I am a finalist in the MARSocial Author-of-the-year competition. The winner will be announced on Feb. 1, 2014. 

In November 2013 MARSocial launched an Author-of- the-Year competition, which is extremely altruistic. All genres were invited to participate. The international authors involved in the competition are promoting each other by tweeting and re-tweeting their own as well as the other authors’ book excerpts to bring awareness to both the competition and their books.

My recently published novel Desperate Pursuit in Venice, a contemporary adult romance thriller, has made it through to the finalist stages of what is being called the X-Factor of author competitions. It is the biggest international author/book/film competition ever launched on the worldwide web with over 100,000 individual tweets promoting the international authors having gone out. The excerpt from my book has so far gotten about 4,700 tweets / re-tweets as well as Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ and LinkedIn shares.  It’s a huge international competition with authors from the USA, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, France and numerous other countries.

At last a competition that is run by authors for the benefit of all authors involved in it. While authors compete against each other, they tweet and share the other authors’ excerpts in an extremely altruistic way. All of them have become close friends and supporters of each other thanks to MARSocial’s altruistic competition. To enter this competition authors simply had to post the most exciting excerpt from their book, (between 500 and 1,000 words and then tweet and re-tweet the excerpts via the Twitter button appearing at the end of each excerpt. MARSocial in conjunction with KeeranVaani Creations, an independent filmmaker from the UK, http://marsocial.com/2013/11/disturbed-feature-film/ will present the M.A.R.S. Author of the Year Award. The winner and the 20 runner-ups will be announced on February 1, 2014.

Please check out the cool Pinterest Board with book covers of my fellow authors

http://www.pinterest.com/karynnesummars/marsocial-author-of-the-year-competition-2014/

In 2013 I published my first novel and joined a large author community, i.e. the World Literary Cafe and MARSocial as well as BookLikes. I never thought that fellow authors would support each other that much, so I was more than pleasantly surprised.  

While busy writing the sequel to Desperate Pursuit in Venice, I met the independent filmmaker KeeranVaani Creations and joined them as Executive Producer for the movie DiSTurBeD, a psychological thriller/mystery horror movie. While this was not on my plan for 2013, their passion and commitment convinced me to do so and has since widened my horizon for 2014. 

Update for Sequel to Desperate Pursuit in Venice (DPIV) 

Work in Progress: 36,700 words written so far. More emotional twists and turns for Luca, Kataryna, Roberto, Carlotta and Francesco. I have also introduced new interesting characters in the sequel. I know that I am a little behind because I had planned to publish the sequel around year-end but I have a good excuse- DiSTurBeD Movie. 
Have a look: www.disturbedmovie.com

However, this gives you, the readers, some more time to finish or start reading DPIV.
Meanwhile here is an excerpt from Chapter Six of Desperate Pursuit in Venice for those who haven't read it yet. FYI: It has some adult content. This excerpt was published via MARSocial in connection with their Author of the Year Competition which I entered last year.http://marsocial.com/docs/desperate-p...

I have also recently entered a competition on LinkedIn. If you would like to support me, please follow the below link and click "Like" on LinkedIn. 
Here is my link.
http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Desper...

I wish you all the best, personally and professionally for 2014 and beyond.

www.karynnesummars.com