Hello lovelies! It gives me great
pleasure today to host Liz Crowe and her new book, “Tapped”! For other stops on her Goddess Fish
Promotions Book Tour, please click on the banner above or any of the images in
this post.
Be sure to make it to the end of this
post to enter to win a $10 Amazon or Barnes and Noble Gift Card! Also, come back daily to interact with Liz
and to increase your chances of winning!
Thanks for stopping by! Wishing you lots of luck in this fabulous
giveaway!
Tapped
by Liz Crowe
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GENRE:
Contemporary Erotic Romance
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BLURB:
When wealthy
brewery owner Austin Fitzgerald meets sexy saleswoman Evelyn Benedict, angry
sparks fly. They seem destined to clash, until a hot hookup in a cold beer
cooler changes everything.
For Austin,
it's a life-altering moment that sets him on a path away from his birthright,
while Evelyn must face her fears about committing to a man considered the
playboy of the micro-brewing world.
The power of
preconceived notions nearly tears them apart—until they meet up with brew
master Ross, who opens their eyes to a deeper, even more erotic connection. But
three strong personalities don’t always make for the best emotional mix and
when a simple misunderstanding causes chaos, it’s up to Ross to repair the
tattered shreds of their relationship.
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EXCERPT ONE:
Sensing
the heat of Evelyn’s fury as he finalized another large order, he excused
himself and made his way toward the restroom. The tuning-fork sensation had
morphed into a dull ache centered in his gut, which steadily made its way down
to his balls.
When
he emerged—after splashing water on his face enough times to calm the hardening
in his jeans—he almost plowed straight into her. He gripped her arms to keep
her from falling and the impulses that had bounced around in his brain since
the morning nearly brought him to his knees. He dropped his hands and looked
away, swallowing back the urge to say something, anything, to convince her he
wasn’t such a bad guy.
“Sorry.”
Her
voice was flat. He took a step back, stopped only when his butt hit the wall.
The space between them filled with near-visible silence, but he didn’t move.
“I
don’t know how I’m doing it, but the longer we work together, the more sales I
make, and the more you hate me. Clue me in here, Benedict. I thought sales were
the goal of the day.” He crossed his arms, holding them close to his chest so
she couldn’t gauge how shaky his hands had gotten.
She
swallowed, and he watched the exquisite warm peach hue of her skin redden.
Admiring the line of her neck, her jaw, the plump fullness of her lower lip as
she bit it, a nervous tic he’d love to come to love, if she’d let him, Austin
sensed himself falling deeper into a very scary hole. Her ongoing silence took
on a life of its own.
“Well?
I left my secret-sales-goal decoder ring at home. You obviously have a
different agenda for today. I get it. ‘Prove to the rich boy he doesn’t have
what it takes’ is fine, but we could have saved some time if you’d just told me
first.”
She
opened her lips, then pressed them together and shouldered past him. He
watched, fascinated, as his hand reached out of its own accord and snagged her
arm. She stopped, stared at it, then up at him. When he realized the blue of
her eyes was brighter because of tears, he hesitated. Female tears always
unnerved him, but his chest tightened in a thoroughly alarming way at the
thought of having caused her unhappiness.
He
let go. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to…”
In
a split second, her beautiful face was within inches of his. “Don’t flatter
yourself. I’m just pissed off. You’ve had that effect on me since I first laid
eyes on you, so yeah, I guess I set you up. But apparently, all your
country-club, private-school time has been worth it. Bullshitting comes
naturally to you. And that’s all this job is. A whole barrel of bullshit.”
She stomped away before he could speak or,
even better, grab her and kiss her. The space she vacated quivered with anger.
But her crisp perfume stayed in his nose and he had to clench his hands into
fists to keep from shoving her up against the wall and kissing her until she
saw it his way.
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GUEST POST:
I recently had
the privilege of attending something that was presented to me as “sales
training” for my day job—that of convincing people to sell and /or buy what for
most of them will be the biggest investment (or two or three) they every make.
“Real Estate”
in other words.
Said training
was to occur over four straight days, 8:30-4 at a local hotel’s generic
conference room. It was called “Ninja Training” which, as you might imagine
gave rise to all manner of joking around my real estate office about leather
pants and throwing stars. We can be a pretty funny bunch when we try.
But those four
days changed my life.
How does this
affect US—that is to say, “You and Me”— the collective unwashed masses of
scribblers clamoring for attention from readers, agents and bigger/ better/
deeper pocketed publishers?
Pretty
directly. Allow me to explain.
The first day
we pondered the concept of “Abundance” vs. “Scarcity.” Humans tend to operate
from the “scarcity” side of the spectrum. There are only “so many readers” (or
houses, or buyers, whatever). There are a limited number of these
readers/agents and they are all “used up” by the best seller types or those
lucky enough to already HAVE an agent. It’s the proverbial “glass half empty”
view, really but with a bit more around it. In short, it’s defeatist, limiting,
and the mindset of a victim. (“It’s EL James/James Patterson/Lee Child’s fault
I’m not a best seller.” By way of example)
“Abundance” on
the other hand, is the mindset we were encouraged to contemplate. This way of
thinking leads to a more positive frame of mind but it’s not “smile and the
world smiles with you” brainless positivity either. It’s embracing the actual
reality that there are, indeed MORE readers out there. They’re created every
day (many of them BY the EL James/James Pattersons of the world). There truly
is no limit to what you could do, if you use this sort of thinking as you
ponder the pile of edits, revisions, submissions, queries, rejections,
promotional opportunities from both legit and non-legit entities—in short, your
“daily business as an author in 2016.”
