This Week on "Nina Does a Blog Tour"

My first blog tour started last Monday, and it goes till next Wednesday, and so far so pretty darn good!

Our adventure so far starts New Years Eve, when Othersphere was born. (Even though more than one person told me they got it early! I've learned that happens often with books. No biggie.) Since I finished Othersphere, I've written the first book in a whole new series, and I was feeling a bit distant from the Otherkin trilogy. My head had gone to completely different places since Dez and her friends set foot in another world, where the moon has a heartbeat all its own...

But my emotional distance was also partially due to the fact that it was the last in my trilogy and that thought made me sad, so I chose to concentrate on other things.

The journey back to Othersphere started with me writing this post for Read It In Houston, about why I wrote the series in the first place. I started to get back in touch with my inner tiger.

I highly recommend it.

Then the holidays hit, and I kept writing blog posts for my upcoming blog tour while celebrating with family and friends, eating home-made tamales and seeing movies.

The actual day the book came out was a busy one - I had to take my cat Lucy to the vet (She's doing fine. Here she is enjoying the Los Angeles sunshine and keeping her highlights brown):

I also talked to my lovely editor on the phone, and (poor me) hung with fabulous friends for New Year's Eve.  I did a bit of book birthday social media blah blah blah, but book birthday's are weird things. People get the book on their e-readers (a couple of people were sweet enough to let me know they got theirs! I have such great friends) and it's now officially available in hard copies as well.

But it's not like the book leaps out of a cake and does a striptease. (Wish I could find a .gif of that!) Oh well.

It's magical and weird and awesome, but it's not as if your book parachutes down amidst fireworks or emerges from the primordial ooze to crawl at last upon the land. It's all oddly abstract for the author. For me the book was done six months ago. But that's how it has to work in publishing.

I was back at work on Jan 2, a bit shellshocked to return to the real world. I mailed off a bunch of books and swag to the winners of the YA Series Insiders launch giveaways (the main winner got over $1,000 worth of goodies from 11 different authors - crazy! Be sure to check out the YASI blog and keep checking for more giveaways. We've currently got one for the hot January releases going.)

Then - dun dun DUUUN! My first blog tour commenced. I'm giving away signed copies of all three Otherkin books, a gorgeous tiger necklace, fearless earrings to evoke that inner tiger, and more! Go here to see the whole deal, or read on.

First, a nice review at Ren's Rambles.

Second, an interview at Para Your Normal.

Third, a not as thrilled review (I'm being honest here, but don't get used to it!) at Hope, Love and Happy Endings.

Fourth, a super fun Dream Cast post at Taking it One Book at a Time.

Fifth, a review of the first book, OTHERKIN, at Bibliophilia, Please. (Because OTHERSPHERE is the last in the series, I thought it would be best to give the bloggers a choice as to which book to review.)

And tomorrow, a review of OTHERSPHERE by the lovely Jenna Does Books. No link to that actual review yet because it hasn't been posted, but here's a hint - she gave it five stars on Goodreads!

After that:

January 12th: CiCi Theories REVIEW ALL 3 BOOKS
January 13th: Unofficial Addiction Book Fan Club TENS LIST
January 14th: Dream With In A Dream REVIEW ALL 3 BOOKS
January 15th: TTC Books And More SPOTLIGHT & EXCERPT

Phew!

In the meantime, I got a nice mention in USA Today, I Smell Sheep reviewed OTHERSPHERE, as did Book Hoarder Mom, and Maci and Zoe Read Books published a very fun interview I did with them.


My best friend sent me flowers to commemorate the book coming out.

And so many nice messages on FB and twitter! My head is still spinning!

It was a relief to go to Lissa Price's launch for ENDERS and think about someone else's books for a little while. And of course I snagged copies of STARTERS and ENDERS signed by Lissa.

Hmm. Could be the makings of another giveaway...

Thanks for tolerating all my yim-yamming about this past week. Figured I should do my due diligence by listing it all, and thanking all the bloggers and Book Nerd Blog Tours for reading the books and taking the time to post things.

All the attention is amazing, don't get me wrong. I engineered a fair amount of it, after all, by setting up the blog tour. But I'm an introvert at heart, so I'm kind of excited to be working on the outline for my next book this weekend. I'd rather tell stories than blabber on about ME.

