Writing / Publishing – Page 10

Faire Booth Preparations

I mentioned recently that my application for a booth at the local Renaissance Faire was approved. This weekend, I planned to go shopping for additional items for an outdoor booth dressed in the necessary theme. I hoped to have ninety percent of the materials and do a test run in the backyard. I would take some pictures of how amazing it looked and share them with you to bask in the glory of my creative use of limited funds.

As you can imagine, little of my shopping today went according to plan. The canopies we have are too big—my booth space is only 5×5—and none of the stores we stopped at had any options smaller than 8×8 or a 7.5-foot circle. Looking for decoration accents was also a bust. The craft stores were too DIY for my skill/time, while Party City’s merchandise was too modern.

Fortunately, our most important stop of the day paid off and made the shopping headache worth it. Looking into suggestions for decorating a Ren Faire booth, there were many recommendations to use old sheets to wrap modern supports to make them look more like a medieval cloth tent.

We went to Goodwill to search the linens, picking up a number of sheets to cover the tent, table, and chairs. I plan to use our twine to tie it all to the supports for that billowy tent feel. On a pass through the decorations, we also found another picture stand and a wood box to replace some of the more modern items we used at my first book signing in February.

This was the table at my first signing. I will use most of this again in August.

The rest will need to wait for delivery, as it had to be ordered online instead. I should have most of it before the end of the month to do a trial run. In addition to the tent, I ordered more sealing wax for more wax seals, some cute butterfly hair clips for potential giveaways with books, and some bookmark charms shaped like swords and other old weapons. Along with the advertising flag I ordered, I think my booth is going to look marvelous, and most of the supplies can be used again in the future!

Books at the Faire

I have seen a lot of advice on how many books to bring to events like this, and it still feels like I am stumbling in the dark. Some say 20 per 1,000 attendees at the event (I’m not sure if this is for each book or total), which would mean about 600 for this event for me. Another person recommended 50-100 of each book for a two-day event, depending on size. This would put me at about 400 books for this two-weekend event. I have decided to order 250 more of my first book, which will give me around 280 available. I’m debating between 150-200 of the second book, which I hope will arrive before the first weekend. The books will not go bad, so hopefully, my guesses will not be a massive overspend.

As for my second book, it has been with the editor for a couple of weeks now. This one is about 30k words longer than the first, so it is taking a bit more time. She expects to have it back to me by next weekend. Over this next week, I want to finalize the cover, frontmatter, and backmatter so it is all ready to upload to quickly order a proof copy. If that first proof looks good, then I will have about six weeks for a large order to be printed and shipped in advance of the event.

This also means the book is likely to be released ahead of schedule! I need the paperback to be live to order author copies on KDP (yes, I know there are other options). Sign up to follow my blog here or for my newsletter on the homepage to hear when Hidden Sanctuary officially goes live.

As a final note today, thank you to all the new readers leaving reviews for Hidden Memory. I am now up to 16 ratings/reviews! Reviews are amazingly important to new authors, and I appreciate all of you for taking the time.

Have another great weekend!

Of the Realms – Orientation

Elaria is a realm where the current inhabitants are not all native in origin. Throughout the Hidden Series, I make references to other realms and the races coming to Elaria from them. For the story in this series, the specifics of how the realms interact are not critical. It is enough to know humans, dwarves, and magai are immigrants.

However, I have been asked about the realms by readers. I could add more explanation into the books, but it adds little to the story, slows down the pacing, and can start to feel like a lecture. Instead, I have decided to lecture here and offer these “realms” posts as bonus insight for my readers who check out my website. Details on specific realms will come later. Today, we will look at the general structure and interaction of the realms.

Orientation

So, what are the realms?

The realms exist upon another dimension. I’m not referring to the “everything that can happen, does happen” type of multiple dimensions, but about X/Y/Z dimensions.

3D, Time, and the theoretical “mystical power” dimensions.

