My Journey Promoting Spindrifts

Hi!
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Let me start by saying that it was a huge challenge to launch my debut novel Spindrifts during the pandemic. So, I decided to take a slower pace for the first few months and use social media to bring attention to my novel, which is about climate change, inclusion, and hope. Let’s face it, these themes are important given wildfires, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and other disasters.

​I have had some good success in promoting Spindrifts thanks to the amazing writing community involved with various social media platforms.
 
In this Blog, I will let you know about a few of my promotion and marketing adventures in the last year, once it was safer to travel and be at events with my debut novel, Spindrifts! By the way, as you can see from the main page of my website, I now have a second novel, Spelldrifts, published. More about that later.

​My promotions journey started the day my books arrived. It was a thrilling morning and as you can see I was excited about this new phase of writing.

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​Then Rivendell Bookstore in Barrie, Ontario invited me to do a signing. It was a very hot day in June 2022. Such a thrill for me to have this new experience, meeting readers and telling them about my book. One young woman rushed in right at the end of the signing and we chatted about her desire to write a book. She bought a copy of Spindrifts, and that was the very nice ending to my first ever signing.

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​My favourite pharmacy is Seasons Pharmacy and Culinaria in Sudbury, Ontario, where I live. They host local community events and offered to have two signings and keep my book, along with others, for sale. This has been a very successful partnership and sales have been very good.

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​Old friends and new ones, along with some family members, kept Seasons busy both days because many of those interested in Spindrifts had never visited before. Seasons is not only a regular pharmacy but they also sell food from local farms and vendors in keeping with their philosophy of promoting holistic health.

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​Along my journey I was shortlisted for a few awards, including the Eighth Annual Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize (2022), The Whistler Independent Book Awards (2022) and was a finalist in the Canadian Book Club Awards (2022). What an honour to have been selected even though I did not receive any of the final awards. 

Anne M. Smith-Nochasak, a Nova Scotian author, and I decided we would partner on a creative collaboration where she would promote and market Spindrifts in the Maritimes and I would promote her wonderful book, ​A Canoer of Shorelines, in my travels. This has been a very good partnership that we have expanded to include our second novels. 

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I hope you have enjoyed reading about some of my promotions adventures. I have enjoyed meeting new people and seeing some very excited readers who wanted to read Spindrifts.

My adventures continue with the launching next week of my second book, Spelldrifts, the standalone sequel to Spindrifts. More about that soon.

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