Bronze Kindle Edition

Just a quick post to announce that Bronze (The Glister Journals, #1) is finally available on Amazon Kindle. It's a big book for only $1.99! Get the ebook for .99 when you purchase a print copy. Nook and other formats will be available soon. Buying a copy now will help boost Bronze's visibility across Amazon during this busy holiday time. Your help and support is very appreciated!

---

---

Bronze can be ordered through any bookseller (ISBN 9780982893678) or order now at Barnes and Noble or Amazon.
Visit theglisterjournals.com for news, excerpts, and more about The Glister Journals series.
Reviews for Bronze

All original text and materials by or commissioned by B. B. Shepherd are copyright 2012-2017 to B B Shepherd.

Bronze New Edition Cover Reveal and Street Team!

I'm so excited about this! I absolutely love it. I think it fits the mood and main character of the book perfectly. The new edition paperback is in production, the on-sale date is set. I'm waiting for the proof copy and can't wait to see it! It took a long time to write the book in the first place and get the first edition finished. It's taken even longer and has been much harder to get to this point, so forgive me if I seem disproportionately excited about a re-release. The thing is, unless the first book reaches a broader audience, the next books in the series will have a hard time too. Going by the media and reader reviews it's already received, I'm sure more people will like it if they have a chance to read it!

That's why I need your help! Self-promotion is really hard for me. I've never been good at selling anything. I once even tried selling Avon but was hopeless! I also find the concepts and mental juggling required (executive function skills) for marketing very confusing, which may be due to my autism. So I'm seeking help from people who have already read Bronze or would like to read it, and that live in the US or Canada. If you'd like to know more about the series, you can read my About The Glister Journals page and take a look around The Glister Journals website. A few excerpts can be read HERE to see if you like my writing style, etc.

What does the street team do? The team's purpose is to get the word out in any way possible. The most important thing is to actually read the book and review it, especially leaving a review on Amazon. Any help is immensely appreciated. Posting your thoughts and reviews to social media is also enormous help, but telling people in real life is too, people you think would enjoy the book, or may know someone who would - your neighbor, your family, your book club, your local librarian! Letting others know about the pre-order is very important too. Books with a healthy pre-order base are more likely to be stocked in bookstores. Even more important, they'll be actively promoted by Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other online retailers. The MOST important thing is to post a review on Amazon on or as soon after release day as possible. Posting reviews to other retail and book community sites (such as Goodreads) is extremely helpful, too.

What do you get for being on the team? First of all you get my heartfelt and everlasting gratitude! It's an overwhelming task for one person to accomplish, but your help can make all the difference in the world! More tangibly, you get an advanced reading e-copy of Bronze and each of my books months before anyone else for as long as you're on the team. The second book, Copper, is in revisions and I hope will be ready for ARCs by the end of this year or early next. There will be an exclusive Facebook group where you can ask me questions and share ideas and experiences. There will also be Glister-related swag and gift card giveaways exclusive to the street team, early reveals, and exclusive sneak peeks from upcoming books. I'm very open to other ideas about how I can reward you!

Everyone that pre-orders a print copy of Bronze will also get a free e-book copy. Pre-orders (print OR e-book) will also get you early access to the Bronze soundtrack which will be publicly revealed in a countdown to the release of Copper. I'm open to other ideas about pre-order perks too! (Bronze is available for pre-order on Barnes and Noble right now for over $3 under list price!)

I won't go into details about the team here, but if you'd like to help, please fill out the form in the link below. For legal reasons we can only accept adults over 18 on the team, but if you're under 18, I'd appreciate your help so much! You can find some ideas HERE. Anything you do to get the word out will help and I'd love to know all about it! You can stay in touch with me here on my blog, on Twitter, through Goodreads or through The Glister Journals Facebook page.

The Glister Journals Street Team Application

I look forward to working with you!

---

---

Visit theglisterjournals.com for news, excerpts, and more about The Glister Journals series.
Reviews for The Glister Journals: Bronze
The Glister Journals: Bronze can be purchased through any bookseller or purchase now at Amazon.com

All original text and materials by or commissioned by B. B. Shepherd are copyright 2012-2017 to B B Shepherd.

Update: Summer 2017, Upcoming Releases, and Your Help

Personal News

This is long overdue. I'm sorry if it seems I'm neglecting the blog, but life's been overwhelming for quite some time. I've been taking professional development (curriculum developing and salary increasing) classes all summer which, along with writing every day, have kept me very busy. I haven't even had the chance to get out of town except for a day trip to Monterey with my youngest daughter (which was fun!). I greatly missed going to visit my son and his family, especially my new granddaughter, but it just wasn't possible this summer. School starts in less than a week so I'm gearing up for that, along with everything else going on right now.

One of the things I am excited about is being on the launch team for Anne Bogel's new book, Reading People.

