Today I wanted to talk about the importance of critique partners and having ones who will be honest. Of course we all want to hear that our work is great and its going to be the next best seller, but I can tell you, it can always be better. There are always plot holes or somewhere it could be better. So when your choosing a critique partner, be sure to look for someone with experience in this industry.
I have two wonderful critique partner. Ella Jade and Tamaria Soana. Every now and then I write something and turn it in without them reading it first. Guess how those edits go? No where near as as good as when I have them do a read through.
What are some things you want your critique partner to look for?
1. Plot holes of course. A funny example. In the last Hot Bods book, Opposites Attract, I didn't have my CP's read it. During edits, my editor found a naughty scene where the couples was intimate. My hero reached behind his head to get a pillow. Guess what? He was on top, straddeling her. I don't think there were any floating pillows in that room. lol. So, if I'd taken the time to have them read it, I bet they would've spotted that!
2. Over used words. You might not always see that you used the word normal six times in a paragraph. Eventually you'll learn to spot those, but when you're reading your own writing, you're going to miss those
things.
3. Things just not reading right. You wrote it and when you read it, it makes sense. But your CP might read a sentence and think "what the heck is she trying to say?" And that's important! If they don't get it, chances are someone else won't either. And do you want to leave your readers wondering if they know what you're trying to say?
4. Overall suggestions. Do they think something could be taken away or something needs to be added. Should something be reworded or was there too much telling and not enough showing.
Most importantly, if you read a suggestion that you don't agree with. Never forget, you're the author. But before you make a rash decision to ignore what your CP has said, let the comment sit before you move on. Your CP isn't there to trash you. Your CP if there to help you and your writing succeed.
Welcome back once again to Writer's Words of Wisdom. I'm Tammy and Wednesdays are my day to share little tidbits of wisdom I've learned during my journey in the wonderful world of publishing. Here I am about to release my fifth and sixth books over the next two months and still many people in my life think it's just a passing hobby.
I've been asked by friends and strangers alike how I got into writing poetry and erotic romance. They seem to think there's some magical muse that determines the specific genre each author has to choose to craft their stories in and that's that. No switching around. Period. End. Of. Story. The End.
Not so fast, Jack.
The magical muse thing is real for me. I don't set out to write for the readers who love a specific genre. I just listen to those inner voices...errr...characters clamoring in my head to have their stories told. More often than not, none of the characters talking the loudest are in the same tales, subgenres or categories.
For example, the first two books of my Now and Forever series had clear cut M/F pairings, detailed explicit sex scenes, and ended with happily ever afters—definitely contemporary erotic romances.
With the second book I stared adding a little fantasy and paranormal elements with the Guardian Angel characters and the Eternal Siblings known as The Three. These immortals and the angels help the characters of this series find each other through all the adversity thrown at them. This book turned my erotic contemporary romance into an erotic fantasy contemporary romance with paranormal elements.
But wait! There's more...
With the third book of this series, I've explored more of the paranormal and fantasy aspects but now I've changed up the sexual pairings of the main characters. Instead of just M/F, my heroine is a bisexual and is in love with both a man and an woman. She's also having a hot affair with another man...whew!
Unfortunately, according to the publisher of the first two, the mixed pairings don't go over well with readers(read that as don't sell well) of erotic romance. So not even bothering to ask me to do a revision and resubmit, they decided to use their right to first refusal on not only this book, but any future books in the series.
Now most people would've been a bit upset, but I was relieved. My muse and characters won out. I can write the way I wish without having to keep to rigid guidelines. All the future books in this series will be done MY way with my own publishing house, Sassy Vixen Publishing. No more "house" rules and I may not follow the traditional rules of romance either.
Why? Because I want to tell the story as it comes to me. The rules be damned. If the characters go to a dark place, I'll go there with them. If the ending isn't so happy, happy, happy, so be it.
Last week I wrote about powering through writer's block. The times I got stuck with nothing but silence from my characters have been when I tried to mold their story into a specific genre or category. Once I let go of those preconceived notions, their worlds once again opened up to me.
So don't be afraid to tell the stories of your characters they way they're MEANT to be told. If you can't find an agent or publisher that sees your vision, keep trying or go the self publishing route. No matter what you decide, we're here cheering you on every step of the way!
