My Book Has Just Been Published! Now What?

This month, University of Texas Press published my memoir, Walking Nature Home: A Life's Journey. It's my twelfth book, but it's the one I've been working on the longest. (Yup, it's taken me the better part of two-and-a-half decades to get the story right. I may be slow, but I do not give up!)

UT Press did an outstanding job of editing, design and production: the book's a hardcover with a beautiful dust jacket, great blurbs, and gorgeous watercolor illustrations by my neighbor, artist Sherrie York. The design positively invites you to pick the book up and dive in. The Press has gone out of their way to get review copies out to national and regional venues and has even partnered on publicity for a few key events. But the rest is up to me.

So what am I doing? My first instinct was to run around like a chicken without a head--rush in all directions, accepting every promotion opportunity offered. But after thinking carefully about my limitations, both financial and in terms of my energy (see my blog post, Aiming for sustainability at work), I decided to be very picky, choosing only those events I felt gave me an opportunity to be at my best, and grouping events to save travel and energy (mine and the planet's). I also decided to go really green and make a big splash without leaving the couch where I often write by planning a blog book tour.

So today I'm off on two very different tours: Tonight I'm giving a talk on "Gardening With Nature" in Fort Collins, Colorado, for the City's Environmental Living Series. I'll draw on the restoration of the formerly blighted industrial area where I live and is conveniently featured in the last chapters of Walking Nature Home, thus giving me a good plug for the book.

I'm also headed off into cyberspace, visiting a dozen blogs over the next three weeks, beginning here at Women Writing the West. I'll be chatting with the virtual audiences of blogs ranging from one focused on writing women's memoirs and one about our ties to place to one written by a knitter who is fascinated by the connection between craft and life, a blog news-magazine, and a gardener in West Texas who also makes hand-crafted canoe paddles. Plus, I'll be interviewed on a national teleseminar on memoir-writing. (Details on my web site and blog.)

My next stop: Janet Riehl's Riehlife village wisdom newsmagazine on March 27th. That same night in the "real" world I'll be reading at Tattered Cover Bookstore on Colfax Avenue in Denver. If you're in the area--virtual or real, please stop by.

Thanks for joining me in this post, and let me know what you think of the book and my tour. The schedule for both tours is on my web site and also, of course, on my blog.

You can read the first chapter of Walking Nature Home on the UT Press web site. They're offering a 33% discount off list price for online purchases, a great deal! And here's a wonderful review by Susan Albert, just posted today on the Story Circle Network book review site. So off I go....