New Novel Updates!

In the world of self-publishing, releases happen fast. Really fast. Some indies pump out a book or more a month. Not me.

When I burst onto the SP scene in early 2011, I already had three novels fully-edited and vetted, ready for publication (Anathema, Oubliette, Sleepers). During 2011, I wrote one novel and began a second (Severed, Afterlife). In 2012, I finished one novel and wrote a second (Afterlife, The Sundering). In 2013, I've written one novel and been working steadily on another (Shucked and the untitled work-in-progress).

Some days I feel as if I'm falling behind, but when I look at what I've really accomplished, I've been quite steady in my writing.

If the past is a predictor of the future, I should have a release before the end of the year. I'd love that to be true, but it may take a little longer. Here's why:

In the past, my novels have been YA and they've clocked in around 55,000 words. The book I'm working on now is epic fantasy, for adults. I've broken 65,000 words and I'm anticipating at least 80,000 words, but I'm hoping it'll be more than that. Maybe even closer to 100,000 words (which is normal for a debut epic).

I'm not a math whiz, but even I know this means it'll take me double the time to write this book as it's taken to write the others. Not to mention I'm managing multiple points of view and a new world far more expansive than any I've ever written (including a custom map I've commissioned from Stefanie Verish). This book is the biggest, most exciting project I've ever tackled. Add on one of the most personally chaotic years of my life, and well, you've got one crazed author.

I'm excited about my upcoming novel. It's chock full of dragons, magic, new frightening beasts, a dangerous world, and plenty of enigmatic characters. So hang in there with me, readers. I'm working hard to bring you the most ambitious novel I've ever written!!!

XoXo,

Megg

Reveals, Promos, and Giveaways, OH MY!

Hey guys! I hope you've had a chance to visit my new website, www.meggjensen.com. It's completely updated, has a gorgeous new look, and it's got everything you need to know about me and my books.

Go on, take a peek, then come back.

Okay, okay, I know you want me to get on with it. What's the promo and the giveaway all about?

I'm setting The Song of Eloh Saga, my compilation ebook of all six of my fantasy novels (Anathema, Oubliette, Severed, Sleepers, Afterlife, The Sundering) plus the novelette (The Initiate) on sale for only $2.99 for the month of September at Amazon/Kindle, Barnes&Noble/Nook, Apple/iBookstore (I'll post the link here as soon as it's available), and Kobo. Yes, that's a $15.96 value for only $2.99. Crazy, right?

But I need your help in spreading the word. Here's how it works:

Use the Rafflecopter entry form below. It tells you all of the options you can use to spread the word about my big sale. Use the form to enter and I will choose a winner on September 12th.

What's the big prize? Signed copies of Anathema, Oubliette, and Severed in paperback.

Enter below and have fun!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

A FREE eBook and a Little More Sex and Violence

It's like a game of hide-and-seek. Where's Megg? Why does she keep popping up and then seemingly disappearing?

If you're on Facebook with me, you know a bit about what's been going on in my real life, yanno, the one I live when I'm not writing.

Here's a basic breakdown:

September 2012 - the toilet in my kids' bathroom overflows, causing MAJOR damage in my house. We're talking months of construction. Oh, and we also had to pick up our new puppy. Great timing. I spent the next three months basically living in the basement as our house was being reconstructed. Who knew a toilet could do so much damage?

January 2013 - My hubby, who has a history of back problems and one spinal surgery already under his belt, re-injures his back. Weeks of therapy didn't help. He ended up in the hospital for a double spinal fusion. It wasn't that simple, though. Due to the pain medication he was on, he couldn't drive for almost two months. My life was turned upside down as I played the role of single mom and caregiver (no complaints, just the facts).

This lasted through March. I had about 60 days of quiet where I published Shucked, a contemporary YA novel I'd had bouncing around my head for years (it's a miracle I got any writing done during the time).

May 2013 - We got some news about our kids' private school that caused us to put our house on the market so we could get into a better public school district. Anyone who's tried to sell a house in this market knows how stressful that can be. And the CLEANING, OMG, I had to make the house we'd built and lived in for 11 years look like something out of a magazine.

The house sold. The first day. For cash. But we had to be out in two weeks. TWO WEEKS. Oh yeah, and the hubby was still in recovery from back surgery so it was up to me to pack everything by myself. Did I mention I had only two weeks?

From June 10th - July 5th we were basically homeless. On the weekends we lived with my parents an hour away and during the week we lived in hotels near my hubby's job and my daughter's swim team. My computer was in storage and, really, who can write on an iPad in a hotel with two stir-crazy kids? Not me.

