Rainbow Awards - Best LGBT Erotic Romance
Once I knew I was up against Heidi Cullinan and L.A. Witt, I knew I didn’t have a chance of placing first or second, but I’m beyond thrilled. Acceleration tied in 4th place with Finding Master Right by L.A. Witt, and Velocity ties for 7th place with two other books, which is more than I expected. Congratulations to Heidi for placing first, and to all the other finalists!
Filed under Acceleration, Announcements, Contests, Velocity
So, Tuesday I will be heading to Atlanta for my first-ever GayRomLit retreat. I will admit I’m a little nervous because this is the first time since he was born that I will be away from my six-year-old for that long. Until last month at GRNW in Seattle, I’d never been away from him longer than over a single night, and even then he was just a mile away at his grandmother’s house. Now I’m going to be across the country from him for five nights. Eep!
Also, I have absolutely no idea what to expect from GRL. I know I will be on a panel at the writer’s workshop on Wednesday afternoon, the BDSM panel that Sarah Frantz will be moderating. So I’ll have at least one opportunity to make an idiot of myself publicly. I think at least part of my fear is that I didn’t know until very late in the game about the YahooGroup that most of the GRL stuff was being discussed on, so I think I missed some pretty significant announcements and information. Thus, I’m clueless.
But before I go, some business to take care of. In case you have missed my tweets on the subject (and Heidi Belleau’s and Riptide’s) we have a sort of kink meme going on for some audience participation in the third Professor’s Rule book. This book will take us back to the “present day” in James and Carson’s lives, after the short trip into exploring their past in TPR #2. (Yes, I like non-linear storytelling. I feel like it often gives a narrative a sort of mobility that otherwise it wouldn’t have.) It’s time for James to re-unite with his Professor, and also for him to keep his date with menswear salesman Satish. Last week we were taking nominations for the sort of kinks you’d like to see in the next book, and this week we’ve narrowed the list to five and you get to vote on them. Those five are:
1. Voyeurism
2. Fire Play
3. Needle Play
4. Breath Play
5. Sensory Deprivation
You can go here to take the survey. Thanks to The Jeep Diva for hosting this contest.
As for GRL, I will have some items available for free and for purchase there. I will have coupon codes to give away for Inertia, as well coupon codes you can purchase for downloads of Acceleration and Velocity, and for the All-in-One ebook volume of the Impulse trilogy. I will also have paperbacks of all three books available, 30 of Inertia and 10 each (I think? Maybe 15?) of Acceleration and Velocity. Riptide will also have a free version of Giving an Inch (TPR #1) to hand out, which will include excerpts from An Inch at a Time (TPR #2), Heidi Belleau’s Apple Polisher, and my upcoming release, Strain. So be sure to grab that! For autographs and whatnot, I’ll be in the supporting authors session, not the featured authors. So look for me there!
Annnd I think that is all my business to attend to before I leave, so I’d better get back to researching how to pack a week’s worth of stuff into a carry-on sized suitcase. Fun!
Both Acceleration and Velocity made it into the finalist round of the Rainbow Awards for LGBT Erotic Romance. I can’t say how thrilled I am that they have gotten this far. The other books in the category are amazing and it’s stunning to be ranked among them! Congratulations to all the other finalists!
Filed under Acceleration, Announcements, Velocity
Today, the second of five announcements regarding who rated an honorable mention in the Rainbow Awards was released, and Velocity was on the list.
The quotes from the judges regarding the books have been very rewarding as well.
Re: Acceleration
April: The main character definitely kept me reading. I found myself liking him right from the start. He had character traits that were identifiable within all of us. The writing style also kept me reading, wanting more of the story. The author did a great job with the plot flow.
and re: Velocity
Christina: Beautiful story, I had feeling of being let into the lives of two men that I came to adore. I finished this story in just hours, so drawn into their romance, the struggles they overcame, and their everyday lives. I was glad to see them get their happy ending and embrace their love and commitment to one another.
For a little self-published trilogy from an author no one had heard of just over a year ago, I figure this is a great showing, whether or not the books become finalists in their category.
Again, if you have a chance, please be sure to stop by the cover contest and vote for Kerry Chin’s gorgeous artwork! http://elisa-rolle.livejournal.com/2374986.html
Elisa, who runs the Rainbow Awards, has started releasing the titles of the books that have won at least an Honorable Mention. Here’s what she has to say about this category:
To give to everyone the chance to enjoy the spotlight of their honorable
mentions, I decided to post a little of them every day until October 1, when I
will announce the finalists of the 2013 Rainbow Awards. An Honorable Mention
means a judge really liked the book, so much they gave it a rate above 36 out
of 40; an honorable mention doesn’t necessarily mean the book is a finalist,
you have to wait the actual announcement on October 1 to know that.