ME is boring.

ME and YOU on an adventure, in a story? That's more like it.

Happy Birthday, OTHERSPHERE! Lucky Book Number 3.

My third book is out today. The third in my OTHERKIN series, OTHERSPHERE.

They say 3 is a lucky number. They say it's magic.

In fact, they sing about it.



All I know is that I feel very lucky to have three whole books out there in the world, telling the story of Dez and her friends. It has been magical. Thank you everyone who has taken the time to get to know them along with me.

Win the OTHERKIN Trilogy in my Facebook-Only Giveaway!

To reward the folks who've so kindly liked my Facebook page this year, I'm giving away THREE (yep, 3) full sets of the OTHERKIN trilogy, signed and personalized for each winner. This is an international giveaway, opent to all.

Three folks will get a signed hard copy of OTHERKIN:

OTHERMOON:

And the Advance Reader Copy (ARC) of OTHERSPHERE. All the ARCs of OTHERSPHERE are mysteriously missing the last five words of the story. Crazy, right? So I promise to hand-write those last five magic words into the last page of your OTHERSPHERE ARC myself, making it just that much more personal.

Unless you don't want me to and want to be left hanging because you're funny that way. Up to you!

Just go here to my Facebook page and comment on the post announcing the giveaway (you might have to "like" the page first), telling me your favorite animal character in literature. (By which I mean any animal, magical, talking, or not! And not shifters like my characters.)

Animals in books are part of what drew me to reading in the first place, whether it was Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia or Charlotte, Wilbur, and good old Templeton the rat (see any resemblance to my character November?) in CHARLOTTE'S WEB. But as my all-time favorite I have to pick Iorek Byrnison from THE GOLDEN COMPASS/HIS DARK MATERIALS trilogy by Philip Pullman, probably because this amazing armored polar bear is as flawed and three-dimensional as any human character in books.

  

This is a still from the movie, but don't see the movie. (It's not that great.) Read the books! They're amazing.

And thanks to everyone on my Facebook page this year. I really am thankful for you all!

OTHERSPHERE - Now Available on NetGalley!

If you're a blogger or reviewer, you can now read OTHERSPHERE (third book in my OTHERKIN series) on Netgalley here.

If you're having trouble and/or need to be approved, just email me at ninaberrybooks (at) gmail (dot) come and I'll send a request to my publisher to get you approved.

I'm waiting...

Or if you need a widget, I can email it to you. Just let me know!

The Otherkin Series to Be Published in Czech!

 
The headline says it all except for - WOO HOO!

To celebrate, here's my own photo of Prague from my visit there in 2008:
 

Such a spectacular city!

How cool is it that a book I wrote will be coming out in a language I can't even read? It's surreal.

I can't help wondering - how will "otherkin" translate in Czech? Not to mention "humdrum" and "Othersphere"!  Luckily for me, that's up to the translator.

And what will the covers of the books look like? I'm a huge fan of Czech artist Alphone Mucha, and so am dreaming of art deco tigers dancing across the covers...

Or perhaps that a very dated way to think about Czech design. Here's the cover of Czech edition of Maggie Stiefvater's Scorpio Races, as a more recent example:

Very cool!

Thanks to KTeen for making the sale and I'll keep you posted when I finally do see a Czech book cover and find out the Czech word for otherkin. Stay tuned!

Catching Up, Sleepily

So... I turned my fourth (!) book into my editor last night. It's the first in my new series with Harlequin Teen, titled THE NOTORIOUS PAGAN JONES. And I love it  and it's going to be awesome. But as is the way after you've been feverishly been working on something for months on end - I'm happy to say goodbye to it for a little while. As I tweeted, I should be partying, but really, I just want to sleep. By the time my editor sends me her notes, I'll be rested and refreshed and ready to tackle the rewrite.

Enough "r" words in that last sentence for ya?

Meanwhile, it's October! The month of scary things like monsters, or what we think of as monsters.

Maybe they're just misunderstood, right?

Or maybe they're truly evil...

No no, I love Lady Gaga. TRULY EVIL, I said.