Welcome to RRBC'S WRITERS' CONFERENCE & BOOK EXPO!

 Join me at RRBC's 8th Annual Writers' Conference & Book Expo!

Win books & prizes!

Meet the friendliest authors online!

https://rrbcwritersconferencebookexpo2023.wordpress.com/meet-author-susanne-leist-rrbc-wcbe21-susanneleist/

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT DAY 2

Thank you, JOY NWOSU LO-BAMIJOKO, for hosting my blog tour today.

AUTHOR SUSANNE LEIST IS OUR RAVE REVIEWS BOOK CLUB’S “SPOTLIGHT” Author!

It is my pleasure to welcome Susanne Leist on my blog today.

BLOG POST:

MY ADVICE FOR NEW AUTHORS

The best advice to a new author is to have everything in place before your book is published. Blogs and online accounts must be opened and ready for business. The book’s publication shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone but an anticipated event. I learned the painful way from experience. 

Outskirts Press, a self-publishing company, sent an email stating my book was published on Amazon and Barnes & Noble with no prior warning. I hurried to check my Amazon page. The Dead Game sat on a blank page with no book or author description, the same for B & N. I raced against the clock to write a summary and author bio. It was months before I was able to sit back and take a breath. After that earth-shattering day in September, I decided never to leave myself unprepared.

My learning process evolves daily; there’s no rest for the weary author. My earliest posts appeared on Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Since then, I’ve added sites to my repertoire, including Pinterest, Instagram, and author groups. The author sites I’ve found most useful are Rave Reviews Book Club, All Author, and Authors Den. I opened blogs on Tumblr, BlogSpot, and WordPress blogs. In the beginning, I wrote poetry for my blogs and tweets as a way to market my books. Over time, poetry has evolved from a mere tool to one of my favorite passions.

A website is another essential marketing tool for authors. It should serve as the central hub for an author’s books. Mine hasn’t achieved its goal yet since I chose WIX, which is hard to use. It’s crucial to pick a user-friendly website. Newsletters are also essential to an author’s survival as a way to keep in touch with readers. 

The most useful advice I can offer an author is to do your research and be prepared. You must keep writing and never doubt yourself.

AUTHOR BIO:

I have always loved to read. Agatha Christie, Alistair Maclean, Robert Ludlum, and other authors filled my young imagination with intrigue and mystery. When I wasn’t reading late into the night, the TV shows such as Murder She Wrote and Columbo, entertained me with murder and suspense tales.

Over the years, my taste in TV expanded to include such shows as Supernatural and The Originals. I searched for paranormal, murder mysteries, but found few at the library or bookstore. So, I wrote one.

The Dead Game, Book One of The Dead Game series, brings fantasy and surrealism to the classic murder mystery with dead bodies, suspects, and clues. It offers vampires, vampire derivatives, and a touch of romance to spice the motley mix.

The story continues in Book Two, Prey for The Dead, as The Dead vampires use an exclusive club in Disney World to infiltrate the rich and famous. As The Dead grow in power, not even the bright sunshine of Florida can weaken them. Linda and her friends join forces with human vampires–known as hybrids–to defeat the evil threatening to control Oasis. A masquerade ball and a romp through the tunnels beneath the town lead to a showdown in southern Florida’s swamps.

The Dead At Heart is Shana’s love story. Will her love for William strengthen, or will Sam lead her on a different path? At Chateau Frontenac in Quebec, Shana and her fearless friends fight for Oasis and their lives.

A career in writing has been a giant leap for me. Accustomed to the number-crunching field of budgeting and the hectic commodity markets, I left my first career and M.B.A. in Finance behind to pursue my dream. I do not regret my foray into literature for one moment. Fellow authors helped me make my way through the competitive field. I write every day and even tried my hand at poetry. If someone tells you it’s too late in life to try something different, they are wrong. It is never too late to follow your heart.

BOOK ON TOUR:

THE DEAD AT HEART 

William’s bite bonded Shana to him, but he didn’t ask her to mate with him for life. She isn’t ready for a lifetime commitment. Now, William excludes her from his vampire meetings. Shana understands he’s an original vampire with immense powers. For them to be a couple, he has to treat as an equal partner. If William doesn’t respect her, then what are their chances of finding happiness?

Shana speaks to Linda, her best friend, of her fears.

“Paradise is an illusion.” Shana’s face grows heated as her frustration mounts. “Oasis is a haven for vampires. I’m tired of their battles. The Watchers get rid of an evil group of vamps, and another group arrives and attacks. It’s a vicious cycle. Vampires are trouble.”