Learn More About Tammy
Tammy Dennings Maggy is a best selling, multi-published poet and erotic romance author with Siren and Sassy Vixen Publishing. Her writing explores many facets of romance from ultimate betrayal to finding your soul mate. Her poetry serves as a companion to her novels and has inspired entire series all on their own. Tammy and her alter egos Lia Michaels and Stephanie Ryan make up the core authors at Sassy Vixen Publishing and together they've created the shared world series Temptations Resort. Look for the first books in that series to come out later this year.
Now happily married to her own Muse and soul mate, she continues to live her dream and act as secretary to all her characters demanding to have their stories told.
What's NaNoWriMo?
National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to creative writing. On November 1, participants begin working towards the goal of writing a 50,000-word novel by November 30.
YOU WRITE. NOT EDIT. YOU ONLY WRITE. WRITE. WRITE.
Who can sign up for NaNoWriMo?
Valuing enthusiasm, determination, and a deadline, NaNoWriMo is for anyone who has ever thought fleetingly about writing a novel. That means YOU can do this.
**I participated for the first time in 2012. The result was my book HOLD MY HAND that I published in April 2013. Proof that this system can work.** How do I sign up for NaNoWriMo? Go to their website. Register. It's that easy. The accountability is all yours. If you try it and don't succeed, try again next year (or not).
Is there any support?
Yes! You can find writing buddies -these are other writers in your genre who you can share ideas with online. You are also placed geographically into regions of writers. Each region has a leader who often hosts in-person writing events too.
There's also this great program called COME RIGHT IN where local venues are supporters of NaNoWriMo. What does this mean for you? Well, if you’re a Wrimo, it means you’ll have a space in your neighborhood where you can get to know your fellow writers and simultaneously pen your NaNo masterpiece! If you’re a staff member at a library, bookstore, another community organization with space for writers—or a student or faculty member at a college or university—you’ll be able to welcome a flood of avid novelists and engaged community members into your space.
Think about it. If you're looking for incentive or a jumpstart or need to power through a new book, this is a great program. I wrote my first self-published book HOLD MY HAND during NaNoWriMo 2012 and plan to do it again this year. Want to join me? Once you register, look me up and I'll be your on-line Writing Buddy!
Welcome back to Tammy's Tidbits on Writer's Words of Wisdom. This week I thought I'd discuss the one thing writer's fear more than rejection letters or poor reviews.
Writer's Block. We all go through it at one time or another. Sometimes it hits us right in the middle of a pivotal scene and other times it stops us dead in the water before we even put one word to the page. One thing for certain, it's frustrating as hell when it happens.
So what do we do to break through it?
Don't panic! It's not the end of the world if you can't move forward with this particular scene or start a project at the moment you decide to start.
Step away from the project for a while. Put it aside and try another one. Sometimes just changing to a completely different story line will get your creative juices flowing. Before you know it, you've plotted out a few more scenes for the new story, and then the characters from the first one will be begging for your attention again.
Listen to the voices of your characters demanding to be heard. That's your MUSE talking. If you stifle it, the story may stay locked to you for a lot longer than you wish.
Give yourself permission to walk awayfrom a project that seems to be going nowhere. Let it go. Accept the fact the rest of the story may never come to you. As soon as you do that, the pressure is off and the words start to flow again.
Don't be so caught up in your writing that you neglect your "ME" time. We all need vacations from our day to day lives and our jobs. Your writing is your career. Make sure you give yourself down time from that as well. It not only helps you to relax and rejuvenate your health and well being, it will recharge your creative juices and open up your connection with your muse.
If none of the above suggestions work for you, then make it a goal that you write for one hour each day. It doesn't matter what you write, just do it. It can be pages of complete nonsense as long as you keep the words flowing out of you and into something else such as a blog, journal/diary, or even napkins if that's all you have handy. If you commit to that one hour daily, you'll be surprised how often you end up doubling that or even more.
I have small spiral notebooks I picked up in the dollar bins at Target and Michael's Craft store. I make lists, plot points, sketch scenes of future books or those I'm working on now. I work on ideas for blog posts or write my opinion about something in the news or from a book I'm reading. I carry at least two of these notebooks with me at all times.
From those writings I've been able to plan out multiple books in several series I wish to write under all of my pen names. I don't worry about which pen name's supposed to write what story. I just write it down and figure it out later. It's the same reason I don't write a story from the start to the finish. I write the scenes as they come to me. It's in the editing stages where I cut, paste and rearrange the scenes to make the story flow well.
