FYI, while I’m not changing my plans to keep my contests open to international readers as much as possible, some prizes just don’t work particularly well in other countries.  Things like wireless ebook readers, etc.  Sometimes I give away treats picked up from local candy stores and mailing food internationally is a complex mess-you can’t mail food to certain countries, I don’t think. Or a gift certificate to a store like Borders, B&N that isn’t international-these are things I often pick up spur of the moment for a random giveaway.

An example on why this is becoming necessary…I had to spent more than an hour dealing with getting a gift certificate.  The prize was for a place in the US (people could argue ‘then you shouldn’t buy them…’ but that’s another debate, as I’ve got every right to support the stores around me, as well).  This GC was useless to an international reader and an international reader did win.  As promised, I found an alternative.  But it took an hour.  An hour might not sound like much, but when you think about all the other things that eat up all people’s time…well.  It’s just getting too complicated sometimes.  I gotta simplify.

For this reason, when I’m doing certain contests, those contests will now be limited to the US only.

Please try to understand, this isn’t because I don’t appreciate my international readers-I do, I appreciate you guys a lot-it’s why I try to keep my contests open internationally.

I’m wearing myself out trying to juggle in everything that goes along with writing, and not writing as much as I want to, in addition to not sleeping as much as I should, wearing myself, blah, blah, blah…this is just another one of the things that has been tugging at my time and it’s time to nip it.

I hope you all understand…but I think most of you are reading this blog anyway because of my books.  And it only makes sense for me to make sure I’m focused as much on the book writing as possible, and stressing less on the other stuff.

Again, the random giveaways of books  will remain open internationally.