Hi everyone!

First, I want to announce the winners of The Good Girl’s Guide to Being Bad Audiobook Giveaway!!! Thank you to everyone who entered and helped spread the word about Sadie & Colton’s story! <3 You rock!

Without further ado, the winners are:

Alyssa C., Michelle H., Cassandra D. and Grace B.!

Congrats, you guys!!! I’ll be sending your prizes ASAP, and I hope you love The Good Girl’s Guide to Being Bad!

Second, since it’s Friday, I wanted to do a fun post about the 5 Things: I Learned @ the M & M Writers Conference :). (Sidenote: I learned more, but I like lists of five ha ;))

Plus, since it’s NaNoWriMo, I thought it might give some of my writerly peeps some inspiration!

Here are my 5 Things:

1. Someone out there needs your book. Every day started with a motivational talk from one of the big authors attending. The first was Alyssa Day, and though I’ve not read her books, what she said resonated with me. Her favorite thing was hearing from readers, and if you’ve followed me on my publishing journey, you’ll know that hearing from my readers is my most favorite thing as well! She read us 10 messages she’d received, some funny, others saying her books had helped them in some vital way. It reaffirmed my belief that writing is important, and books can change the world.
2. Market vs. Heart. I’ve heard this before, but in one class, they posed a question all writers have to ask themselves. Am I going to write to market or what’s in my heart? My answer: Both. I always write what’s in my heart, and my books just happen to be commercial. So, I don’t think you have to make a choice here. I think you can do both, write from the heart and still be successful. In fact, I don’t know how you can do it any other way.
3. Ads, Ads, Ads! Most of the classes I attended mentioned ads; most authors were doing them (some with greater success than others), and everyone kept saying how you have to run ads now to be visible. In other words, there are so many books out there that running ads is imperative if an author doesn’t want their books to fade into oblivion or wants to build their author brand. I will tell you: I’ve only run 2 Amazon ads. Ever. For two different books. They ran for a month and were at least semi-successful…I guess. I didn’t lose or gain a lot of money. It always seems to me like a crapshoot. The problem is I don’t understand ads (there are so many factors!) or the whole putting-money-in-to-get-twice/triple/more-on-the-return etc. Also, how do you know if your book’s success is due to the ad, something else or just people organically finding the book? Anyway, I hope to learn more, maybe run ads, but for now, my books have done pretty well.
4. Author Swag. One of the coolest things was the goodie room :). Maybe it’s because this was only my second conference, but I thought it was awesome seeing all of the author swag! Pens, chapsticks, bookmarks, magnets, all the book stuff! I’ll be having my first book signing next month for the Entangled print edition of ADORKABLE coming on Dec. 3, 2019 (YAYYY!!!), and I bought some swag for anyone who comes out! Hopefully, I’ll get to give some of it away lol!
5. Books save lives. Again, my favorite part of the conference (besides getting to hang with my awesome family) was the motivational speeches. One of them was from Jennifer L. Armentrout!!!!!! 😀 If you just squee’d that was me when I found out she was going to be there LOL! Anyway, her speech was wonderful. She told us so much about her journey as a writer, her amazing success, as well as her eye condition that she was recently diagnosed with that will eventually end up taking her sight. I nearly cried four times while she was speaking. She told us not to listen when people say mean things about writing romance. Told us romance and books save lives. She also told us to stop denying our hard work, to stop telling people our success was just “luck” because we tend to give everyone else the credit and never give ourselves any. We diminish ourselves, all the work we put in, our achievements by doing this. Again, I nearly cried four times (“nearly” because I was in a banquet room full of people), but everything she said was so motivational, so right on. I loved hearing her and hope she writes for a very long time to come!

So, those are my 5 Things! If you’re doing NaNoWriMo, I wish you so much good luck and fantastic writing days! Hope you are all well!

Happy reading,

Cookie O’Gorman