Friday Fun Facts: Win a Prize! (or more than one...)

Hey everyone, The Romance Studio is holding a Valentine Gala from today through Tuesday, Feburary 14th. For the next 4 days, romance authors will be chatting and posting excerpts...and you can win a lot of great prizes! I'm giving away an Amazon Gift Card AND the winner's choice of any of my ebooks. Click here for the main Gala page (then click on "Party Giveaways" to see the list of all the prizes).

And tomorrow I'm joining my fellow Hudson Valley RWA authors at the Barnes and Noble in the Palisades Mall for an afternoon of meeting and chatting with readers and shoppers! Should be fun (as long as the weather holds...believe it or not, after an almost snowless winter, we might be getting some of the white stuff tomorrow).

Happy Weekend!

Writers' Wednesday: Listening to a Book

Yes, I skipped my Monday blog post....suffering from an awfully bad head cold that is making the rounds at work. Why, oh why, do people INSIST on coming to work when they're sick? I suppose I shouldn't fault the devotion of the students, maybe not even the other teachers either, but really, martyring yourself by dragging your sick self coughing to work is only going to spread around your lovely cold germs for the rest of us.

Aargh....

Well, I'm on the mend now, and anxiously awaiting the narrator demo tapes for the first of my 3 novels that will be produced as audio books this summer. When AudioLark started up a couple of years ago, and did my first 2, that wasn't an option, but now they let the authors have a listen to the narrators they're considering, and we get a say in who will read our words. How cool is that??

Friday Fun Facts: Hero Worship Contest Starting Soon!

Well, it's February, and that means time for Valentine's Day and my First Annual Facebook Hero Worship Contest!

From February 11 - 18th I'll be holding a "Hero Worship" contest. Every day that week, I'll post an excerpt from either my published books OR my works-in-progress...spotlighting all my wonderful heroes, of course! All the posts will be up on my Facebook Fan Page, so you'll have to "Like" me over there if you haven't yet. Then, all you have to do at the end of the week is email me which hero was your favorite. That's it! I'll choose 2 winners from everyone who emails (yup, count 'em - two!) to receive their choice of any of my ebooks AND a $10 Amazon gift certificate. Plus you get to drool over some romance heroes just in time for Valentine's Day...

Hope you'll join me :)

Writers' Wednesday: Battling Online Pirates

Hey writer friends, here's a link you might want to check out, especially if you're e-published and you've found some online scoundrels posting your ebooks for "free". Yeah, those e-pirates are awfully tough to track down, but www.muso.com is a site that will do it for you. For $15/month, the site scans the Internet daily to look for illegally posted "shared" files that violate copyrights. They'll send you an email every day, and then you can have them send an official DMCA letter to have the file removed (the monthly fee covers 60 "takedowns" although you can pay for more).

So far I'm pleased with the site. It only found 15 illegally shared files of mine the first day, and those were taken down within 24 hours. I'll probably continue with them until/unless there's not a need...which, unfortunately, may not be anytime soon, knowing piracy sites. But at least there's something authors and other artists can do to protect our copyrighted works. We've certainly worked hard enough to produce them!

**Note: email me at allieb@allieboniface.com for the email link that will take you to the $15/month fee, otherwise I think it's $25/month if you go straight through the main Muso site.

Monday Mentionables: New Banners!

I have two new banner ads today, courtesy of the design staff over at The Romance Studio. Click here to see the banner ad and click here to see the headliner ad, featuring my 3 "One Night" books.

I LOVE the second one, especially! Don't you? And if you check out The Romance Studio, you'll see it live, starting later today!

Friday Fun Facts

Happy Friday!!

Fun Fact #1: I have a "first kiss" excerpt up at Coffee Time Romance - check it out!

Fun Fact #2: I'll be holding a Hero Worship Contest over at my Facebook Fan Page from February 11-18, and the winner will receive their choice of any ebook or audio book. All you have to do is "like" me there to find out more...

And Fun Fact#3: If you're looking for a reasonably priced, professional web designer, try Glass Slipper Web Design. She has an expansive portfolio to look through and works with all budgets. She's been my web designer from the start, and I've been nothing but happy!

Writers' Wednesday: The Influence of Charles Dickens

I read an article in Time magazine yesterday about Charles Dickens, and why he was and is such a popular author. Interesting: he was one of the earliest authors who really wrote for his audience, who understood what it took to make a connection with readers and who tailored his stories and his characters to what he thought people wanted (and later in his career, messages he wanted to send about the world he was living in). Really interesting stuff. Of course, he was the master of serialized fiction, and he made a career out of writing stories with chapters that end in cliff-hangers, with plotlines that continually move forward and characters we always want to know more about.

I can't say I have a favorite by him (I did take a Dickens seminar in college, where we had to read a book a week by him...yikes...), though I do like the very traditional A Christmas Carol and the less-traditional Bleak House (great characters, and great commentary on society getting caught up in business at the expense of the individual).

But Dickens knew what to do as a writer - connecting with readers is so valuable, and yet some authors definitely do it better than others. Social media does help in this respect, I think. Even those writers who aren't particularly comfortable talking with people in person, face to face, can do so on the safety of the computer in arenas like Facebook and blogs and chat groups and such. I think readers like the sense that an author listens to their opinions and cares about what they have to say about the world.

Charles Dickens. Huh. Never pegged him as a visionary, but guess what? Maybe we can all take a cue from him. Can you picture his Facebook page? Status update: Wrote 500 words today. Time for a new quill pen...