This year I'm going to do NaNoWriMo. Starting November 1st and running until November 30th, I've committed to write a 50,000 word novel. It's not going to be perfect. That's not the point of this challenge. It's to get all the words down on paper/in a computer file in whatever order the scenes come to you. When you've reached your goal, THEN you can do the organizing and editing to make it perfect and ready to submit to a publisher or to an editor if you're self publishing.
There's still time to sign up and join me for my first NaNo. With all the book ideas I have already plotted out, this is the perfect challenge for me to buckle down and commit to one. Of course if I feel like I'm blocking, I'll still write my word count goal for the day. It just may be on another book! All those words count. Who knows? Maybe I'll have TWO novels written by the end of November.
Okay, now who's with me? Let's smash all those walls blocking us from achieving our writing goals!
Until next week,
~Tammy
Learn More About Tammy
Tammy Dennings Maggy is a best selling, multi-published poet and erotic romance author with Siren and Sassy Vixen Publishing. Her writing explores many facets of romance from ultimate betrayal to finding your soul mate. Her poetry serves as a companion to her novels and has inspired entire series all on their own. Tammy and her alter egos Lia Michaels and Stephanie Ryan make up the core authors at Sassy Vixen Publishing and together they've created the shared world series Temptations Resort. Look for the first books in that series to come out later this year.
Now happily married to her own Muse and soul mate, she continues to live her dream and act as secretary to all her characters demanding to have their stories told.
Welcome to Tammy’s Tidbits here at Writer’s Words of Wisdom, WWoW for short. Ever since Paloma Beck came up with the idea, a group of us have been sharing bits and pieces of wisdom we’ve accumulated along our own journeys to become published authors. We may have different experiences and opinions on what worked for us individually, but we do agree on one thing—our need to continue sharing what we’ve learned with fellow authors.
This week, I’d like to expand a bit on my post from last week. I shared Kristen Lamb’s book Rise of the Machines: Human Authors in a Digital World. The biggest lesson to learn from that book is social media should be first and foremost SOCIAL. You make connections on those sites by being personable and sharing a bit of yourself to make people WANT to get to know you. If they like you, they’re more than willing to take a look at your books and you never have to ask them. They’ll do it because they want to. If they like it, they’ll tell many more of their friends, and so on and so on. As authors, our best form of promotion is word of mouth.
The Dark Side of Social Media
As much as this can make your career, it can just as easily break it. You’ll become a nuisance if you start filling up your Facebook pages and Twitter feeds with nothing but promotions and posts that scream: •“Buy Me!” •“Like my page!” •“Here’s a copy of my book, now write a review.” •“I liked your page so here’s mine…” •“Please RT my book link. I need more reviews.” Don’t get me started on the automatic response messages as soon as someone actually does like your pages or follow you on Twitter! Those are so annoying and impersonal. It basically tells the recipient that you’re way too busy to actually chat with them or comment on any of their posts. If you’re too busy for them, what makes you think they’d be willing to take time out of their busy day to do what youdemandof them?
So what do you do when you have very little time in the day to make your presence known on all your social media sites?
There are some programs that can help you such as Hootsuite, Tweetdeck and Triberr. They all have their advantages and disadvantages. The biggest disadvantage of them all is they enable you to schedule a ton of posts ahead of time, around the clock, giving the illusion you’re present when in actuality it’s just empty words. The only way you can connect with authors, readers, publishers and anyone else you wish to “meet,” is to be PRESENT. I’m not saying you need to be there 24/7, but the time you are there, make it count. Comment on posts and tweets before you share them. Comment on things that have nothing to do with books or publishing. Show people you have other interests that make you a real person to them.
I’ve bonded with others online over my crafts and cooking. These very same people have gone out and purchased every single one of my books so far and we’ve never talked about them at all. They were interested in me personally, so they made the extra effort to read my books. Now they’re my biggest fans and cheerleaders and I do the same for them.
What about support groups?
