Gratitude - Robyn Bradley

A couple of months ago, I posted my first round of shout-outs. Methinks I’m due for a second round of gratitude-filled thanks to the awesome folks who’ve been helping me out. Here we go, in no particular order:

Cheryl Perez from You’re Published did the interior design/layout and back cover and spine for the paperback version of Forgotten April. She does great work and is reasonably priced. She’s launching a new website soon, but for now, you can reach her here.

Steve Tannuzzo of Tannuzzo Copywriting has a connection with a printing company and was able to print up all the copies of Novel #2 for my beta readers. He’s also a fabulous writer/copywriter/proofreader, in case any of you are in need of one of those.

My beta readers rock my world! They include the Nobscot Niblets (writers group) and some family members and friends who are like family. If any of you are reading this, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Someone on Twitter asked me the name of the song I use in my book trailer for Forgotten April. The great thing about Animoto, the software I use, is that it offers a vast music library and all the licensing is taken care of. I mentioned in this post how I stumbled on some music by an artist I’d met many years ago (and I ended up using his composition for my short story “Crush“) and how he’s now writing musical scores for movies in Hollywood, which is way cool.

Anyway, when I looked up the group that sang “Happy,” which is the song in the Forgotten April trailer, I decided to Google the group to see what I could find. The name of the group is Secrets in Stereo. Here’s their Facebook page. And below is the group singing the full version of “Happy.”

Enjoy!

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention all the wonderful, talented people who are helping to bring my little book to life. I highly recommend these folks. Here they are, in no particular order:

1106 Design: I’ve mentioned them before, but they did the cover art for Forgotten April (as well as all of my other books). They’re based out of Arizona, and they’re incredibly nice, pleasant, helpful, and prompt — all those things you dream about in a vendor but wonder if it’s possible to find anymore.

Laura Matthews at thinkStory.biz: copy editor and story editor extraordinaire. Get her while you can, folks. Laura has a novel she’s releasing this summer, and it’s good. DAMN good. I think great things are in store for her — and that she won’t be doing copy editing of others’ work for too much longer. (But, Laura, if you’re reading this, you’re still committed to editing my book #2 in August, ok? :))

Jennessa Durrani at Celebrate: Jennessa is one of the most creative people I know…and she’s also one of the nicest. Seriously, I’ve never seen her get annoyed or irked…and we work together on some of my copywriting clients’ stuff, which ain’t always easy. I’ve been using Jennessa for a bunch of things, including banner ads that I’m running on various sites.

And she’s created a cool bookmark, which I’m stuffing into about 500 gift bags for The Exceptional Women Awards, an event Magic 106.7 in Boston hosts. I worked for Magic for a long time, so I’m exploiting leveraging this connection. You may be wondering why a bookmark for eBooks…well…I’m releasing a print version as well. And it *should* be ready and live by the time these hit the goodie bags.

Cold Spring Design. These are my fabulous web dudes. They designed and built the site (including the CMS [content management system] so that I can have total control over updates. Me likes to be in control…muahahahahahah). They also are my go-to resource for when files need to be crunched to a certain size or when I have other questions.

eBook Architects. I can’t stress this enough to self-pubbed writers. Unless you’re a total tech geek, you should outsource your eBook conversions. Formatting is critical (many of us indie writers receive flack for poor formatting, and there’s really no excuse for having it). Take pride in the appearance of your words as much as you do in the words themselves. I know it might seem easy to do the conversion yourself, but it’s so, so, SO easy to miss something or screw up a couple of pages or whatever.

I just contracted a designer who specializes in interior book design (for print books), spines, and back covers. She was recommended on Joe Konrath’s blog. She seems great so far; I’ll report back with her info and will include images of her work when it’s done.