Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Guest Post and Giveaway: Black Atonement by Sasha Hibbs





The burden of Dave’s girlfriend’s death pushes Brandi, the Seraph of Love, to abduct David Howels in hopes of protecting Dave from his murderous father. Will Brandi be able to show Dave that all in life is not lost in death? Twists and turns abound as Brandi discovers her own shocking revelation—that Dave has been her soul mate all along.

Separating Dave and herself from their allies on the threshold of the apocalypse, Brandi turns to an old friend for help—a witch—to aid her in her quest to prepare Dave to face his worst fears and her own. Filled with curses, and secrets that threaten to destroy everything, Brandi must find forgiveness from within before she can find love. In the past, healing a broken heart would’ve been easy, but now faced with the task of healing Dave’s broken heart while not exposing her own, Brandi learns why love is truly the greatest gift of all. 



Staying on Task: Advice for Authors and Writers

Being a writer and author can be rewarding, fun and most definitely challenging. The biggest obstacle I’ve encountered is staying focused. Distraction can be a big problem. Solution: Finding a way to juggle it all.

I’m the Director of Nursing for a company that provides services to MR/DD individuals. I provide those services within 4 counties and oversee a good size nursing department. This job also comes with the responsibility of being on-call. I am the mother of two beautiful girls and wife to an amazing husband. And somewhere in all of that I’ve managed to write three books and working on the fourth as we speak. 

Being an author and writer isn’t just about writing the books and putting them out there in the world. They are like our children. We guide them through marketing, promotion, blogging, tweeting, Facebook, Goodreads, etc. However, if you’re not carful to manage all those social areas, your own work can kind of get lost in the shuffle.

Hours can pass by spending time on FB, GR, blogging, obsessing over how your book is doing on Amazon. I get it. I know. I’ve been there.

After I wrote my first novel, I can remember finding myself saying, “It’s been two whole months since the release and I’ve written nothing on the sequel!”

And I remember my husband giving me some good advice, “Sasha, if you need to do all these other things in addition to writing, then you need to make a schedule.”

The long and short of it is that while social media is crucial to reaching readers, you can’t let yourself get caught up or overwhelmed by it to the point where you’ve quit writing. Make a schedule for yourself. Think about the topics you want to blog about and if you have the time write all your posts out for the week and then schedule them so you don’t find yourself spending an hour or so each day writing the blog posts as you go. Twitter and Facebook: I’ve tried to get my time spent on there down to a ½ hour each day. I already know the pages I’m going to look up and promote. That way you don’t find yourself hours later scrolling or trolling down pages. Twitter: the same. I try not to spend more than 15 minutes to ½ each night on Twitter.

Social media is wonderful! Don’t misunderstand me. I love it like the rest of the publishing world, but if you’re spending hours a day on there then that means you’re not writing. Find a way to balance it out so you don’t lose focus on what brought you there in the beginning: your writing.


Author bio:


By age 5, Sasha Hibbs' favorite movie was Gone With the Wind. By age 12, she completed her 7th grade book report on the sequel, Scarlett. By 18, she met and married her very own Mr. Rhett Butler and as it turns out, she never had to worry about going back to Tara to win the love of her life back. Fortunately, he stuck with her.

With a love of all things paranormal, the ambiance of the South with its gigantic antebellum mansions and canopies of Spanish moss, and a love for her husband’s rich storytelling of blacksmiths and the mythology surrounding their origins, it wasn’t long until the world of her debut novel, Black Amaranth, was born.

When not working her day job as a nurse, you can find Sasha dreaming of her next beach trip, reading the latest YA novel, and drinking more white chocolate mocha than she should.

Sasha lives in mountainous West Virginia with her husband, Tim, and their two daughters, Aeliza and Ava. She is currently hard at work on book four in The Vulcan Legacies series.



Giveaway
Sasha is giving away a $25 Evernight GC

a Rafflecopter giveaway

3 comments:

  1. I agree on having to schedule your promotional activities and social networking. It's important not to forget that what best sells books is good books and for that you need to spend most of your time writing not surfing the Web.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have found social networking can at times be a real time drain. You're right: finding the balance is the thing to do.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I liked her advice to writers...I couldn't even imagine how much goes into writing a book...it has to be completely draining!

    ReplyDelete