Where Women Rule!--Instafreebie Giveaway

If you like either women's fiction or fantasy, then I have 101 choices for you. There's a giveaway on Instafreebie called Where Women Rule running through July 3rd where you can download a copy of Scattered Seasons (if you don't already have it) and a hundred other books, including Hereafter by my blogging buddy Terri Bruce. I have to check out some of the other books myself, so I hope you will too!

Lady Gwendolyn lo Havil is an Ava Spring, born to heal others and lead the Season Avatars of her generation. Season Avatars with divine magic must work in groups of four to save the country of Challen from Chaos Season, times when all of the seasons appear at once. When the current Ava Spring dies in a riding accident, Gwen must find the other three Season Avatars she will link with.  But two of them are missing, and with Gwen's own magic crippled by a cursed pottery shard, she will have to use all of her skills to find the Avatars scattered across the country of Challen. During her journey, she meets a stranger who claims to know the shard's origin. Is he truly an ally of the Season Avatars, or is he trying to stop them from uniting?

Fierce Hearts: Women of Sci-Fi and Fantasy Giveaway

One of the ways I've been promoting Scattered Seasons is by giving it away on Instafreebie. Currently, it's part of the Fierce Hearts: Women of Sci-Fi and Fantasy Group Giveaway. This event runs through the end of the month and features over 130 free books. Even if you already have my book, check out all the other ones available! You just might find a new favorite book or author.

Marketing Mondays

I've decided I need to be a better marketer (among many other things), so I'm setting aside some time each Monday evening to work on it. Part of that will be updating my newsletter subscriber list on Mailchimp. (I use Instafreebie to distribute a free copy of Scattered Seasons to new subscribers, but for some reason Instafreebie doesn't automatically send the e-mail addresses to Mailchimp, even though it's set up to. I'm going to try changing something to see if that helps.) It can also be time for writing blog posts, especially guest ones; planning sales; buying ads; and playing around with Adobe Spark. (This is a free online program that allows you to make images, videos, and other social graphics. I plan to make graphics with lines from my stories and share them.) More ideas will probably come to me with more experience.

Do you do marketing on a regular basis? If so, what do you do? Feel free to share in the comments.

2016 Reading Review and 2017 Goals

Happy New Year! I hope you enjoyed the holidays. I didn't get as many "fun" activities done during my break as I'd hoped, but I purged a lot of old documents and other things from my office. I also updated the back matter (including book links and info about my Instafreebie giveaway) in all my works and put everything in wide distribution.

Anyway, I managed to get a lot of reading done on December 30th and finished the year with 202 books read. (Goodreads includes everything from short stories to multi-book editions as a single book, and my reading spanned the gamut.) Here's the breakdown by genre:

Science Fiction: 34
Fantasy: 95 (this is always my biggest category)
Other: 26
Non-Fiction: 47

Most of my stories were eBooks, but about 67 of the books were paper. The vast majority of those were library books. Only a handful were books owned by me or a family member. My paper To-Be-Read stack comes up to my shoulders, and I doubt it'll shrink much in 2017.

Here are some of the standout reads for me this year:I'm too lazy to hyperlink them all, but please let me know if you'd like more information about a particular book.

The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World
Binti
1491
Uprooted
Wonder City Stories
The Ugly Princess
Miss Landon and Aubranael
Sorcerer to the Crown
Too Much of a Good Thing
Kingfisher
The Dorito Effect
The Sixteen Burdens
The Deathsniffer's Assistant

For 2017, I've scaled back my Goodreads reading challenge to 180 books. I might unofficially strive for 200 books since that's a more impressive number, but I don't want to worry about making my goal as much as I did last year.

Here are my writing and publishing goals for this year:

Writing

1. Complete the Young Seasons short story collection. I'm almost done with the last story, but I'm still working on the resolution.
2. Complete a children's (middle-grade level) book that I've already started. I may publish this under a pseudonym, so I'm not going to discuss it much in detail yet.
3. Draft the first book in a new urban fantasy series. I need to do some more research and story development before I start. This one may carry over to 2018 if necessary.
4. If time permits, finish some of the short stories that have been hanging around for a while.
5. Write a holiday short story set in the Season Avatars world.

Publishing

1. The Young Seasons collection, tentatively in the first quarter of the year.
2. Summon the Seasons, the fifth and final book in the Season Avatars series. This may come out mid-year or later.
3. The Season Avatars holiday story mentioned earlier, probably in November or December.


Do you set goals for yourself every year? If so, feel free to share them in the comments.