Monday, December 4, 2023

Christmas Letter by Paty Jager



This month snuck up on me! I was so busy through the month of November, I didn't realize until today we were into December! 

Well, I knew because I sold books at a Holiday Bazaar on Dec. 1st and 2nd, but it didn't click that it was a new month until I was nudged to get this month's post written. I decided to share the Christmas letter my dog, Nia wrote.


Happy December!

Do you know what this means? More toys! Yes!! I love the little ones that squeak when I bite them. They are so much fun to run around the house squeaking and annoying the people and making Mikey want to take the toy away from me.

But then I also like the big ones. They have lots and lots and lots of stuffing! Big white billowy piles of stuffing. Once they are gutted, my favorite thing is to turn the toy inside out and chew on the seams. That is a real good tooth cleaning.

In case you haven’t figured it out, this is Nia, Paty’s Chiweenie. I’m now a year and a half old and am trying to be good. But it is so much fun to ignore someone calling to me when I’m zooming through the tall grass or eating wildlife poop. Even the tasty treats Paty carries with her can’t tempt me when I’m bounding around the side of the hill chasing rabbits. I really want to catch one of those furry things and see if I can pull out their stuffing.

I went on several trips this year. And they took a few without me. Which was okay. I got to go to the neighbors and play with their weenie dogs and puppy. We ran and ran and burst through their doggy door and around the living room. It’s more fun chasing dogs my own size than the big lugs, Harlie and Mikey.

In the spring Paty's hubby was busy getting fields ready for summer. I like it when I stay home with him. He doesn’t put me on a leash, and I get to zoom around the fields like a crazy little pup. 

May, when the whole family went to Alaska for a high school graduation and wedding, I stayed with the neighbors. I was glad I didn’t have to ride in a plane, but I zoomed around the neighbor's yard like a low-flying fighter jet!

At the end of the month, Paty tried out the new book trailer that they'd built. They made lots of noise in the shop while they tore it apart and then made it better. While she was at the Sumpter Flea Market, I stayed home. But in September, we both went to the Flea Market. It was fun to stand at the entrance to the trailer and wag my tail, drawing everyone over to pet me. Then Paty and Mary would ask them what kind of books they liked to read. I’d get pets and sometimes they would sell a book. Win-win for all of us!

Paty and I took a trip to Wallowa County to research for a book and to attend the Tamkaliks powwow in Wallowa. I stayed at her brother's house playing with Chubs while they drove out to Starvation Ridge where the Jeep had a flat tire. Luckily, her brother was kind enough to change the tire and they returned to Enterprise in time to get it fixed before the tire store closed. The powwow was as colorful and entrancing as Paty remembered from prior visits.
August brought a trip Paty had been waiting for. It was ten days on the Big Island of Hawaii with a friend. Her hubby was busy haying and told her to go. I stayed home with him, hanging out in the yard watching him drive hay equipment and occasionally getting a good zoom through the wet alfalfa and grass. I love the swish of the plants along my sides!

When Paty was home, we had fun walks, some around the fields and some up on the hills. I like the hills the best. There are so many different and interesting smells. I have my nose to the ground when I’m not trying to find Harlie who gets to run wherever she wants. I have to stay on my leash. Paty is afraid if I follow Harlie she’ll take off after a coyote or deer and, of course, I’d follow because who doesn’t love a good chase!

The first week of November, Paty went to Las Vegas for a book marketing conference. She came back tired and full of things she wants to incorporate into her writing career. We barely got back into a routine and Paty's granddaughter and her two fluffballs (Pomeranians) came over to house-sit while  Paty and her hubby went to Portland for a long weekend. Paty was selling books at the Portland Holiday Market and hubby was visiting friends. While they were away, Kevin (the male fluffball) and I learned how to squeeze under the gate. It was fun! Until her granddaughter saw us.

Now it’s December and I’m so excited! There are pretty lights all over the front and back porch and around my yard. I’m pretty sure it was this time last year that Mikey and I received several fun toys. Most of them have been gutted, torn apart, and thrown away by now, so we are ready for some new playthings.

