Guest Post and Giveaway with Kelly Maher

Today the Book Pushers want to welcome Kelly Maher to talk about her new releases! Take it away, Kelly! 🙂

A well-written newsletter is a thing of beauty. It is at once informational, entertaining, and heartwarming. I’m one of those weirdos who looks forward to any year-end newsletters that holiday card correspondents include with the cards. I actually enjoy writing letters in general. In February of this year, I began a weekly tradition of writing a short card of what I’ve been up to for the last week to my grandmother who turned 98 this summer. I live hundreds of miles away and had been home visiting. When I said goodbye to her, her response was along the lines of “Have a good life.” Are you hearing that record-scratch stop in your head right now? I sure did. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to make it home until August, so I started the letters to ensure that if I ended up not seeing her alive again, I would be comforted by the fact that I’d remained in contact with her and she knew what I was up to. She’s still alive and kicking, and I’m still writing the weekly cards.

Last year, I started a newsletter that I planned on sending out when I had a new release or upcoming event. Well, when your releases and events are a bit stretched out, you’re not exactly in constant contact with your readers. I thought further about how I wanted to approach this aspect of promotion. I thought about some of my favorite features in the newsletters I receive as a reader. I hunt down Nalini Singh’s in my mailbox (because, of course, GMail hides it from me) to read the story snippets and outtakes she includes with every issue. Other authors include photos of research trips they’ve taken, and I dream of vacationing there one day myself. Still others talk about the antics of their pets. Finally, I thought about those weekly letters to Grandma. I wanted to do a very personal, with names changed to protect the guilty, newsletter without beating people about the head with the information about my latest release. I’ve never claimed to be the best of marketers 😉

As of last Sunday, November 1st, I’m now running two newsletters. One is my New Releases and Events newsletter where I include information about the newest and upcoming releases, events I’m doing, excerpts from the latest release, books I’ve loved since the last newsletter, and a Thank You Program where, for every 100 subscribers, I choose one subscriber to receive a $10 gift card to their ebook retailer of choice (that provides gift cards). The newest one is my Monthly Musings. Here I talk about what I’ve been up to for the last month including trips I’ve taken, interesting things I’ve seen on social media, TV shows and other media that have caught my attention, craft and food projects I’ve worked on, and a general update of what I’ve been up to writing-wise. The newsletters have been flying fast and furious for me this fall with the fact that I’ve had three new releases with the Sweet Heat: Collected Stories series and a few events. I’m enjoying the pressure 😀 If you’d like to join one, the other, or both, you can do so via the Contact page of my website.

As a thank you to the Bookpushers community for welcoming me into your corner of the Internet, I’m giving away 5 sets of the Sweet Heat: Collected Stories series. These three volumes comprise my collected backlist (excepting one short story), and I’m very proud to have them available again. You only have to answer one question via Rafflecopter about your favorite feature of newsletters, but there are two other ways you can enter as well. The entry period will end the evening of Sunday, November 15th. Thanks so much for having me, and I look forward to seeing what it is you love about the newsletters you receive!

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Bio: Foiled in her attempts to pursue a career in Forensic Anthropology due to a fatal incomprehension of calculus, Kelly turned to a life of telling people where to go…AKA librarianship. She then took another page out of her idol Indiana Jones’ playbook and renamed herself after the dog, writing tales of romance of varying heat levels and erotica. She currently splits her time working on new writing projects, and at the day job in a federal library in Washington, DC.