Monday, Feb. 20, the official launch day for The Sweet Spot, fast approaches. For the past couple of months, I’ve been trying to generate interest in my hilltown novel’s characters and plot. I will continue that practice over the next few days via these posts.

This has been a hectic week for Michelle Gutierrez, the novel’s designer, and me. Dissatisfied with the proofs of the book’s physical cover — the spine’s printing was off — she decided to change the design a bit to alleviate any problems. Ah, so another set of proofs had to arrive, which they did Wednesday. Voila. The cover looks fabulous. But I am holding off publishing until last minute. (With Create Space and Kindle, you can’t set a future release date.)

The Kindle version was a bit trickier. But Michelle figured out the formatting problems.

Then I had to come up with ad copy through Amazon marketing for the Kindle version. I plan to run the ad for the next two weeks at least, starting Monday. People were nice enough to weigh in on the ad copy on Facebook.

Ah, then I found out I had to reduce it all to 150 CHARACTERS. Wow, how do you reduce 80,000 words into that amount? Here’s what I came up with: Most love Edie, widow of a soldier killed in Vietnam, until her affair with his brother ends badly. Can she survive her small town’s biggest scandal?

That will appear on certain ads, like when somebody opens their Kindle e-reader.

I also came up with a headline for the other types of ads: Secrets and Scandals in a Small Town.

Of course, I will do promotion via social media, and later next month, a reading in Taos. It would be fun to return to the hilltowns of Western Massachusetts to have one.

And hopefully, those who read and like my novel will write reviews as they did for my last novel, Peace, Love, and You Know What.

More tomorrow ….

ABOUT THE PHOTO ABOVE: That image of the road leading to the William Cullen Bryant Homestead in Cummington, Massachusetts was taken from an old postcard. Hank and I used to walk the old-growth forest beside it when we lived in the hilltowns. Conwell, the fictional town in The Sweet Spot, would fit nicely beside Cummington.