I’m waiting for Santa to show up with all those new toys. I hope you have a wonderful Christmas with lots of stuffed toys, ropes, and treats under the tree. And you have a fun and spunky new year. I know I plan on it!


Nia 



Paty Jager is an award-winning author of 56 novels, 8 novellas, and short stories of murder mystery, western romance, and action-adventure. All her work has Western or Native American elements in them along with hints of humor and engaging characters. This is what Books a Plenty Book Reviews has to say about the Gabriel Hawke series: "The blend of nature tracking, clues, and the animals makes for a fascinating mystery that is hard to put down."

Saturday, December 2, 2023

The Quiet Year Behind, but What's Ahead, By M.L. Buchman

Note: I’ve been doing this here at Romancing the Genres for several years now. If you’re in a retro mode or want to peek at my last year’s prognostication (or want to see how right/wrong I’ve been in the past), visit: https://romancingthegenres.blogspot.com/2022/12/what-year-2023-will-be-by-m-l-buchman.html.

Looking forward, I see a couple of very clear trends. None of these are shocking news. I’ve pegged them before because the indie industry has largely stabilized. Not completely, but the Wild West of its first ten years now lies solidly in the past.

Success in the near future, as I see it, is a little about tools and a lot about strategy. So, think of this more as a wandering set of random observations and suggestions than predictions.

TRANSLATIONS

In 2021, I said we were 2-3 years from universal—on the fly—translations: choose a title, choose a language, start reading.

I know people who are now doing AI translations without a professional bilingual proofreader, but I can’t imagine how annoying those are to read. Clean-up is still needed.

So, auto-translate isn’t here yet…maybe by 2025?

But affordable AI translation backed by a professional bilingual proofreader? Oh yeah, so doable now. I’ve already started that with the first one live by the New Year if all goes well.

 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The pandemic effect continues. All of those programmers stuck at home were able to deeply focus on advancing AI tools and WOW did the landscape shift fast.

I also said that it would an exciting time for IP lawyers—and is it ever! Look for legal wranglings to continue for the foreseeable future.

Do you use AI for idea generation? Fine.

Do you use it to create cover art or actual words? Wow, are you ever walking into a world of potential hurt. LLM (Large Language Models, the way AIs work) are trained by, you guessed it, feeding them lots of language (or images or whatever).

Developers have two choices:

One, only feed it works legitimately in the Public Domain? The LLM will sound / look beyond archaic (because it was filtered from works created seventy years past the death of the author or from low-grade fan fiction [if it was high-grade they would need to copy other’s worlds]).

I even try not to read any books over a few decades old to avoid sticking my writing voice hideously in the past.

Train your LLM on modern materials? You’re stealing copyright according to the initial bits of case law and a little thing called the Berne Convention of 1887 ratified by 181 of the 195 countries of the world. (Hot tip: You can avoid all that mess by limiting your LLM sources to Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, and a few choice others.)

Just yesterday as I write this, Sports Illustrated was shamed into taking down a whole series of magazine articles written / generated by AI, complete with AI-generated profile pictures and bylines. Yep, the times are going to be interesting. (Shamed before the lawyers had a chance to come after them.)

AI-Audiobooks

These and translations appear to be the only AI elements steering clear of the whole legal wrangle over how they were trained. It’s an economic way to create additional IP from your deep backlist.

Again, like a translation, it can be posted simply as it’s generated, but a proof-listen and edit is still highly recommended. Is “lead” pronounced “leed” or “led”? Does “read” come out “red” or “reed”? That alien race name in your SF masterpiece…Cthulhu anyone?

But these translations are still cheap / free and a great place to start.

ADVERTISING

I’d previously noted the collapse of the “advertising churn” model. The number of people living on the churn (spending $250,000/year to make $75,000/year because the rest gets pumped back to the ad company) has collapsed. I’m sure there are people who are still managing that, but far fewer than ever before. Readers are ad saturated.

My take on it is that ads can still be effective, but rarely anymore in a saturation mode. Targeted ads, intended to build audience and new fans, seems to be the way to go—as maybe it always was.

