Welcome to the new CaliforniaAuthors.com! Click around and you’ll find our familiar features with a fresh face and an easy-to-navigate new site.

To celebrate our re-launch, Kate and I are delighted to share an autographed copy of Mark Sarvas’ new novel, Harry, Revised.

Mark hosts the popular and often cheeky litblog, The Elegant Variation. Along with chronicling the latest book news, Mark likes to write about the ins and outs of getting a first book published, even managing to make the arrival of his copyedited manuscript into a lively blog item that drew a slew of reader comments.

“TEV has always been intended as a place for serious conversation about literary matters and was never meant to promote my book,” he says, “but as I mentioned my novel-in-progress, readers became interested and emailed me with questions. I realized I had an opportunity to take them along on the journey from creation to (with any luck) publication, and I’ve been able to shed a light on some of the more opaque corners of the publishing process, and share my ongoing education with my readers.

“One of the great joys has been the remarkable, kind outpouring of congratulations that has accompanied each milestone in the process - the sale, the first galley, the first finished book, the first bookstore sighting. It’s been a memorable way to put out a first novel.”

Mark is off on his book tour, but he graciously shared a signed book with us before he left LA. If you’d like to enter our Book Lotto, please use our contact form to send us your name and e-mail address. Put “HARRY, REVISED” in the subject line. We’ll select a winner at random on Monday, May 19. Update, Monday, May 19: There’s still time! We’re choosing our winner later tonight; so you can keep those entries coming.

P.S. To our author pals who still scoff at the notion of starting a blog (you know who you are), please note: Mark Sarvas says he now gets about 7,500 readers daily at The Elegant Variation, which he started on a whim in 2003. As he recently explained to the LAT’s Scott Timberg, “I really launched the site without a great deal of thought: I was sitting at home in an apartment in Westwood; I was getting increasingly excited by the things I was reading on these other literary blogs. I found [the blogging platform] TypePad, and within an hour or two it was up and running — I was posting.”