Thomas Becket's Hero?: Anselm of Canterbury

Today, I get to post over at English Historical Fiction Authors about the archbishop who defied a king...two kings, actually. No, it's not Thomas Becket. It's his predecessor, Anselm. One of the interesting things I discovered while researching this is that it was Thomas Becket who requested that Anselm be canonized as a saint. It certainly makes sense, given that Becket was following in Anselm's footsteps by defying royal authority and defending the power of the Church.

English Historical Fiction Authors is a fabulous blog run by Debra Brown with around forty member authors and a new historical post every day. The blog celebrated its first anniversary a few months back and Debra is compiling a book of the first year's blog posts, to be published by Madison Street Publishing. A very exciting project for us, and lots of proofreading for me to do! I'm thrilled to get to read through all the posts again and help present them in a more accessible format to readers. The release date for Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors has not yet been set, but I'll be sure to keep you posted.

Questions for a Self-Published Author: Interview at Ashley Barron's Blog

In September and October I had the chance to do several interviews with historical fiction bloggers on my virtual book tour for Road from the West. Most of the questions involved the inspiration for and the plot of the book and there were a few personal questions about my life outside of authorship.

Today I have an interview of a totally different nature over at Ashley Barron's blog, a fellow self-published author. This interview focuses mostly on my publishing journey and the hurdles I have overcome to get my books out to readers.   The decision to self-publish, how I market my books, how I use social media--those are all topics I get to address in today's interview. If you're interested in a candid story of an indie author's path to publishing, head on over to Ashley's blog to get the scoop.

Madison Street Publishing

When I published I Serve independently in June of 2009, I will confess that I had no idea what I was doing. I wrote the book, had it formatted by a friend/graphic designer, submitted it to a Print On Demand company, and tossed it out into the great unknown. Six months later, I had sold about one hundred copies to friends and family and decided it had been a fun adventure, although not a particularly profitable one. 

Enter David Spears--new husband and self-appointed marketing director. At the end of 2009, two weeks after we were married, he convinced me to format I Serve as an e-book for Amazon's Kindle and other e-readers. Then he began a learn-as-you-go marketing campaign sending review copies to book bloggers and buying ads on Kindle promotion sites. I was dubious (which is actually a euphemism for: I fought him every step of the way). But despite my self-deprecating pessimism and because of his energetic optimism, I Serve took off and entered the Top One Hundred List of Amazon's Historical Fiction for Kindle. As I write, we have sold 6346...wait, make that 6347 copies of I Serve, most of them in the e-book format--small potatoes for some authors, but big news for us.

Next month my second book Road from the West is being released, and with the experience and marketing savvy we've accumulated over the past year and a half, we're hopeful that the launch will be a success. This time we're releasing the book under the auspices of Madison Street Publishing, a new publishing company that we started this summer. With Madison Street Publishing we hope to provide a good home for my books as well as help other new authors find their niche in the changing market of today's publishing world.

Madison Street Publishing was founded on the simple idea that the story and the author who created it are the most important components of the publishing industry. Publishing companies should work for the authors, not authors for the publishing companies. MSP intends to live by this philosophy by putting our money where our mouth is and giving our authors the lion's share of their books' profits. At Madison Street Publishing, we mean it when we say that the story is our bottom line. Stop by our website to learn more about this exciting new endeavor.