10 Great Posts on TwitPitches
10 Great Posts on TwitPitches
By Tasha Turner
I decided this week to do a list of 10 great posts on TwitPitches rather than reinventing the wheel.
- How Is Your TwitPitch? — How To Craft An “Elevator Speech” in 140 Characters
- The Twitpitch
- Need a quick summary? Try a “TwitPitch”
- Fashion PR/Social Media: 5 TwitTips for a Successful TwitPitch
- The Elevator Pitch Is Dead. Introducing The Twitpitch
- The TwitPitch and the Social Media Press Release
- The Art of the Twitter Pitch
- How to Pitch via Twitter
- The #Twitpitch
- The Official Scriptshadow Twit-Pitch 100
Have you ever created a TwitPitch? Have you seen a good TwitPitch? What do you find the hardest thing about creating TwitPitches?
Review of Zakia and the Cowboy
Zakia and the Cowboy by Lorraine Nelson
Guest Review by Rebbè Landers
“Right there and then, Zakia fell in love with him all over again. Once he’d used his pet name for her, she knew her arrogant, macho cowboy had been the right person to turn to after all. Zakia turned with a wide smile on her face, relieved and very much at east for the moment, as she made a big scene over the ponies. ‘They’re adorable… and they’re twins! How can you tell them apart?’”
This story was an enjoyable read about a couple who marry young and after some misunderstandings that led to their divorce bring them back together once more during a crisis. Finding that love still lingers between the two, not to mention a little surprise for him, they can’t seem to stay apart.
You just know from the first moment they set eyes upon each other that the fireworks between the two of them were inevitable. The descriptiveness of the scenery in the areas is fantastic, as the characters come to life in the mostly rural setting. Family and life in the country are an important part of this story making one wish to be a part of the lifestyle even if only for a short time.
I enjoyed this story enough that I had to read it for a second time. I enjoyed it all over again. I’ve always loved a cowboy on horseback or off, and there is a great suspense to this story as well. While reading this story you can see how a hard working cowboy earns a living at the same time teaching his children about the peacefulness and quality of life on a farm or ranch. It made me wish to be able to go for a ride on a horse with the lead character myself. Giddy up go cowboy!
I give Zakia and the Cowboy 5 big ole Texas style stars, and sure do wish there were more of those kind of cowboys out and about here, droolworthy writing.
About Lorraine Nelson
Lorraine Nelson lives in rural New Brunswick, on the east coast of Canada. Always a bookworm, she’s read many novels of romance and mystery over the years, finally deciding to put her pen to work at writing one. “To write romantic suspense is my dream job, although my mom says I was born with an avid imagination and pencil in hand, crafting stories from an early age.”
I am mother to three wonderful boys, grandmother to four fantastic grandsons and two beautiful granddaughters. I live alone with an independent yet affectionate tomcat. Now my children have grown and have lives of their own, I have time to indulge my passion for writing. When not at the computer, you can find me spending time with family, gardening, baking and, of course, reading.
This is me. This is who I am and I’m loving it!
Lorraine Nelson can be found at:
Facebook Profile
Facebook Author Page
A little bit about our guest blogger Rebbe Landers
I LOVE shopping, spending money, shopping, watching movies, reading almost anything, sitting in our yard out in the country round a bonfire in the nice warm Alberta evening and meeting new people much to my kids chagrin as I’ve never met a stranger, just a friend that I’ve yet to meet. I love to travel with my husband and have enjoyed a few trips to Thailand in the past and plan on going back again in the future. I’ve always loved to write and have since being a child. Stories have always interested me and kept my imagination quite fertile, much to my teacher’s dismay.
She can be found on Facebook.
Review of Her Unlikely Bodyguard
Her Unlikely Bodyguard by Lorraine Nelson
Review by Tasha Turner
Blurb from Amazon.com: A stalker who wants revenge…a past flame rekindled…Jemma Leigh’s summer just got interesting.
***
Jemma Leigh Harding has drawn the attention of an unknown stalker and returns to her hometown of Somerville, a safe haven—or so she thinks—on the east coast of Canada.
Theodore Garrity is the last person she expects to see, considering how easily he walked away from her after graduation to join the army.
Their past history involves secrets Jemma Leigh is hesitant to share. When it becomes clear the stalker has followed her home, Teddy becomes her unlikely bodyguard. Will the terror and past hurts separate them forever? Or will love blaze a fresh path for their future?
