless of course you sell thousands of copies quickly, then it’s a great way to great way to get noticed, ask Zane} Isn’t self-publishing a good way to get noticed by editors? {probably not, unless you get lots of wonderful reviews and sell lots of copies quickly. Editors and agents typically have enough submissions on their desks without having to troll self-publishing sites.} Why aren’t self-published books given the same treatment as those published by traditional publishing houses? {While yours may, of course, be the exception, traditional publishers generally provide a measure of quality control that self-published works lack. To maximize limited resources of time and money, most readers are likely to look to the traditionally published.} And then from those who’ve tried the self-publishing or [heaven forbid!] vanity publishing route, the saddest of all questions: why isn’t my book selling/getting noticed? {Well, self-publishing means that you have to do marketing and promotion all on your own. If you’re not fully committed, the book is bound to fail.}

From what I’ve seen, authors who go into self-publishing with their eyes wide open and who have a strong sense of what they’re doing and why, have the most success. One of my authors, Bettye Griffin is a great, recent example. She is the author of sixteen published books of romance and women’s fiction with such publishers as Kensington, Harlequin and BET Books. Her latest, A New Kind of Bliss, was released by Dafina in May of this year.

Well, Bettye had this story that she had been thinking about and working on for several years. It’s a modern-day marriage of convenience story involving a strong, independent woman who finds herself in the U.S. illegally and the two men who offer to come to her assistance. As her agent, I had tried on several occasions to interest editors at traditional publishing houses in the story, but no one seemed to want to take a chance. So this year Bettye just decided to publish it on her own.

First, Bettye did what every good author must do. She wrote the best manuscript she possibly could. Then, because she understood the value of a good editor, she actually hired someone to go through and professionally edit her manuscript. I championed this decision because I know how hard it is for any author to see all the forest for the trees when she is deep into a manuscript. Everyone slips up from time to time (e.g., changing a character’s name on page buried deep in the story) and it takes a neutral party trained in such copy-editing skills to really work the kind of magic a published book needs. Then when the manuscript was polished, Bettye set out to handle all of those things that publishers typically do.

She designed an interesting cover, wrote clever and engaging cover copy, and with the help of the printer that she secured for the project, selected the size, fonts, page layout, and made all the other design decisions necessary to pull off a professional product. Once she knew she would have a great looking book to sell, she then went out in search of distributors. You’ll see that her book is available at Amazon (both as an e-book for the Kindle and in print form) and on her own website. She's also working on local bookstores, both to carry the book and for signings. All of these are arrangements that she has had to make on her own. She also contacted friends and reviewers and sent out copies so that she could get reviews posted to entice people to buy her book. As I understand it, sales are going well and Bettye’s delighted at the decision she made. To read more about how she made her decision to self-publish, see her blog, and definitely be on the lookout for her book -- a great read.