It’s July, and the Friendly Ghost Party is getting closer!
Just so you know, this online party is a celebration of the launch of my new
book, Stone’s Ghost, not a Tupperware party. What I mean by that is
that I hope you’ll all come and have fun, enter the contests, share your
stories and mingle with the other party-goers, but I am not expecting everyone to buy the book. If you do, super-duper,
but the main thing is to have fun. Just want to get that out of the way.
As promised earlier, I am ready to
reveal the cover of the book. I want
to thank Brenda Remlinger of www.coversbydesign.net
for her artful expertise in turning my cover design into perfection. I
typically snag pics off a Google search and cobble them together to match the
idea in my head, then send the whole mess to Brenda to do the full-up legal,
hi-res version. As always, she did a fabulous job. I heartily recommend her to
any of you who are searching for a cover designer.
So without further ado …
To add to the excitement, I have
ordered the first proof and am waiting anxiously for it to arrive. LOVE holding
a new book in my hands!
Now, back to the party. It’s already
getting started, and will go on all month until July 26.
There’s a lot to it, so I want to
plot this out for you.
If
you have a blog and would like to co-host the party with me on that one
day, please go here
and sign up. I can provide content and graphics and/or am open to suggestions,
author interviews, whatever. While my blog and the Facebook page will be the
primary locations, I will be encouraging party-goers to visit the co-hosts and
share the love.
Contests
The first contest is on the Friendly Ghost Party Facebook
page. I’m encouraging everyone to post
ghost-related pics here, and we’ve already got quite an assortment. We’ve got
pics of haunted places, pics of possible ghosts and some not-so-ghostly but
still fun, and we’ve even got some video. Don’t have a pic of a ghost? No
problem. Post pics of your kids in their Halloween ghost costume, your dog or
cat doing sneaky, ghostly things, anything remotely ghost-related. Then go
through the pics and vote for your
favorites by liking the posts. The post with the most likes at the end of
July 26 will win a Stone’s Ghost Prize Package.
The second contest is here on my
blog (but could spill over to my co-hosts’ blogs, as well). In the comment
section below, type in or paste in your
short ghost story. This could be something that really happened to you,
something that happened to a friend or relative, something you heard about or
something you just made up, but share your stories in the comment section here
and on subsequent blog posts. (Please keep your story to ~250 words or less.) At
the end of the day July 26, I will pick a random winner and they, also, will
win a Stone’s Ghost Prize Package. I am going to kick off this
contest with my own story below. Please feel free to comment and/or add your
own.
The final contest will be a giveaway on Goodreads. I will post the giveaway about
a week ahead (and will post a link here) with a giveaway date of July 26, and
the winner will get an autographed copy of Stone’s Ghost.
Discounts
To commemorate the launch, on July
26 the Kindle version of Stone’s Ghost will be available for .99 cents for that one day only. I’ll
post a link when the sale price is viable. In addition, to further the
celebration, all the books in my back
list will also be available for .99 cents that one day only. If you’ve seen
one of my books that you thought looked interesting but weren’t quite ready to buy,
this will be the time.
Timeline
Having an online party is
complicated. The good news is that you don’t have to worry about what you’re
going to wear, you don’t have to drive anywhere and you don’t have to keep
track of how many drinks you’ve had (but you do have to stock your own fridge).
The bad news is that a party like this can extend all around the world and we’re
not all in the same time zone. I’m using Mountain Standard Time because I’m in
Arizona (and we don’t do Daylight Savings Time here—yeah, I know, we’re weird),
so the party will start at 5am MST (same as PDT) on Friday, July 26, and will
go until 5pm. For my friends “across the pond,” that means it starts at 1pm
London time (if I’ve done my calculations correctly). For my friends across the
slightly larger pond, that means it starts at 8pm on July 27 in Perth,
Australia. Is that perfectly clear? I hope so.
What
else?
What else is going on? I don’t know;
I’m making this up as I go along. I’ll reveal the prizes later on, maybe
announce some spot prizes during the day just to keep things interesting. The
most important thing is YOU—I’d love
to have you come to the party. I think it’ll be a lot of fun, and the more the
merrier. If this sounds like fun to you, please mark your calendar.
See you there!
