Friday Updates

[jimhines]

Sunday (3/28) at 2:00, I’ll be speaking at the Portage District Library.  There will be a public interview with John Wenger of Kazoo Books, some reading, some open Q&A, and some book selling/signing.  So a little bit of everything.  Stop by and say hi if you’re in the neighborhood.

#

The full results from my novel survey are now posted at my web

Comments

[chris_gerrib]

Not sure about Michigan, but in Illinois, charities can get a permit to run a raffle from the town in which the raffle is based. It's usually free or very nominal fee ($10 or less).

[jimhines]

Michigan law is pretty straightforward, as I understand it. Raffles require a license. Licenses are only given to organizations. I am an individual, not an organization. Therefore even if I wanted to pay the fee and wait the six+ weeks, I'm out of luck.

But what I wanted to do doesn't appear to qualify as a raffle. And I'll be tweaking the rules anyway, just to be safe.

[jimhines]

It shows how much more common it is for writers to go the agent route. I want to stress the correlation =/= causation thing again. But if I had to do it over, I'd definitely be querying agents first.

[sixteenbynine]

Good news for small presses, which actually makes a lot of sense since you can now do a lot of successful promotion for a book to its target audience through social media (Facebook, etc.) rather than conventional channels.

Off Topic

[twisted_knicker]

I just wanted to say that I recently found your books and have read "Mermaid's Madness" and "Goblin Quest" over the past 4 days and I'm going out to buy "Goblin's Hero" Sunday b/c I Love your books! I've already turned my girl onto them and she's reading Goblin now and she already loves your humor! As do I! I read the first chapter of your next book and think June is too far away and it's too bad I can't see you at the library but I don't live there. I think I'm ranting but I wanted to tell you to keep it up, more people are even now finding your books and loving what they find.

Also, uh... could Talia please get with Snow? That would be the best. :)

Re: Off Topic

[jimhines]

Thanks so much! Please feel free to go off topic like that any time you like ;-)

Talia/Snow is something I've been working on for four books now, trying to figure out what felt right for that storyline.

Re: Off Topic

[finnyb]

Does that "for four books now" comment mean that The Snow Queen’s Shadow is going to be the fourth book in the series? (At some point I got it in my head that it was a trilogy, but if there's to be more I'll be very happy!)

Re: Off Topic

[jimhines]

Yep, four books.

Stepsister Scheme
Mermaid's Madness
Red Hood's Revenge (July, 2010)
Snow Queen's Shadow (2011, probably)

I'm planning to wrap things up with #4 and move on to a new series idea after that. Assuming I ever get in gear and pitch the new one to my editor...

[snapes_angel]

Nice LEGO shot!

BTW, your survey was cited on the Writers Beware blogsite. Huzzah!

[jimhines]

I saw that! Very cool. Now if I can just get BoingBoing to notice :-)

[snapes_angel]

Hehe. BTW, what's BoingBoing?

[jimhines]

http://boingboing.net/ It's Cory Doctorow and company, and gets hits from about half the Internet each day.