“We will have a happy ending.” Linda lifts her head. “Don’t lose faith. The Watchers will protect us, and Gregg has an elite force of original vampires.” She touches Shana’s arm. “William loves you; he won’t let something happen to you.”

“The vampires keep secrets from us.” Shana swallows the lump in her throat. “I don’t want to live with vamps anymore, and I need time to decide on my relationship with William. One minute, I’m suffocating, and then the next, I’m lost without him.”

As a new enemy descends on Oasis, Florida, Shana turns to Sheriff Sam, who broke her heart. Can she trust the human-vampire?

This begins Shana’s journey to fight vampires and werewolves with Sam at her side.

An explosion at Chateau Frontenac in Quebec doesn’t stop Shana and her friends from saving their town, and maybe even the world.

SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS:

Twitter handle:  @SusanneLeist

Facebook URL:  https://www.facebook.com/susanne.leist.98

Website address:  https://www.susanneleist.com/

Thank you for supporting RRBC’s “SPOTLIGHT” Author!  If you’d like to follow along with each stop of this tour, please check out our “SPOTLIGHT” Author forum on the RRBC site.

LIVE THE FANTASY

5 Stars Review of PREY FOR THE DEAD

From excellent writing and grammar to amazing storytelling I highly recommend this book! Now, this author has a new fan.

HEAVEN

marthasbuildings

Rijksmuseum Library

Shelves to the ceiling.

Ladders to reach high.

Tables for my books.

Chairs to relax in.

Lamps to give me light.

Quiet for my thoughts.

A slice of heaven.

A HEAVEN OF SWEETS

Source: weheartit.com

Take me to the room,

Where books cover the walls.

Globes stand at attention,

Ladders set to be climbed.

Cushioned chairs for reading,

Tables set for writing.

Let’s climb up to the stacks,

And see what we may find.

Romance today for thee,

Perhaps a mystery for me.

A confectioner’s treat,

A true heaven of sweets.

TICK TOCK

Source:lightsindarkuniverse 

TICK TOCK

Tick tock tick tock

Chimes the old clock.

Cold like a vault.

All dancers halt.

Evil so near.

The Dead are here.

Heads are rolling.

Game of bowling.

Midnight is here.

Nothing to fear.

THE DEAD GAME

http://myBook.to/TheDeadGame

http://bit.ly/1lFdqNj

CAN WE JUDGE BOOKS BY THEIR COVERS?

This article by MIT Technology Review tests the answer.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602807/deep-neural-network-learns-to-judge-books-by-their-covers/

Deep Neural Network Learns to Judge Books by Their Covers

A machine-vision algorithm can tell a book’s genre by looking at its cover. This paves the way for AI systems to design the covers themselves.

• by Emerging Technology from the arXiv
• November 7, 2016

The idiom “never judge a book by its cover” warns against evaluating something purely by the way it looks. And yet book covers are designed to give readers an idea of the content, to make them want to pick up a book and read it. Good book covers are designed to be judged.

And humans are quite good at it. It’s relatively straightforward to pick out a cookery book or a biography or a travel guide just by looking at the cover.

And that raises an interesting question: can machines judge books by their covers, too?

Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Brian Kenji Iwana and Seiichi Uchida at Kyushu University in Japan. These guys have trained a deep neural network to study book covers and determine the category of book they come from.

Their method is straightforward. Iwana and Uchida downloaded 137,788 unique book covers from Amazon.com along with the genre of book. There are 20 possible genres but where a book was listed in more than one category, the researchers used just the first.

Next, the pair used 80 percent of the data set to train a neural network to recognize the genre by looking at the cover image.  Their neural network has four layers, each with up to 512 neurons, which together learn to recognize the correlation between cover design and genre. The pair used a further 10 percent of the dataset to validate the model and then tested the neural network on the final 10 percent to see how well it categorizes covers it has never seen.

The results make for interesting reading. The algorithm listed the correct genre in its top 3 choices over 40 percent of the time and found the exact genre more than 20 percent of the time. That’s significantly better than chance. “This shows that classification of book cover designs is possible, although a very difficult task,” say Iwana and Uchida.

Some categories turn out to be easier to recognize than others. For example, travel books and books about computer and technology are relatively easy for the neural network to spot because book designers consistently use similar images and design for these genres.

The neural net also found that cookbooks were easy to recognize if they used pictures of food but were entirely ambiguous if they used a different design such as a picture of the chef.

Biographies and memoires were also problematic with the algorithm often selecting history as the category. Interestingly, for many of these books, history is the secondary genre listed on Amazon, suggesting that the algorithm wasn’t entirely bamboozled.

The algorithm also confused children’s books with comics and graphic novels as well as medical books and science books. Perhaps that’s also understandable given the similarities between these categories.

