gladwynn-grant

My books aren’t making money and I’m never going to be famous but writing fiction is fun

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 8 Comments

I am very excited to be getting closer to the release of Gladwynn Grant Shakes the Family Tree.

I don’t have an exact release date just yet but the manuscript is in the editing stage with corrections being made.

From there it will go through another round of edits and another round of corrections and read throughs by beta readers, formatting, etc. etc.

It is all very exciting and overwhelming at the same time but I’m leaning more toward exciting at the time of writing this post.

Maybe you’re new to the blog and don’t know that I write books and self-publish them. Sometimes I share chapters on here, but I haven’t been doing that recently.

Instead, my books are available on Kindle Unlimited and for reasonable prices on Amazon at this time.

Self-publishing books is not a lucrative business for me.

I am also not a famous author (not that was ever my goal).

Sometimes people complain I have a typo or suggest that I am endorsing something I am not endorsing and that gets weird and makes writing books not so fun.

Most of the time, though, writing books is fun.

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I like sharing stories that I have crafted in my own brain.

I like when people like my creations.

I have especially been blown away by the support of my Gladwynn Grant Mystery books.

If you don’t know, Gladwynn Grant is the main character of the series and she’s loosely based on my grandmother, whose middle and maiden name she bears.

Gladwynn’s grandmother, Lucinda, who she lives with, is based on a combination of both of my grandmothers.

Gladwynn is a reporter at a small town newspaper, which is a job I did for 14 years at four different newspapers. Gladwynn, however, is not me.

She is very different from me.

She is tall, brunette, beautiful, loves fashion and makeup, and full of confidence.

I am none of those things. I like to look at fashion but I never really worried much about how I look. How I ever landed my husband I have no idea. I guess he’s attracted to troll-like women wearing baggy clothes who don’t know how to brush or fix her hair.

So Gladwynn is based loosely on me but only on the part that she works at a small town newspaper.

A lot of people think that the reviews on a self-published/indie book are from friends and family of the author. This was actually said one time in a reading group I used to be a part of.

My family and friends have not reviewed my books. Actually, most of my family and friends have not even read my books. That hurts a little but people are busy. I’m not going to say that none of the reviews I have on the Gladwynn books are from friends because that would not be true. There are two or three reviews from friends I’ve connected with online.

There are also reviews from people I have never met or even heard of in my life and those are the reviews that have blown me away.

People really like my book? Wow. That’s super mind-blowing to me.

My books are simple stories, sometimes cheesy. They are not award winning. They are not the best written and even when they are edited I somehow seem to mess up on making the corrections and eliminating the typos.

Yet people have supported them and have said they look forward to more.

I would love to write books and just share them on Amazon for 99 cents since I don’t know how to share them for free, so people can read them and just have fun reading them or not reading them. After all, they only spent 99 cents on it so if they don’t like the book then they aren’t out much.

Charging only a dollar for a book makes a book look cheap, though, so I’ve been told, so I charge a little more.

If I make money from the sale of the books it does help my family. I’m able to put a little money toward groceries or a bill and that helps.

But people reading my book and saying they like it is like getting paid in a different way. It’s paying me back for all the long hours of writing, the nights laying awake with ideas prodding my subconscious, begging to be written down. The time I asked my children if I could have some time to finish the story I’d started because I wanted to see how it finished. The time I took suggestions from early readers on  how to fix a plot hole. The time I took to fix all the edits my editor (ahem..husband) and Mom suggested.

When readers tell me they liked my book it’s like someone saying, “Your ideas weren’t stupid. Your love of writing is something I’m glad you have because I’ve benefited from it too by reading a story I enjoyed.”

If you’re one of those people who have enjoyed my little stories – thank you for taking the time to read them! If you’re one of those who left me a review on Amazon or Goodreads or sent me a note to tell me you liked them – thank you!

