World Tour News

I'm working like crazy on upcoming special appearances to promote Photo, Snap, Shot.

I wish I could visit each and every one of you. Really I do. I've had so many nice invitations. Please know that they warm my heart. I'm trying to keep good records, although we've moved in the middle of this venture and I've since found out that my computer program did NOT archive messages as it should. I figure that if I keep records of your requests I might be able to visit you sometime in the future, if not now. You see, I have a difficult choice to make when I tour. I can see you in person or I can be about the business of writing. As you can imagine, touring takes money and time, and the latter commodity is very hard to replace. So please know that I keep trying to show up in as many places as possible.

I do have a few alternatives to offer. If I can't visit you in person, we can always talk by phone to your group, or we can try Skype and you can actually see me in my natural setting, or we can use the "chatroom" function on my website.

Meanwhile, to view my most current travel schedule, I invite you to go to BookTour, plug in "Joanna Campbell Slan" and see where I'll be.

Tweet, Tweet, Tweet--and You Could Win a Big Box of Books!

Argh. Every day I open my email and think: I don’t have time for all this. I especially don’t have time to update my website, to check all the posts on all the list-serves I belong to, visit every online community I need to, and comment on everyone’s blog as I should.

But I do have time to Twitter. Apparently, the rest of the world agrees. The site has reported an eight-fold rise in visitors since 2007, and in December reported 2.7 million people stopped by. At this rate, it is poised to overtake Facebook. It’s especially popular among the young and restless. One in five people between the ages of 18 and 35 with Internet access have “tweeted” or posted short messages of 140 characters on Twitter at least once.

Why do we twitter? Because we can. Because I can dash off a 140-character (that’s letters and symbols, not characters as in people who populate books!) post to update people on the release date of Cut, Crop & Die, the second book in the Kiki Lowenstein Scrap-N-Craft Mystery Series. (That’s June 1, so mark your calendars or go to Amazon.com and place your order.)

Because I can post regular journaling prompts to remind scrapbookers the world over to write about their own lives. (Check it out at twitter.com/joannaslan. If you are an author, the journaling prompts are great tools for overcoming writer’s block. Try them and you’ll see!)

Because I can follow my favorite authors, geeks, and newsmakers by hitting the FOLLOW button.

Because I can make a post to Twitter from a Blackberry. (Try doing that with a regular blog post. I mean, if you are young and have well-trained thumbs, you probably can handle this, but I can’t. Yet.)

Because Twitter will automatically take any regular URL and turn it into a tiny URL and post the link for me. Because I can quickly scan the posts and see what interests me. Shakespeare said, “Brevity is the soul of wit,” so I think he would have LOVED Twitter.

Because Twitter fits. I can squeeze it in.

Want to see how it works? Become one of my followers on Twitter and I’ll enter your name in a contest to win a Box of Books. Yep, I did find time to cull an entire box of mysteries from my bookshelves. (It's a honking big box!) So, add your name to my followers on Twitter by going to twitter.com/joannaslan, hitting, FOLLOW, and then EMAILING me at savetales@aol.com and telling me you are now following me. Be sure to tell me your “twitter” name so I can see that you did it! (No cheating!) I’ll choose one follower and mail him/her that box of books. For best results, share your postal address with me. Otherwise if I can't get a hold of you and get your address confirmed within a day or two, I'll choose another winner. (Life's too short to chase you down!)

Let’s see if this Tweeting works!

PS You can hear a live broadcast of a scrapbook crop at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/circle-of-seven/2009/02/14/readers-entertainment-radio-with-guest-joanna-slan-author-of-paper-scissors-death If you have NO idea what a “crop” is, or why women love them, this will be very, very enlightening!

Live from a Scrapbook Crop

Ever wonder what women actually DO at scrapbook crops? Here's a live broadcast from one I attended last night:

http://tinyurl.com/ab4gy2


Yep, it's really all that much fun! You can hear the women cheering in the background. Smell the food. (All the best crops have loads of fun, food and prizes.) And hear why women are loving my book, Paper, Scissors, Death.

Happy Valentine's Day to all my sweethearts!