Tag Archives: amazon

Get STRAIN for only $0.99 just in time for BANE! #postapocalyptic #mmromance

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For a limited time, STRAIN is on sale for $0.99 at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo (maybe elsewhere? If so I haven’t found it yet.) Be sure to grab it before BANE comes out next week! (and don’t forget to check out JUGGERNAUT while you’re at it!)

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Kobo

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Where to buy JUGGERNAUT

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So the various ebook retailers have been getting Juggernaut up on their own time, and now it’s fairly complete, so if you have a preferred site, here are the links:

Riptide Publishing (please remember that more of the sales price goes to the publisher and author if you use Riptide’s own site, thus enabling them to keep making books!)
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Itunes
Kobo
All Romance eBooks (also, Riptide has a 25% rebate going on at ARe right now, which makes this a great opportunity to pick up other Riptide titles you’ve been hankering for, or to pre-order Bane)
Smashwords

So there you go!

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Player vs. Player now available for pre-order at Amazon #mmromance #mystery #gaming @RiptideBooks

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Player vs. Player is now available for pre-order at Amazon.

Keep in mind that if you pre-order through Riptide, you get the book two days earlier, and more of the proceeds support the author and publisher. However, ordering at Amazon affects the chances of the book making bestseller lists upon its release, and that’s important too.

But, most important of all, readers have a choice. Which is always awesome.

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The Field of Someone Else’s Dreams: now available for free on Amazon. Get your first glimpse of the Saugatuck universe.

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Looks like Amazon’s crawlers finally caught on and now The Field of Someone Else’s Dreams is available for free there, as well. In case you missed it, this is basically book 0.1 of the Saugatuck universe. Saugatuck Summer will be the official Book #1. Topher (the main character of Saugatuck Summer, coming next month and available for pre-sale from Riptide) is mentioned a few times in passing in The Field of Someone Else’s Dreams, though he doesn’t play an actual role, so I wouldn’t quite call this a prequel. Just… related. The Field of Someone Else’s Dreams has, until recently, only been available through the MM Romance groups website at Goodreads and in the LHNB anthologies, but now it has a new cover (courtesy of the lovely P.D. Singer) and I’m offering it for free through all the usual ebook vendors.

It is also available for free at All Romance eBooks, Kobo and Smashwords. Itunes and Barnes & Noble don’t seem to have it, which is weird because they totally should, but anyway.

If you’re curious about Saugatuck Summer, I did a reading this weekend at Rainbow Con. You can see the video in this post.

 

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Now available for free: get your a first look at the Saugatuck universe with “The Field of Someone Else’s Dreams”

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Last summer for Goodread’s “Love Has No Boundaries” event, I wrote a novelette featuring two classmates of Topher (the main character of Saugatuck Summer, coming next month and available for pre-sale from Riptide.) The Field of Someone Else’s Dreams has, until now, only been available through the MM Romance groups website at Goodreads and in the LHNB anthologies, but now it has a new cover (courtesy of the lovely P.D. Singer) and I’m offering it for free through all the usual ebook vendors.

There’s a slight hitch that I need your help with, however. I have listed it free wherever I can, but Amazon and Barnes & Noble won’t allow you to list an ebook for less than $0.99. They will, however, price match if it’s offered for free elsewhere. So what I need you to do is go to the Amazon product page and click on “Tell us about a lower price” and then provide the link to All Romance eBooks (https://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-thefieldofsomeoneelse039sdreams-1477916-149.html). If there is a similar process for Barnes & Noble, I haven’t found it yet, but hopefully they will get with the program soon.

The Field of Someone Else’s Dreams is also available for free at Smashwords. Hopefully iTunes and Kobo will be live in a few days.

 

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The first week of #STRAIN: a recap #postapocalyptic #erotica #mmromance @RiptideBooks

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Friday wrapped up the Strain blog tour, but there is still time to comment and enter to win one of three copies of Impulse: The Complete Trilogy. Entries will remain open until February 28, with the drawing being held on March 1, so be sure to comment at each stop and leave contact information (you can leave a Twitter or Facebook ID if you don’t want to leave an email.)