That first day
of Going Ninja as we came to call it, also involved what was even more
life-changing for Yours Truly. Mainly because it encouraged me to dump my
victim-hood and take on the mantle of “player.”
Yeah, I’ve
written about plenty of Players in my books, including TAPPED which has not
one, but TWO strong male players, plus and equally strong female. I think I
created those people so as to affirm that their hard work combined with a
positive outlook on life creates success.
Wait….What?
I “created
characters” with personalities more like I WISHED I had?
Um…hold up.
I already knew
that to be a “Player” meant being the opposite of a “victim.” I’d written
countless of these people, both men and women, many of whom had come through
some pretty tough circumstances to get to the top of their personal mountain,
whatever it was. In some cases, entire novels were written by me about HOW they
went from Victim to Player.
And here I was,
sitting at one of those annoying skinny tables with a sweating pitcher of water
in the middle, just out of my reach, surrounded by colleagues eagerly
scratching down notes on the fancy Ninja-labeled legal pads, with my mouth
hanging open as I pondered my own victimhood of the past, oh, 24 months of so
and accepting that only I had the power to change it. I was only a victim inside my own head.
Whew. Heavy
stuff. But seriously, would I remember any of it later?
I assure you
that I have and I’m here to tell YOU today, dear Pro Rookie column loyalists,
that the Time of Our Victimhood Is Over.
Let me bring it
down to the nitty gritty.
You’re slaving
over a new manuscript while trying to figure out ways to boost your
reviews/ratings on other books. You just got “paid” for a month of “sales” that
were utterly depressing.
You owe money
to your editor, your cover artist, the four or five promo venues you use and
trust. Oh, there’s that pesky “groceries” thing and perhaps “heat” for the
winter and “shelter” in the form of a rent or mortgage payment.
It’s January.
It’s a Tuesday. It’s cloudy and cold but doesn’t have the decency to snow and
be pretty for a few hours. You open your email to find three fresh rejections
from agents you were sure would adore your attempt at a sexy thriller novel.
You are a good
Liz Follower and usually avoid reading your reviews but happen to scan down the
page of one of your books and find three or four scathing, 1-star lengthy
diatribes on the novel you just spent $400 to give away free on bookbub. The
dog’s puking on the carpet. The laundry is at avalanche-level DefCon 5. On Facebook you see three or four new posts
about authors who used to read YOUR books who’ve made the New York Times Best
Seller list after a few months of publishing.
Pretty dismal,
no?
This was me, a
few weeks ago.
But thanks to
the time I spent pondering the fact that all of these things could either:
1. drive me
under the table in a ball, thumb in mouth, cradling a bourbon bottle to my
chest at 10 a.m. OR
2. drive me
away from the house, out for a walk, to yoga, to a coffee shop to meet a friend
who had no clue as to my misery, to anything that would take my mind off all of
it for a short while and allow me a re-set.
Either way,
only I had the power to determine which direction I would take.
Because I am a
Player.
Some call this
the “fake it ‘til you make it” mindset and it could be taken that way for
certain. In real estate, we are more or less required to “dress the part and
show up” for things like office sales meetings, learning sessions, to the
office as many times a week as we can, in order to help us “feel” like we are
actually successful until such time as we actually ARE.
This is all a
little warm and fuzzy this month but hey! It’s January! It’s
start-all-over-fresh time, right?
So this is your
Liz Pep Talk moment and I encourage you to heed it. Don’t be a Victim—this
means that when you are tempted to go on your Facebook page, your Twitter feed,
your Google Plus whatever the heck that is, your Pinterest feed and just pour
your sorry-for-yourself guts out all over it, stop, take a breath, and walk
away.
Put positive
out into the world instead. I’m willing to bet you’ll get it back, you Player
you.
Cheers,
Liz
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Amazon
best-selling author, mom of three, Realtor, beer blogger, brewery marketing
expert, and soccer fan, Liz Crowe is a Kentucky
native and graduate of the University of Louisville currently living in Ann
Arbor. She has decades of experience in sales and fund raising, plus an
eight-year stint as a three-continent, ex-pat trailing spouse.
Her early
forays into the publishing world led to a groundbreaking fiction subgenre,
“Romance for Real Life,” which has gained thousands of fans and followers interested
less in the “HEA” and more in the “WHA” (“What Happens After?”). More recently
she is garnering even more fans across genres with her latest novels, which are
more character-driven fiction, while remaining very much “real life.”
With stories set
in the not-so-common worlds of breweries, on the soccer pitch, in successful
real estate offices and at times in exotic locales like Istanbul, Turkey, her
books are unique and told with a fresh voice. The Liz Crowe backlist has
something for any reader seeking complex storylines with humor and complete
casts of characters that will delight, frustrate and linger in the imagination
long after the book is finished.
Don’t ever ask
her for anything “like a Budweiser” or risk bodily injury.
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BOOK BUY LINKS:
Amazon
Kindle:
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and Noble:
Kobo:
Apple
iBooks:
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Play:
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GIVEAWAY INFO:
Liz will be awarding a $10 Amazon or Barnes and
Noble Gift Card to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter during the tour.
**This post contains affiliate links and if clicked and a
purchase made I may receive a small commission to help support this blog. This does not cost you anything, it just
helps pay for all those awesome giveaways on here.**
This contest is sponsored by a third party. Fabulous and
Brunette is a registered host of Goddess Fish Promotions. Prizes are given away by the sponsors and not
Fabulous and Brunette. The featured author and Goddess Fish Promotions are
solely responsible for the giveaway prize.
