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Thursday, June 20, 2013

Lost Book Tour and Guest Post



Sometimes you need someone else to help you find your way.

Maria's life was torn apart when she was fifteen, and for seven years she's kept her terrible secret hidden from the world. Now, in her final semester of college, she still struggles against paralyzing fear just trying to speak up in class, and the terror and helplessness linger on in her nightmares.

Across campus, Owen sees his scars in the mirror every morning while he gets ready for class. They remind him of the broken home he left behind, the father he hates and fears, and the little sister he couldn't protect. Now, in his final semester of college, he's scared that he may have to return to the hell he called home after staying away for almost five years.

When Owen becomes a teaching assistant for one of Maria's classes, they find themselves irresistibly drawn to each other. As the two learn each other's secrets and grow closer, they realize that although they may be lost, they're not alone anymore.

This new adult contemporary romance is recommended for ages 17+ due to heavy subject matter.

Released: March 25th 2013 
PurchaseAmazon

I would like to thank Nadia for Coming out and doing a guest post on this little old blog. My very first guest blog... so exciting. And if you haven't picked up lost and read it... do it now.... this book had me in tears most of the time but it was amazing!!!!

About the Author
Nadia Simonenko
Nadia Simonenko is a scientist and author currently living in Indianapolis with her husband, two cats and a dog. When she isn’t writing, she develops new oncolytic compounds and dreams about someday getting to take a vacation.

Official links: nadiaromance.com | twitter.com/NadiaSimonenko


Ten Things I Wish I’d Known About Being an Author…
#1 – Writing is hard work.  No duh, right?  Seems like such a no-brainer now that I’ve done it a few times, but when I first started a few years ago, I was like “Oh hey, I’ll write a book.  How hard can it be?”   Really, really freakin’ hard.  Which leads me into number two…
#2 – Ergonomics are really important.  Yeah, I rolled my eyes too.  I had double tendonitis for four months after the publication of Lost.  Why?  Because I was a moron and typed and edited the vast majority of the book on a tiny laptop sitting on my lap with my feet up on the sofa.  I also refused to stop writing when my wrists started hurting, because I’d set myself a release deadline and I had no intention of missing it.  One release date isn’t worth the nearly four months of lost writing time, I’ll tell you that.  Nor the pain.  Tendonitis really, really hurts when both your day job and night job involve a lot of wrist movements.  I now type on a regular desk with an ergo keyboard, use a proper mouse with wrist-rest, and purchased voice recognition software for my planning work so that I can save my hands for the nitty-gritty stuff.  (They’re still not all the way better.)
#3 – Your job is more than just writing.  I’m a self-published author, which means that I have no support network unless I make it for myself.  This means doing your own marketing work as necessary, designing your own covers or finding cover designers, doing self-editing or finding editors, so on and so forth.  I work with a wonderful group of romance authors, and we all share editing duties and critical reads of each other’s manuscripts to try to get around the editing woes, but there’s still a ton of non-writing related work that can’t be helped.
#4 – You will write to an audience or you will die alone and in pain.  Well, that might be a little bit of overkill.  Maybe.  What I mean is this:  If you can’t tell someone exactly who your target audience is for your book, in very clear, concise terms, your book is almost certainly going to fail.  (You still might not succeed even if you can name your audience, but at least you aren’t guaranteed to fail.)  If you don’t know who your audience is, you either (a) don’t have one, or (b) have no guarantee that what you’ve written will resonate with anyone or even meet their expectations.  As soon as you think of an idea and decide you like it enough to write about it, before you even begin fleshing it out, you should be figuring out who wants to read that idea.  High school through college girls?  Elderly mystery readers in the vein of Agatha Christie?  That sort of thing.
#5 – You have to edit your own book, but you cannot edit your own book.  Seriously.  It’s impossible.  You are too close to the subject matter.  You will miss all sorts of things.  I’m not even talking about grammar here; I’m talking about the plot itself.  You’re going to miss stilted dialogue, excessive word choices, plot decisions that make sense in your head but not to readers, etc etc.  You need to edit your book to make it as good as you can get it and then you need to throw it at fresh eyes who know next to nothing about your manuscript—ideally people with an axe to grind over something you did who will take great pleasure in humiliating you.  If you missed Mother’s Day this year, now might be the time to recruit her as an editor! J
#6 – Your first negative review always hurts.  The second one probably will as well.  Let’s face it… your book is kind of your baby, and you just threw it into the public eye.  There’s nothing I can say like “deal with it,” or “it gets better” or anything like that to make you feel better about it.  It’ll hurt.  You’ll eventually learn how to mentally filter out useless reviews and focus on the helpful ones, and then you can learn from them and keep improving your writing.
#7 – In the vein of negative reviews hurting, someone always hates your book.  Look at some of the most popular books of the last decade.  There isn’t a damned one of them without one-star reviews.  Just accept it.  You can’t please everyone, so just do your best to please most of your audience, and learn from the experience.
#8 – Add two weeks to any deadline you set.  You suck at setting deadlines—you just don’t know it yet.  To quote the inimitable Douglas Adams, “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”  I certainly hope to have Found published by July 1st.  I have lingering tendonitis, just started a move to Pennsylvania, have a husband who misses me since I’ve been hiding in the manuscript for months, really ought to go for a jog eventually or at least walk the dog, and still work a damned day job.  Hitting that deadline is about as likely as finding a winning lottery ticket in my underwear drawer.  That’s why I made it the 15thJ
#9 – Butt-In-Seat-Time is the secret to finishing everything.  You will never finish a book if you keep making excuses.  The scene will not write itself while you vacuum the carpet.  Even scrubbing toilets will occasionally seem preferable to finishing that stupid chapter that you just can’t seem to…. aargh!   You know the feeling.  Look… it sucks, but you have to write that chapter.  You either need to write it or you need to revisit the plot and find a different direction.  Either one of these requires that you work on the book, though, which means get your butt in that chair and work until you’ve made it past the problem. 
#10 – Take any opportunity you can to plug a book!  I mean, let’s just say you randomly had the opportunity to post about your writing career on a wonderful lady’s blog—let’s call her Bethany, just for kicks.  Well, what better chance to get some free advertising out of it than to clog up her blog with things about your new book Found coming out in July and concluding the Lost & Found series?  I mean, it’s a really great book and you know all the readers are going to love it, so you should really take the opportunity to tell them about it if you ever get the chance.  (Love you, Bethany!  Please don’t hurt me!)   (Psst… buy my books, everyone!)

That’s it for tonight!  Thanks for having me, Bethany and thanks to the rest of you for reading my wandering pile of blabble about being an author.
J 
-Nadia




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4 comments:

Shane @ItchingforBooks

This is a great guest post by Nadia. Thanks for participating, Bethany :)

Evie

Awesome guest post! Some of the points Nadia made are just too funny (but very, very true!). I think every author can relate to all that! Writing is definitely hard work and that's why I respect authors for what they're doing :)

Thanks for sharing!
Evie @Bookish

Evie

The plot sounds interesting :) New Adult is hot these days, and this one sounds quite unique and intriguing. love mysteries combined with romance!

Kelly

My comment was removed. I didn't mean anything bad just pointed out how horrible their situations were.

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