Here I am, August 7th, the house is 90% put together. I (finally) find myself with time and the mental capacity to sit down and write. Five days of drafting and I've written 6,709 words. I know my output will at least double when the kids go back to school. The story is flowing and I'm letting my imagination run wild. It's an exciting time.

The next ebook is a high fantasy, similar to the others I've published, but this one is an adult fantasy, not YA. That means a little more sex, a little more violence, and no love triangles. lol

I feel like I'm making a comeback. I was never totally gone, but, to be honest, I haven't been as committed to work as I should have been for almost *shudders* a year. I can't believe it's been that long.

So here's the good news. The SCBWI-Illinois reps have asked me to be the regular self-publishing columnist for the Prairie Wind. I'm really excited!!!

To celebrate, I'm giving away one of my ebooks to anyone who is signed up for my newsletter by August 21st. All the details will be in the newsletter I send out, so if there's a book of mine you haven't read yet, sign up!

Thanks to all of my fans for sticking by me over the last 11 months. My life has been a roller coaster, but knowing I had all of you waiting on the other end was a big motivator to never give up on my writing career!!!!!

XoXo,

Megg

Shucked Book Blast!!!!

Shucked is going on a tour this week, thanks to Xpresso Book Tours. Below I'm listing all of the awesome blogs participating. Be sure to visit them and try to win an ecopy of Shucked!!!!!

Dates & blogger participation are tentative. Not all posts are doing giveaways.

I will be posting direct links to the posts as soon as I can grab them. Asterisks indicate the post has gone live.

May 6th:
***All the Stacks***
Spontaneous Literary Awareness

May 8th:

***Alice in Readerland***

The Bookmark Blog 

Books Beside My Bed

***The Cover Contessa***

***Dizneee's World of Books***

***Fragments of Life***

***Lola's Reviews***

My Love of Film and Novels

***My Neurotic Book Affair***

***Ralu's Book Basket***

***Read These Books and Use Them***

***Sammy the Bookworm***

***Say it with Books***

***Teen Blurb***

***Thoughts of a Dreamer***

Toot's Book Reviews

TSK, TSK, What to Read

***Tyhada Reads***

***YA Book Addict***

May 9th:

***Always YA at Heart ***

***Book Nerds Anonymous***

Book Whirlwind

Coffee and a Book Anytime

***Cover2Cover***

The Cozy Reading Corner

***Girls Heart Books***

***I Read Indie***

***Kaidan's Seduction***

***Ki0Lu & Mimi***

***Little Bookworm ***

***Literary Meanderings***

***Mom with a Kindle***

***Off the Page***

***Pink Polka Dot Book Club***

***Seeing Night Reviews***

***The Serial Reader ***

***Story Envy***

***Whatever You Can Still Betray***

***Whispers at Moonlight***

***The White Unicorn***

May 10th: 

***4 the LUV of SaNiTy***

***All in One Place***

Books a la Mode

Books and Swoons

***Creative Deeds Reads***

***Gimmie the Scoop***

The Girl with the Red Cape

***I'm a Book Shark***

Julia Crane

Jump into Books

***Little Library Muse***

The Top Shelf

Why I Can't Stop Reading

***Words Create Scenes***

May 11th:

***Actin' Up with Books***

***Because Reading is Better than Real Life***

Chris' Book Blog Emporium

***OMFG!Books***

May 12th:

***Beauty and the Bookshelf***

Bookworms' Avenue

***Every Free Chance***

Into the Hall of Books

The Kooky Bookworm

***Mythical Books***

***Pause Time***

Sarah Elizabeth's Bookshelf

***Vanilla Moon***

May 13th:

A Backwards Story

***Bianca2b***

***Confessions of a Book Addict***

***Darlene's Book Nook***

***Paperback Treasures*** 

***Unraveling Words***

Wintry Words

Ever Feel Like You've Been Totally SHUCKED?

I've been working on SHUCKED  on and off for more than four years. I held off on finishing it because it didn't fit my author profile. It's always been my goal to be recognized as a fantasy author - and SHUCKED is the farthest thing from that.

But in January my hubby re-injured his back and our lives took a very difficult turn. Due to the medications he was on, he could no longer drive. Nor could he lift. And walking was a struggle. The pain was constant.

I tried to continue working on my fantasy novel, but my heart wasn't in it. Yet there was Tabitha, calling to me from the sidelines. I told her to go away. Her story wasn't part of my life right now. She wouldn't stop.

I gave in, throwing myself into Tabitha's world, one I'm very familiar with since I grew up on a farm. Walking with her through this story of self-discovery and learning to deal with circumstances beyond her control was very healing for me. In SHUCKED, Tabitha struggles through her environment just as I was doing with my hubby's injury. After major surgery, we're entering the brighter side of our experience. If you read SHUCKED, I think you'll find Tabitha does a great job of working her way through unexpected disaster too.