Right from the start the book pulls you in. So many secrets. You don’t know who to trust. The characters are believable. I was totally engrossed in the story. You have hot guys. Real-life situations. At first I struggled with the problem of Jemma being strong at some times and weak at others until I thought about how I’d feel if I were in her shoes and I realized I’d probably bounce up and down also. And this is what I love about Lorraine’s writing I lose all track of time, I can’t put the book down, I have to find out how it ends from the 1st chapter. And from the start she had me stumped. Who the stalker is came as a complete surprise. And stumping me is hard. My husband hates watching TV or reading books with me as even outside of my genre I usually figure out who done it very early on.
But this book was not only a good mystery. We also had some great kids in the book. Nothing I love more than single parents getting a 2nd chance at love. And kids at having a family. And extended family. And a community that comes together and helps each other. This is a book about hope and the goodness of people even while it has evil stalking the heroine. This book makes you yearn for a community like Somerville or if you are like me and live in such a community thankful that such places still exist.
If that was not enough we have a hot, steamy romance with just the right amount of sex. Hunky men who are not afraid of strong women but instead attracted by them. A woman who everyone wants because she is something special. Strong, sweet, loyal, beautiful, what normally we’d hate in another woman but instead we are rooting for her throughout the book.
I felt very privileged to have been able to read this before it was released and only wished that my health would have worked for the review to have been up on the day the book was released. If you love a good romance go get this book. I give it 5 stars. I can’t wait to read my next book by Lorraine and thank her for the honor and trust she put in me.
About Lorraine Nelson
Lorraine Nelson lives in rural New Brunswick, on the east coast of Canada. Always a bookworm, she’s read many novels of romance and mystery over the years, finally deciding to put her pen to work at writing one. “To write romantic suspense is my dream job, although my mom says I was born with an avid imagination and pencil in hand, crafting stories from an early age.”
I am mother to three wonderful boys, grandmother to four fantastic grandsons and two beautiful granddaughters. I live alone with an independent yet affectionate tomcat. Now my children have grown and have lives of their own, I have time to indulge my passion for writing. When not at the computer, you can find me spending time with family, gardening, baking and, of course, reading.
This is me. This is who I am and I’m loving it!
Lorraine Nelson can be found at:
Facebook Profile
Facebook Author Page
Becoming a Better Writer
Becoming a Better Writer
By Tasha Turner
Love this graphic from Copyblogger and it is a great lead in for today’s post.
Thanks to Tara Chevrestt I have begun writing for 30-60 minutes every day. My short Jewish vamp story is coming along. It is changing a lot from what it was when I wrote it for The Gage Project back in February. I suspect it will go through several major revisions before it sees the light of day. But thanks to Tara it should be out this summer as a stand-alone short. Fiction writing is so different in many ways from the technical writing I do. With technical writing one does not wait for the muse or the moment to strike one just writes. With fiction it feels different but as people keep telling me it really is not. I just have to write every day. So to fellow writers out there, join me in giving it a try. If you have fallen off the writing wagon like I have then get back on. Let me know how its going. Find a writing partner to get on your case. Help each other out. Use a timer, go by word count, decide to write a set number of scenes, whatever you need to do. Just get writing again. We can do this.
Like this infographic? Get more content marketing tips from Copyblogger.
Tara Chevrestt
Tara Chevrestt is a deaf woman, former aviation mechanic, writer, and an editor. She is most passionate about planes, motorcycles, dogs, and above all, reading. That led to her love of writing. Between her writing and her editing, which allow her to be home with her little canine kids, she believes she has the greatest job in the world. She is also very happily married.
She also writes as Sonia Hightower. Sonia writes the racy stuff and argues that she was here first. She just wasn’t allowed to be unleashed until the last year.
While Tara and Sonia continue to fight over the laptop and debate who writes the next book, you can find buy links, blurbs, and other fun bits on their website: http://tarachevrestt.weebly.com/index.html or their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tara-Chevrestt-Sonia-Hightower/218383211513877
Free to Succeed
Guest Blogger Karen Magill
Please welcome Karen Magill to our blog this week. She is going to talk about a freebie promotion she ran this past weekend on Amazon. The amount of work it takes to put it together as well as how she did with it. She was extremely organized this time around and very impressive with her planning and goals. It was a pleasure to help promote her. Look for a review of her book Mystique Rising here in the near future. Now I hand the blog over to Karen:
Free to Succeed
by Karen Magill
Most authors by now have heard of Amazon’s KDP-Select program and have heard of those who are making masses amount of money through it. An author has to make their book exclusive to the KDP-Select and Amazon for a period of ninety days and readers not only buy the book but can also ‘borrow’ it as if it were in a public library. Part of the KDP-Select program is that an eBook can be listed as free for a maximum five days during the ninety day period. On July 9 and 10, I tried the free promotion.
