Heather's Blog

To my favorite charitable organization: Thank you for fighting the good fight without end. And Happy 50th Birthday!!!

It’s been a while, I realize. The last month has been a living, breathing transition for me. Time seems to have come alive over the last few weeks, donned unfamiliar clothing, and laughed at me in tones that range from tender and parental to hysterical and maniacal. It’s definitely laughing at me, not with me.

As many of you know, I’ve recently moved out of state. My family and I packed up and left our home with nothing more than what we could carry in our suit cases. Amidst a tumultuous backdrop of friends caught in tornadoes and loved ones in the hospital, we entered what has seriously amounted to a “whole ‘nother world.”

I realize now that though I was more or less born under a wandering star, for the last decade, I’ve lived a relatively sheltered life. Everything is relative. There is a lot to be said for being able to drive to the grocery store, stock up on everything you’ll need for the entire month, drive back home, park in your own garage, and unload said groceries.

In the big city, humanity tends to revert to its more primitive state. We have no vehicle, so we have to walk or take public transportation everywhere we choose to go. What this means is that when it comes to shopping (read, hunting and gathering), we must trek across a twisted metal and concrete jungle, the threat of predators very real and alive at every street corner (read, behind every tree and over every hill.) When we find our food, we are forced to purchase (gather or kill) only what we can carry back with us.

Effectively, if we want to survive, we have to work for it. And that’s the physical kind of work, not the sitting behind a desk kind of work.

It’s a different world.

If you want to witness the human race in all of its multi-faceted splendor, take the train in San Francisco. Ride the BART. Catch a bus. Open your eyes and ears, keep your guard up, and whatever you do, wash your hands with anti-bacterial soap before you eat anything with them.

There is a value system alive in the big city that is unheard of in “smaller” parts of the world. You think you know what is important, what’s worth what, and then you pound the pavement of downtown Frisco and unwittingly sign up for a lesson in Priorities 101:

That flimsy piece of plastic with the blue triangles on it that it cost someone half a penny to create a hundred of in Honduras? It’s worth a fortune because it gets you on an overly crowded street car at midnight and off of the dark avenue corner where three shirt-less men have already fallen asleep and the crows are picking at a dead sea gull.

That trash bag with the hole in it? Worth more than suede because it’s water proof and when it begins to pour at four in the afternoon, you’ll want to make like the wizened homeless man is doing and drape it over yourself just to stay dry until you can make it to the train station.

The cigarette butt the woman in Prada tosses into the gutter is the one that the chain smoker who has learned to beat the system will pick up, light off of the one he’s finished with, and take down the street to the next street corner, where he’ll pick up another tiny treasure with enough nicotine and tar in it to get him yet another city block.

Trash cans stink, but they become windbreakers on the pier when the temperature drops and the Pacific’s icy fingers claw at your skin and bones.

Like I said, it’s a different world.

And then there’s the yellow end of the spectrum, far from the indigo hardness that makes up the unsettling aspects of making this kind of move…. If you’re standing at the top of a hill in San Francisco and looking back at the bulk of the country in the early morning, the sun rises over the bay with a promise unrivaled and paints the water in colors no artist’s palette has ever possessed. The roar of the crowd in the Giants stadium after a home run is like a freight train of happiness barreling through the hearts and minds of anyone lucky enough to be within earshot. And the steady, International Red metal majesty of the Golden Gate Bridge welcomes home a weary world with quiet and constant magnificence.

So this is home. For better and for worse, this is home.
xoxo

Hi all, I was fortunate enough to be interviewed by Cheryl Bradshaw for unearththeclues and thought I would share it with you here….

Guest Post by Heather Killough-Walden

Heather Killough-Walden is the author of several novels which you can find HERE on Amazon.com. She is also the New York Times and USA Today Bestselling author of the Big Bad Wolf series and The October Trilogy.

Her novels are fantastic and offer readers that rare opportunity to step out of their lives for a moment and to be swept away into a world of fanstasy and suspense. All of her books are well written and appeal to a multiple of audiences.

