Category: celebrations.

A Postcard from 2018

Posted on | by Rosie Travers | 2 Comments on A Postcard from 2018

Everybody is doing a big fat quiz of the year, but here’s my personal postcard from 2018 – edited highlights of what has been a rollercoaster ride.

January – The excitement of starting a year knowing I had just signed my first publishing contract is offset by panicking about packing for a six week trip to Australia and New Zealand. How many pairs of pants…

February – Visit Australia and New Zealand. Too many wow moments to mention and definitely too many pants in my suitcase, but fulfilling a childhood ambition of cuddling a koala pretty much tops the highlights list. I know it’s not ‘PC’ but the opportunity was there…

March – Coming home from Australia and discovering we had missed the Beast from the East and all the fuss about the snow. First steps into the magical world of publishing as I begin working with a professional editor on The Theatre of Dreams.

April – Discovering two short stories I’d submitted to Writing Magazine competitions had been shortlisted in the same month.  Another successful competition entry at Hampshire Writers Society for the first 300 words of a commercial women’s fiction novel, is actually mushrooming into a commercial women’s fiction novel. Could this be Book Number Two? Yes it could. Change name of book from competition title of Marrying Mother to Your Secret’s Safe With Me after all sorts of plots twists infiltrate the original idea.

May –The rush is on to finish Your Secret’s Safe With Me so it’s out of the way before the launch of The Theatre of Dreams.

June – Choosing my book cover, writing blurb and dedications and then coming home from a week’s holiday in Spain and finding a paperback copy of The Theatre of Dreams waiting for me on the doorstep.

July – How do I launch a book? Surely if I just throw a few tweets out there, chat about it on Facebook, add a few Instagrams, tell a few friends…that’ll work, won’t it? The first Amazon reviews are in and they’re very good – but they are all written by people who know me.  Fulfil another personal ambition and visit Hampton Court Flower Show on the hottest day of the year.  We all wilt and have to be revived by large doses of Pimms. I do, however, gather ideas for a winter knitting project if the writing career plummets.

August – The Theatre of Dreams is officially launched into the world and the euphoria soon ends with a look at my sales figures.  How do you make one book stand out against so many millions of others? Maybe I should have done a bit more tweeting and making friends on social media. Maybe I should have just paid out big bucks for a professional book promotion service.  Maybe I need a much bigger family. It’s a steep learning curve but on the plus side more reviews are in and they are not written by people who know me…

September –  We set sail on a two-week cruise to the Baltics.  After traipsing through a mere smidgeon of the 22km of corridors at the Winter Palace in St Petersburg it’s easy to see why the Russians had a revolution.  It’s jaw-dropping opulence in the extreme. Publisher accepts Book Two.

October – Do what we we’ve been meaning to do since we returned from the Netherlands twelve months previously – put house on the market and plan an escape to the country. Yes we are that couple of empty-nesters looking to downsize to a house with sweeping views in rural isolation but close to all local amenities and obviously we still need something big enough for all our stuff, and our children’s stuff that didn’t leave the nest with them…

November – Onwards and upwards to conquer the Everest sized mountain of book marketing and self-promotion.  Meanwhile, start edits on Your Secret’s Safe With Me.

December – First author talk, nobody fell asleep which I take to be a good sign.  Continue to try and make self more alluring and interesting on social media. House sold – first challenge of 2019 will be to find a new one that ticks all our 101 boxes. Edits complete on Your Secret’s Safe With Me and launch date set for 18 February 2019.  Who’d have thought, this time last year…

Book Links:

The Theatre of Dreams

Your Secret’s Safe With Me

 

Many thanks to everyone who has supported my writing journey and also to my fellow authors who have guested on this blog during the year, either talking about their favourite comfort reads or their own magical books.

Wishing you all a very happy and prosperous 2019.

 

 

 

The Book Launch

Posted on | by Rosie Travers | 3 Comments on The Book Launch

The day finally arrived – The Theatre of Dreams was officially launched and it’s like sending a baby out into the big wide world. You hope everyone is going to like it, you hope you’ve created something endearing and captivating, but of course, books are subjective and not everyone is going to be enthralled by your style or even interested in your genre.

It seems to have been an awful long time coming – eight months in total since I signed that publishing contract and it has been hard keeping the momentum of  ‘I’ve got a book coming out’ going. I have tried to build an ‘author platform’ during that period – it’s a been a learning curve that has taken me right out of my comfort zone and I’ve still got a long way to go.

I’ve extolled the virtues of my book, I’ve described it as warm-hearted, as funny, entertaining, now at least it’s out there in the public domain people can read it for themselves, make up their own minds and hopefully agree.  The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. I think I’ve baked something quite delicious but now it’s time for the taste test!