I tried to structure this blog tour a little differently, making it like the extras on a DVD. Along the way, I shared not only a deleted scene and a sneak peek at Bane, the upcoming prequel to Strain, but also a lot of behind-the-scenes discussion of the world-building that went into Strain. Here’s a brief recap:

Part One: Project Juggernaut (The Jeep Diva)
Part Two: The Juggernaut Battalion (Pants-Off Reviews)
Part Three: Does a Sex Scene Have to be Sexy? (3 Chicks After Dark)
Part Four: The Women of Delta Company (Queer Town Abbey)
Part Five: Oh, But This Darling was Tough to Kill (a deleted BDSM sex scene at Sinfully Sexy Book Reviews)
Part Six: Fluid Exchange in Strain (The Book Nympho)
Part Seven: A Sneak Peek at Bane, the prequel to Strain (Book Reviews and More by Kathy)

There were also a number of stoplight stops. Be sure to check those out as well!

Coffee and Porn in the Morning
Words of Wisdom from the Scarf Princess
TTC Books & More
Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words

Also, in case you missed it, on Valentine’s Day, The Book Bella shared bonus content not only from Strain, but also from books by Lisa Henry/Heidi Belleau, Andrea Speed, and Reesa Herberth. As far as Strain goes, I wrote a brief scene that pre-dates Strain, dealing with Joe and Toby and the genesis of their relationship. Be sure to check it out!

Since it’s still February, I am still Riptide’s Author of the Month. That means you can find an interview with me at Riptide’s site, and get Giving an Inch (The Professor’s Rule #1) for absolutely free! (it’s also available for free at Amazon, ARe and other retailers.) There are also significant savings on a number of my other titles, including An Inch at a Time (The Professor’s Rule #2), The Laird’s Forbidden Lover, and finally, pre-sales of Every Inch of the Way (The Professor’s Rule #4) and To The Very Last Inch (The Professor’s Rule #5) are only $0.99 each-67% off! If you pre-order at Riptide, you get to download the books two days in advance, which means they’ll be available at midnight this coming Friday!

Speaking of pre-0rders, Saugatuck Summer is available at Riptide now, as well, for 22% off. If you’re a reviewer, the ARC is also available at NetGalley, so go ahead and check that out. Saugatuck Summer is coming in May.

Whew! That was a lot of links.

On the professional level, I really don’t have much of a basis of comparison for how well Strain is performing. It has broken the Top 10 Bestsellers in Gay Fiction and the Top 20 in Sci-Fi > Post-Apocalyptic over at Amazon. Of course, seeing as how the book is a Riptide release, I have no way of monitoring sales in real time like I do with my self-pubs, except for the Amazon sales via NovelRank, which isn’t always accurate. I do know that it is much higher in the rankings at Amazon than any of my other releases have ever gotten, and has stayed there longer.

BestsellerIcon100X100 It has also made its way to #15 on the All Romance eBooks bestsellers list, which, again, is better than any of my other titles have done. And it is on the Riptide best sellers list for this month, along with three of the five The Professor’s Rule titles (no doubt that has something to do with all the discounts!) The reviews at Goodreads and elsewhere continue to be overwhelmingly positive. All in all, this has definitely been my most successful title so far, and I’m absolutely thrilled to see it doing so well. It was a long, hard slog to get this book to market, but I’m glad it’s finally here.

I’m sure I had something else to say about all this, but apparently I’ve lost track of what all I meant to say in this post. All in all, it’s been a great first week for Strain, and I’m thankful for all of you who have come along for the ride.

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Velocity #paperback on #sale @Amazon #mm #gay #erotica #romance #mmromance #amreading

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!

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The rolling out of Velocity begins today

So, for those of you who don’t know exactly how self-publishing works, here’s some insight.

Those nicely coordinated releases where a book hits everywhere at once? It doesn’t happen for me.

The problem is, is that except for a few places (namely Kobo, ARe and RainbowEbooks) unless you’re a major publishing house, you cannot upload an ebook to be released at a future date, the creating a pre-order page or even just obtaining a URL to which you can direct buyers to in advance. At Amazon, Barnes & Noble, SmashWords, and I believe Itunes, the moment it is uploaded and approved, it goes live.