Acceleration was one of the first batch mentioned. So at the risk of tooting my own horn, congrats to me! No word on whether or not Velocity, which was also in this year’s awards, might also have won anything. I guess we’ll know over the next five days.
Just a reminder, also, there are still a few more days to vote in the Rainbow Awards cover contest, for which the covers of all three Impulse books are nominated. You can vote on as many as you like, no need to restrict yourself to just one. Please, take the time to make sure Kerry Chin’s gorgeous artwork gets acknowledged! Vote here: http://elisa-rolle.livejournal.com/2374986.html
Filed under Acceleration, Announcements, Inertia, News for Released Titles, Velocity
Good news! Acceleration made it through the first round of voting! YAY to Kerry Chin’s gorgeous artwork. Now Velocity is up! Let’s show Kerry some more love!
http://elisa-rolle.livejournal.com/2050429.html
Filed under Announcements, Contests, Velocity
Rainbow Ebooks is having an Easter sale this weekend, 30% off throughout the store, including Inertia, Acceleration and Velocity. Get ’em cheap!
Filed under Acceleration, Announcements, Inertia, News for Released Titles, Velocity
So, imagine my surprise when I wake up this morning to see that Mandi at Smexybooks, who regularly rewrites a recommendations column for the Happy Ever After blog, chose to spotlight Velocity as one of her picks this week.
You can see Velocity on the front page here (or at least I can at the moment) and the full column HERE.
Thank you so much, Mandi! This is very exciting for me!
Filed under Announcements, Reviews and Features, Velocity
I’m not entirely certain why Amazon has discounted the paperback of Velocity by over $5 but it’s on sale right now, so by all means, if you want a physical copy in your hot little hands, grab it while the grabbing is good!
Filed under Announcements, Velocity
As always, Rainbow Ebooks has some awesome deals as part of their Totally Tuesday promotion. This week, they’re featuring New Releases for 15% off, which means it’s an excellent time to snag a copy of Velocity!
Filed under Announcements, Velocity
Due to the way things worked out when I approved the proof on CreateSpace, the paperback went immediately up for sale. The Kindle and other ebook versions won’t be available until release date (or shortly before if they are processed early on the sites which have to approve them) but if you want the paperback, you can buy it at Amazon now.
Filed under Announcements, Velocity
Those of you who have already bought Acceleration have read the sneak peek for Velocity, but as I did with Acceleration, I’m going to share it here, as well, to add to the Free Reads page.
Filed under Upcoming Releases, Velocity
So, There’s one aspect of the GORGEOUS artwork Kerry did for Velocity that you can’t see very well on the ebook cover. The convention for the series until this point has been to feature a character portrait of the POV character and then a “couple” shot. Well, Velocity is told from both Derrick AND Gavin’s POV so the portrait feature became a bit trickier, as there’s only so much room on a book cover before thins begin to look crowded.
So, as you can see in the background here:
there IS a portrait of the two of them, but in order to see it fully, you need to see the back cover of the print edition. For those of you who won’t have the print edition, however, I’m including it here.
If you want to see the portrait of Derrick and Gavin without the text over it, you can check it out on Kerry’s DeviantArt page, here.
Have I mentioned how much I love my cover design team? Because, I mean, really!
Filed under Upcoming Releases, Velocity
So! Hi there! Yes, I’ve been very quiet the last month and a half or so, haven’t I? On December 19th I was supposed to participate in the The Next Big Thing blog hop, for which I’d been tagged by Anne Tenino and had tagged P.D. Singer and Leta Blake. Clearly, I completely spaced making that post. I also owe Leta a guest blog post I was supposed to get to her earlier this month.
Though the holidays and the release of Acceleration were a not-insignificant portion of my distraction, the main part of it has actually been illness. Around December 10, a mildly escalating cough became a case of bronchitis that has not wanted to let go. On Christmas Eve, when I was supposed to be getting my house ready to have MIL over for Christmas the next day, I was instead at the urgent care clinic having an albuterol treatment, where they also prescribed for me antibiotics and an inhaler. Two weeks later I went in to see my own doctor because I still hadn’t improved, and she prescribed for me a different inhaler with steroids in it. Now here we are nearly two months since the first cough began and I’m still not over it, though it does appear to be (very slowly) improving.
Despite my illness, the only aspect of my productivity that has taken a significant hit is my blogging obligations. 😀 I did manage a guest post for Chicks & Dicks, which will be up on Wednesday. Their theme for January is New Beginnings and I took an opportunity to discuss how that relates to some of my current projects and also my writing philosophy.
In addition, I’ve been very busy on the writing and editing front. On December 19th, I submitted Velocity to my editor. A couple days later, I heard back from the press to which I had submitted Sooper Sekrit Projekt, which I now feel comfortable letting you all know is titled Strain. I got a Revise and Resubmit letter and did some brainstorming with the editor I’m working with, which resulted in me significantly restructuring most of the 65K I had already written, and adding almost another 40K, making Strain nearly twice as long as the books of my Impulse trilogy.