If you want to read my books, you can find them here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Lisa-Howeler/author/B07Y3W52FD

I can’t wait to keep sharing more of my creations with my readers – whether they be friends, family, or strangers.

Fiction Friday: Reintroducing Gladwynn Grant

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 7 Comments

I’ve had a few new visitors to the blog lately so I thought I would bring back my Fiction Friday feature for this week to reintroduce Gladwynn Grant, the main character of my cozy mystery series.

There are only two books in the series so far, with both of them currently on Kindle Unlimited, which is an ebook subscription service through Amazon for those who aren’t familiar with it. It is also available for sale as an ebook on Amazon and as paperbacks on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Gladwynn Grant is a young woman who has moved in with her eccentric grandmother after being laid off from her job as a research librarian at a community college. Let’s be honest, she also moves to her grandmother’s small town to get away from her ex-boyfriend, Bennet Steele.

She used to visit her grandparents in Brookstone as a child and teenager and always thought the town was fairly quiet. Her image of the place is shattered, though, when she finds out in the first book that someone may have tampered with the brakes on the local bank loan manager’s car and again when someone drops a car on a disagreeable resident in the county.

The first book, Gladwynn Grant Gets Her Footing, will be part of a blog tour with Celebrate Lit beginning March 12.

You can learn a bit more about the book, the tour, and the stops for the tour here: https://www.celebratelit.com/gladwynn-grant-gets-her-footing-celebration-tour/

 For the blog tour, I shared a bit about how I came up with Gladwynn’s name and personality so I thought I’d share that here today too.

I can’t say that Gladwynn Grant’s character is based completely on my grandmother, but, in some ways, I did. I named her Gladwynn after my paternal grandmother whom I grew up living over the creek and through the woods from.

Gladwynn was her middle name but I’m not really sure how she spelled it because she never really used it. She usually just wrote G. as the middle initial. When we did a search on Ancestry, we saw that some spellings on her documents were Gladwin and some were Gladwyn. I guess her family wasn’t sure either, but if I remember right (I don’t have the document right in front of me) on her birth certificate it was spelled Gladwin.

I liked the spelling of Gladwynn with a “y” and two “n’s” though so that is how I spelled Gladwynn’s name for the books.

My grandmother was tough and to the point. She wasn’t mean but she didn’t pull punches. She was not super maternal or affectionate. Again, though, she was not mean.

She lived through the Great Depression and raised children during World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War.

Her youngest, my dad, was in the Air Force when Vietnam broke out. He was never sent overseas but he helped build bombs and work on airplanes during that time.

She knew about hardship, trials, and heartbreak. Her husband died of cancer when he was in his 60s and she spent the next 35 years without him. She began to lose her eyesight to macular degeneration in her 80s.

None of what life threw at her stopped her from living her best life.

She still traveled and kept her house and property up. At the age of 86 I caught her on a ladder cleaning out the gutters. Around the same age she marched down the dirt road in front of her house with a walking stick and told the township road workers to make sure the drainage pipe they were putting in didn’t run into her field and flood it.

If she was afraid of things, she didn’t show it very often.

My family lived with her while I was in college and I learned so much about how to preserve and live a happy and fulfilled life despite the tragedies or trials of my life.

When I started thinking about writing a cozy mystery series, I wanted the main character to be a lot like grandma, but also more affectionate and sentimental than my grandmother seemed at times.

I only remember my grandmother telling me she loved me once or twice in my life, but I know she did because she showed it in her actions toward me.

I wrote Gladwynn to be bold and tough, but also to be affectionate and open with her feelings – a lot like my grandmother, but also a little different.

I think my grandmother would love the idea that I am writing a series of books based on her name and partially on her personality.

I will be sharing about the tour again when it comes closer to the actual launch date for it. If you would like to check out the books from the Gladwynn Grant Mysteries, you can find them here, Gladwynn Grant Gets Her Footing:    https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C1KSQJXP         and Gladwynn Grant Takes Center Stage: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CB74L7TQ