There are a ton of them out there and it’s just so easy to join them all and worry about how you’ll participate in all of them later. The BIGGEST mistake you can make is to set up your promotional posts to go into all the groups at the same time. Not only do you run the risk of breaking the rules of when you’re allowed to post promotional material, you will tick off the people in the group you’re trying to connect with in the first place. Trust me, I just spent the end of last week trying to be peacemaker between two groups of author friends who were at war with each other because of this sort of “spamming.” The sad part about the whole thing, all of it could've been avoided if a couple people took the time to read the rules against posting promotions. These same people belonged to so many groups, they used Hootsuite to set up automatic promotional posts in every single one of them. It's no wonder they didn't remember violating any rules. They didn't even remember joining in the first place! Do yourself a favor and keep the number of groups you join to a few you know you’ll be able to be an active participant and can follow the rules of what sort of discussions are allowed. You never know who may be watching you. If you behave badly, the members of one group are sure to talk to members of other groups. Before you know it, you’re persona non grata. Overall, use social media to socialize with others. Build up connections and friendships with people. These folks will in turn tell the world about you and your books all based on how you treat them. If you’re personable and show people you’re real and care about them, they’ll sing your praises. If you flood their inboxes with buy me links, and take over their personal social media space to proclaim your new release, you’re going to be labeled as rude and yet another author behaving badly. So go on! Meet and mingle on Facebook and Twitter. Join a few Yahoo groups and be active in them. Follow all the rules and guidelines for each group you join and NEVER, EVER forgo sending personalized responses in favor of the impersonal automatic message. Above all else, don’t spend so much time on these social sites or setting up promotions that you forget to do the most important thing of all—your writing! Until next week, ~Tammy
Learn More About Tammy
Tammy Dennings Maggy is a best selling, multi-published poet and erotic romance author with Siren and Sassy Vixen Publishing. Her writing explores many facets of romance from ultimate betrayal to finding your soul mate. Her poetry serves as a companion to her novels and has inspired entire series all on their own. Tammy and her alter egos Lia Michaels and Stephanie Ryan make up the core authors at Sassy Vixen Publishing and together they've created the shared world series Temptations Resort. Look for the first books in that series to come out later this year.
Now happily married to her own Muse and soul mate, she continues to live her dream and act as secretary to all her characters demanding to have their stories told.
Since I've been thinking about self-publishing a novella, I've been asking around for good Cover Artists or Book Cover sites.
Bellow, find a list of resources for simple premade book covers -- some sites have other services for more extended service. This is by no means an endorsement of any of these artists or sites. I haven't used any personally at this time. However, it's a good idea to check them all out before making a final decision!
The list could continue. In fact, have you had any great experiences with a designer? Have any resources to share? Leave a comment below!
Melinda Dozier is a contemporary romance author. Her first four novels were released in 2013: The Boy Next Door, Time Changes Everything from Entranced Publishing, Breaking the Rules from Crimson Romance and Love and Other Games: Trouble with Gold from Swoon Romance.
Have you written a story and tossing around the idea of self publishing it? It's a scary idea, really. Or at least it should be.
I consider myself a 50/50 author. I self publish and I use small press. I began to self publish a little over a year ago, and to be honest, I enjoy it and have thought about doing it more than I am now. Some authors have great luck with, while others's I've talked to haven't. So again, it's 50/50 if it's for you or not.
I thought for today's post, I would make a Pros and Cons list on self-publishing that might help you with your tough decision.
Pros
You're in complete control. You choose your release date. You choose your editor (PLEASE HIRE ONE!) You find the cover artist that you want.
Does your book need a sale to possibly get in more readers hands. Put it on sale.
You've got full control. Need to make changes to the manuscript? You can easily do this and upload a new version. Want a new cover because yours isn't working. Get a new one.
Obviously, all money earned is yours. And after 60 days, you will get a paycheck monthly from Amazon and Nook. You'll know what's coming so you can plan your months 60 day in advance.
Cons
All expenses are out of your pocket. You pay for edits. You pay for the cover. You pay for marketing (thought few small presses pay for book tours. But there are some out there that will.)
It's all you telling the world about your book, unless you've hired a blog tour company or a PR person.
If you've never published small press and gotten to know some authors you might feel super lonely trying to connect. Most of the relationships I've built have been from my time at a small press.
Each publishers pay different. Some are monthly, some quarterly. You don't see your sales until you have a statement. And you earn a percentage of the net sales. Remember though, your profit is paying the publisher and your editor, so you're usually only getting 40% of what's earned on the book.
Hopefully looking at those lists, you'll get a better idea if you want to attempt self publishing. Two pieces of advice I have are:
If this is your first time publishing, I really do recommend going with small press because you will learn so much about the publishing world. Even if you want to self publish one day, give the small presses a shot at first. And ask around before submitting to just any press.