If you would like some hints about Strain, since it was open on my desktop at the time, I used a couple snippets of it when P.D. Singer and Anne Tenino tagged me for the 7/7/7 game over on Facebook last week. You can find the posts here and here.
Back in August when I was trying to come up with something short to fill in the interim between the release of Inertia and Acceleration, I wrote a short story about Highland lads that I subsequently put on the shelf because I was under a deadline to write and submit Strain. After having Leta Blake take a look at it and assure me it didn’t go off the rails quite as badly as I seemed to think it had, I reworked and expanded it a bit and I’m rather pleased with the results. So finally I polished it up and sent it off, and we’ll see just where it ends up.
Then last week I got my edits back for Velocity. In addition to being ill, I’ve been a bit hesitant to release a lot of news about Velocity because I don’t have any cover art for it yet. Kerry Chin and I had originally targeted the end of December for having the cover art done, but health and RL issues have been plaguing her as well. This is why I still don’t have the first chapter up on my Coming Soon page. Now we’re hoping to have that done at the end of January.
While this has put me behind the ball on the publicity front, on the text front, things are going just swimmingly. I’m really happy that I made arrangements to do the edits so early, so I won’t be caught in a crunch to turn them around and get the ARCs out immediately after I get the edits done like I was with Acceleration, and I’ll have a lot more time for proofreading without hitting that point where I want to gouge my eyeballs out with a spork if I have to look at the text one more damned time.
With that in mind, assuming I have the cover art, the release date for Velocity will be March 2. I may have to reschedule if something goes wrong on the art end, but I don’t think that will be necessary. I will be posting more information as it becomes available.
If all goes well, I hope to release something every three months or so this year, whether by self-pub or through a press. I’m hoping to have the Highland story published around June, and Strain around September. What will I have for December? Well, that is the big question. I have a couple different ideas I’m tossing around that I hope to begin writing once I have Strain resubmitted. Stay tuned!
Filed under Announcements, Other Authors Blogs, Upcoming Releases, Velocity
Just a reminder for those who missed it (due to the information being tacked onto the end of my last long post) because it was released on November 29/30, Acceleration DOES qualify for the Members Choice awards at the GoodReads M/M Romance group. You can read about it down at the bottom of this post. I would really love to see my cover artists’ hard work rewarded by getting a nod for this gorgeous cover you see here. Anything else is just gravy.
If you’re looking for fun stuff, I think I have at least one guest post going up at Eden Winter’s blog this week. Possibly two. It was a two-part series dealing with some of the music types and songs I referenced in Acceleration and I’m not sure what the posting schedule was supposed to be, but be sure to check it out for some really great insight into Derrick and his musical tastes.
The rest of this may be boring to readers who just want to know about the book and/or the author. This is mostly diary stuff about the self-publication process for other authors who want to know, so I’ll put it under a cut.
In the wee-small hours last night, I sent to final proof of Acceleration to Michael at Booknibbles to be formatted and converted. Since the upload and approval process for Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Kobo takes 24-48 hours, I will begin uploading it as soon as he has it back to me (hopefully tonight.)
What this means is that there’s a chance that Acceleration will actually be available for purchase at various times the day before the official release, since I have no control over when the file actually gets approved and posted to the various sites. I don’t know what time zone All Romance Ebooks is in, but I know it’s at least an hour or two ahead of me, so if you bought Acceleration on pre-sale there, it will be available perhaps midnight Central or Mountain time (maybe even Eastern, I dunno.) I plan to upload it and have it live at Rainbow Ebooks and SmashWords around the same time.
I will be posting buy links as they become available.
It may be another week or two for the paperback to become available, as that process takes considerably longer due to the need to ship and approve physical copies.
Now, for those of you who are interested, a little insight into the life of a self-published author.
I don’t usually bother saying stuff like this, because I want readers to buy from the website that is most convenient for them, which is why I have it available at so many places. But, if you’re indifferent to where you get the file and want to know which sites are the most profitable in me (thus enabling me to continue writing once my kid is in school full-time rather than getting a day job) here’s the breakdown of the royalties I get from the various sites:
SmashWords: 85%
Kobo: 80% through Nov 30, then 70% after
Amazon: 70% minus a few cents for the file transfer fee
Barnes & Noble: 65%
All Romance Ebooks, Itunes and Rainbow Ebooks: 60%
So SmashWords definitely pays me the best, though if I had to express a preference for where people buy, it would actually be Amazon and ARe, even though I get lower royalties there. The reason? Because they have bestseller lists (Kobo, Itunes and B&N probably do, too, but my sales on those sites are practically non-existent so I’m not going to hit them anyway, and SmashWords just doesn’t move the volume for it to matter if I’m one of their best sellers.) If I end up on the bestseller lists for Amazon or ARe, however, I will get a lot more exposure and sell a lot more books.