Remember, a fan isn’t someone who you managed to churn or discount a book into their hands. A fan is someone who finds you and thinks, “Oh, I like this kind of stuff.” Then, with proper handling (which I’ll get to in a minute), they buy a second and a third book. By the end of the third book, you are well on the way to turning them into a true fan who will now go and plow through your backlist and join your newsletter to see anything new coming.

If you’re still living in the ad churn, ask yourself this, “Been sleeping well lately?” I wouldn’t be.

PANDEMIC

As I write this, we’ve just survived 2023, the Year of the Post-Pandemic Craze.

Writers who were smart about business loved the Pandemic. Not only did we have an excuse to stay home and write, but after people burned out on the Netflix catalog, they bought books. Lots of books.

Then because of a minor miracle of science (called building a major vaccine in under a year instead of the more typical decade), the populace finally declared the pandemic to be over (well before the experts were ready). I read an article yesterday that the US population alone was estimated to have banked about $20 trillion (that’s $20,000,000,000,000) in savings during the Pandemic. They drove less, they ate out less, and they sure didn’t fly anywhere.

In 2023, it’s estimated that they’ve burned through $19 trillion of those savings. They played, they partied, they traveled far and wide, they had a great time.

There was one thing they were not doing—reading books.

Many, many authors saw their income halve overnight, and remain that way throughout 2023. (Mine dropped, but thankfully not like that.)

I expect 2024 to find some modicum of balance as the US and others are forced back to work, as college loan payments return, and budgets are once more a matter calling for some attention.

That’s good for writers, so I’m hoping for a better 2024 as are many others.

 DIRECT SALES

I harped on this at length last year (see the link at the top to revisit the discussion, https://mlbuchman.com if you want to see what I did). The only thought I’ll add to that is Do it! Do it now!

Yes, it’s a total pain in the ass. Sure it makes you a higher percentage of the cover price for each sale, which is offset by the time it costs you.

BUT it gives you direct connection to your fans.

Re-read that sentence. Here, I’ll force you to: It gives you direct connection to your fans.

You get their e-mail and that’s your ticket for the long term. You get to coax them into the second and third purchase that turns them from reader to fan. The importance of the chance to market them directly can not be overstated.

Why?

See the next topic.

DISCOVERABILITY

For the last five years or so, a friend and I have had a two-hour cross-country brainstorming session every month (And in September we met up for five days and really shorted our brains out.) In the past, we started every conversation with, “How do we break publishing?”

This was the relevant question over the last five years as we sought ways to leverage new tools in creative ways. I even built a mini-conference designed to give the software vendors more ideas and clearer feedback (several of the ideas have since appeared on their platforms).

But those platforms have stabilized. Sure, they’ll continue to improve, but they’re now about how to create or distribute a book better, faster, cheaper—rather than how to do it at all.

So, we’ve started asking a new question, “How do we break discoverability?”

Because that’s the current challenge. If you aren’t asking yourself that question daily, or at least weekly, you’re failing as the manager of your small business of being an author. Constantly ask yourself, “Other than writing high-quality stories, what can I do to improve my discoverability?” (Hot tip: If you aren’t asking the question, you’ll never find an answer.)

Personal Example 1:

I’ve started new fan outreach initiatives: bonus scenes, recipes from the books, cast lists, and readers club videos. To see what I did, visit: https://www.mlbuchman.com/fan-club-freebies/. Feel free to join!

Personal Example 2:

For eight years I wrote a short story a month and gave it away for free for a week. People read them in droves, and then bought them in droves until they were a third of my income. But after over a hundred stories (there were some years with Christmas bonus stories), I wasn’t feeling as inspired as I had been.

I planned to stop the monthly Ides of Matt short stories, but first I asked the magic discoverability question.

In answer, I came up with Thrill Ride – the Magazine. It’s an opportunity to expose my stories to the fans of the authors I bought stories from. It’s a win-win discoverability tool. https://thrillridemag.com. (By the way, submissions are open through 12/31/2023 at midnight.)

My second best advice?

Think, think hard, about creative ways that you can “Break Discoverability” and reach your fans in your own new and creative ways.