The Theatre of Dreams is out there taking its first steps, and the online launch  – interacting on social media with four different devices all pinging away at the same time – went without a hitch,  and the physical launch, more of a celebration with friends and family and an open invitation to everyone I’ve ever met in Southampton to come along, went better than I could have hoped, and in fact provided a wonderful opportunity to catch up with a few people I hadn’t seen for years! (Oh yeh, and I did sell a few books too…)

As much as I’d now like to sit back and take a break from social media I can’t. The launch is just the beginning – a book is for life, but I no longer feel quite so much like a one-man band. I’ve had good reviews, I know I’ve written a well-rounded story and I will keep on plugging away.   Hopefully I will have more confidence to go out there and promote myself.  I read somewhere that the best marketing tool is to write another book. That’s taken a bit of a backseat over the last couple of months  but I feel ready now to pick up the WIP and attack it with new vigour.  And more importantly, breathe…..

Competition Time!

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I think it is every writer’s dream to see their name in print. I write because I enjoy it, and I want to publish what I write not for some great ego trip, but because I think other people might enjoy reading it too. I’m an avid reader, I’m never without a book at bedtime, and I write the sort of stories I like to read myself.

I don’t enter  a great deal of writing competitions. I did when I first started out because quite naturally when you first start out you think everything you write is absolutely brilliant. One win in a local competition early on spurred me on to national competitions where the field of competitors increased considerably. After paying for a critique and receiving feedback where the only positive comment was the way I’d laid my story out on the page, I more or less gave up – until earlier this year when I plucked up the courage to submit a couple of short stories to Writing Magazine.

When I began submitting novel number one (which has been re-named and rejected so many times it’s easier just to refer to it as novel number one), I followed all the old advice about starting something new straight away and the idea for the Theatre of Dreams, which had been brewing for some time, just seemed to fall into place.  Second time round, when I began submitting The Theatre of Dreams I had no back-up plan. I didn’t have an idea for a new novel, so I had to think of something else to take my mind off that lengthy wait for aents/publishers to respond (which thanks to Crooked Cat wasn’t such a lengthy wait after all!).

Science Fiction has never been my forte, and I’m not usually up for a challenge, but the theme of ‘Other Worlds’ caught my imagination as did a second competition due in the same month,  on any theme as long as the words  ‘without that everything falls apart’ were used mid-way.

Most writing competitions these days carry an entry fee, which can add up – another reason I’d stopped entering, but as a magazine subscriber one of the stories was free to enter and the other was  discounted. They tell you in the rules that if you don’t hear within two months you haven’t won. Two months down the road I had edits to work on with the Theatre of Dreams, and a new novel idea was starting to take shape. I kept busy.

So, imagine my surprise when I sat down with my lunch the other week, opened up my newly arrived May edition of the magazine to see my name in print! I hadn’t won the ‘Other Worlds’ competition (no surprises there) but beneath the winning entry I was NAMED on the shortlist!  And then I flicked through to the mid-sentence competition, and there I was NAMED AGAIN!!

I know it’s not quite the same as an Oscar nomination, but I’ve waited all those years to appear on a short list and then two come along at once! I’m happy with that. Very happy!

 

(I will be putting these stories up on this website soon).

Celebrations and Palpitations

Posted on | by Rosie Travers | 2 Comments on Celebrations and Palpitations
It’s back down to earth with a rather exciting bump. Forget all those exotic locations of the previous few posts, I am now back in the UK, shivering in the snow, and looking forward to the next stage of my writing journey.
 
The good news is I have a publication date – 1st August 2018.
I now feel I have entered the world of a proper writer – no longer an imposter. 
 
I have an editor (it takes a professional to realise that when I was waffling on about the beginnings of a beard the word I was actually looking for was stubble….) and hopefully very shortly, a book cover.
 
For the last few years I have been lucky enough to have had a lot of time to concentrate on my writing ‘hobby’. I was an empty-nester, my fledglings had flown and we had moved away from our friends and family in the UK to live in the Netherlands. I didn’t have a job, and with only a relatively small circle of new friends and acquaintances, I had an awful lot of time on my hands. A more sociable person might well have gone mad at the thought of the long lonely day stretching ahead once their other half had left for work each morning, instead I sat down at my keyboard and wrote (although I may have gone just a little bit crazy at the same time).
 
 
I can write a novel in social isolation, but the next bit, the publicity, the marketing, requires the opposite – engagement. Subliminal engagement, because  it’s strictly forbidden in book marketing circles to SHOUT OUT that you’d like everybody  TO BUY your novel, PLEASE.  Instead it’s all about creating a buzz, or a murmur, an interest, luring the potential reader in…
 
So while I am still basking in the celebrations of having a publication date, I am also having a few palpitations at the thought of the road ahead and all that it entails.  
 
I will be stepping out into unknown territory. I’ve never been very good at conversing with strangers, I’m the shy, retiring type, but the upside of social media is that I don’t actually have to talk to people face-to-face about my upcoming publication. I can hide behind my Twitter profile, create a whole new persona on Instagram, and re-invent myself as the bubbly, vivacious author of an entertaining romantic comedy that will tug at your heart-strings and make you smile all at the same time. 
 
Of course I have to be aware of potential sales figures, but right now I’m still on my newbie-author high. It’s extremely satisfying (and also something of a relief) to know that a publisher has put their faith in me and my writing, and believes that I have produced something that other people will want to read.