pronunciation | Michelle Proulx

Happy Friday, everyone! May your day be filled with lots of sunny goodness, preferably the non-sunburn-inducing sort.

Moving right along to my first topic: Goodreads Giveaways. There are mixed feelings about Goodreads Giveaways amongst the self-publishing community, because apparently a lot of authors who send out free copies of their books via the giveaway never hear from the winners again, or get the reviews they’re hoping for.

That wasn’t my experience at all, I’m pleased to say. I held the giveaway back in April, and the two ladies who won the contest were very sweet. They responded promptly to my messages querying them about their addresses, and how they wanted the books signed to them, and they’ve both now posted reviews up on Goodreads and Amazon. Maybe I just hit the jackpot with these winners, but I’d definitely say it was a good experience overall.

The giveaway also resulted in approximately 463 people adding Imminent Danger to their to-read list. Now, this might not translate into sales (I still haven’t received my first sales report from iUniverse, lol), but it at least puts my book on the radar, which is pretty decent. I can only hope that one day, in the distant fog of the future, someone will look at the their to-read list, see Imminent Danger, think “Heck with it”, and download that puppy so fast it grows up into an adult dog and starts barking at everyone with wild abandon.

Oh yes, and I’m going to be holding another Goodreads Giveaway starting tomorrow, so keep an eye out for that! Only one book up for grabs this time, but I did open up the competition to include Australia, so … yeah. Woo!

Once more unto the vlog …

One of the aforementioned ladies who won the Goodreads Giveaway mentioned that I should post some sort of pronunciation guide on my website for my book. The problem, of course, is that Imminent Danger is sci-fi, so there are assorted silly-named aliens and planets and technology and whatnot parading around. I’ve decided to one-up her request and create a vlog about pronunciation, partially because it’s a lot easier to figure out pronunciation if you hear it, rather than trying to sound it out phonetically, and partially because it was recently brought to my attention that I haven’t done a vlog in ages.

On with the show! (Note: If the lighting fluctuates wildly, blame Youtube — they decided to “fix” my video.)