If you have any interest at all in personality frameworks and understanding other people, this is the book for you! I'm almost finished reading the ARC copy but have preordered the paperback as I prefer to have physical copies of books I'll refer to a lot. And I'm sure I will with this one! And you get a free audio edition with the preorder! I'll be posting my review soon.

Glister Journals News

Work on The Glister Journals is ongoing. At this moment we're finalizing the new cover of Bronze. I really love it! The new edition paperback and e-book should be available for preorder within the next two weeks. I'll have a firm release date soon, but it will probably be October. It will also be available for review through NetGalley by the end of the month.

Bronze received great reader and media reviews when it first came out, but I didn't know how to get the word out far and fast enough, so very few people knew about it. If people don't know about a book, they can't buy it, and if they don't buy it, it pretty much disappears. That is what happened to Bronze. I'm hoping the change in cover will give more of a feel for what the book is really like than the original artwork does. And now that I understand marketing a little better, I'm hoping the book can achieve a wider audience than it has so far.

But I need your help! I'll be building a street team to help get the word out, not just about Bronze, but for each Glister Journals book as it's released. If you live in the United States and have an active social media presence, your help is invaluable! For those of you who don't live in the US (and I know there are a lot of you!), your support, comments, and reviews will always be extremely important. But for now we have to concentrate on US sales to help the book and series really get off the ground. Advanced Reading Copies (e-books) of the new edition of Bronze will be made available through NetGalley. If you've already reviewed Bronze, I thank you so much! There is no need to read the new edition - nothing has changed except a little detail has been left out and the prose cleaned up slightly - but you are certainly welcome to re-read and your help is even more valuable if you're already a fan! New readers will be encouraged to post reviews on or near release day. You'll be the first to receive ARCs of Copper and the remaining books in the series. I will also have exclusive giveaways, freebies, and first peeks at new content for street team members. I will post separately about this with the new cover reveal very soon!

Which brings me to Copper. The first draft is finally finished and I've begun first revisions on the second half. The first half (chapters 1 thru 15) has been written for quite a while and has had several revisions already. It's in good shape and I'll revise the whole book once I've cleaned up the second half (chapters 16 thru 34). Then the hard work of cutting and polishing will start. Unfortunately I can't give a release date, but I hope to have review copies available by the end of the year. I love my full-time job, but sometimes I really wish I could just concentrate on writing!

Also new is a short newsletter, once or twice a month, just to keep you informed of things you may be interested in: current and upcoming giveaways, recent blog posts, Glister Journals news, book reviews, etc. You can sign up for it here on the blog or on The Glister Journals website.

Currently writing: Copper revisions
Listening: The Shins - Heartworms and Passion Pit - Kindred.
Reading: Reading People by Anne Bogle and The Almost Sisters by Joshilyn Jackson
Watching: The Bold Type

---

---

Visit theglisterjournals.com for news, excerpts, and more about The Glister Journals series.
Reviews for The Glister Journals: Bronze
The Glister Journals: Bronze can be purchased through any bookseller or purchase now at Amazon.com

All original text and materials by or commissioned by B. B. Shepherd are copyright 2012-2017 to B B Shepherd.

Smoothies and Book Club - A Summer Update

{Photo of one of my first smoothies on a bookshelf with some of the books I've bought recently}

Well I started this post before summer vacation started and look - it's almost the middle of July!

In Glister news, I've been waiting on getting my laptop fixed, the one with all my heavy-duty programs on. I wasn't able to use my USBs and for various reasons don't have internet on it, so transferring work to upload on this computer was impossible. It's apparently working okay now, so first up will be the new edition of Bronze in paperback and then I'll be looking into releasing it as e-book again. I have mixed feelings about this as book theft is such a problem, but with Copper coming out as soon as I can manage it, I really want that e-book out there. I'll also be doing Goodreads giveaways and might post chapters of both books at Wattpad and Smashwords. I'll keep you posted.

I'm staying close to home for most of the summer, doing curriculum planning for graduate credit as well as doing my best to finish the second Glister Journals novel, Copper. So I'm very busy. I admit that I've been stuck for a while on the last chapters, not because I don't know what happens at the end, but I'm not sure in what order those things happen, which affects what ties them together, which has made it difficult to focus on just writing. Earlier this year, there was a lot happening at work that adversely affected me and possible changes to my job on the horizon, both of which had me very stressed out for the last six months or so. Nothing of my doing, but I was deeply affected none the less. So that also made writing difficult to focus on. I'm not making excuses, just saying the way it is. I am making good progress now though, and all chapters are going out for final critiques.

I have no road trips planned this summer, which I'm a little sad about, but my poor little car has seen better days. I think I'm going to play it safe until I can buy a newer one. I plan on doing that next spring, if my car lasts that long without needing major repair. Poor thing's over ten years old and has over 200,000 miles - almost all mine! It's been a little trooper to be sure.

