Anna Jones Buttimore

I just had the sales figures for Honeymoon Heist and to say that they are not good is stretching understatement to the limit. Not that I'm not grateful to both the people who bought it, but after all the effort and time I put into that book - and especially the work I did in promoting it - it's easy to feel disappointed and discouraged. My first book sold 2,000 copies which made it a bestseller for an LDS book, but that was ten years ago. What has changed? Is my writing getting worse? Should I hang up my keyboard and take up gardening instead? The internet was still relatively new in 2001, so Haven was widely promoted the old-fashioned way, with posters, an advert in the Deseret Book and Seagull Book catalogues, a radio advert and bookmarks. I even did a "virtual" book signing where a friend sat in a bookstore in Utah sticking stickers with my signature on in copies of my book presented to her buy buyers. Promoting a book is often prohibitively expensive for the publ...

I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and have been for some years now. As an entity, the church is much maligned and misunderstood. It does have some unique beliefs - premortal life, modern-day prophets and baptism for the dead - but not as many as you might suppose. I "church hopped" for many years before joining this church, and some of its distinctive beliefs are what eventually drew me to it despite my best efforts to put up objections to them. In particular I might cite the LDS view of the trinity as three separate and distinct individuals who are one in purpose, rather than the traditional view of a single, formless deity who can divide into three parts at will and is given to talking to himself. I always struggled the traditional trinity doctrine - largely because I couldn't understand it or find in anywhere in the Bible - and I was more than happy eventually to abandon it. For the most part I fully endorse and support the doctrines...