A Super Busy Spring!

Happy April!!! I'm finally taking a moment to do a blog post. March just flew by while I was working on a number of projects. Between writing a book, working at my other job and getting ready to set up at some library book fairs, I have been burning the midnight oil.

I'm excited about the book festival I'm going to participate in the last of this month. I've decided to set up a Mardi Gras table for fun, plus my historical romance, one of the dear-to-my-heart books, is set in New Orleans. I finally got the book in print. The interior looks great! I used a formatting service that was recommended by a friend. I do my own ebook formatting but I simply didn't have time to learn the print process. I did do a lot when it came to choosing fonts and making sure the book had the look I wanted before I sent it in. To me, that was important.

So the interior is beautiful. The cover, however, has been a more difficult process. I spent a couple of weeks trying to get it right. I had a cover designer help as well and there were still issues. Finally, after dozens of revisions, I hope I've got it right. It looked really good online so I'm waiting to see the actual product.

Also, I gathered up all my humorous Southern short stories for a print anthology, I called Dixie Darlings. I made the cover for Dixie Darlings. That was also a process that took me working a lot in March. I had this image I wanted to use and I worked for days on it. Never was happy so I finally gave up on it and started over. I got the idea to use legs. So I started out with a variety of legs, blue jeans and boots, skirts and bare feet, etc. I was like "meh." Then I found a pic of legs with vintage high heels and I was like "Oh, Darlene would love those!" (Darlene is a character in 2 of the stories)

I found a starry blue background and decided to flip it and put the legs on it. I went with a red-white-blue color scheme. It turned out so cute. Plus the interior of the book looks awesome. Paul did a great job again.

I have a table covered in stuff to haul to this festival. This morning I've been practicing with the Square credit card chip reader, learning how to use it. I like that you can go on their website and put in all your prices plus upload a copy of your cover to go with the price.

I'm hoping to be finished with the book I'm currently writing by the end of May or at least mid-June.
Plus I'm looking at setting up a new website. I did notice that Blogger has a bunch of new templates but I haven't had time to check them out.

Now I have to get back to working on the book. How is your spring going?