Jo Frances's Blog

Thank you to everyone who entered the giveaway!  The final count was 719 people entered which was GREAT.  I'm mailing them out now, and according to Amazon, the winners should get their books around September 28th.

Woke up this morning to great news---28 people have already entered the giveaway for "Without Chase".  Since this was my first giveaway for either book on Goodreads I didn't know how I was supposed to promote it.  Then up until midnight last night, my giveaway was still "pending approval" so I didn't want to promote it just in case the giveaway wasn't approved at all, or approved in time.

Unless there was another reason I don't know about, the delay was probably my fault.  ...

Things I learned from doing a three day free promo on Amazon:

1.  One day is long enough.  I got most of my traffic the first day.  By the second day downloads had dropped to less than half, and on the third day downloads were half of that.

2.   Give yourself enough time to market your free days.  The Author Marketing Club has a great list of sites that list free promos.  Click for the Book Submission Tool.  I listed my promo only on these sites, and got a goo...

The sequel to "Fame, Love and other Lessons" is complete and ready to be uploaded to Amazon!  I'm adding the exclamation mark not because I'm trying to "generate excitement", but because I feel like someone crossing a marathon finish line eight hours after the winners.  I did it!  Has it really been three years since the first book?  Yes.  Yes, it has.  Anyway, it's called "Without Chase" and it will be available July 30th.

The truth is, I thought I was done with...

I'm participating in NaNoWriMo this year, and 24 days in, I know I'm not going to be a winner.  For those who don't know, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, and it's held each year in November.  You sign up online, with the goal of finishing a novel in a month by writing about 1660 words per day.  That's it.  There are no fees, no check-ins, nothing except the solidairty of working with other writers struggling to finish those words counts.  You "win"...

I made a lot of mistakes in writing my first novel, but an inadvertent one had to do with the story's abrupt ending.

Now, unlike mistakes caused by carelessness (editing) or inexperience (the original book cover), this mistake was the result of being too experienced in a different genre---screenwriting.
In screenwriting, a writer has about 120 pages, or 120 minutes to tell their story.  This means that everything has to be distilled to its essence, and screenwriters strive to capture only...

I've been struggling to write my second book for awhile now.  I really wanted the story of Jamie and Chase to continue, but as much as we would love it in our own lives, two hundred pages of a couple in love just wouldn't be that interesting of a read.  Shortly after finishing the final, FINAL versions of "Fame, Love and other Lessons", I was trying to imagine what would happen to the characters.   Something that would show that their story wasn't over yet, but something t...

The good news is, "Fame, Love, and other Lessons" is doing well.  It's hovered in the #10 spot for the past week in the Sports Fiction genre, and even better, is around #50 in the Coming-of-Age bestseller list.

The bad news is, my book was placed on a website that has "pirated" works.  This may explain the large number of returns I got during a one week period---the week my book was first listed.
There's nothing to be done about this, apparently.  Online piracy exists and people...

Hi, my name is Jo.   And it's been three weeks, five days and nine hours since I last wrote.  I am a writer who doesn't write.  

There.  I've admitted it.  And like an addict, I probably wasn't even telling the truth about when the last time I wrote was.  My sense is that it's been longer.  I just don't want to know.

Now that I'm older, I've built up an entire warehouse full of what-could-have-been's.  How my life would have turned out if I hadn't...

Another author scandal, this time by a British crime author, RJ Ellory.  Ellory was caught writing glowing five star reviews about his own books, and giving his competition scathing one-star reviews.
Before I published on Amazon, I would have heard about this and given a big "so what" to the whole thing.  But now that I see how important reviews are to the sales, and therefore ranking of our books, I can certainly sympathize with the need to help the process along.
As an author, revie...