In super thrilling news, Heart First is nominated for a few Queer Indie Awards: Best Overall Mystery/Thriller, Best Lead Character for Daniel, Best Romantic Relationship for Daniel and Tony and Best Debut. You can vote here until February 2nd (voting has been prolonged). The easiest way to find it is to search for "Barnes" in the poll, since the poll is pretty long to scroll through.
That said, I highly recommend taking a look at everything else being voted for - I know it's added to my to be read list for 2024! There are so many interesting books, novellas, graphic novels and so many beautiful covers to check out!
Huge thanks to anyone and everyone who nominated Heart First, voted for it, and everyone who took the time to leave a review on Goodreads or elsewhere!
It's hard to put into words how it makes you feel, as a writer, to read a review of your work that really gets what you were going for. It's motivated me to dive into the editing of book 2 (the contract for which I officially signed this week! Daniel and Tony will be back!) I'm so thankful to everyone who took the time to leave a review on Goodreads!
I'd like to also explicitly include everyone in that who had criticisms or didn't enjoy Heart First in those thanks. Not only is it instructive for me to learn how it comes across to different people, the book reviewing/publishing industry can be kind of weird about people having the audacity to not like everything they read. No book will be universally acclaimed and that's fine, and Goodreads/Storygraph are resources for readers to share their thoughts, not for authors to market themselves.
I know it doesn't always work like that in practice, but we live in a weird time in which readers and authors have direct access to each other via social media, and I've seen a lot of weird situations including authors going after reviewers for bad reviews or reviewers specifically @-ing authors whose books they didn't like. For me personally, reviews are a space for readers to reflect on their experience of reading the book, they aren't a space for me to question or comment. (This is also why I'm so allergic to the ~15-20 message requests in my Instagram inbox asking me to pay someone in exchange for reviewing the book on different sites).
If someone has questions or wants to reach me directly to talk about the book or anything else, that's something you can absolutely do via my socials; I view that as separate from the act of reviewing. Unless it's outright defamatory, it's definitely not my place to interact with reviews. Imagine me reading them from my cave underground hoarding them like a very weird dragon who never goes outside but appreciates every review that floats in through the cave entrance.
You can check out the goodreads page here, order on amazon or smashwords, and vote for Heart First in the Queer Indie awards until Feb 2nd!
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