New Year, New Goals and New Stories

I set some new goals and posted on my other blog and have been concentrating a lot on my other writings. I've neglected my state stories way too much. One of my goals this year is to write the next four books in the state series so that Heather can illustrate them and do her thing on a more timely basis. I've already failed part of one goal and we are only three days into the new year, but not a complete failure. The goal to write everyday is something I need to work on more. I also need to be a more regular blogger.

I didn't really write yesterday, mostly fought with my computer but I did get some preposted blog postings ready on my other blog and last week I did start a new story, tentatively titled Imogene: Innocense Lost (you can find a brief description of the book here under the label WIPs), which I hope to get back to after writing my four state stories slated to come out this year. They are started for the most part but I need to fill in the story part. Have an idea what State of Acceleration and State of Monuments will be written like, it is just a matter of sitting down and writing them. I will keep you apprised on my progress with them as I get closer to release dates and have new covers for them.

So far I've had no requests for any of the PDF files of any of the books in exchange for reviews as posted last week. So my biggest goal is trying to find readers and followers to both my blogs since I need to boost my sales for both my print and ebooks.

If you are a librarian, teacher, parent or anyone who enjoys the variety of stories I write and would like to read any or all for free in exchange for posting a review of the books, please email me at eeldering@gmail.com and let me know in the subject line which title you would like to receive to read. Your choices are State of Wilderness, State of Quarries, State of Reservations, State of Successes, State of Heights, State of Nature, Finally Home, "The Proposal" (an April Fools Day story), "The Tulip Kiss" and hopefully later this week and by the end of next week "Bride-and-Seek" and "Butterfly Halves" will be available, both of which I do have the word doc files and can convert to PDF if need be but those reviews can't be posted until the stories are available on Nook and Kindle and Smashwords. Thanks everyone.

First event is the Geofest in February and then the big event of the SCASL conference in March. I'm also going to try to be a presenter at the SC Book Festival in May, but if that doesn't work out, I'll be splitting a booth with two other authors hopefully. From there, it looks like Decatur may be the next big event of the year as well as the Savannah Children's book festival and YALL fest (the last count I had was possibly 10 events total where I will be making appearances so that is something else I need to work on is scheduling events this year and posting my calendar of events on my JGDS website; so keep an eye out for that).

Of course in order to do these events, I need to sell books to help cover costs. That goal is right now to sell 15 of each title per month consistently - which I'm nowhere near at the moment. That is roughly 34 books a week for the nine titles I have available, and this week is young. Remember for any print book you order directly from me, I will sign it. For any book or order made via createspace pages (you can find those on the JGDS website) or amazon.com as well as ebooks via kindle or nook, you can get an e-signature by dropping by my kindlegraph page and requesting a free kindlegraph. These are not just for kindles as you can have the file sent to your email and then you can send that directly from your email to your nook or other device.

The author of Near Death (her blog is called Keystrokes and Word Counts) posted on her blog last week about using kindlegraphs during her blog tour, which I'm going to try. Every time I do a blog tour, I'll use the kindlegraph requests to thank my hosts as well as offer them in conjunction to the blog tour. The thing is that you the reader has to directly request the kindlegraph; I can't just go in and sign a whole lot of them and just send them out.

I hope you all will continue to follow the adventures of the JGDS as well as Ms. Elysabeth in this new year. Looking forward to great things in 2012. Ma America :)