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!

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!

Big Book and Slushie Maker Giveaway!

It's still summer, so let's celebrate by reading books and drinking icey cold drinks!

In that spirit, I'm holding a giveaway starting at midnight tonight where two (2) lucky winners will each get:

A signed copy of OTHERKIN and OTHERMOON...

And a fabulous brand new Zoku Slush and Shake Maker!

Both of the Slush Maker's I'm giving away are purple, which is the one second from the left. Pretty!

I'll also throw in a couple of OTHERSPHERE bookmarks to hold your place when reading and to whet your appetite for the third book in the series, which will be out this December.

See the Rafflecopter widget below for how to enter. There are two ways - leave a comment on this blog (just say hi, or whatever you like, as long it isn't mean or yucky, please) or tweet about the giveaway. You can do each of those once per day to earn another entry in the contest and increase your chances.

This starts at midnight TONIGHT (so midnight on August 14) and ends a week later, midnight on August 21

Good luck and happy mid-summer to you all!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The Lost Books of Youth

The internet is an amazing place that yields up all kinds of information and allows you to track down things you weren't sure even existed.

But it can't bring back a book that's out of print. Well, not without some huge campaign where signatures are acquired or some such, anyway, and even then you can't figure a publisher would bring back a book first published in 1937.

That book is THE LOST QUEEN OF EGYPT by Lucile Morrison.

one of my favorite books when I was a kid. The book was old even then, and perhaps already out of print. But Cooke Library at Punahou School had a copy and I read it at least half a dozen times back then.

With the advent of places like Amazon, I was able to find most of the slightly more obscure books I loved as a kid like THE LITTLE BROOMSTICK by Mary Stewart, and MARA, DAUGHTER OF THE NILE by Eloise Jarvis McGraw. I even found NO FLYING IN THE HOUSE, by Betty Brock, a book that had me trying to kiss my elbow for weeks because I wanted to be able to fly too. (Read the book if you have no idea what I'm talking about - it's for middle graders and possibly younger, but it's a blast.)

But even with places like Amazon and Abe Books, and Google and Ebay, the cheapest I could find for a copy of THE LOST QUEEN OF EGYPT was a used copy for $84.40.

No, I haven't bought it. I'm not overflowing with money for those sorts of purchases, but still! It haunts me. I vividly remember the charming drawings inside of the young Ankhsenpaaten and Tutankhaten, the joy of family life as depicted in ancient Amarna, and the sadness as the young Queen moves toward her inevitable fall when her husband, King Tut, dies. And of course, the delightful, melancholy ending, which adds a marvelous twist to what could be a tragic tale.

I guess what I'm saying is - if your library has this book, read it! And savor the books you love that you're reading now. Not everything is accessible all the time, even in this day and age. And you may end up with nothing more than a beautiful memory when it comes to your favorite books.

Author Fair and Book Signing This Sunday!

I'll be at the fabulous El Segundo Author Fair this Sunday, June 2, signing books and giving away bookmarks and temporary tiger tattoos from 1:30 - 2:30.

Barnes and Noble will have books on hand for people to buy if they wish, but I'm happy to sign books already purchased - or anything else you like. I'm easy like that.

Here's the flyer (front and back) telling you about all the fabulous authors and panels and such. I haven't been before, but apparently they get a lot of people.

So many great authors attending!

(Just click on an image to make it bigger if you wish.)

I'm Giving Away Three Copies of Othermoon!

Here's your chance to win one of three copies of Othernoon! I'm running a contest on Goodreads (click on the widget below to enter) open to all in the US and Canada.

You have till May 21 at midnight to enter! I'll sign the book over to the winners and include some bookmarks because you guys are awesome.

Hmm. Link below seems to be broken. GO HERE to enter.

 
 

    Goodreads Book Giveaway
 

   

       
   

   

     

          Othermoon
     

     

          by Nina Berry
     

     

         
            Giveaway ends May 21, 2013.
         

         
            See the giveaway details
            at Goodreads.
         

     

   

   

      Enter to win

(Sorry, international folks, but funds are low, so I can't swing the huge mailing costs for an international contest right now. But when things change a bit, that too will change!)

In Which My Title-Announcing Thunder is Stolen by Internet 'Bots

I just turned in the third book in the Otherkin series to my editor, exhausted, wild eyed, thrilled, ready to sleep, clean my house and finally have a glass of wine and see my friends. Because I haven't done those things very often in recent memory.

You see, the last few weeks I've had my nose to that writing grindstone, finishing up a draft that was good enough for my editor to see. It wasn't easy, wrapping up three books full of adventure, romance, and paranormal world building. But it really was fun.

Now that I've had a few nights of sleep and have caught up with the latest episodes of Mad Men and The Good Wife (still have to catch up Justified, The Americans, and The Borgias, and well, I never stopped watching Game of Thrones and The Daily Show) I figured I'd announce the title of the book.

