Reviews, Thanks & A NEW Thesaurus is Coming!

Happy Wednesday, Musers! I hope like me, everyone is getting back into the rhythm of work, school and writing again, carving bits of time to work on your latest and greatest projects. I am so proud of each and every one of you for your perseverance and dedication to this writer's road!

You Are Awesome

© Copyright William Bartlett  licensed for Creative Common

First, a big THANK YOU to everyone who has so kindly posted a book review on Amazon of The Emotion Thesaurus. Great things have happened as a result--the ET is #3 on Amazon's Highest Rated List for Writing Books and I am sure that the rating helped the book get picked up by the University of Illinois for their Creative Writing program. Seriously, thank you!

Have you fallen for a book lately?  If so, consider writing a review for it. :) Writers more than anyone know the work behind those breathtaking worlds and characters so intensely original they sweep us right into their stories. I'm sure most of you know about the recent black mark caused by a select few who paid in bulk for fake reviews, but this should not take away from all the honest reviews out there, am I right?

You Are Awesome, Pt. 2

The ET Loves You, Too!

I also want to piggy back on this to also give our sincerest appreciation to those of who have purchased the Emotion Thesaurus book and then recommended it to other writers on industry listservs, critique groups, teachers and more. You've posted on blogs, mentioned it on forums and even written about it in newsletters. Word of mouth is the most valuable currency and we are overwhelmed by the generosity of our readers. The ET is a success because of you and we are determined to continue to work hard and bring you helpful new content! 

And Speaking of New Book Content...

As Becca and I wind up what we've dubbed 'The Discoverability Tour' for the ET, we are turning our attention to the next Thesaurus Book. *cheers* I can't tell you how excited we are about this! However, in the interest of sharing what we learned from our first attempt at launching a book into the world, we're open to some future posts on Marketing if this would be helpful to readers. So, if you have specific questions you'd like us to answer/discuss about our choice to launch the book by sidelining it in favor of Random Acts Of Kindness For Writers, what we did to encourage discoverability, our marketing focus or anything in between, please leave them in the comments!

A New Thesaurus On The Blog? Yep!

By Husky via Wikimedia Commons

It's time to tuck the Character Trait Thesaurus into our sidebar and move to a new Thesaurus! Becca and I have picked something that we believe will help writers in a vital area of description. We'll have the official introduction for it this Saturday, so check back. I will say this: it will help you build your characters!

Spam Must Die

One last thing...The Bookshelf Muse is becoming a huge target for spammers using the Anonymous function to leave comments to create back-links. Now while our spam filter catches these before they hit the blog, we still get emails for them. I'm talking 40 or more emails a day...so you can imagine how bloated our inboxes are getting. We've decided to shut off the ability to leave anonymous comments because of this. I know a few of you may not have Blogger, Twitter or Facebook accounts that allow you to comment otherwise, and I apologize. However you are always welcome to send us emails instead if you like. Just click on our blogger profiles! 

Oh, I am hanging out at two different places today, so I hope you'll stop in:

@ Seeing Creative: The Subtle Knife: Creating Characters Readers Trust But Shouldn't

@ The Writer's Dojo: Emotion-Charged Settings

Don't forget to comment if you have any questions or topics you'd like us to cover in future posts regarding what we did to market our book! If something we did might help you, we're happy to talk about it!