Becke Martin - Contemporary Romance with Sizzle...and a Twist

If you feel so inclined…

August 29, 2011 at 3:18 pm | Category: blog

My son is participating in the Chicago Susan B. Komen Chicagoland Area Run for the Cure fundraiser. His page is here.

August 28, 2011 at 4:39 am | Category: blog

Awhile back, I blogged about my friend MARY KENNEDY, who mentioned me in the acknowledgments in her latest TALK RADIO book.

I totally forgot to thank two other author friends who mentioned me in their acknowledgments, too. (and I want to plug their books – I’m not just their friend, I’m a fan!).

So here’s a big thank you to MONICA BURNS and KERI STEVENS!

My Non-Fiction Books and Articles

August 28, 2011 at 3:45 am | Category: blog

Before I started (attempting) to write fiction, I had a career as a garden writer. (I still do!) I’ve written well over 1,000 garden-related articles for newspapers, magazines (trade, specialty and national), given seminars and I’ve also had five garden books published. Two were later released in paperback, and two were book club selections (back when “book club” meant things like the Country Homes and Gardens Book Club).

My garden books are out of print, but you can find them used online (if you’re interested):

This is my first book:

This is the paperback version of the same book:

This was one of the most fun to write, but I think it sold the least:

This is probably the best selling of all the books – originally, I was contracted to do five garden plans but I ended up doing three times that number. Two other garden writers contributed plans to this book, too. It was later reissued in paperback (with the same cover):

This one another one I really had fun writing. It was a Book of the Month Selection for the Country Homes & Gardens Book Club:

This book confuses a lot of people, since it looks like it’s the same as my first book, SMALL GARDENS. This one was the first in a proposed series of books (by different authors); the series was to be called EASY GARDENS. The title of this book is EASY GARDENS: SMALL GARDENS. Only one other book ended up being published in this series, as far as I know.

I wrote one more non-fiction book, which I’ll blog about in a separate post since it wasn’t garden related.

At one point it looked like I was going to have one more book, but nothing ever came of it – I wrote a 15-part series on the history of Chicago and its parks for an Illinois landscape magazine. I got such good feedback on it my editor looked into having it published in book form, but we never got very far with it. Maybe one day…

You can read examples of my garden/landscape articles here:

http://www.chicagowildernessmag.org/issues/summer2009/outdoors.html

https://www.ilca.net/landscape_illinois/2008_Landscape_Illinois.pdf

https://www.ilca.net/Landscape_Illinois/2009_Landscape_Illinois.pdf

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1082/is_n1_v40/ai_17907651/

http://www.dnr.state.oh.us/Portals/12/soils/pdf/StateSoil.pdf

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1995-04-09/news/9504090147_1_bedding-plants-impatiens-mulch

http://armintrouts.com/products/serbianspruce/serbian_spruce.html

http://www.treecareindustry.org/PDFs/TCI_Mag_NOV_SM_.pdf

Check out the mention of my book in this Publisher’s Weekly feature: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20040315/20266-sowing-seeds-of-optimism-.html

http://www.treecaretips.org/Diseases/TCI0408_p76.htm