In This Issue
- New Author Signed: Amy Dressler
- New Author Signed: Celaine Charles
- New TikTok account
- Minor Setback – Failed Bookclub Experiment?
- ARC Readers Needed
New Author Signed: Amy Dressler (Women’s Fiction)
I met Amy last fall at a conference and am excited to announce I’ll be publishing her novel How to Align the Stars. The book is Shakespeare meets Gilmore Girls in a body-positive, feminist retelling of Much Ado About Nothing. Amy’s book was a contest finalist at the PNWA conference. She is currently writing another Shakespeare-inspired book. I’m so excited to begin working with Amy! Amy’s newsletter and social links: https://amykdressler.com/
New Author Signed: Celaine Charles (Poetry)
Gravitational Pull is a poetry book about adoption, told from the viewpoint of the birth mother, the adoptive mother, and the child. Celaine and I met at the PNWA conference last fall (it was a very productive and fun conference!), and I couldn’t be more honored to have the opportunity to publish one of her works. In the coming months Celaine and I will be working to finish this touching book of poems. Celaine’s Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cc_celainecharles/
New TikTok Account
I’m testing out TikTok as a method of connecting with other book-minded friends. So far I’m on the fence about it. On the positive side, your videos go to a massive audience. On the negative side, it seems like a giant time suck. What are your impressions about TikTok? Tell me on my Twitter page. Lol. Here is the my new TikTok account: @egretlakepoems
Minor Setback – Failed Book Club Experiment?
Last year I started two bookclubs using the Amazon Book Club early access, hoping it would be a way to develop community and chat with other readers of similar books.
Unfortunately that’s not how it played out. Instead it was me posting up things like “Would you rather spend a month in Sunshine Falls or in Nora’s New York life? Why?” and getting no response. I moved to more general questions such as “what constitutes a beach read, in your opinion?” Still no response.
Seven months, six books, twenty-three book club members, and zero comments. This leads me to believe Amazon Bookclub is a fail. It did not encourage community and discourse as I had hoped. I don’t feel too bad considering Sarah Selects bookclub has 16,000 members and her last post only got 16 comments (she is the Amazon Books Editorial Director). So perhaps it is a 10,000 to 1 club member ratio for comments?
On the upside, hosting two book clubs did get me to carefully select and then read new books and think critically about them. I also flexed my review-writing skills, and last year got more comfortable reading on my kindle in order to facilitate reading multiple books at the same time.
In that light, the book club was a success. I’m thinking I might keep my bookclub, but merge the two clubs into one, and adjust my expectations of it by using it as more of a blog platform rather than a community. If you have thoughts on this, let me know. Is it worth keeping it going?
ARC Readers Needed in the Future
An ARC Reader gets an advance copy of a book with the understanding they will post a review of the book on the day it releases. With three books in production so far this year and several more on the horizon, I am going to need a small army of ARC readers. Sometime this spring or summer I will put a call out for readers and post the signup here in my newsletter.
That’s all for now.
Thanks for reading my newsletter and being part of the Egret Lake Books community.
Talk to you soon!
Tess Jones, Editor, Egret Lake Books
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