AND MY BEST ADVICE (my same final paragraph as last year and the one before that and…)

Ask: How much time am I spending writing?

It better be over 25 hrs/wk if you’re a full-time author. Over 10 hrs/wk if you’re still in the aspiring mode.

Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! is more effective than the next book for ensuring that your backlist grows, your future expands, and you’ll be in the best position to take advantage of 2024, 2025…

Note: my webstore is live at https://mlbuchman.com.

 


USA Today and Amazon #1 Bestseller M. L. "Matt" Buchman has over 75 novels, 200 short stories, and 50 read-by-author audiobooks.
From the very beginning, his powerful female heroines insisted on putting character first, then a great adventure.

PW declares of his Miranda Chase action-adventure thrillers that: “Tom Clancy fans open to a strong female lead will clamor for more.” About his military romantic thrillers: “Like Robert Ludlum and Nora Roberts had a book baby.” He is also the founder and editor of Thrill Ride – the Magazine.

A project manager with a geophysics degree, he’s designed and built houses, flown and jumped out of planes, solo-sailed a 50’ sailboat, and bicycled solo around the world…and designs quilts. He and his wife presently live on the North Shore of Massachusetts. More at: www.mlbuchman.com.


Friday, December 1, 2023

Do We Ever Fail?

Hi, I’m Judith Ashley, author of The Sacred Women’s Circle series, soul nourishing romantic women’s fiction with light paranormal elements. My stories show you what life could be like if you had a place like The Circle where you are unconditionally accepted, supported and loved. And where, with this support, you make choices to overcome the darkest nights of your life to choose love and light.

This month Genre-istas can repost an old blog post from Romancing The Genres or from another blog. Or they can write something original on whatever PG or PG-13 topic they choose. I’ve chosen to do the latter.

While I was going through, yet again, piles of papers and notes, I found scribbled on the back of a grocery list the following:

To be successful, you must learn how to handle failure.

My challenge with this quote is I’m not sure where I saw it or heard it. When I Googled it, a quote from Michael Jackson has the message but stated a bit differently in that he said one must learn to fail.

I prefer the learn how to handle failure.

Why? I’ve never met anyone who has always done things perfectly. In other words, sat up, crawled, stood up, walked, talked in full sentences, spelled all words correctly, etc. We all move forward in our lives by striving to learn that which we see as beneficial to us.

Children who are always carried or pushed in a stroller do not walk as early or as easily as a child who learns to turn over, crawl, stand and then walk.

When I read that quote I’d scribbled on the grocery list, I thought of my journey as an author.

First: What is success? I’ve written eight fiction and one non-fiction books. They are all available through the major vendors (think Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, etc.) in both e-book and print. I had a goal to have my non-fiction available in audio book this year and that isn’t going to happen for a variety of reason I won’t bore you with. (and yes, that’s a dangling preposition).

Second: My definition of success has changed in the 20+ years I’ve been writing.

Third: What is failure? I like the premise that no one fails. What they’ve done is ruled out what doesn’t work. Knowing that allows them to be more focused on finding what does work.

Fourth: While I may not succeed in the exact way I’d planned, that doesn’t mean I’ve totally failed. My writing goals for this year centered on getting that audio book recorded and released and writing 10K new words.

While, as you know, I didn’t get the audio book recorded and released, I did write 10K new words. Perhaps not a new short story, etc., and yet I did write over 10K new words in blog posts for Romancing The Genres, Windtree Press and The Glasser Institute for Choice Theory-US.

So I reached 50% of my goal. We often discount what we do achieve because we didn’t reach 100%.

I also believe that we are always doing our best giving what else is happening in our lives, where we are at the time (health, other commitments, etc.) and how we perceive what is going on in our lives.

For the past several years I’ve been battling with chronic fatigue. I’m sure that some of you can relate to the “I’m tired of being tired” message I reported to my doctor more than once.

We tried various things that did not work.

And then labs showed my blood iron levels were below 20 (normal range is 20 – 150). Low blood iron levels were the culprit. After looking at an iron rich diet (thankfully I like spinach, almonds and dark chocolate) my numbers did not go up and actually dropped. At one point my levels were 9.