To give you an idea of her current success, check out these numbers on Amazon from just a few of her novels (current as of this moment):

THE HEAT
#98 paid in Kindle store
#4 in Romance Vampires
#4 and #5 in Romantic Suspense

THE STRIP
#114 in Kindle Store
#6 in Romance>Vampires
#9 Romance>Contemporary

SAM I AM
#180 in Kindle store
#7 Children’s Fiction>Love and Romance
#14 Children’s eBooks

HELL BENT
#165 in Kindle Store
#9 Fiction>Action Adventure
#32 Thrillers>Suspense

THE CHOSEN SOUL
#559 in Kindle Store
#10 in Fantasy>Epic
#11 Science Fiction>Adventure
#11 Romance>Fantasy

And that isn’t even the best part. All of Heather’s novels are only $1.00 on the Kindle right now.

I had the chance to interview Heather and I asked her to share some of the secrets of her success with other writers.

1. How long did it take you to achieve the success you are having with your books right now?

It took quite a while. I did the query letter routine for ten years without success and publishing houses almost never accept unsolicited manuscripts any longer. I have more than 300 rejection letters in my closet. Finally, Amazon Kindle came around, providing for people like me a venue and platform through which to share their work with the world. I hastily posted a vampire romance I wrote called The Third Kiss: Dorian’s Dream. It shot to #1 in vampire romance on Amazon and prompted a call from an incredibly prominent (and very good) agent. That agent, the CEO and chairman of Trident Media Group, managed to secure a number of publishing deals for me in record time. I have the best agent in the world!

The entire process, from the time I finished my first novel to the time that I signed my first deal took approximately ten years. I felt like giving up a hundred times. Maybe more. But Churchill’s famous speech kept ringing in my head and I hung in there. I’m very, very glad that I did.

2. What was the best thing you did marketing wise that you believe helped you get where are you today?

Again, that would have to be simply posting my work on Amazon. Amazon also possesses a number of blog sites and lists that you can join as an indie author in order to promote your work. I have to admit that I’m relatively shy, so I only posted on one or two of these. However, I priced all of my books at $1.00 and that, combined with the incredibly popular paranormal genre and (I’d like to think, lol) my writing skills, ensured that the books sold anyway, thrusting me into the top ranks on Amazon. I recently made it to the USA Today Bestsellers List, in fact. It’s an incredibly momentous occasion for me.

3. What do you do to market yourself? What works, what doesn’t?

At the moment, Trident Media and my print publishers are in charge of a lot of the marketing for my upcoming print publications (The Lost Angels series, due out in the UK in July and here in the US in November). However, for my electronic works, I have created a number of mild marketing techniques.

Once I had enough readers, I developed a newsletter through which readers learn of upcoming releases, contests, awards, etc. A good friend of mine handles the list for me. I also have a Facebook page and I love to friend readers and carry on conversations with them; they’re all very unique and precious individuals and I am more grateful for their loyalty than I can say. I have a website as well, and through that website, I keep readers informed of what is going on in my literary career, I have a blog, and I thoroughly enjoy feedback. Now that my books have sold a good number of copies, Amazon also does a bit of marketing on my behalf by suggesting my books to readers for me. That’s a big, huge help.

4. What tips/advice do you have for other writers?

I have very often felt like giving up on pursuing my writing career. The rejections really hurt, and when you get enough of them, no matter how good you are, a part of you begins to believe them.

Plus, if you’re not selling books, then you’re not making any money, and in so many people’s terms, that means you’re not “successful.” Like it or not, you’re judged on your financial worth. Add to that the fact that being poor can be literally painful at times, and you have one disheartening situation.

So, to those writers out there struggling day after day, rejection after rejection, Ramen meal after Ramen meal, I take a page from Winston Churchill and say this:

“Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty. Never give in….”

Hi all. I woke up to the neatest post on IndieReader, a wonderful site dedicated to promoting excellent new authors. The Spell is #5 on their Best Sellers List.

The Spell is both a USA Today and New York Times ebook bestseller. A good friend of mine made sure to procure a copy of the New York Times for me yesterday so that I could see The Spell sitting at #25 on the list. 🙂

Apparently, the Wall Street Journal is interested in doing a story with them about the list soon, so maybe The Spell will show up in that venue before long as well. Here’s hoping!

