Best gifts you can give an author

Have you ever wondered what you as a reader can do to give back to your favorite authors? There are plenty of things you can do to say thank you--and most of them are completely free; they only cost a little time.

1. Buy our books (okay, so this one isn't free)
2. Leave a review
3. Tell your friends
4. Send fan mail
5. Request our books at the library
6. Resist "download for free" sites

We love when you buy our books, of course. But we also love it when libraries buy them--so please ask your library to carry your favorite books.

Please leave reviews, especially with online-retailers. For less-well-known authors, it is hard to get promo if we don't have 30+ reviews on Amazon. I'm facing this issue with my book I WISH. I'd like to buy an advertisement, but it's not likely to happen because I WISH doesn't have enough reviews on Amazon.

Recommend your favorite authors and books to friends, family, the twitterverse.

Send fan mail.  Trust me, we love for readers to contact us. Writing is a hard and sometimes lonely business.  Knowing that readers are enjoying a book and loving the characters as much as we do is amazing.

Please don't download from "free sites."  That is stealing from the author. Only 15% of authors earn enough from book sales to be able to write full time. I can't afford to quit my day job. (Plus, just a warning, a lot of those sites will drop malware on your computer.)

I'm at the beach with 5 other writers this weekend. We're working on our next books and brainstorming with each other.  Here's a photo of the view from the deck!