If you self publish, please, I am begging you, hire an editor! Do not put your work out there without one. Reviews will come in and will say your book wasn't edited. This isn't good for your career. And your best friend since second grade isn't an editor (well unless they really are). Hire someone who knows point of view, what readers are looking for, and so on. Yes, it can be a lot of money out of your pocket, but in the end it's worth it.
See ya next Thursday! Got pros or con to add, please leave a comment. :)
Hello fellow authors! Welcome to Tammy's Tidbits here at Writer's Words of Wisdom. Each week I try to share the information I've learned along my journey to become published. It's been two years since my first erotic romance was published. Now with three pen names, five books published, and the launch of my own publishing house I can honestly say...whew! What a wild ride! Some may say I must have found the secret to succeed in this author eat author world, but that couldn't be further from the truth. I'm still learning the ropes and feeling my way around to find the best methods to connect with fellow authors, readers, publishers and everyone else in between. I've gone from having zero social media accounts to having six different blogs, two separate websites, five Twitter accounts, multiple Facebook accounts and pages,LinkedIn, Tumbler, StumbledUpon, Pinterest, two Goodreads author accounts, and all the email accounts to go along with the pen names and my publishing house. Can it get anymore complicated? Yep, but let's Not. Go. There. LOL! Recently I looked back through all of my Facebook and Twitter feeds and noticed way too many promotions. Hashtags seemed to be sprouting out of everywhere. It was just too much. Sort of like this video.
While this skit made me laugh, it also made me reevaluate my own use of those things. I'm involved in a few different author support groups and the use of hashtags is encouraged by all of them. Trust me, you'll know those of us in those groups by the sheer number of tags in our posts.
What does it do? Ultimately instead of helping get the post noticed by new connections, it ends up only being used by those in the same group. Sure it's nice to have so many folks retweeting all of your posts to their followers, but eventually the venues get saturated with the same tweets over and over again. Readers just skim through and ignore these tag loaded entries.
Social media is supposed to be SOCIAL. You're supposed to interact and connect with people who genuinely want to know about you and your work. They want to know you're a real person even if you do have multiple pen names. They want to know you have something in common with THEM.
Kristen Lamb's book Rise of the Machines: Human Authors in a Digital Worldshows you how to be social and make connections with people in and out of the publishing world. She shows how you in turn can be someone who connects others to each other and thereby broadening your influence and building up your brand...YOU.
You'll learn what NOT to do too such as
Never immediately send someone a private or direct message thanking them for the connection and asking them to "like" your pages or buy your book.
Never expect someone to "like" your pages simply because you just liked theirs.
Never expect an automatic follow back
Never post your own book promotion on another author's Facebook Page or Wall without their permission.
Never set up automatic tweets or status updates throughout the day and think that will fool others into thinking you're actually online.
Those are just a few of my pet peeves when dealing with other authors and their street teams. That sort of behavior doesn't build up your brand, but makes you and your brand #1 on the "unfriend, unfollow and block" list.
I can hear you all now. "But authors are supposed to support each other. What's wrong with asking them to help out?"
It's ANNOYING. When you don't even bother to take the time to socialize with people before you hit them with the commercials to buy your new book, you really tick them off. It appears to them, all you want is a book sale.
If you really want these folks to help promote you, then you have to share a bit about yourself. Comment on their posts and get personable. This makes people WANT to check you and your work out. If they like it, they'll promote you all over the place using "word of mouth" advertising at it's best. If you choose to be the annoying infomercial all the time, folks will be turned off and tune you out. They'll also tell others about your rude behavior. "Word of mouth" at it's worst—for you and your brand that is.
I'm going to try to revamp all of my social media sites to be less promo and more interaction. Why don't you give it a try too? Pick up Kristen's book and see if you've been doing more on the "don't" list than on the "do." Use her advice, and connect with folks all around the world. You'll be surprised at how your book sales will just fall into place. Mine are starting to pick up and it's only been a week since I started making changes.
Go on, give it a try. You've got nothing to lose and everything to gain here.
~Tammy
Learn More About Tammy
Tammy Dennings Maggy is a best selling, multi-published poet and erotic romance author with Siren and Sassy Vixen Publishing. Her writing explores many facets of romance from ultimate betrayal to finding your soul mate. Her poetry serves as a companion to her novels and has inspired entire series all on their own. Tammy and her alter egos Lia Michaels and Stephanie Ryan make up the core authors at Sassy Vixen Publishing and together they've created the shared world series Temptations Resort. Look for the first books in that series to come out later this year.
