KAREN JANOWSKY

First of all, Dear Prudence is available for pre-order! It'll go live for you to read on 8/25 but in the meantime, check out my "books" page for pre-order links. That way, the book will either show up on your e-reader or Kindle or show up in your mail without your having to stick the date on your calendar!

I've been drowning in papers to grade again. That's hardly a new state of affairs. Grading is my least favorite part of teaching--that's true for most instructors I know. And, like many (at least, I hope I'm not in the minority), I come up with all kinds of unconscious ways to put it off until I'm teetering on delinquency. "I'll just hop on FaceBook for a second; I just want to finish writing this last paragraph of a manuscript before I get back to work; I've already seen all the episodes, but maybe I'll finish one more episode of Death in Paradise while I finish my dinner before heading back to the computer."

No more. I've decided I'm no longer a procrastinator; I'm an innovator. 

That's right--I've been on a mission. I've been exploring and experimenting with a bunch of different apps that use AI to transform images, videos, etc. It's all in the name of marketing. For those of you who are unaware, authors--even ones who have "Big 5" publishers, have to do at least some of their book marketing themselves. Publishers simply don't have the resources to do all the advertising anymore. With millions of romance novels sold a year in the USA alone, there's a lot of competition to sell. I'm not fantastic about "putting my name out there," and have learned over and over again how challenging it can be to get potential readers to go from interested in a book to purchasing it, to buying and maybe reviewing it. With a new book coming out at the end of the month, my anxiety about selling has been amping up.

Having said that, I've latched onto a new marketing strategy: cats. Yes, my crew: Catsanova, Surya, Dagon, Frejya, Wally, and Kali are my newest "book models." That means I've had to look for new innovations to frame them in the most flattering ways as possible. Catsanova cares deeply about his appearance, after all. I swear, all those hours I've spent using apps to put my lovely models into various costumes and "on location" sets is for the sake of my books. I swear. I can't imagine the strategy backfiring.