Back and forward. Right and left. Up and down. These are the physical dimensions in which we exist as we pass along the time dimension. I am not a theoretical physicist, so this is where I will depart any proven/measurable science to delve into the world of fantasy.

The various realms exist along a spectrum of mystical power and governing forces with diverse expressions.

Aryanna (Earth), Elaria, and Scorcellen as they currently sit on the dimensional line.

Our realm exists toward the physical end of the spectrum. Toward this end, science and the laws of physics hold sway. One plus one will equal two. Actions and reactions, from a physics perspective, will be calculable. The further this direction a realm goes, the further it departs from magic and mysticism and becomes more structured and standard.

Moving in the other direction along the spectrum is where things become more chaotic and fascinating. Magic and other arcane forces change how the people of a realm interact with the world around them.

In Elaria, the world and its creatures exist connected to the people evolving there. The natural world strives for balance, and it exerts influence on and through those people. While there is power beyond the physical, most life conforms.

Further down the line, Scorcellen sits seeped in magical energy at the edge of what the magai call the boundary between high and low magic. Our world is on the low magic side. On the high magic side? Wonders. All you can imagine, glorious and terrible, can exist in those realms.
Fae, dragons, and even god-like beings dominate independent high-magic realms.

Perhaps they have visited. Maybe it is only stories of their existence that have passed down through the realms. They exist out in the far reaches of the power spectrum, spinning and ever-changing.

“But how do they all interact and fit together?” you ask.

Such interaction is a topic I will touch on further in the upcoming “realms” blog installment. Until then, have fun imagining a realm of your own making.

Bionic Font

I see this new Bionic Reading font popping up on my social media accounts lately. It is the one that bolds portions of many words in a way intended to help guide the reader’s brain through the text and provide a means of faster, in-depth reading comprehension.

“What do we want? With Bionic Reading, we aim to promote reading and comprehension of textual content in a hectic and noisy world.”
bionic-reading.com

This article on uxdesign takes a look at it and the recent reaction on Twitter. It also has a couple of comparisons between “regular” font and the bionic reading conversion.

I like the text and think it speeds up my ability to read and retain the information I have read. Reading is one of my main hobbies, and I read a lot. Not the 100+ books a year I have seen some folks claim, but I think my annual book count is up there. This means I can already read relatively quickly with comprehension. It felt like the font smoothed this out for me, as though it built a road between reading and processing.

With that said, I would be hesitant to jump into an entire book in this font just yet. If I read for an hour, does it tire my eyes faster? Would it give me headaches? Would that road it creates decrease eye/brain strain over time? I do not know and have not taken the time to test this myself, but I am intrigued.

Check out the links and share your thoughts. Do you like it? What would you think about this font in your next eBook?

Hidden Sanctuary Cover Reveal!

The time you have all been waiting for has arrived! Okay, maybe it is just me, but I’m going to share it and pretend everyone else has been biting their nails in anticipation. If you can’t wait even a moment longer, you can scroll down to see the new cover, but I first wanted to share some exciting news.

WA Renaissance Faire

The organizers have accepted my application for a booth at this summer’s Renaissance Faire! I will be there for the second and third weekends of the fair, August 13/14 and August 20/21. With Hidden Sanctuary set to release on August 16th, I am scrambling to make the necessary changes with enough time for author copies to arrive in time for inclusion at the booths. If all goes well, I will be able to sell some advance copies that first weekend!

August 13/14th is the “Fairytales & Fantasy Adventures” weekend, aligning perfectly with the story told in the Hidden Series. Then, on August 20/21, the theme is “Across the Multiverse,” for those who want to dress up in more of a geek chic than fantasy nerd. Either way, I will be there all four days selling books and signing them all!

Hidden Sanctuary

Thank you to Jonathan Lebel for another piece of beautiful artwork. He, once again, took a stick figure sketch from me and turned it into this beautiful landscape with inspiration from the stunning Cascade range we have here in Washington State.

After the entire series is released, I will probably look at changing up the covers to something more action-oriented and target-market, but I love the art of these images. These original covers will be for me, and I can appeal to the market later.

