What's up for Monday?

It's time for another Backlist Book of the Week!

For an excerpt from Wolfsbane visit Bernadette's Place on MySpace and read my latest blog entry.

URL http://www.myspace.com/bernadettesplace
Blog URL http://blog.myspace.com/bernadettesplace

For details on my Backlist Bonanza Book of the Week Contest visit either of my Websites:

www.bernadettegardner.com

www.jennifercolgan.com

Chances to win every month just by chatting with me!

Congratulations again to May’s Winner:

Tiarie Vaughn-Lazzar!

Please contact me, Tiarie, to claim your prize!

Book of the Week

Time for another one!

My Backlist Bonanza Book of the Week is:




For an excerpt from Ken’Ja visit Bernadette's Place on MySpace and read my latest blog entry.

URL http://www.myspace.com/bernadettesplace
Blog URL http://blog.myspace.com/bernadettesplace

For details on my Backlist Bonanza Book of the Week Contest visit either of my Websites:

www.bernadettegardner.com

www.jennifercolgan.com

Chances to win every month just by chatting with me!

Backlist Bonanza Book of the Week

And the contest begins!

My first Backlist Bonanza Book of the Week is:




For an excerpt of Hunter's Moon visit Bernadette's Place on MySpace and read my latest blog entry.

URL http://www.myspace.com/bernadettesplace
Blog URL http://blog.myspace.com/bernadettesplace

For details on my Backlist Bonanza Book of the Week Contest vist either of my Websites:

www.bernadettegardner.com

www.jennifercolgan.com

Chances to win every month just by chatting with me!

Personal Backlist Bonanza begins soon!

Promo is the bane of my existance.

I'll be the first to admit I'm not good at it. It's hard. I don't like to toot my own horn and often times when I do I feel like no one's listening anyway, but statistics show [or so people say] that promotion does help sell books.

What's the best form of promo? Beats me. I've done contests, and I plan to do more. I've done chats and every time I do one I swear I'll never do another. I've done author days which can be fun and paid for ads and went around bragging about my good reviews. I couldn't say if any one of those things [well, okay the paid ads, yes] has brought about an increase in sales.

Nevertheless, I must do it.

So starting Monday and running through September, I plan to have my own Backlist Bonanza and promote one book of mine each week. I plan to post excerpts here, at MySpace and on a few of my groups and generally talk about my books and take questions and very possibly give away prizes...I'm working on that one.

Stay tuned for Monday when I announce my first BOOK OF THE WEEK!

Sin and Redemption

One of the things we writers talk about and worry about and maybe even obsess about is the idea of having a theme in our work. It’s a little different from branding and perhaps even more important.

When I first learned about theme, I sat down and thought about the bulk of my work and realized that I do have an underlying theme to my work. It’s Redemption – or maybe more accurately, Sin and Redemption.

I like characters who have something to atone for, real or imagined, big or small, they have some mistake to fix, some hurt they need to make up for before they can truly be happy. It isn’t always my main character either – in Conjured in Flames, my first novel, there was Graciela, the “alien” sorceress. She was bad to the bone, but she did have a moment of clarity where readers learn a little bit about why she was bad and hopefully feel a little bit sorry for her.

In Bonfire of the Vampires my heroine, Abby, is a vampire killer [note I don’t use the word slayer]. She’s forced into it as a means of survival. In the sequel, Fresh Blood, it’s my heroine’s sister, the misguided Elena Talbot who needs redemption. Her sins against the heroine, her twin sister Erica, are too numerous to count.

In Wolfsbane: Aspect of the Wolf, hero Daniel must atone for his attempt to run Emilie’s business out of town. In The Soul Jar, Chance struggles to get Bree to forgive him for leaving her and in The Rebound Guy, Lauren deals with her tremendous guilt over using her best friend Eric as an emotional balm when her boyfriend cheats on her.





This theme occurs in most, though not all of my stories and hopefully it’s a salable point. I’m the writer who writes about forgiveness, earning it from others and from ourselves, and about overcoming the bad you’ve done to make good and move on.

If you’re a writer, what is your theme? If you’re a reader, do you find you look for books with particular themes or can you identify the theme of your favorite author?