Eden Mills, and some new reviews

Eden Mills Writers Festival - well, we tried.
I wouldn't say that was a huge success however.

I had hoped my daughter and I would go down, and we'd sell 20 to 40 books. I really had no idea what to expect - it was my first time setting up a booth to sell my books at a book fest, so I had a LOT of copies printed, thinking it'd be worse to run out prematurely, as opposed to return home with an excess of copies.
BUT - we sold... (drumroll)... 5 books.
Sigh.
The painted rocks that I'd done and took with us didn't really seem to help very much. What we really needed was better (i.e. professionally designed and printed) signage. The other booths had real signage - and were also more genre based (horror / fantasy / sci fi  etc). I suppose that if you're a fantasy fan, and you walk by a guy's booth who is a fantasy writer, you might stop to browse even if you've never heard of the guy. I don't think that's as true for a booth (our booth) that isn't flaunting a certain genre at you.
"Hi! Come and browse our hard to describe literature books! Festival is a coming of age novel, but Close Your Eyes? God knows what Close Your Eyes is!"  :)

Oh well. I learned a few lessons, and my daughter and I are undaunted, and agreed we would try again at another book fest and try to do better next time.
Plus, it was nice to work side by side with my daughter all day. I truly enjoyed that  :)

Other news!
I am continuing to try and put my book (Close Your Eyes) into the hands of book reviewers, and with few exceptions, when people read the book, they enjoy it.

Some recent reviews:

Crossing the Pond / 4 out of 5 stars. And Stefan was intrigued enough by the book that he requested that we do an interview as well - thank you so much Stefan!

OpenMyPages / 4 out of 5 stars. "Equally hopefully and heartbreaking".

The book continues to be on Netgalley incidentally, if any of you want to access it via that site.