*Spoiler alert* This blurb below includes spoilers for Hidden Memory.

Larron’s hope fades as he discovers it is not only his people facing the brink of destruction. As the council tries to save what they can, a young mage approaches Annalla with a tempting, if crazy, proposition. He knows a story, an old family tale, and it might hold the answer to finding the fairy.

Join Larron and Annalla as they work with new allies to continue their desperate quest against a cruel dictator bent on destruction in Hidden Sanctuary!

Book Days Abound

We have a few book-related days lined up and squashed together right around this week. First up was National Tell a Story Day in the USA on April 27th. Today, the last Saturday in April is Independent Bookstore Day! Finally, tomorrow kicks off the start of Get Caught Reading Month in May!

National Tell a Story Day

On Wednesday, I decided to celebrate this day by posting a few shorts on social media about the various realms mentioned in my Hidden Series. Depending on if and where you follow me, you might have seen one of these three blurbs pop up in your feed:

The Realm of Elaria, homeland to the elves, used to exist in balance. Growth and destruction. Life and death. Good and evil. Kahnlair has broken this balance. For the first time, evil fights united. A merciless army spreading and overwhelming the allied forces until even the immortal elves face extinction.
Centuries ago, humans came to Elaria from a realm known to the elves as Aryanna. The two crossed briefly, less than a mere hundred years, for the human realm is governed by the physical world around them. Laws of math and science hold sway, and the humans developed to a point incompatible with Elaria. The realms drifted apart once more. Small human settlements remained within the mystical realm, but in Aryanna, all the elves left behind were legends and folklore.
The magai of Scorcellen know a great deal, and entirely too little, about the existence of other realms. Scorcellen exists in a magical bottleneck of sorts. In one direction, the realms become lower magic, floating around each other in a nearly linear pattern. In the other direction, the realms fan out, spinning and bouncing off each other, generating a stew of high magical energy, energy the magai need.

I have been getting more questions about the realms and how they interact from readers.

For the Hidden Series, broad information about the realms is not central to the plot, so I have yet to find a way to bring it into the story without it sounding like an out-of-place lecture.

To resolve this, I have decided to kick off a series of blog posts about the realms as a perfectly placed lecture instead! Readers who follow my blog here or later check the website will be able to get some of those answers to questions I will likely not be fully explaining in the books for quite some time.

Independent Bookstore Day

For this day, I am going to highlight Page Turner Books in Kent, WA. Earlier this year, Wayne at PTB gave me a table in his store for the Meeker Street Nerd Party event for my first book signing ever.

PTB has a great selection of books, new and used, and things like Funko toys. Next door, PTB recently expanded into a second location for comics and manga. Between the two, they likely have something to satisfy your reading needs. They also participate in Meeker Street events and have additional nerd-related signings.

Do they stock my book(s) yet? No, because I’m not yet on expanded distribution on Amazon, and I have not reached out to see if he is interested in buying a couple directly from me.

Eventually, this will be the most likely bookstore to find signed copies. Once I’m in demand enough for expanded distribution, PTB will be one of the closest indie bookstores to me and easiest for me to stop by and tag a few.

Get Caught Reading Month

I have decided to issue a challenge to you all for this month:

In the month of May, anytime from the 1st to the 31st, post a picture or video of yourself with my book (cover visible in either format) on social media and tag my relevant account. It could be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or TikTok (@tiffanyshearn_author), and all of my accounts except TikTok are at the bottom of my blog, newsletter, and website.

If just ten people do this, when I do my Hidden Sanctuary giveaway of a signed paperback later this year, I will giveaway two instead of just one, AND everyone who makes a post will automatically receive one entry.

The giveaway will be done the same way as the first time through the newsletter with the same fine print (mostly around not being able to guarantee international), but you do not need to be signed up for the newsletter to receive this social media entry. I will also allow the winner(s) to pick which of my two books they want me to sign and send.

Have fun getting caught reading in May!