Contest ends Monday

The January Wish List contest ends Monday.  From now on I'm only going to do one contest a month and gives readers the entire month to make comments and/or become followers.  You can read the new rules in the side bar.

Okay, that takes care of business and now I can get to a conglomeration of things.  First I finally have a book available on Kindle. I'm a book person so publishing on Kindle made me feel a little bit like a traitor, but there are advantages to using an e-reader.  They're lightweight and the books are cheaper for those watching a tight budget.  It also solves the crowded book shelf problem for those with limited space. It's my first novel, Run Away Home, which most of you probably read a long time ago.  Covenant first published it back in 1993 and it has been out of print for some time.  When I first wrote it, there was a prolog, which the publisher took out.  LDS novels were just beginning to take off then and publishers had to be more careful than they are now in mentioning touchy topics.  I incorporated most of that prolog back into the first chapter.  I also had to change the cover.  Covenant changed the cover when the book was reissued in 1997, so this will be the third cover for that book.  It's a photograph of a tree-lined road I took myself.  I like playing around with photography; goes back to my newspapering days. 

Preparing a book to submit to Amazon for Kindle (electronic reader) was an interesting experience.  Amazon provides instructions, but since I don't speak computerese too well, it was a long process to prepare the book.  I suspect the next one won't be so difficult because now I have some idea of what to do.  Preparing a new cover was the hardest part for me, but fortunately I have a home teacher who is a computer genius who writes programming and was willing to translate the instructions into language I understand and it turned out pretty cool, if I do say so myself.  If any of you download and read this new version, I'd love to hear what you think of it.

I got through most of my reading list I posted earlier and I enjoyed most of the books on that list.  There was one other book, a last minute nominee for the Whitney category I'm judging. I struggled through it and came away convinced the writer has a large and loyal family or he/she would never have made the list.  I won't mention the title or author since that wouldn't be kind.  My current "to read" stack begins with the book at the bottom of my last pile:

The Wishing Hour by J. Adams
The Kiss of a Stranger by Sarah Eden
The Upside of Down by Rebecca Talley
All that Was Promised by Vickie Hall
Who's at the Door?  by Dan Harrington
Dearly Departed by Tristi Pinkston

Just so you know,  I try to read books in the order I receive them, but I don't necessarily review them in that order.  I try to avoid too many books by one publisher reviewed consecutively.  Also I don't review every book I receive; that doesn't mean I review the good ones and skip the not so good ones. I receive many books each month, but I can only review four of them. Some writers write a lot of books and I don't want to review two or three books by one author within a short time frame.  I don't want to review the same type of book week after week either; it's better to mix them up by subject matter or genre.

Sometimes I wonder if people actually read my reviews.  If you do, do they help you choose which books to purchase or check out of the library?  What do you find the most helpful in a review?  From a reader's perspective?  From a writer's perspective?

I've rambled on long enough.  Remember the January contest ends Monday.