Listen, Bitches

Here is a handy trick, for when you know your blog post / FB entry / office memo / etc is taking too long to get to the point. Start the first sentence with "Listen, bitches." You can go delete it after you've finished writing. But I guarantee it will get you straight to your point. For example:

Listen, bitches.

I would rather eat a bucket of eyeballs than promote myself.

Especially on social media. All that hashtag-spamming algorithm-twisting click-follow-share-like-buy digi

tal donkey-braying feels incredibly gross and fake, and I hate it like I hate stepping in a puddle with socks on. 

Now. With that said, Kristine Hall of

Hall Ways

and #LSBBT is THE BEST blog-tour-guide there ever was or will be. She is just egregiously kind, and helpful, and patient, and so good that I even have to take back some of those ugly things I said about social promotion in the above paragraph.

You know what she did?

She set me up a special prize drawing, where I can put the first chapter of my next book in with the three copies of One Night in Sixes that we're giving away. (It ends at midnight tonight, so

go quick if you want in on that

.)

She put together

this neat scrapbook

, where I can show off the amazing beautiful things that some of you guys have made and done for me, that I could never, EVER have done for myself.

And she has put my book in the hands of SO many fantastic bloggers and readers, like

Tabatha Pope

and

Melyssa Prince

and Texan Girl Reads and

Bookadelphia

who have written reviews that I would have never in a million years known how to ask for myself. Like

this one here

, that legit made me cry, because she just GETS IT.

I don't know how much sense this will make to those of you who haven't done the author-thing, but like... Kristine brought my book back to life, y'all. I thought it was dead. I thought I had failed. Now there's all these brand-new people picking it up, and some of them are enjoying it the way I had never EVER dared to hope that perfect strangers would or could, and my writing-world is a garden of possibilities again.

So, even though I'm probably always going to be rotten at instanipulating the blogarithms, I'm prepared to confess: in the right hands, these book-tour-barn-raisings are really something else. Hashtags and all. And if you don't have someone on speed-dial already...

#listenbitches:

Hall Ways

is the fearless, friendly media-mancer you need, want, and deserve in your life. Go find her.