Now happily married to her own Muse and soul mate, she continues to live her dream and act as secretary to all her characters demanding to have their stories told.
It's book release day and what do you do? Yep! Check and recheck your book sales ... even when you tell yourself you won't! So, I'm here to share a few online sources for checking sales. Although I have heard it's not quite accurate, it is helpful to "calm" your nerves.
NOVELRANK:
Completely free for tracking book sales from Amazon (all domains).
Once you type in your book name, the site provides sales information:
You can also download Excel Spreadsheet format or check out Twitter and Blog searches.
Completely free sales ranking with searchable items.
You can search by your author name or book name.
I've also found this site useful for researching publishers and their sales ranks for recently released books.
Melinda Dozier is a contemporary romance writer. Her three debut novels were released in 2013: The Boy Next Door and Time Changes Everything from Entranced Publishing, and Breaking the Rules from Crimson Romance. Her latest release, Love and Other Games: Trouble With Gold was released last week from Swoon Romance. You can find more information at her website:www.melindadozier.com
Seek out authors who write in similar sub-genres or heat levels. Maybe this includes authors in facebook groups with you, authors who publish with the same publisher or authors who participate in the same weekly memes.
Check out their blogs. Do they include information on other authors? If they already do, they're more likely yo be interested in swapping with you.
Contact them.Email, tweet, facebook message.
Ask if they'd be interested in placing your banner on their site in exchange for having their banner on your site.
DON'T BE DISCOURAGED if some aren't interested. Authors have different rules for banner displays. When I did this type of banner swap, I asked authors of similar heat level and had a comfortable working knowledge of them. Nearly all jumped at the opportunity.
It's Wednesday and time for Tammy's Tidbits here at Writer's Words of Wisdom. The last two weeks I talked about using the program Scrivener to help organize all my projects from the research through the editing phases. One part of that program I still haven't mastered yet—converting my final manuscript into all the different ebook formats needed to upload to various retail sites. Don't get me wrong. I didn't give up on using Scrivener for conversion of files, but until I work out the process, I found another way to do it...for FREE.
Calibre is program you can download for FREE and use it to organize your entire ebook collection in one place. Not only that, you can convert your files from one format to another and organize them all in one location on your computer.
Here's an introductory video put together by the creator of the program. It's pretty self explanatory on the site, but this video shows you more detail and in real time.
Now I'm going to come right out and say this. Some people use this program, with additional plugins, to remove the digital rights management (DRM) restrictions from books they've purchased in order to convert them to other file formats to use on different ereaders or actually upload the file to pirate book sites. This post is in NO WAY supporting this sort of action. What I want to discuss here today is converting MY OWN manuscripts to the various ebook formats. With Scrivener, I can create a final document and save as a .doc file. This is the format I use to upload to both Amazon and to Smashwords. My file will then automatically be converted to the formats required for each site. Unfortunately, I can't use any of those files on other sites such as All Romance ebooks and Omnilit. So what do I do now? Open the .doc file up in Word and the SAVE AS a PDF file. This is the format I add to my files in Calibre. Once you open the program, you'll see the menu bar at the top where you can add books/files, edit metadata, and convert books. Here is the screen shot of what the conversion page looks like.
Removing the conversion window, this is what my collection looks like so far. I've highlighted the Courtship of the Vampyre files. On the right of the photo, you can see the files I've created from the PDF. Those files I then uploaded to ARe/Omnilit and are now for sale there.
As you can see, creating your own ebooks isn't hard to do when you have access to programs such as Scrivener and Calibre. With a little time and patience, you can be in charge of your own publishing house in no time! Until next time, ~Tammy
Learn More About Tammy
Tammy Dennings Maggy is a best selling, multi-published poet and erotic romance author with Siren and Sassy Vixen Publishing. Her writing explores many facets of romance from ultimate betrayal to finding your soul mate. Her poetry serves as a companion to her novels and has inspired entire series all on their own. Tammy and her alter egos Lia Michaels and Stephanie Ryan make up the core authors at Sassy Vixen Publishing and together they've created the shared world series Temptations Resort. Look for the first books in that series to come out later this year.
Now happily married to her own Muse and soul mate, she continues to live her dream and act as secretary to all her characters demanding to have their stories told.