The first thing I would like to point out is that getting organized for one of these promotions – even if it is only for two days – is lot of work. For this one I started three weeks before so that I could notify places like Pixel of Ink because I hoped that they would list my free eBook. That site, as well as Ereader News Today are two of the bigger sites for listing free eBooks. The exposure that an ebook promotion can get from those two sites is invaluable. (Pixel of Ink didn’t list my book though Ereader News did.) As well, I wrote out numerous tweets and postings so that I could just copy and paste the information over the weekend.
(You know all of this would have been a lot easier if I didn’t have to deal with fatigue, sleep, tendonitis in my wrists, food – normal things we humans deal with. If I were a machine that could just keep at it for hours, I could have notified the world and exploded on Amazon. Maybe next time I will work that out.)
The week of the promotion is the time to notify most contacts – the day before in many cases. Any earlier and the person may forget. Therefore, that was a busy week for me. I started to direct message everyone on my twitter followers list. At that time, I had over seven hundred and that takes awhile even if I am copying and pasting the message. I worked on it for two days and I notified everyone I thought would be interested and might help. After that, I sent the same message to anyone new who started following me.
Friday the 8th came and I had to do more notifying. I had researched groups on Facebook that advertise free eBook days and I started copying and pasting my message about Mystique Rising being free on them. If you are going to do this, be careful. It didn’t take long to get a notice from Facebook saying I was ‘spamming’ people and if I didn’t quit they would block my account. Next time I will do it over a few days and be sure that I word the notice differently for a few of the groups. I spent much of that day tying up loose ends and doing another push to get the notifications into different places.
Finally, the first day of the promotion arrives and I am up bright and early. I had a couple of places that would only take the information the first day of the promotion so I did that first thing, created an event on Facebook and invited all my friends (the first time I did this I tried to contact everyone individually but that was tiresome). I also checked to see the number of downloads since midnight. There were a few hundred. Then I got onto Twitter and started posting tweets.
That is what I did for most of Saturday. I tweeted, I posted on Facebook, I thanked people who said they downloaded the book, I posted notices repeatedly. Saturday evening Mystique Rising was number two in fantasy/contemporary and number four in action/adventure. I was ecstatic! I was sure it was going to go to number one.
Sunday morning I woke to find the numbers the same as the night before. I tweeted, posted, emailed and gently nudged people to download the free book. However, in the late afternoon, the eBook started to slip in the rankings and I was getting tired. The eBook never reached number one.
That’s all right though, I’m not upset. Number 2 is not a bad position to be in. I am waiting now for the exposure I hopefully got to translate into sales. I haven’t made massive amounts of money on this program yet but I am going to keep working on it.
Have you got your copy of the Amazon Kindle Bestseller, Mystique Rising (formerly Let Us Play, A Rock ‘n Roll Love Story) http://amzn.to/Jr4GoZ?
In paperback it is known as Let Us Play, A Rock ‘n Roll Love Story http://goo.gl/mqHSq
Have you read The Bond, A Paranormal Love Story in eBook http://goo.gl/EtzSs or in paperback http://goo.gl/6lDxf
Travel the city with The Vancouver Vagabond blog, http://karen-magill.blogspot.com
Look for Missing Flowers, my next book, to be released soon by Saga Books.
Changes
Changes
By Tasha Turner
Things have gotten too hectic for me over the past few months since the car accident. Tasha Turner Coaching is cutting back on clients at this time. We’ve decided that with the different direction Little Acorns Publishing is taking combined with Tasha’s cutting back that we are going our separate ways so we won’t be taking on any new Little Acorn Publishing clients.
The Assassins Club review
Dixon Rice has created a compelling story full of adventure, mayhem and murder entitled The Assassins Club. Enter Tyler Goode, A good ole boy, HA! catch the play of words on that? LOL, anyways Tyler is a bartender at the Rough Rider near Hungry Horse Montana. All Tyler wants to do is make money for college continue with his studies and get over the terrible things that happened to him years ago. But when a bully named Brute comes in and starts breaking up customers in the bar Tyler has to step in. He stops the chaos going in the bar, but it’s not over for him.
The next day Tyler accidentally drives into the gas station where Brute happens to be working. Long story short, Brute dies, Tyler covers it up. Brute’s family is huge and they are all mean, some of them come after Tyler and he defends himself in whatever way he can. At some point he realizes that his problem is that he feels no remorse. The fact that he feels no remorse over the deaths of these men is really one of the reasons I LOVE this book!
Seriously folks! How often do I, or any of us for that matter, get to cheer for a guy who is not constricted with feelings of grief and remorse after killing someone??? OK, OK, I hear ya yelling at me! Lisa! How on EARTH can you like a guy who kills without remorse?? What can I say!? READ THE BOOK!! You will GET it! Oh YES, you will get it!
