Lauren Dailey is in break-up hell. - Empath by S. Usher Evans

Stuck between moving on and letting go, she puts on a brave face while crying herself to sleep at night. But when a mysterious voice promises escape from her sadness, she is suddenly transported to a new world. And in this place, the slightest touch pulls her out of her tortured emotions into the mind of another - an empath.

Description:

Lauren Dailey is in break-up hell.

Stuck between moving on and letting go, she puts on a brave face while crying herself to sleep at night. But when a mysterious voice promises escape from her sadness, she is suddenly transported to a new world. And in this place, the slightest touch pulls her out of her tortured emotions into the mind of another - an empath.

The villagers - sweet Aerona and her mischievous twins, wise Siors, and hunky Cefin - welcome her and the blessings her empath powers bring. But this world is not without its dangers. The Anghenfil, a fire-breathing monster, has haunted the village for decades, and has a taste for empaths. And that mysterious voice promising escape from sadness? It's sounding more like a whisper tinged with smoke and embers.

Can Lauren keep the monsters in the mountain and in her head at bay? Or will she succumb to the darkness like the empath before her…

GUEST POST

Business is always inherently risky - you put up your own money, time, and effort and you pray that the investment will pay off. Bookselling - being a business (anyone who tells you otherwise is an idiot) - is even more risky because you add in the subjective nature of the book-liking process.

Let me back up for those who are unfamiliar with my background: I'm a project management consultant (and I write science fiction and fantasy novels. I'm layered, yo). So my day job is one big exercise in maximizing profit and minimizing risk through planning.

I love to plan. I plan to plan the plan for planning the plan (yeah boi). I plan the risks, I plan the mitigation of those risks, I plan the expected outcomes. I plan how I'm going to achieve those outcomes. I plan what I'm going to do with the outcomes of the outcomes.
And then, things don't go according to plan.

I'll give you a really good example. In September of this year, I set up my very first book signing. For whatever reason, I envisioned lines of excited readers queuing out the door, and so I put down about $300 to buy 75 books, and lugged all them books to the bookstore that I had agreed to show up at. I printed about 50 fliers with my face on them and handed them out around the town.
And then…I sold six books.
SIX.
TO PEOPLE I ALREADY KNEW.

Since then, I've done a lot of conventions where I've put up a lot of my own money and prayed that I make it back. And I'll be frank - I've lost money. A lot of money. But at the same time, I also have seen small seedlings of larger response. I've met people I otherwise never would have met, got the book into the hands of people who otherwise would have never known it existed.

You can't let the fear of failure keep you from taking the risks that you know are the right ones to take. You also can't get disillusioned when have a string of bad luck, like when I didn't sell as many books as I thought I was going to this fall.
You just have to readjust your sails, look at the plan and see if there's a way you can make up for lost time. You have to look at the risks you are taking, and make sure you've done everything in your power to mitigate them. You have to take a deep breath and send a prayer to God/The Universe/Leveman's Vortex/Flying Spaghetti Monster that things will work out the way they are meant to.
Perfect example:
After that terrible bookselling, I panicked and signed up for a convention in Virginia Beach where I sold 42 books in one day.
Which meant I was…

Everything works out the way it's supposed to.

TOUR SCHEDULE

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About the author:

S. Usher Evans is an author, blogger, and witty banter aficionado. Born in a small, suburban town in northwest Florida, she was seventeen before she realized that not all beach sand is white. From a young age, she has always been a long-winded individual, first verbally (to the chagrin of her ever-loving parents) and then eventually channeled into the many novels that dotted her Windows 98 computer in the early 2000's. After high school, she got the hell outta dodge and went to school near the nation's capital, where she somehow landed jobs at National Geographic, Discovery Channel, and the British Broadcasting Corporation, capping off her educational career with delivering the commencement address to 20,000 of her closest friends. She determined she'd goofed off long enough with that television nonsense and got a "real job" as an IT consultant. Yet she continued to write, developing 20 page standard operating procedures and then coming home to write novels about bounty hunters, teenage magic users, and other nonsense. After a severe quarter life crisis at age 27, she decided to finally get a move on and share those novels with the world in hopes that she will never have to write another SOP again.

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