His Perfect Passion

Now, isn’t that pretty? My book released yesterday and I must say the excitement of first sales is pretty heady. The nice folks at Bookstrand give you a sales tracker that lets you know how many books you sell every hour. For new authors here is a tip… “you check it a lot.” *smiling wink*

Upon opening my email this morning I was thrilled to see the banner that was created for my first book. I love that the blue shawl got added to this one. It’s definitely part of the story and it pleases me to know that whoever made the banner actually read the cover questionnaire I filled out way back in February. I’m telling you, Siren-Bookstrand has done me good and I couldn’t be happier with my first publishing experience.

Excitement is good and motivating to most people, BUT like most things, needs tempering. You’ve all heard the saying~ Too much of good thing…

So, it’s pretty simple really…if I can just restrain myself from returning to my Sales Report, oh, every 10 minutes or so, I might actually get my word count in for the book I’m writing now.

~Raine

My contract for, His Perfect Passion came and with it, some Homework assignments. First, I had to describe my characters in specific detail, height, weight, physical characteristics, etc. along with other elements key to the storyfor a cover questionnaire. I was invited to provide a link to a photograph of a person I could “see” as my character. This part was fun. I have found inspiration in paintings several times for my writing and it was a John William Waterhouse painting of Boreas that inspired my vision of the heroine, Marianne. The hero of my book, Darius Rourke, was just as fun to imagine. Darius is half English, half Italian, and a cultured but domineering gentleman. I found the perfect man one day in a cologne ad from a magazine. From the moment I spotted the photo I could not picture anyone else as my Darius. He is him, in my vision at least. Actually, ‘he’ is a Spanish model named, Oriol Elacho. I love his hands in the picture. You can feel the ‘cultured elegance’ just by looking at his hands. Delicioso…

zegnacolonia 2 — Oriol Elacho as Darius Rourke

The less fun part was writing three separate book blurbs. The first: 25 words or less for use on ads. The second: 50 word blurb for use on the website. The third: 150 words or less for the back of the book. Now, this was rather hard to do in my opinion, and the hardest blurb, by far, was the 25-word one. I did it, but it took me several hours to get it right. Condensing a novel down to just two sentences and conveying the essence of your story is a challenge. As a writer you have to make your book sound interesting enough that people will want to read it. That’s the tricky part…but also the beauty of writing–the part that keeps me typing away.

Raine

They made me a banner~

Contracts, Covers, and Blurbs…