Drastic measures?

Not really drastic but definitely annoying. A few more tests showed I had a bacteria that interfered with my body’s ability to absorb the nutrients in my diet. Two courses of antibiotics finally killed the culprit.

With it being gone, I knew I’d be bouncing with energy in no time at all.

“Not so fast” said my body.

In August of this year through the efforts of a friend who has no qualms about searching for things on the internet, I found Nature’s Bounty Gentle Iron. Those blood iron level numbers began to rise!

How does all this connect to “To Be Successful You Must Learn How To Handle Failure”?

Like most things in life, it takes more than one try or effort to be successful

For me the critical piece is to continue to search for answers, to continue to fight for the level of success I want and have the right to experience and to continue to believe that, in the end, I will succeed while acknowledging the end may not look exactly like I initially envisioned.

And how does this all fit into my writing?

The characters in The Sacred Women’s Circle series face the every-day kinds of challenges most women face. They each keep searching and in that process make the decisions and changes so that they do manifest their dreams. Perhaps not exactly as they’d originally seen it, but certainly exactly as it needed to be for their happiness.

You can find my books at your favorite e-book vendor as well as through my website www.JudithAshley.net and Windtree Press. Print books are available at Jan’s Paperbacks in Beaverton, OR and Arte Soleil in Portland, OR. Get the addresses from my website. And be sure to ask your library if you’d prefer to read my books through that resource.


Learn more about Judith's The Sacred Women’s Circle series at 
JudithAshley.net

Check out Judith’s Windtree Press author page.

You can also find Judith on FB! 

© 2023 Judith Ashley

Wednesday, November 29, 2023

The Story Behind The Story by Sue Moorcroft

     Authors are often asked where they got the idea for a book. When I’m asked, I sometimes struggle to answer, because it’s something as nebulous as an old bullying case I remembered or an anecdote I was told.

Truthfully, there is a connected anecdote to The Christmas Love Letters. My dad used to tell me a story about one of his ‘aunties’ (which could be a cousin or a family friend rather than a blood relative) as her wartime husband went missing in action. Long after the war, just as she was preparing to request that  he be declared dead so she could remarry, up the missing husband popped.

He’d been hiding out in Italy all this time … 

Society being as it was in the fifties, she was given the choice of resuming life as his wife, or to get out without shared property – because as a married woman, her husband controlled the lot – and to face a world that disapproved of divorce. This injustice stayed with me, and although I’ve given Maddy a husband who vanished from a clifftop one snowy night, I also gave her a lot more options than those of my dad’s aunt.

But that’s just a subplot. 

The idea for the main thread was literally put in my hands. I was at a writers’ conference, Swanwick Writers’ Summer School, and a lady asked me to take a bundle of letters. They’d been written to her late sister-in-law and she didn’t want them around. They were an embarrassment, but she recognised their value in social history terms, and so she’d hesitated before throwing them away. Did I think I could make a story out of them?

To be honest, I was reluctant. I don’t enjoy people suggesting subjects for my books. But I took them to my room and began to read. I think I’d read two before ideas began to bombard me! The letters cover nearly thirty years of contact between illicit lovers. When they met in the seventies, he was a sergeant in the same British army regiment in which my father served (I’ve just realised Dad comes into this post twice!) and she’d been a civilian working with the army. I recognised the world he wrote about from my army childhood, and her experiences as a woman were universal. 

I was hooked, and when I reached the end of the letters, I desperately wished I could just go to Amazon and download the final instalment.

As that wasn’t possible, I wrote The Christmas Love Letters instead, beginning with Raff turning up in a seaside village with the love letters Maddy’s great-aunt Ruthie wrote to his dad. I changed all the names, of course, but I kept the locations and the voices of those long-ago lovers, filling in the blanks and projecting into the future. 

Writing The Christmas Love Letters was a labour of love. And though I usually hesitate to admit that I like one of my books over the others, I am very fond of this one!