Without giving away any more of the story, cause you know me, at some point The Assassins Club was founded with a couple of guys Tyler knows. What I like about this book is the fact that Tyler, though he seems to be the antagonist in the story, rises up to be the hero. There is another main character in this story, and he is the TRUE antagonist, Dixon got me good with this one as I didn’t see it coming until almost at the end.
I love the fact that Dixon decided to create this book around the area of his REAL hometown. His descriptions of the town and the area surrounding it makes me feel like I’ve been there. Or at the very least, I wanna GO there! What say you Dix!? Wanna give me the ole hometown tour?? I am giving this book 5 star, for its ease of reading, its awesome plot twists and turns, and the fact that anytime someone can fool me til the end of the book, they SERIOUSLY deserve my 5 star rating! I hope that Dixon allows me to review his next book as well; I really look forward to future books from a great writer. Check Dixon out on Twitter too!
How to Break Out of a Creative Rut
How to Break Out of a Creative Rut
Saw this today on Copyblogger and just had to use it – with their permission of course. What do you think? Does this help you? Or does this leave you more frustrated?
Like this infographic? Get more content marketing tips from Copyblogger.
Devils Colony; a James Rollins SIGMA series book review
HEY ALL MY JAMES ROLLINS FANS! I bring you the next James Rollins review, Devils Colony. OK, before I even get into the review I need to let you guys know that I recently received ALL of the SIGMA books! Well, except for the new one… Bangin’ Mother’s day HUH!!?? Ok, enough about me and mines: let’s get back to the book! I have to admit that I feel an affinity to this book because my fiancé is a full-blooded Cherokee Indian. NO, NO, I am NOT about to compare this book to the Cherokee ways you sillies. This book is NOT about the Cherokee, I have talked to Jesse, my fiancé, about various parts of this book. It is based on the Ute Indians, and while talking to Jesse, I got a lot of insight into the various aspects of the Indian nation at that time. He did me the favor of pulling on his memories of what his mother and uncles have told him about those times as well.
On a different note, I have to say that I LOVE that James includes some little known history into his books. Not having known much about Thomas Jefferson, I find it exhilarating that he cared so much about the Indian nation that he was an avid collector of Indian artifacts. Another thing about Jefferson that many of you may not be aware of is the fact that he was VERY into creating codes and much of his correspondence to friends was done through codes he himself created.
James Rollins does an excellent job with his research into the Inca tribe and his research on Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Yea, I didn’t mention that Franklin was involved in this did I!?? See how I keep you guys guessing!?? Thomas Jefferson was very serious about his collection of Indian artifacts. It was widely believed that Jefferson had a huge collection of Indian artifacts but after his death, a majority of them disappeared from his collection. What happened to his collection? That is STILL a mystery that has yet to been solved! Anyone out there know the ANSWER??
I am trying to figure out how to explain to you guys what is going on in this book! I don’t wanna give too much of it away as you guys well know, cause what’s my fav saying!!??? READ THE BOOK!!! That being said, Devils colony is about, what happens when a lost Indian tribe is discovered. It seems on first glance that they are a regular Indian tribe but it is soon discovered that they are not.
Without going into too much more detail, this book takes us on a free for all ride from scientific to old school Indian stuff. Our heroine has to figure out which side of the fence she should be on… Our MANY heroes ride rampant trying to uncover and discover what the TRUE story is. In the end they have to race against the clock to do what!!?? SAVE the world!! Save the world HOW you ask? Ummm READ THE BOOK! Seriously, you guys should know me by now!
As for our Antagonist… this is a guy that makes you want to kill him on site! Ya know what tho!?? Without HIM our story wouldn’t unravel in the manner that it did… and to a certain degree, he is kinda likeable! He is that itchy spot in the middle of your back that you would KILL to get rid of, but once it’s gone… AWW, you MISS it! Anyways, James got me again! I SWEAR one of these days I am gonna get him BACK!! Sooner or later I will figure out what’s going on BEFORE he ends up pointing the obvious out to me!!!! YUP 5 stars for this one!
On another note, I have decided to dedicate our blog at tasha-turner.com to Happy Mondays! On Mondays is when I will be posting what I may start calling the “Rollins reviews”!! HA! That kinda sounds like a news special doesn’t it? What do you guys think? Good idea? Bad idea? Leave a comment and feel free to shoot me a howdy sometimes. Like me or love me…FB me and James, Twitter me and James lol. Keyeta! Jesse says that’s Cherokee for goodbye!