So this morning I clickety-clicked into my email and saw there was someone who wanted to be my friend on Goodreads. I clicked yes, then went to check my author page on that site, just to see what my to-reads were up to. And lo and behold! Goodreads had book 3 up already - with the correct title!

Crap. So much for my "big" announcement. Had it been announced in Publishers Weekly or something and I missed it? I high tailed it over to Amazon and voila! They also have the book up, available for pre-order (cough cough), and the release date down as December 31, 2013.

Well, that's news to me!

(I can't vouch for that being the correct release date, by the way. It could be correct, or not! Will let you know when I know...)

Fricking internet bots. Somehow they ferreted out the title. Not that title was this huge mystery. My friend's very smart daughter figured it out and emailed me, asking if she was right. Well, she was! Because after book 1's title being OTHERKIN, and book 2's OTHERMOON, the title of book 3 just had to be:

*insert pointless cymbal crash here* 

OTHERSPHERE

Yep, Othersphere, the world that lies closest to our own, where the otherkin draw their shadow selves from. Where Caleb's powers as a Caller of Shadows dwells. A beautiful, magical, dangerous place. And yes, you get to step through the veil and see what it's like...

You can see what parts of it look like on my Otherkin Pinterest page.
 
Here it is on Goodreads, and Amazon. I couldn't find it on the Barnes and Noble site or anywhere else... yet. But it will be there, and in bookstores soon!

I hope to have the cover in a month or so to tantalize you with further. Till then - read on!

What Writers Don't Know About Their Book Sales or - Just About Everything

So, you're a writer and you're busy writing your third book. Your second book just came out, and it's doing okay, you think.

And you think that but really you have just NO FLIPPING IDEA how it's doing.

People ask me how book sales are going, and the truth is I don't know.

And that's because there is no one source for book sales, and some sources won't share their info. I can look at what Amazon tells me on my Author Page, but those numbers don't include: 1. Sales from independent book stores who don't use bookscan. 2. Kindle sales. (No, really. Amazon won't tell me how many electronic copies they've sold of my books on Kindle. You would think that would be the easiest thing thing for them to track and to share with an author. But no.) 3. Nook sales. (Barnes and Noble doesn't even have an Author page or its equivalent, so forget it!) 4. Kobo sales. 5. Sony E-Reader Sales. 6. Random other sales that apparently happen that nobody knows about.

You would think in this age of electronic whatchamajiggies and tracking thingamabobs that it would all be known.



No, it is not flippin' known!

So when I get a cool @reply on Twitter from a friend telling me that OTHERKIN has hit #94 on the Amazon Teen Fantasy (Kindle) charts, I rush out and squee and tweet about it. And I watch obsessively throughout the day, refreshing the OTHERKIN page to see if it's moved. And it did move! All the way up to #81 on that chart! Then it was on two charts - Kindle Teen Fantasy and Kindle Children's Books at spots 84 and 99!

Now today, it's not on either chart, but is (as I type this) ranked #4,694. OTHERMOON isn't far behind.

But what does that mean?

Say it with me:

I do know it's a good thing to be on a chart somewhere. Being in the top 100 (or top 10, as OTHERKIN was on the Sony Reader store Children's list last year for awhile) is better than not being in it.

Now this may vary, depending on your publisher. Another writer told me that her publisher sent her weekly emails with sales numbers.

I hope she's right. But I can't quite believe it. It's like believing in fairies or the Easter Bunny. You want it to be true, but if your life depended on believing it... like, if a vampire was coming at you and you held up a picture of the Easter Bunny to fend it off, would the vampire flinch back? Or would it laugh and tear the picture from your hand, saying, "Your lack of faith will be your doom!"

What if the Easter Bunny was a vampire? Oh wait. They did that story. And it was awesome.

So I celebrated and tweeted being on the Amazon charts yesterday. But I have no idea what that really means for my sales. It's good - don't get me wrong. But I can't quantify "good" for you. I wish I could.

Eventually I will get royalty statements. I'm looking forward to those.

Sort of.

I think some part of me is glad not to know, not to quantify my writing too much. It's a creative process. Getting numbery about it isn't conducive to my creativity.

Meanwhile, a three day weekend is coming up, which means ... more writing away at book 3. Wish me luck. Wishing you a happy:

Another Giveaway - Win a Signed Advance Copy of Othermoon

Hear ye, hear ye! I'm doing another giveaway on Goodreads, handing out two signed copies of OTHERMOON to readers in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia!

Click below to enter. It's open from now till January 17. And good luck!

 
 

    Goodreads Book Giveaway
 

   

       
   

   

     

          Othermoon
     

     

          by Nina Berry
     

     

         
            Giveaway ends January 17, 2013.
         

         
            See the giveaway details
            at Goodreads.
         

     

   

   

      Enter to win