There is one shortcoming in this work. Iwana and Uchida have not compared the performance of their neural network against humans’ ability to recognize book genres by their covers. That would be an interesting experiment and one that would be relatively straightforward to do with an online crowdsourcing service such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Until that work is done, there is no way of knowing whether machines are any better at this task than humans.  Although, no matter how good humans are at this task, it is surely only a matter of time before machines outperform them.

Nevertheless, this is interesting work that could help designers improve their skills when it comes to book covers. A more likely outcome, however, is that it could be used to train machines to design book covers without the need for human input. And that means book cover design is just another job that is set to be consigned to the history books.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1610.09204: Judging a Book by Its Cover

Uzi Poznasky's Bargain & Free Books

Uvi Poznansky: Bargain&Free: ��   Please double-check prices before downloading  ��   Murder in the Theater By Christa Nardi Myster...

Bargain&Free

📯 Please double-check prices before downloading 📯 

Murder in the Theater By Christa Nardi Mystery, Thriller & Suspense  $0.99 $2.99 ★ Kindle ★ 11/03/2016-11/08/2016 It’d be the season to be jolly if only someone hadn’t set the stage for murder. Can amateur sleuth Sheridan Hendley find the killer before the curtain call?	.The Dead Game By Susanne Leist Paranormal Suspense $0.99 $2.99  ★ Kindle ★ Nook ★ 10/31/2016-11/07/2016 Linda moves to a seaside town to live a quiet life. She opens a bookstore and makes new friends. Life is simple--that is until the dead body washes up on shore. Linda is horrified to find that dead bodies and disappearing tourists are common for this small town. But this is only the beginning.
Sugar for Sugar New Release By Seb Kirby Mystery, Thriller & Suspense  $0.99 $2.99 ★ Kindle ★ 11/04/2016-11/10/2016 Issy Cunningham has made a new life for herself but that's all about to come crashing down. If only she could recall what happened that Valentine's Eve, she would be able to tell the police what really took place.  How can she set the record straight when her past won't let her be?	Dead Lawyers Don’t Lie  By Mark Nolan Mystery,Thriller & Suspense $0.99 $2.99 ★ Kindle ★ 11/03/2016-11/09/2016 An action-packed thriller from beginning to end. Dead Lawyers Don’t Lie has been a #1 bestseller in Pulp Thrillers, and among the most popular books in Kindle Unlimited All-Stars.
Dangerous Waters By Anne Allen Women’s Fiction $0.99 ★ Kindle ★ 11/01/2016-11/07/2016 Tragedy seems to follow Jeanne Le Page around . . .  Can she really go through it again and survive? And will her return to Guernsey bring her pain - or love - or both?	In Flight Tales of the Dragonfly By Tamara Ferguson Romantic Suspense $0.99 ★ Kindle ★ 10/15/2016-11/15/2016 When Sam's search for a killer leads him back through his own tarnished past, will Penny, a woman who's afraid to trust, be able to forgive a man who considers himself undeserving of her love?
Murder at the Polo Club By Dianne Harman Cozy Mystery, New Release $0.99 $2.99  ★ Kindle ★ 10/26/2016-11/30/2016  Antiques, polo, and relationships. What do they have in common? Murder!	Dangerous Places A Roman Cantrell-Nikki Holden Mystery #1  By Elaine Raco Chase Mystery,Thriller & Suspense $0.99 $2.99 Kindle ★ Nook ★ Apple ★  Kobo 11/02/2016-11/08/2016 The 7 deadly sins have never been so deadly or so fun!
After the Evil A Jake Roberts Novel By Cary Allen Stone Crime Fiction, Psychological Thriller FREE $0.99  Kindle ★ Nook ★ Kobo 11/01/2016-11/07/2016 Jake’s in a steamy love affair with flight attendant Lori Powers. Tensions run high when Jake discovers who the killer is. Will they get there in time to stop another murder?	A Touch of Passion Boxed set Romance  FREE $1.99 Kindle ★ Nook ★ iTunes ★ Kobo 11/01/2016-11/07/2016 Lose yourself in a touch of passion. Whether it’s the magic of a kiss or the agony of heartbreak, explore love in these captivating full-length novels, written by twelve bestselling, award-winning, USA Today and NY Times authors. These sensual tales will leave you with music in your heart.
Amelia’s Story  By D.G. Torrens Memoir FREE $4.99  ★ Kindle ★ 11/04/2016-11/06/2016 While being moved from one children's home to another, Amelia has just one wish: to make it through to adulthood and hold her destiny in her own hands.	.

📯 Happy reading! 📯

For Authors