Gentle readers, YOU ROCKED THE BOOK LAUNCH!!!!
I'm not quite over being a hot new release yet, so once more with that fun photo:
You did three awesome things this past week:
- You bought the book! Thank you, thank you, thank you!
- You shared about it on Facebook, Good Reads, Twitter, Instagram.
- You wrote reviews, which are so lovely they bring tears to my eyes.
What did all that accomplish?
- People I don't know, and can never be in contact with on my own, found the book.
- Some of those people, amazingly, wrote reviews. Really. There's a review at Amazon that says "I saw a friend review this book on Facebook and I immediately wanted to read it." See what you did there? You rocked it!
- When I contact people for advertising or reviews on other blogs, it's not just me saying, "Hey, I think my book is okay and you might want to read it." There are a bunch of other people who are willing to say they like it, too. It really makes a difference when I can say, "Read the reviews." And there are lots of reviews. And they are so, so precious.
Here are some of the things I'm doing to keep this thing rolling:
1. We're working on advertising on some blogs whose readers seem compatible with ours. In fact, we've got a live ad at Elizabeth Esther right now. A couple of other bloggers have it and have said they'll read it for review.
2. I've sent out books to a number of people who might review it on various blogs. I'm hoping like crazy that the beautiful cover will snag potential reviewers and readers and maybe get them to the inside.
3. I was interviewed for a podcast, in the official randomest connection so far. Christy Largent was browsing on Amazon when she saw As Soon As I Fell. She loved the cover, loved the reviews, found the website, asked if she could interview me for her podcast! Yay for a beautiful cover, and yay for wonderful reviewers! We did the interview last Friday morning, and it was such a blast. We'd be having lunch and hanging out together right now, except she moved to California a couple of months ago. I'll post the link when the podcast goes live.
4. I've also had a number of interesting conversations with different people in different places about all kinds of different things. So we will see what happens with all of those. I will let you know!
5. We (and this is the royal we, which means tech support aka Andy) have been working to make the blog more useful to everybody.
- "We" redid the resources page. It's actually now several pages, categorized. And there are nifty new carousels that take you straight to Amazon so you can impulse-buy to your heart's content. These are all top-quality books, so I don't feel bad for contributing to your Amazon habit in this particular instance.
- "We" added an archive page. Please click over there so you can appreciate my cleverness with the header photo. Get it? Get it? Anybody? (Records??) This was after a reader asked me for something I wrote last year and it took like 6 of us 27 days to find it. That was ugly. Hopefully this makes it easier for everybody. Also, if you want to go back and read the blog from the beginning, well, bless your heart, you sure can do that now.
- "We" added a video to the connect page. In December, I'll be moving my private practice to a new counseling center, and this is a promo video for Creekbend Center for Counseling. I think the video guy did a great job, and if only they'd budgeted to get Julia Roberts to play the part of Kay Bruner, it would have been perfect.
- "We" have new like and share buttons for social media at the top left hand side of this blog page. If you click the Facebook icon, it takes you to my official "Kay Bruner's Blog Friends" page. If you like that page, you'll get random things from me on your Facebook feed: TED Talks, marriage stuff, parenting stuff, songs I like, etc. Just more of the good stuff to help us all make it through the day.
Friday night Andy and I went to see The Oh Hellos and Needtobreathe live at Southside Ballroom. We had floor tickets, so I can't strictly say that I have "seen" either of these bands, except in passing glances on my tippy-toes. Mostly I saw their light shows overhead. The music was a ton of fun anyway and I kept my neighbors busy staying out of the way of my dance moves.
I've been singing this song ever since: "May this offering be stretched across the sky, these hallelujahs be multiplied."
Because while As Soon As I Fell is about a bunch of dark things, ultimately this is my offering of praise: out of my darkness, Light.
It's the the word of my testimony that God redeems all of our lives from the pit.
And there's no better hallelujah than that, in my book.