Author name: Jill Monroe

It’s been a little over two years when Booksquare suggested I blog over here. It was December 2004. My first book was out, and BS thought people might want to read about a first time author’s trials and tribulations. Or maybe she didn’t think I’d really do it and has been secretly laughing about it behind her hand all this time. So, some of you have suffered under my first attempts at writing a blog including my horrible efforts with adding tags, links and quotes. (Believe me, this used to be a lot harder.) I’ve shared the first time I […]

I’ve spent the day at camp in 90 degree plus heat with 12 first graders. While I should be cooling off with something like an ice bath, I checked my e-mail first. Someone forwarded me the wikipedia entry on hack writers. You know what…I am one. Yes!! Hack writer – From Wikipedia

Whenever authors talk promotion, usually author branding comes up. Let’s be honest, my writing career is in its infant stage. We’re still paying off the college student loans, so throwing a lot of cash into publicity is just not in the cards for me right now. I’m just doing the standards of booksignings at the local bookstore, postcards to the family and friends, the (hopelessly out of date) website. The usual. One thing I do is answer every e-mail someone sends me asking about publishing, writing romance, etc. When talking about my first book, Never Naughty Enough, I usually just

You find some amazing things when you go troll through the Internet (okay, I was googling). I found a nice mention of Booksquare in The Christian Science Monitor. …the fact is that book blogs can be vibrant and sharply opinionated, full of odes to favorite authors and jibes at everything from “cheesy” bestsellers to the shrinking book review sections of major newspapers. Hey, that’s Booksquare! Book blogs aren’t without their quirks, however. Like readers and reviewers, they can be snobbish or parochial. And they’re hardly egalitarian: Most are run by one person with dictatorial powers over what gets reviewed and

Sometimes I wonder when the reporters will get bored with this topic. When I was in journalism school, we were told to be very careful of falling in love with our own words. Of being so enamored of our slant of the story that we forgot things like facts, research and basically avoiding the easy cliche. This week I found a delicious article in The Guardian that should be in a freshmen’s textbook: They both put a lot of emphasis on chastity, though there is a lot more snogging in Mills & Boon than there is in the Bible. Fundamental

Ugh. The agony. The kids were in bed, the dh had ordered us a movie and I’d just typed my name in the google search engine. Then I found it. A tiny blurb that didn’t look like a glowing rec for my book. I had to click. Dh very selfishly didn’t want to hear me rant about getting a bad review, and kept calling “come on, the movie is starting” from the front room. So, I waited until the movie was over, and headed back to the computer to read the review. There it was – in all its easy

Last week I had an interesting experience…I substituted for five days in the first grade. (I say five days rather than a week, because for some reason five days just seems longer!) I taught freshmen before I settled down to write, so the differences are numerous. In first grade, the students are shorter than I am (this changes around fifth grade). The children are excited about learning and give hugs. They also color you pictures. Lots of them. They also are learning how to read. And for some children…this is a very painful process. As well as for me. I