Ellisa Barr's Blog

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My favorite thing is their audiobook library. I've listened to ERAGON, THE SELECTION series and THE RAVEN BOYS series so far. This month they changed their audiobook service so I only get 1 free audiobook/month, but it's still worth it, thanks to the thousands of books from major publishers and self-publi...

Summer is about to begin!

But just because it's summer doesn't mean we should stop reading and writing. I’ve teamed up with the YA Chicks and many participating authors on a global campaign to encourage readers, writers, students, and teachers to share pictures all of the places—both ordinary and extraordinary—where they are reading and writing. This is open to all readers/writers of both middle grade and young adult books!

You can also take part in...

A MONSTER GIVEAWAY!

Every author participati...

For chances to win a copy of Outage, enter theGoodreads Giveaway,theApocalypse Whenever Giveaway, andmy Facebook launch party on Friday night, May 29th.

It's been just over a year since I started writing Outage, and I've been getting questions from people that want to know how I came to write it. They ask me about my inspirations and how I chose the genre and characters. I never would have guessed that I would forget those things, but I did!

I remembered that a friend and I did NaNo together last year but I couldn't remember whose idea it was, or why we did it, so today I went back through my email to see how this whole thing started. It's kin...

One of the unexpected benefits of writing Outage has been discovering other authors that share my love of post-apocalyptic story-telling. Summer Lane is one such author, and her new book, State of Pursuit, just released today.

State of Pursuit is the fourth in the Collapse series by Summer Lane which starts with State of Emergency. I had to read the first book as soon as I found it, because it's an EMP story with a fantastic female leading character.

Her 4th book,State of Pursuit, is just...

At a little after 10am this morning California time, the 1,000th copy of Outage was sold. Yay!! The book has been out a little over 3 weeks, so this is a huge milestone for me, and very humbling. I'm grateful that so many of you have chosen to pick up my book and read it. I love hearing that you're enjoying it and that it's helping you think more about being prepared. When I started this process last November I didn't have a clue that 8 months later, more than a thousand copies would be out i...

May 13th, a little before midnight, was the day I hit publish on Amazon. It took until the next morning before it was available. I didn't tell anyone I'd launched the book that day because I wanted to make sure everything looked okay. Good thing, too, because I could NOT get the formatting to look good on Barnes & Noble's site, and I couldn't figure Apple out at all that first day. THEN, Amazon decided to combine the free preview and the full novel into one listing, so it looked like you coul...

Once I got the cover finished I was ready to send my book out into the world. I don't know yet who I'm writing this blog for, but right now since it's mainly for me to help me remember how Outage came about, let me share a few numbers about the free preview. It was distributed for 5 weeks before I published the full length novel. Here are my results from that:

Free downloads after 3 weeks: 627 // After 5 weeks: ~1500Facebook likes after 3 weeks: 1 // After 5 weeks: 5Mailing list signups after...

Just thought you might like to see the original cover for Outage (formerly known as Powerless). I created this cover using a stock photo and editing it at www.picmonkey.com. I really like their site and almost always use it for editing images. However, it wasn't powerful enough to do what I wanted, so I downloaded a free editor called GIMP and watched Youtube tutorials until I knew enough to get by.

I still can't get over the difference! I should also thank the artists and authors at kboard...

I like to write a novel in the same order it will be read, and I feel like that about this blog too. I shared the journal entries I wrote as I was writing Outage, so I'll share here a few things I did after I finished to get it ready for publication.

I mentioned in the last post that I had family and friends read it. This was really critical in the evolution of the book, because they all pointed out different things that I could improve. There were a few things they all agreed on too. I think...