Working together to publish a book. Sisters In Crime

Saturday our Sisters in Crime held our second book launching. We meet once a month to critique our short stories, revise them.  Hear a speaker explain new writing ideas, have a book review and talk about writing and getting published. It bonds us together as women writers even through there are Mister Sisters who attend and speak at our meetings, so we learn to bond with all writers. Sort of we learn to work well and play together and write well and publish together.
      This our second anthology.  It made it so clear to me how we have grown as writers and as a group that can work together to complete all the details of publishing. We have terrific editors, fact checkers, researchers, and compilers. They sought out a terrific publisher, Blue River Press in Carmel. We had an excellent public relations person who has help get our names out there, articles in print about the book. We have contacts now all over the state to speak about our book and hopefully sell them.
      All of this of course took time, energy, trust, learning and understanding of each others needs. It was not easy. It was not work we were all suited to. Writers like to write. Period. All that other stuff, booking people to speak to us, booking us to speak. Articles, promotions that's for someone else, not so artistic to do. But dear hearts, writers and gentle reader we learned all those skills. And how to sell books. Did we learn how to sell books. To listen to each other when we were sure our own ideas were  the very best . We learned to push ourselves to the limit and beyond of what we thought we knew. We stuck together and worked it out. We learned to take and understand critiques of our short stories and novels. We listened and learned from publishers, agents, researchers, book sellers and most of all the most important THE READER.
      So June 12 was success for us in skills coming together, having a great and large audience and knowing how to work to succeed.  Thanks to everyone in Sisters in Crime who worked hard for that.
      Now we are ready for the next challenge. To write with more discipline. To listen better to the critiques. To search for more writing markets and share them with the group. To start thinking about the next book.
       We thank our PR person for all the work he did to get the news about the anthology in the media. To our two editors who check and rechecked every single word in our work. Our publisher who was not satisfied until the cover was perfect and our stories were perfect. To the compilers of racing statistics and the fact checkers of those statistics. To each one of us who wrote, tore up pages, and went for long walks screaming into the wind everything from "I can't write this, I won't write this" to "I damn well am a writer and I will write this" I am proud of Sisters in Crime, Speedcity Chapter and invite all interested writers, fans, publishers, agents, booksellers to come and join us at meetings the fourth Saturday of every month at Barnes and Noble at Greyhound pass Mall in Carmel. Speaking of them. They were so great to us. Buy a book from them, especially "Bedlam at the Brickyard," or "Racing Can Be Murder."
        Next blog, how we started. Then maybe back to oil and energy or not. I shall hold you all in the light. Sherita