***

Suburgatory meets Indiana Jones...on a farm

 Fifteen-year-old Tabitha has had the kind of life that would impress even the greatest adventurers. She's escaped a croc attack in the Amazon, walked the length of the Great Wall of China, and earned a black belt in taekwondo in Korea. She owes her worldly experience to her mother's career in

Cover design by Steven Novak

archaeology, but when her mother takes on a dangerous new assignment, Tabitha is devastated to learn she can't tag along.

Instead, she's forced to live on a midwestern farm with her grandparents where she'll have to attend a full year of public school. It's Tabitha's greatest nightmare, because despite all her adventures, she has no practical experience with the one thing that frightens her the most - other teenagers.

Her math teacher is her mom's old high school boyfriend, she can't tell the friendly girls from the mean ones, and she develops a major crush on a boy she knows she can't trust. And just when she thinks she'll never get the hang of this normal teenager thing, an attack brings the danger of her previous life right up to her midwestern porch. Who could have ever guessed getting totally shucked would bring her face-to-face with her most exciting adventure yet?

*** 

Now for the fun stuff!

WINNERS!

Subscribers to my newsletter were able to enter a contest to win 1 of 15 ebooks of SHUCKED. The winners have all been contacted via email.  Congrats to:

Bonnie H. ~~~ Cathy P. ~~~ Sara D.
Dee S. ~~~ Jacquelyn L. ~~~ Kris A.
Lourdes S. ~~~ Kassandra F. ~~~ Yvonne W.
Lisa C. ~~~ Patrick M. ~~~ Lysette L.
Becky N. ~~~ Ruth J. ~~~ Pam. B.

Check out this awesome Facebook banner my friend Sharon Rosen made for SHUCKED:

And Chris Whigham of Derby City Social Media created these bookmarks for SHUCKED:

My newsletter subscribers got first crack at these bookmarks, but I have some left, so I'm opening it up to everyone else - internationally! If you want three bookmarks, please fill out this form (until supplies last):

(I will not save your addresses or share them or sell them.)

A New Outlook on Querying

When I was a freelance parenting journalist, My livelihood came down to one tool: query letters. I considered myself an expert. Why? In seven years I landed every assignment I queried. So when I started querying Anathema in 2010, I thought querying would be a piece of cake.

When the rejections started pouring in, I was stunned. I didn't expect every agent to want to rep me, but I did expect far more partial and full requests than I got. I ended up with an offer of representation - but it was too late. I'd already decided to self-publish. You'd think with all the rejection I'd endured, I would have liked turning her down. I didn't. It was scary as s£|!. But I knew I was taking the right path. I have loved every excruciating, horrendous, soul-sucking moment of self-publishing. Hey, no one ever said it would be easy.

Yet here I am, preparing to query again. I have this YA contemporary I wrote. It took me four years to finish it. No, I wasn't working on it that whole time, but it was one of those books I kept revisiting. It wouldn't let me move on.

Self-publishing isn't my juvenile way of giving New York the finger. It was the best path for the books I'd written (and thousands of ebooks purchased supports that theory). But this contemporary isn't the type of book that does well in ePub. The audience isn't teens and their moms. It's just teens. And I'll tell you, there aren't that many teens who read more ebooks than paper books. They are still discovering through their parents, libraries, and friends. This is the audience for my book and I need to do my best to reach them.

More proof self-publishing isn't about me - its about reaching my readers the best way I know how.

So here I am, entering a time warp, preparing to query again. This time, things are different. I don't expect every agent to request a partial or full. I hope they will, but I don't expect it. Truth be told, I don't expect an agent to take me on at all. It's not a lack of confidence, it's understanding the realities of the quickly shrinking publishing world combined with the lust for an immediate blockbuster. These are factors I can't control. All I can do is throw Tabitha and her story out there. Maybe it'll get some bites.

If it doesn't, I'll self-publish it. Not as a consolation prize. I'm only querying eight agents - chances aren't good I'll succeed. For me, it's about going with the best or taking my book directly to the readers. It has nothing to do with giving up. I could query hundreds of agents if settling was my goal. It's not. Writers have so many options these days. I'm simply pursuing the best options for this book.

And as a side note, my next fantasy will be self-published. I have no plans, at this moment, to ever query fantasy again.

Fear and Loathing in Writing

Want to hear my take on writers getting easily depressed? Head over to Author 2 Author, my group blog, and check it out. ;)

Fear and Loathing in Writing