In My Mailbox is a weekly meme started by The Story Siren to showcase books you’ve received for review, bought, borrowed, or swapped. Anyone can participate, and it’s a great way to showcase new books and encourage blogger/commenter interaction.

Here’s what came in my mailbox this week!

Perfectly Dateless – Kristin Billerbeck (YA)

Back on Murder – J. Mark Bertrand (Mystery/Suspense)

And that’s it for me! What came in your mailbox this week?

UPDATE, 11:23am: The RSS feed is fixed! Yay! And the button is back, as you can see over on the upper right — my husband added his own clever touch there. Thanks for your patience!

For those of you attempting to follow me through an RSS reader, I apologize… the feed is broken, so my posts won’t be showing up in your reader (and probably haven’t for some time).

If you’re trying to follow me and can’t find the button to do so, I apologize for that too… I just had someone update WordPress for me and the button vanished! Ahhh!!! What’s going on?!?!

Needless to say, my husband has someone working on fixes for the feed and the RSS icon, so please be patient and bear with me until it’s done — I haven’t disappeared! I’ll post again when it’s fixed so you can add me to your feed/adjust me blog in your reader as necessary.

And as a side note, the archive links over to your right are NOW FIXED!!! Yay, they work again!

Thanks everyone for your patience …all will be right with the blog again soon!

The plenary speaker for Write!Canada 2010 was Joel Freeman, a businessman/ entrepreneur/ writer/ speaker/ film producer/ you name it, he’s done it. Dr. Freeman’s best known book is entitled If Nobody Loves You, Create the Demand, and I definitely bought a copy of both the book and the workbook after hearing him speak. He’s a very dynamic speaker who knows how to engage the audience, and he had a lot of good — and scary — things to say about writing, business, and building a career.

One point I want to touch on today is a statistic Dr. Freeman shared with us… and what he said about it afterward. He pointed out that (and I’m paraphrasing here):

“Over 200,000 books are published in North America each year… the chances of any book becoming a bestseller are about 0.01%.”

Then he told us this — on average, you can literally make more money flipping burgers than you can as a writer.

Wow. That’s harsh, and hard to hear. But think about it for a moment, let it really sink in, and then ask yourself…

Do you still want to write?

You should be discouraged. You should look at that statistic and think “well, there’s no chance, I might as well quit while I’m ahead and find something else to do”. You should run as far and as fast as you can from writing.

But if you read that, take a close look at yourself, and answer “yes, I still want to write despite the odds”… then, as Dr. Freeman said, “you’ve really got something”! You’re meant to do this. You were born to do this.

And if we as aspiring authors are willing to keep on pushing, leap the hurdles, adapt to the industry, and think like both writers AND business-people — after all, writing is a business too — then we’ve really got something.

We can be part of that 0.01%. I can be part of that 0.01%. You can be part of that 0.01%.

Still feeling motivated? Go grab yourself a burger… then sit down and write!

What’s ‘In My Mailbox’, you ask?

Well, it’s a weekly meme started by The Story Siren to showcase books you’ve received for review, bought, borrowed, or swapped. Anyone can participate, and it’s a great way to showcase new books and encourage blogger/commenter interaction.

I’m going to do my best to participate in this every week (Sundays are when most IMM posts go up)… as writers, we NEED to read and expand our reading horizons every week, so hopefully I’ll have a book or two each week that’ll inspire you to pick it up — or maybe you’ll have something to recommend to me in return!

So here we go! This week, I received 2 books in my mailbox:

The King’s Mistress – Emma Campion (ARC)

Releases July 6th, 2010

Scent of the Missing – Susannah Charleson (Review Copy)

Hardcover Released April 14th, 2010

Paperback Releases December 22nd, 2010

Reviews of both books forthcoming! I’m excited to read both of them, though I’m pretty sure I’ll need a box of tissues to get through the dog book…

To those of you visiting this blog from my homeland… Happy Canada Day!

And to those of you visiting from the USA… just a few more days until your celebration!

And to anyone visiting internationally… I have no idea when your independence day/patriotic event is held, but I hope it’s a good one this year.

Now get outside and enjoy some sunshine and fireworks!

I almost forgot! There’s one more book I wanted to remind you about that wasn’t part of the books I read for the tour this month… but which I read a few months back as a part of Librarything.com’s Early Reviewer’s Program.

However, Graf-Martin Communications & Baker Publishing Group included it as part of their selection of tour books this month, and I figured… since I liked the book when I read it… it wouldn’t hurt to give it a little extra promotion, right?

So, in case you didn’t get a chance to read my review back in April, here’s a LINK BACK to my review of ‘Heartless’ by Anne Elisabeth Spengl.

The writing style is a bit ethereal, and it’s an unusual story & development for a CBA book… but ultimately, I enjoyed it, and have since recommended it to a number of people.

Who knows, if you like fantasy? You might like it too.