Sue Moorcroft is an award-winning and
 internationally bestselling author and has reached the coveted #1 spot on Amazon Kindle UK. 

Her novels, short stories, serials, columns, writing ‘how to’ and courses have appeared around the world. If you’d like to see more of her covers go to www.suemoorcroft.com and click on ‘Gallery’.

Twitter  [@suemoorcroft]

Tuesday, November 28, 2023

How to Cope with Grief During the Holidays by Sarah Raplee McDermed

 

The grief of losing a loved one, whether through death, mental illness, drug addiction, or any other way, can be especially difficult to cope with during the holidays. I decided to blog about some resources I found to help me.

In their book, Giving Sorrow Words: How to Cope with Grief and Get on with Your Life, Candy Lightner and Nancy Hathaway share hundreds of pages of lived experience and guidance. Ms. Lightner is Founder and President of We Save Lives and Founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

I found Ms. Lightner’s blog post entitled Coping with Grief During the Holidays to be really helpful. Although her focus is on grief for someone who has died, the advice applies to my situation for the most part. My daughter is mentally ill, drug addicted and homeless

She begins by saying, “I would like to share some things I have learned over the years that have helped me and those I work with who are also grieving. Some of what I would like to share came from the grief facilitating I have done, and even more when I was researching my book.”

Some of her suggestions may surprise you. For example: “Make the most of symbolism.” You’ll have to read the post to find out what she means.

David Kessler is one of the world’s foremost experts on grief and loss. His latest book is Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. Mr. Kessler’s blog post, How to Cope with Grief During the Holidays, includes tips for specific holidays from Chanukah to Father’s Day. He recommends having a back-up plan for a holiday in case you find you can’t handle the family dinner or the Christmas tree decorating party. He says that often just knowing you have a backup plan is enough to get you through.

Whatever your situation, I hope you learned something useful from my post. ~Sarah

Monday, November 27, 2023

Love and the Holidays - Writing Romances for the Holidays ... by Delsora Lowe

I love reading holiday books. And…I admit, I also love writing holiday books. The season is magical, especially when we have young children. Their eyes widen as they unwrap a present from Santa. They love decorating the tree and leaving out the milk and cookies on Christmas Eve. Sadly, my kids are grown, and not so sadly, they now have their own. But all three grandsons are beyond the age of pressing their noses against the window, scanning the sky for Santa.

This year, during my last-minute shopping for Thanksgiving, I came across the candy Advent calendar: a punch-out cardboard, holiday-scene, poster-sized box, where behind each door is a small piece of chocolate for each day in December. Every year I bought them for my young grandsons, one living in my state, and two living half-way across the country.  Until a few years ago, now that all three are in high school. This year, as I perused holiday candy at the grocery store, I spotted, the box sporting Santa. I ended up buying one for my fourteen-year-old grandson, despite knowing he was too old. But it made me feel good as a gramma. So, at Thanksgiving dinner, I prefaced that I had brought him a surprise—that I knew this present was for little kids, but still I couldn’t help buying it, since he loved them when he was little. I handed it to him, and the huge smile that came across his face was priceless. I got a big hug. So, moral, are any of us too old to still believe in the magic of Santa? I think not! 

And for those who celebrate other holidays at this time of year, I love reading about the traditions in those holiday books, too. I would love book recommendations in the comments section! 

All of the above are reasons why I love writing romantic holiday stories. I have memories of enchanted Christmas Eves as both a child and an adult. One such snowy scene I used in Snowbound Holiday, a book that I hope to release in 2024-25. I was visiting my daughter and her family in the Aspen area of Colorado. As we drove home, we found ourselves in the middle of a herd of Elk crossing the street, from one snow-covered field to another. We stopped so as not to hurt any elk or our car, as they soon wandered all around us. Under a full moon that glowed a soft light through tiny flakes of snow, and the shadowy outlines of elk, that to this easterner looked like reindeer, it was a real-life, magical scene I will never forget.

So, here’s to enjoying a good holiday romance.

Below I’ve featured the three holiday books I have written and released so far. 