The one trip I made this summer was to see my son and his family in Iowa. I had mixed feelings about the trip, but I couldn't wait to see my son - I hadn't seen him in two years! I hugged him tightly twice a day to make up for lost time and try to stock up a bit for the future. And I hadn't seen my little grandson since last summer. I'm not sure whether he actually remembered me, but he seemed happy enough to have me around. But I'm not a fan of flying and Iowa and I have a little history together. They're not the best memories. The trip was nice though - just relaxing most of the time. They live in a very nice small north Iowa town where there's not much to do, but the time seemed to fly anyway.

I was interested in exploring SE Minnesota and loved the area around Rochester and especially Chatfield, but didn't have an opportunity to really investigate. Chatfield seems like exactly the kind of small town I'd like to eventually live near. Is anyone from around those areas? I'd love to hear your thoughts or experience concerning them. I'm thinking about retirement within the next ten years and certainly can't afford to retire here in the Bay Area. So I'm looking for alternatives. Somewhere I can buy a decent home in a quiet neighborhood with a low mortgage, maybe even a small farm - for horses, of course. It'll be the first (and probably last) home I've ever owned, so I'm rather looking forward to it!

{a picture of Chatfield, Minnesota, an old fashioned-looking small town. Not my photo.}

The other things I'm working on (in the sense of actually employing them in daily life) are life hacks. It seems like most things should be easier now at my age, but I still struggle with a lot of things, many because I'm autistic, but also just because I'm me! My two favorite discoveries so far this summer are making my own smoothies, which I'll mention again in a future post, and joining a book club, which I've never done before. I have a slow processing speed for some things, including reading, and know I can't keep up with most other people, but thought I'd give it a go for the summer weeks.

Is anyone else in the Modern Mrs. Darcy Summer Reading Club? I've been following her book posts for a few years. This is her first club (I think), and I've really been enjoying it. She chose five books for the summer weeks that I'd never heard of and probably never would have read otherwise. Since I have a very eclectic taste in books, it's been a real treat. Each book's reading time is culminated with a webinar and live feed, but conversation is ongoing on a Facebook group. The first webinar was really interesting. So far we've read One In A Million Boy and The Nest, both of which I enjoyed for different reasons. We're reading Everyone Brave Is Forgiven right now, which I'm not sold on yet. It's hanging in the balance. I may ditch it and sneak in a book of my own choice until we're on to the next one.

One In A Million Boy - From the acclaimed author of When We Were the Kennedys and Any Bitter Thing, the incandescent story of a 104-year-old woman and the sweet, strange young boy assigned to help her around the house—a friendship with unexpected reverberations for the boy's unmoored family.

I LOVE this book. It's difficult to describe and not like anything I've read before, but it's beautifully written with many quote-worthy passages and very memorable characters. I admit I got behind in reading this one and still need to finish it, but it's definitely one to enjoy the journey, not race to the end, so I know I'll be able to pick it back up and finish at my leisure.

The Nest - A warm, funny and acutely perceptive debut novel about four adult siblings and the fate of the shared inheritance that has shaped their choices and their lives.

Every family has its problems. But even among the most troubled, the Plumb family stands out as spectacularly dysfunctional. Years of simmering tensions finally reach a breaking point on an unseasonably cold afternoon in New York City as Melody, Beatrice, and Jack Plumb gather to confront their charismatic and reckless older brother, Leo, freshly released from rehab. Months earlier, an inebriated Leo got behind the wheel of a car with a nineteen-year-old waitress as his passenger. The ensuing accident has endangered the Plumbs joint trust fund, “The Nest,” which they are months away from finally receiving. Meant by their deceased father to be a modest mid-life supplement, the Plumb siblings have watched The Nest’s value soar along with the stock market and have been counting on the money to solve a number of self-inflicted problems.

This is a story about the power of family, the possibilities of friendship, the ways we depend upon one another and the ways we let one another down. In this tender, entertaining, and deftly written debut, Sweeney brings a remarkable cast of characters to life to illuminate what money does to relationships, what happens to our ambitions over the course of time, and the fraught yet unbreakable ties we share with those we love.

This one really surprised me. From the description (which I didn't read before starting) and the conversation of others in the club, I didn't think I would like this at all. Indeed, the characters are not very likable, but they are certainly very human and it's a fascinating study. It was an extremely easy read and I finished way before the deadline. Woot!

I'll have a giveaway for these books later. What are your favorite reads so far this summer?

---

---

Reviews for The Glister Journals: Bronze
New website coming!
The Glister Journals: Bronze can be purchased through any bookseller or purchase now at Amazon.com
Note: All original text and materials by or commissioned by B. B. Shepherd are copyright 2012-2016 to B B Shepherd.