Category: Publishing

Storm Front Free for Five Days Only

2 Comments

Hi guys!

Things have been a little quiet on the blogosphere lately, and I can’t even blame writing a new book. I got to 26K words on The King’s Phoenix and decided I needed to take a break because of my day job, which is all kinds of crazy intense at the moment. I value my down time only a lot and instead of stressing myself out over writing deadlines, I am now trying my best to relax in my leisure time just so I can cope with the demands of my day-to-day life.

At this point I’m not sure if I’ll be continuing TKP for all of August and saving Aura for the real NaNoWriMo. The words are flowing just fine – the story’s not a problem. The problem is my extremely limited time and the fact that making my self-imposed writing deadline was stressing me out.

See, I used to read other writing blogs. And they are all about peddling as much new material as possible. Put out one book, get writing, put out another book, ad infinum. Fill every spare moment with writing. If you produce less than 10K words a day you’re a loser. If you can’t produce a brand new book every three months you’re not doing right. These advice givers also tend to have huge backlists, whereas I’m producing entirely new material. The fact that they were at some point traditionally published doesn’t hurt.

So I’ve stopped reading advice. My writing was becoming too much like work and at this point in time that’s not something I can handle. I’m taking my own time. The book will come when it comes.

Also! Storm Front is free on Amazon.com for five days. Go get it!  Especially because the new Tina Storm book is coming out later this year.

Createspace’s New International Distribution

Something amazing happened last week in the print on demand universe.

Createspace, Amazon’s print on demand company, announced that it will now distribute books in European countries.

(!!!)

Also, they’re doing it for free.

(!!!)

This isn’t Expanded Distribution. This is simply following Amazon’s Kindle practises, and printing Createspace books in Europe, with European prices and delivery, to be available on the international Amazon sites.

(Proof copies and member orders will continue to come from the US.)

I imagine, if I still lived in England, it would be quite momentous.

Alas, I am indeed living in Australian now, and we don’t even have our own Amazon site *sob*.

There is absolutely no hassle involved in making your American-market book available for Europe. It’s apparently as easy as clicking a button.

I will have a think about whether or not I want to click that button, because my paperback sales aren’t as high as my ebook sales. I am concentrating on writing this year, rather than publishing (and marketing). I wasn’t planning on making paperbacks out of any more books, but I might in the future when everything’s settled down.

(Here I was thinking paperbacks are just as important as ebooks but it turns out everyone else takes ages to put their paperbacks together…)

What’s your opinion on this? Is it amazing forwardness on Createspace’s part? Should they have offered paperbacks in all Amazon countries from the beginning? Comment away!

NaNoWriMo 2011 and changing the blog schedule

9 Comments

NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month. It’s held every November and the aim is to write a 50K words novel is 30 days. My first attempt was last year, where I wrote The Edge of Darkness. This year I’m going to do Tina Storm’s first full-length novel, which as yet doesn’t have a title. In fact, I can’t even settle on one. You’ll have to help me out closer to November  to help me think of a title so I can make a banner and mock book cover.

I spent this weekend planning and outlining the novel. It’s a young adult urban fantasy about Tina and her family of hereditary demon hunters that have to infiltrate a witch’s coven that is reportedly using blood magic for personal gain and to hurt innocent bystanders.

The plot totally kicks ass. I get excited just reading the outline. I’m really looking forward to writing Tina’s first full-length novel.

In celebration of this momentous event, I’m going to release a Tina Storm short story every Friday in October. That means the 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th. There are five stories all up, but I’ll only be releasing four. However, they will be completely free and available exclusively on Smashwords for the month of October. Come November when I start writing the novel, I’ll take them down and release the five short stories plus four bonus urban fantasies for sale on Smashwords and Kindle in one collection. I’m not looking to do a paperback version of the short story collection because it’s only small and I doubt it would be worth my time.

So here’s the schedule for the next couple of months on the blog:

  • October-wise we’re wrapping up the weekly Disney Dissection. It’s sad, I know, but we’re literally running out of Disney heroines to talk about. Foreign Cover Friday will still be in effect and Mondays will be whatever I feel like posting.
  • November will be devoted to whatever rambling I get out writing my NaNo novel. I will attempt to blog daily but considering I mostly write at night time it might be sporadic hours after I’ve done my word count for the day.
  • Then in December, I want to tackle the 30 Day Disney Challenge (with a few tweaks of my own because I’ve never been to Disneyland or World or whatever). I know there are 31 days in December but do you really want me to post something on Christmas Day?
  • Come January I will start looking at representations of female characters in Pixar films, because Disney owns Pixar. Sounds good to me. Currently there’s 12 Pixar films.
  • If I don’t have a complete meltdown during that time because my fiancée and I are hoping to move to Australia ASAP, everything will be peachy!

Of course through all this I’ll be writing and publishing a few new e-books.

Thanks for sticking around!

The Edge of Darkness is now available internationally for the Kindle!

6 Comments

Hi lovelies.

I bit the bullet and did a Kindle version of The Edge of Darkness. I don’t know why I hesitated on doing it, it turns out it’s just as easy to self-publish on the Kindle as it is on Smashwords and CreateSpace. Here are the new places you can download an ebook of my sci-fi novel.

Amazon.com for $3.43

Amazon.co.uk for £2.16

Amazon.de for EUR 2.99

Yay much?

I believe there might end up being some price fluctuations or inconsistencies because I’m looking at the price of the US edition while I live in the UK. I wanted to sell it for $2.99, which will be the Smashwords price at the end of the month (currently it’s $1.99) but I think it’s due to added taxes that the prices have been bumped ever so slightly. I’ve heard that Amazon, in their infinite wisdom, like to price-match, but because my Smashwords edition hasn’t gone through to their expanded distribution yet (Barnes and Noble, Kobo etc), they’re not going to drop their prices until it does.

We’ll just have to wait and see!

The Edge of Darkness Launch and Giveaway Winner!

3 Comments

That’s right, loyal blog followers and random people who just happened to drop by: my first novel, The Edge of Darkness, is now available for purchase.

YAY!

*throws confetti, gives out balloons and cookies and fairy bread etc*

So far it’s available on

but as more options open up I’ll let you know.

Also, it’s time to announce the lucky winner of the paperback edition giveaway!

And the winner, selected from Random.org is:

Gayle!

Congratulations! Look out for an email from me to get your shipping address. Please respond in 48 hours or I’ll be forced to choose someone else.

Thanks to everyone who entered the (very small) giveaway. I’m so pleased that the book is now available.

But there’s no rest for the wicked. As an indie/self-publisher, I need to keep working on putting out new material. Now I’m working on two shorter manuscripts for release later this year: a collection of paranormal short stories, and a Christmas novella. I’m self-publishing them because I believe there is no traditional market for either type of book, but they could still be enjoyed at a lower indie price (I haven’t decided if they’re going to be in paperback yet, just ebook). I want to get the majority of that work out of the way before NaNoWriMo in November – I still haven’t decided which novel I’m going to write for that challenge.

I’m also querying Dadewalker again now that I’ve revamped the query letter, because I believe there is a traditional market for that story.