Happy Holidays to Everyone! My your season be merry and filled with light. (A good reading lamp.) Mine sure is. I just today received word my latest release, Literary Titan Gold Book award winner, Backlash, has been shortlisted for the Chanticleer Clue Award for suspense/thrillers. What a gift!
Celebrate the season with my latest award winning books, Backlash, a JadeAnne Stone Mexico Adventure #5 and my memoir of living in Mexico, Saints and Skeletons, available for a promotional price at @Smashwords as part of their 2023 End of Year Sale! Find my books, and many more, at https://www.smashwords.com/shelves/promos/ through January 1! #SmashwordsEoYSale #Smashwords. You can easily find the books through the search function under my name.
Okay, now that you have your book, let's get down to celebrating the season. Tonight I'm going to trim my tree to a good eggnog (with spiced rum), homemade cookies, and a sappy holiday romcom. Then I'll start my round of entertaining. Here's what I'm serving. JadeAnne's grandmother served one at table every Christmas Eve, but it's dramatic with any holiday feast!
Gaga's Persimmon Pudding
Ingredients
1 c. persimmon pulp
½ c. whole milk
1 Tbl. melted butter
½ tsp. vanilla
¼ tsp. cinnamon
½ c. chopped nuts (pecans go well with persimmon)
½ c. raisins ( I prefer golden)
2 tsp. baking soda
1 c. all purpose flour
1 c. sugar
Preparation
Preheat oven to 350
Mix pulp, milk, butter, vanilla, cinnamon, nuts, and raisins in a large bowl
In a smaller bowl, stir baking soda into flour and blend into persimmon mixture
Stir in sugar
Pour into a pudding (flan) mold or Bundt mold, or 2 qt stainless bowl
Place mold into a pan filled 1/2 “ deep with water and place in oven
Bake 1 hour
Decorate with holly. Flame at table
Serve with hard sauce (Joy of Cooking) or Rum Butter and mounds of whipped cream
To flame: fill a small pitcher with brandy or rum , pour a good amount over the pudding and into the. plate. Light a match and watch the blue flames! With a spoon, keep the flames going by dipping alcohol from the plate over the pudding. Don’t worry if the spoonfuls are flaming. It burns at a low temp and burns out fast, but while it lasts, it makes an impressive display. Be sure to dim the dining room lights and flame with fanfare!
Rum Butter
Cream together ½ c. brown sugar, ½ stick butter, 1 tsp nutmeg. Slowly add 2 Tbls. dark rum, 1 tsp cream sherry and whip until fluffy.
Your past will always find you. And it’s going to take everything you love away. Including your life.
“I graduated from college in 1971 with degrees in engineering and computer science. I was young; I believed in my country. The government.” Jackman Quint grimaced. “I believed in democracy and freedom—that the government had the citizens’ backs. It was my duty to preserve these ideals. I joined the ROTC. When I graduated I enlisted in the Army knowing I’d be deployed to Vietnam; I was going to be a hero.”
But everything changed when NSA spook, Chuck Nader got hold of him.
“I did some shitty things during that war. The whole thing was a lie. Vietnam was hell. I let Nader blackmail me into drugs and moving Vietcong opium through his network to the States. Got caught. Did time. But there was more. Secrets. I can’t say how or what, but my gut is telling me they’re connected.”
Now, thirty-two years later, just as Quint has reunited with his daughter JadeAnne, lost to him in the evacuation of Saigon, and found a woman he can love, Chuck Nader has shown up in Mexico City, and he's out for blood.
Grab your copy in Kindle, e-pub and paperback at your favorite on-line retailer.
I’ve maintained silence for long enough! Here’s what I’ve been doing:
PLANNING MY AUTHOR PLATFORM.
This blog is all about "building a better story," and I’ve come to the realization that story is more than craft. Think about it. You can write perfectly crafted stories or articles or novels or poems, but what if no one reads them?
This is my story of presenting my work to the public.
I follow several blogs relating to writing and publishing. My go to is
Helping authors flourish in the digital age, she provides wonderful insight into writing and publishing. Recently she brought subscribers a webinar with Tim Grahl, an expert in author platforms. I attended and have since purchased and read his book, The First 1000 Copies: The Step-By-Step Guide To Marketing Your Book.
Do I hear you groaning and grumbling out there?
"I haven’t finished my book…"
"I’m writing fiction… "
"I haven’t published yet…"
I thought the same things until I attended the webinar,
“Predictable Book Sales” The 3 Step Framework to build a killer Launch platform
and learned: if you plan on publishing and finding an audience to read (and hopefully buy) your work, NOW is the time to start working on your author platform.
The webinar offered participants a system that works and is “repeatable and predictable.” That caught my eye. In grad school, we learned about research. Good research is repeatable and the results will be predictable. It sounded logical to me, but would this system work to sell a series of thrillers set in Mexico against the greed and violence of organized crime? We’ll see!
I’ve committed to developing this system for my future book sales starting now.
Grahl calls this a Connection System. He contends that you as an author need to connect with two kinds of people: Fans and Influencers and build relationships with them so that they become involved with what you’re doing. It’s his definition of marketing: creating long-lasting connections with people. and, Grahl adds—“being relentlessly helpful."
Authors that focus on relationships and help are the successful ones.
I hope everyone isn’t cringing with the mental images of long hours spent on Facebook, Google+, Linkedin and Twitter. I have scant tolerance for social media! (Okay, okay, I love Pinterest and my character, JadeAnne, now has her own board.) Happily, I've learned social media is just a tool in the marketing toolbox, not the Connection System itself.
The Connection System is built on three key concepts and I’ll talk about these and more in future posts as I document my platform building progress and finish The Hydra Effect Book 2: Coyoacan A JadeAnne Stone Mexico Adventure.
When I submit to agents and publishers, I’ll have my platform in place—¡Ojalá!