The Holiday Hitchhiker

Two strangers, one snow-worthy vehicle, and a cozy cabin in a blizzard

Cole Peters is ready to escape the bustle of the wildlife management symposium and the overpopulated conference complex in Reno, and get back to his solitary, mountain cabin in the state park.

What he didn’t plan was a road trip with a stranger, clad in the most unnatural, fluorescent colors, who hops into his truck. With a blizzard approaching, how can he say no to a “hijacker” in tears?

Addy Adams had a rough night. Fired, no place to escape to, and a missing car service, how can she get to her parents for Christmas before the blizzard shuts down the roads? Now stranded on a highway, in a white out, with an accident up ahead, did she trust the right man?

Can two strangers find friendship and more, while stuck in a log cabin with a sweet and welcoming couple and their two kids who are super excited about the arrival of Santa? And will Cole and Addy make their way to their respective homes in time for Christmas? Or will they realize they were meant to celebrate together during the magical season?

Amazon (also in print)

Books2Read

 

The Inn on Gooseneck Lane

Nat and Brad were in love once: the young starry-eyed kind of love. Then life got in the way.

Nat Thomas calls Mistletoe Falls, Vermont home where summers were magical, her aunt became the parent she needed, and high school love bloomed. Sixteen years later, that love lost, Nat returns home for a much-needed break. She's recruited to revitalize her aunt's picturesque inn. Will the boy who broke her heart be the man who rallies to save her home and capture her heart…for good?

Brad Matthews returns home to buy Green Mountain Sports, after years as an outdoor adventure guide. He's thrown into partnering an event to revive the town's inn and boost his business. Can he work with the woman who demolished his heart and ran with no explanation?

In a small town where everyone knows your business and interfering relatives revive snicker-doodling, the lost art of matchmaking, Nat and Brad may not stand a chance. Can the two find enough heart to forgive and accept love again?

Amazon (also in print)

Barnes & Noble (also in print)

                    Apple Books (also in print)

                 

 Come Dance With Me

Improvisational jazz musician meets buttoned up English teacher—will the Christmas lights sparkle or shatter before the dance ends?

Sam Johnson, a burned out, New York City iconic jazz pianist transplanted to small town Maine, finds himself and his muse again through a disparate group of committed teen musicians and their buttoned up, efficient, high school English teacher who is roped into advising the after-school jazz club.

Ashley Sullivan, an expert in classical music and teaching the bard, is out of her element when it comes to jazz or anything impromptu and desperately needs Sam’s help. What she doesn’t know is Sam has made it his mission before this gig ends to get Ashley to lighten up and enjoy the things in life she denies herself; music, friends, spontaneity, creativity, and yes, love.

When Sam works to rescue her from her childhood fears, Ashley runs the other direction. Can what is done out of love tear apart a relationship before it’s in full swing, or forever cement a love that is true?

Amazon

Books2Read


 

~ cottages to cabins ~ keep the home fires burning ~

Delsora Lowe writes small town sweet and spicy romances and contemporary westerns from the mountains of Colorado to the shores of Maine.

Author of the Starlight Grille series, Serenity Harbor Maine novellas, the Cowboys of Mineral Springs series, and the novella, The Love Left Behind, Lowe has also authored short romances for Woman’s World magazine. Recently released were two Christmas stories: The Inn on Gooseneck Lane and Holiday Hitchhiker.

Social Media Links:
Author website: www.delsoralowe.com
Facebook Author page:
https://www.facebook.com/delsoraloweauthor/community/
Amazon Author page:
https://www.amazon.com/Delsora-Lowe/e/B01M61OM39/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0
Books2Read Author page:
https://www.books2read.com/ap/8GWm98/Delsora-Lowe
BookBub Author Page:
https://www.bookbub.com/authors/delsora-lowe-93c6987f-129d-483d-9f5a-abe603876518
Goodreads Author Page:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16045986.Delsora_Lowe
Instagram: #delsoralowe / https://www.instagram.com/delsoralowe/

PHOTOS:
Counting the Days:
countdown to christmas clipart - Clip Art Library (clipart-library.com)
Delsora Lowe Book Covers: cover designer, Covers by Karen