This makes it very hard to conduct a coordinated release. If you upload to ARe and RainbowBooks and SmashWords, it goes live immediately. But Amazon might take 12-24 hours (48 internationally) to approve your upload and create your product page. B&N and Kobo can take up to 72, and Itunes can take a couple weeks.

Believe me, this makes it tough to coordinate release-day reviews, because what I need to do is get the ARC to reviewers weeks in advance, but they won’t have purchase links to put on their post. So then I upload the files as close to release day as possible in order to have them approved and have a URL for the book at Amazon or wherever, and then email the purchase links to reviewers sometimes less than 24 hours before their review is due to go live. It’s really quite annoying and life would be infinitely easier if every site would let you upload in advance and schedule a future date for the files to go live.

The point to all this rambling is to inform you that today I will begin uploading to Amazon and B&N. The files have already been uploaded and approved at Kobo, but of course, there I can schedule an offset release date. The files have also been uploaded to Itunes as of several days ago, but last I checked they hadn’t yet been approved for distribution and might not be for some time yet.

What this means is that Velocity might go live on Amazon and B&N sometime today or tomorrow, before the “official” release date. So if you’re an early bird, you might just be able to snag a copy.

If you’re holding off for ARe or Rainbow Ebooks, I’m sorry but those will not be going live until Saturday. The reason for this is that my sales took a significant hit with the release of Acceleration going the pre-order route at ARe. It turns out, unless you’re a hugely popular, well-known author, people aren’t that interested in pre-ordering an upcoming release. The times at ARe that I’ve made the most sales have been when my book was both live and near the top of the New Releases list. If I were to upload it for pre-order, it would have fallen to the bottom of the New Releases list before it ever actually went live. So, I’m holding off on those sites and will upload and release there on Saturday, the official release date.

Happy hunting!

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So if you’re REALLY desperate for 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.

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Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest for Romance: Second Round http://www.amazon.com/abna

This probably isn’t nearly as exciting as I find it to be, but still.

I entered Acceleration in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest in the Romance category. Today they announced the 400 books in each category that are moving up to the next round, and mine was one of them!

Of course, the chances of me getting into the 100 quarter-finalists for the next round probably aren’t that good, but STILL! I’m very excited!

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Acceleration is now available in print!

Acceleration is now available as a paperback. You can find it at Amazon!

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Less than 36 hours to go to Acceleration!

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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In honor of Banned Books Week

I’ve been watching on Twitter as a colossal piece of irony unfolds. On this week, of all weeks, Amazon has removed from their listings the newly released psychosexual thriller Flesh Cartel by Rachel Haimowitz and Heidi Belleau of Riptide Publishing.

As the authors rightfully point out, this is the same Amazon which sells Lolita, Flowers in the Attic, any number of works by Stephen King, all of which have content that is far more objectionable. Not to mention the proliferation of self-pub tentacle rape porn.

At best, that makes this move of Amazon’s hypocritical. At worst, it smacks of homophobia, because the obvious difference here is that the sibling protagonists (neither of whom is a minor, btw, unlike any number of books carried on Amazon-again, let’s eyeball Flowers in the Attic) are male.

I haven’t read Flesh Cartel yet. I definitely intend to when I feel like getting my dark on but I’m on a deadlines for the next couple months and can’t afford to jerk myself out of the headspace of my current projects. But I find this move of Amazon’s infuriating and as an author, I have to wonder which of us is next?

Therefore, I would encourage anyone and everyone to contact Amazon and register a complaint about this. Whether you support the subject matter or not, I think we can all agree that banning books = BAD, no matter what week it is.

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Inertia, On Sale Now!

In celebration of completing Acceleration, Impulse Book Two, I have decided to have a little sale and drop the price on Inertia for a short while! The new list price is $2.99, available now at SmashWords, and likely within 12 hours at Amazon! If you’ve been interested in checking out Inertia, now’s the time!

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