May 27, 2008

A break here from my weekly blog to talk about the book behind it.

“Open Your Heart with Gardens” recently garnered kudos from the publishing industry. The Midwest Book Review, one of the prestigious reviewing organizations, released this commentary:

“Growing your own garden, raising the plants to maturity and then enjoying the spoils of your long, hard, arduous labors can create quite the sense of accomplishment in you — it can almost be explained as enlightening. ‘Open Your Heart with Gardens: Mastering Life Through Love of Plants’ is here to help those who seek this sense of accomplishment and enlightenment achieve those very feelings using the hobby of gardening. Promoting tips on how you can benefit from gardens emotionally even if it isn’t your own, the unusual quirks of gardening, and the other benefits the garden can promote for its’ gardeners. ‘Open Your Heart with Gardens: Mastering Life Through Love of Plants’ is highly recommended for both self-help and gardening community library collections, and for any amateur gardener hoping to get something intangible yet invaluable out of their gardens.”

Wow! Thanks, guys!

On the heels of this review, the Indie Book Awards announced their 2008 results — and OYHG was a finalist in both the Home/Garden and Nature/Environment categories!

(Fellow Dreamtime authors also fared well: Shawn Rohrbach won the Fitness/Sports/Recreation category, and finaled in Motivational, with “Open Your Heart with Bicycling,” while Janice Phelps Williams also doubled-finaled, in Animals/Pets and Inspiration, with “Open Your Heart with Pets.”)

Per the IBA website (http://www.indiebookawards.com): “The Indie Book Awards was established to recognize and honor the most exceptional independently published books in 70 different categories, for the year, and is presented by Independent Book Publishing Professionals Group (www.IBPPG.com) in cooperation with Marilyn Allen of Allen O’Shea Literary Agency.

Big score for DreamTime, having 3 of its authors place or win in 5 categories! Remember that DreamTime is only two-and-change years old.

For myself, over on the magazine side: my profile of novelist Archer Mayor will appear in the August issue of The Writer magazine. Mayor is the author of the esteemed Joe Gunther police procedural series set in Vermont. I recommend his books to anyone who enjoys high-quality fiction, especially mysteries with a literary texture.

Next week, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

–Carolyn