| Good day, and welcome to the July edition of my (mostly) monthly author newsletter. I hope you are finding time to enjoy the summer and are keeping virus-free. Full-page spread On Monday, my local daily newspaper, the Ottawa Citizen, featured Bane of All Things as part of its Summer Reading series. Thank you again to editor Christina Spencer for making this happen. |
| First in-person book signing I at last had my first in-person event on June 26 at Chapters Kanata. It was great to get out and see people in person after two years of pandemic lockdown. I even received my first piece of fan art (see right), this bookmark by a lovely young lady named Zoë. Thank you to everyone who came out, and to Morgan Lang and the Chapters team. |  |
| If you have read Bane of All Things, please post a review of it! Reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.com are crucial to help any novel stand out and get noticed. You don’t have to have purchased the book from Amazon to post a review there, just have an active account through which you have spent at least $50. A review doesn’t have to be long. It’s enough to just write, “I enjoyed this book.” (Assuming that you did 🙂 ). It’s the number of reviews, not their poetic or epic elegance, that helps a book to get noticed. (Not that longer and more in-depth reviews aren’t great, too, if you’re good at that sort of thing.) The next book, The Crucible Tree The bad news for this follow-up to Bane of All Things is that it has been languishing largely untouched since last summer, due to my health issues. The good news is that it exists, and not just as a rough first draft. I had taken The Crucible Tree through two extensive revisions by that point – just about ready to be passed on to my publisher. You can take a sneak peek at The Crucible Tree with its temp cover here on my publisher’s website. Where we go from here, and when, has yet to be determined. If you are on this mailing list, then you are aware that my publisher often relies on crowdfunding campaigns to help defray the up-front costs of a book’s production and marketing. It’s a tough market out there these days, and the entire publishing industry, like so many others, has been hit hard by the pandemic and continues to struggle. A successful crowdfund campaign made it possible for Bane of All Things to get published. I will let you know as soon as I do if another is the best way forward for The Crucible Tree. On a more personal note I continue to work through my cancer-related health challenges. Based on the latest MRIs, things are looking better across the board. Now, we just need this to continue. We are banking on the combo of one year of treatment with the new gene therapy meds, combined with radiation therapy as needed, to do the trick. But there’s still quite a long road of treatment and regular monitoring before me. As always, it’s all about the small victories along the way. Stay safe and keep reading! Cheers Leo |
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