The List Where Indies Count

… I danced a jig. And said good-bye 2,977 times.

Hi everyone,

I have some tentative (read: TENTATIVE) release dates for the sequels in my series. Here they are, to satisfy your curiosity. 🙂

1. Blood and Grace, July 31, 2011 (to be combined with Thorn and Grace in a novella compilation)
2. Secretly Sam, October 1, 2011
3. Big Bad Wolf Book Four, The Hunt, December 1, 2011
4. Drake of Tanith, February 14, 2012 (to be released along with the revised edition of The Chosen Soul)
5. Beyond Neverland (sequel to Forever Neverland), July 1, 2012
6. Mean Business (sequel to Hell Bent), November 14, 2012

Keep in mind that at the same time I am writing these, I am working on the print publishing books I have already contracted for, such as the Lost Angels series.

Why is everything so hard?

The clothes your husband was thoughtful enough to take out of the dryer and put into the basket and carry into the master bedroom and leave on the bed for you to put away are actually still wet. So, you have to put them back into the dryer. But to do that, you have to take out what is already in the dryer and to do that, you need another basket. After a brief search around the house, you find that the only other basket you have is in your daughter’s bedroom, filled with clothes. So you have to put away those clothes first, but your daughter has gone through all of her folded clothes in the dresser and unfolded them in her pursuit of just the right t-shirt and in order to have room to put away the clothes in the basket, you have to re-fold everything in her drawers.

While you’re busy doing this, your daughter says she’s hungry. It’s lunch time. You leave everything you were doing and go to make her a meal, but as you’re working, your shoes stick to the kitchen floor and you realize something sticky has been spilled and not cleaned up. Again. You tell yourself you’ll mop it up just as soon as you’re done with the lunch preparations. As you’re telling yourself this, your email beeps repeatedly, but you’ve grown used to this and try to ignore it. When your daughter is finally seated at the table eating, you check your email and see, amongst fifty other messages, an important query from a business associate who wants sales figures for the last two months from three different vendors.

You start clicking on different sites, break out the computer’s accessory calculator, and start adding things up and putting them into excel when your daughter spills another drink. It has now joined its buddy on the kitchen floor, which you forgot to mop. She also got it on her clothes. You send her to her room to change, recalling that her clothes are in a half-put-away state and dreading what creative things she will accomplish with this new situation. You go looking for some towels to sop up the juice on the floor and run by the laundry, which you also forgot to finish and now the wet clothes in the basket are wrinkling and molding.

You sigh heavily, use a dirty towel to clean up the mess, and yell for your daughter to brush her teeth. She whines that she hasn’t had dessert yet and the doorbell rings. On the other side of the peep hole are cute little kids selling cookies your cholesterol level doesn’t need at ALL, but what goes around comes around, so you trek off to search for the checkbook.

You haven’t eaten anything, had anything to drink, showered, or started on your real, bread-winning work at all and by this time, your thoughts are so scattered, all you want to do is rip your hair out just to have something solid to focus on.

And then you remember that you’re having guests that afternoon.
Oh yeah, entropy is king.

For those of you wondering when you’ll get your next alpha and dormant fix, book four in the Big Bad Wolf series should come out for the holiday season this year. I promise to keep you all updated on the blog, my facebook page, and through the newsletter. 🙂

My agent informed me this morning that I have three books in the USA Today Bestsellers List! The first three books in the Big Bad Wolf series have made the grade. 🙂 I guess people like their werewolves!

Okay. So, I’m a huge Xena fan (or, I should probably say that I’m a huge “Ares” fan) and I love to go to You Tube when I need inspiration and hunt down videos of Xena and Ares in their incredibly physical love/hate relationship. (The ones by TheBerryBird are especially awesome)

But lately, it’s got me thinking…. Wouldn’t it be cool if someone made a video about the characters in one of my books? Or in one of my series?

And hence, this blog entry. If there are any vidders out there with a taste for challenges, let’s see what you’ve got! Can you create something from a book instead of a movie? Can you hunt down just the right faces and just the right scenes and put them to just the right music?

Oh, I get shivers thinking of the possibilities! Whatever you create, I will link to from this site and include in my newsletter.

Come on, creative ones! Inspire me!
🙂