The same principle applies to the paperback. I make about $3 more on a paperback sold through the CreateSpace website than I do on one sold through Amazon, but sales on CreateSpace aren’t going to boost my rankings, thus giving me more visibility and sales.
Of course, the question everyone is going to be asking once they’re done with Acceleration is “When does Velocity come out?”
The good news is, I’m much more knowledgeable about the process going into Velocity than I was going into Acceleration. Inertia was a whole other animal. No one was expecting it, I hadn’t done any marketing beforehand or generated any sort of anticipation. There was no timeline except when I felt it was ready to be released.
I’m actually a bit embarrassed at my own naivete there. 🙂
It didn’t take me long to realize Acceleration would be different, because people were expecting it. I had to set a release date. I had to set target times for cover art and edits and such to be done and ARCs to be released, because people were watching and waiting for it. I didn’t plan ahead enough (for instance, I didn’t lock in my reservation for when my editor would be available until after I had the manuscript written, which meant that a lot of the delay was simply the manuscript gathering dust because it couldn’t go anywhere until my turn in her queue came up. Likewise, the cover art reveal was a little rushed and haphazard because I didn’t schedule a slot for my artist to work on the art until much later than I should have.
What this meant was that if I wanted to get the book released before the holidays (which I’ve since learned wasn’t really necessary as apparently ebook sales aren’t great in December-I imagine it’s actually after the holidays, when everyone is cashing in their bookstore gift cards, that ebook sales take off) I was really cutting it way too close. But even without the factor of the holidays, there was the fact that people were demanding Book Two and I really needed to get it out there before people lost interest and I fell off the map.
I’ve learned my lesson with Velocity and hopefully have my ducks in a much neater row. I’ve scheduled my slot with both my cover artist and editor well in advance this time. I hope to have the cover art by the end of December, preferably for a January cover reveal. The turn-in date for the manuscript to go to my editor in mid-December and I’ll have it back in mid-January.
So when will Velocity be out? Well, if you’re looking at that banner up top here on my blog, it says March 2013. At which point in March depends on how extensive the revisions I need to do once I get my edits back. If the revisions are minor, I hope to have ARCs available at the beginning of February and will release at the beginning of March. If the revisions are more extensive, we’re looking at mid-to-late February and March, respectively. I’ll have a better idea once I have my edits back in mid-January.
So. Keep an eye out. We’re in the final stretch of the wait for Acceleration. If you would like your chance to win a copy, the drawings at Stumbling Over Chaos and The Novel Approach are still open, so be sure to go register. And also, I’m doing my first GoodReads giveaway, too! I’ll be giving away a paperback of Acceleration at the end of December. Be sure to go enter!
Finally, for those of you who are interested, because it’s being released on November 30, Acceleration will still qualify for the Members’ Choice Awards over at the GoodReads M/M Romance group! Nominations close December 5. The award I’m most concerned with there is the Cover Art award, because Kerry and Michael’s hard work deserves to be recognized. Inertia has been nominated there, but Acceleration has not. If you want to know what other categories Inertia and Acceleration might qualify for, I will list them here:
Nomination - Favorite All Time M/M Romance Book (Inertia or Acceleration)
Nomination - Favorite All Time M/M Series (Impulse)
Nomination - Favorite All Time M/M Author (moi)
Nomination - Favorite All Time M/M Character(s) (Derrick and/or Gavin)
Nomination - Best Debut Book (Inertia has already been nommed)
Nomination - Best Cover (Inertia has been nommed, Acceleration hasn’t)
Nomination - Best Title (Inertia or Acceleration)
Nomination - Best Couple/MC’s (Derrick and/or Gavin)
Nomination - Best Sex Scene (take your pick from either Inertia or Acceleration)
Nomination - Best Side/Supporting Character (Miss Ingrid, LeeAnn, Andi, Devon or Hannah)
Nomination - Best Tearjerking scene (there’s one from Acceleration that just might qualify. You be the judge)
Nomination - Best First Time (this would be Inertia naturally, though honestly, after having read the first time in Frat Boy and Toppy by Anne Tenino? Hoo doggies! I don’t stand a chance.)
Nomination - Funniest Quotes/Best Lines (take your pick)
Nomination - Best book of the year (take your pick)
Nomination - BDSM (sex content) (probably Acceleration more than Inertia)
Nomination - Contemporary (genre) (take your pick)
Nomination - Hurt/Comfort (theme) (maybe? I dunno.)
So. If you decide you want to participate (and this is not meant to be pushy: as I’ve said, the only one that will break my heart to not see the books get the nod is the Cover Art category) check out the rules for the contest, and you have until December 5 to make your nominations.
So excited for people to start reading Acceleration! It’s almost here! Whee!
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