I’m going to be house- and dog-sitting for the rest of this week, but luckily I was able to borrow my brother’s laptop to take with me, so I’ll have internet access and hopefully be able to get a lot of writing done. I’m working on extending Faerie Christmas, I want to finish the chapter of Moonlight that I’m currently working on, and I’d like to get some more of Dragon Bait written, AND I get to start NaNoWriMo at the end of the week. Yay!

Anyway, here’s the next chapter of Moonlight. Let me know what you think. ^_^

Moonlight: Ch. 31

Yay! Breach is available for pre-order at Barnes & Noble. I also uploaded a different cover, one that more closely matches what the print version will look like. It’ll take a few days for the new cover to be uploaded to B&N, but you can view it now on the Breach page.

Recently, I was asked if there was a pronunciation guide for Broken Wings. There wasn’t, but I thought it was such a good idea, I started one. I did the names of all the characters that I could remember off the top of my head. If I forgot somebody, feel free to leave a comment and I’ll add them. Broken Wings Pronunciation Guide

I also finished formatting Breach for print. It took a few days because I learned a few things since I published BW, like special formatting for chapter headings, getting rid of orphans and widows (partial lines at the top of pages), and hyphen-breaking words to keep the justification from leaving big gaps between words. It was a little tedious, but kind of fun, too. I was making my story look like an actual book. 😀

I spent some time today making a To Do list for the near future, which includes a re-write of Faerie Christmas for an early December release. Probably the most common criticism I received on that story, was that the two main characters jumped into a physical relationship way too fast, so I’m going to add a few scenes to develop their relationship a bit more slowly, and perhaps to better explain why they would become physical rather quickly. Since Faerie Christmas is just a short story, it’ll be in e-book format only. However, I’m planning on making print anthologies of several shorter stories eventually.

I mailed books on Friday and again today, and I still have a couple if anyone is interested. ^_^

The votes are in and the readers have spoken!

My 2013 NaNoNovel will contain:

A Were protagonist, a vampire love interest, and a vampire antagonist in a modern city. The Were will be a cross-dressing rockstar who is stranded in the city when his tour bus breaks down. I don’t know if it’s cheating or not, but right now I think the love interest will also be the antagonist. He will be a mildly-autistic serial-killer vampire who kidnaps our hero. There will be bondage, there will be blindness.

The only thing I haven’t figured out how to incorporate the theme. Themes are usually something that is revealed to me after the story is written, not something I actively seek to write. Still, I think the Were falling for the guy who kidnaps him and the vampire falling for a guy (since he has very negative feelings toward men) could count as enemies becoming lovers.

Actually, I’m really looking forward to writing this story. It’s a good thing I’m still working on formatting Breach for CreateSpace or I’d be going batty not being able to start writing. And speaking of Breach…

Breach is now on Smashwords

I got Breach uploaded to Smashwords on Monday and today it was approved for distribution to retailers, so within a week, it will be available for pre-order through B&N, Apple, and Kobo. I thought they were going to accept pre-orders through Smashwords, but it’s just those three retailers.

Smashwords does have have a preview of the first 20% of the book, if you want to check it out. Breach preview on Smashwords. I’ll post an update once I have links to B&N, Apple, and Kobo.

Broken Wings Update

I changed the price of Broken Wings in paperback yesterday to $14.95. It will take Amazon a few days to reflect the change, so if you want a bargain, now is the time to buy.

I also received my order of books today. Yay! I checked each one carefully, because I’ve heard manufacturing errors do occur (luckily, CS has a great satisfaction guarantee) but they were perfect, as far as I could see. Aren’t they beautiful? 😀 Click the image for larger picture.

I finally got to the post office today, so if you want a signed book, shipping will only be $4.00 (within the US), which includes paper wrapped around the book, inside a padded envelope, sealed with packing tape. That’s a total of $16.00. I still have a few unclaimed books, so send me an e-mail and reserve yours today! katicalocke (at) gmail (dot) com

Yay, another chapter of Moonlight! By posting every two weeks, I think I have enough chapters left to see me through NaNoWriMo. There may be a lapse in December while I recover from NaNoing, but I hope not.

This chapter is a lot like the original version, except Izeri actually grows a backbone and makes an effort to start to tell Charias the truth. It won’t come out yet, of course, but he does try.

Moonlight: Ch. 30

 

Yay! I finally finished Honeymoon, the bonus short story that I’m  going to include with the 2nd edition release of Breach. It turned out a lot longer than I’d expected, just a bit over 23,000 words, which is a novella in itself, lol. I still need to do editing, and I can think of at least one scene that needs trimming, so I might bring it down under 23k, but probably not, since most of my editing usually consists of adding content to clarify.

Now I’m working on the articles and I have three of the four half-finished. I jotted down all of the information that I wanted to include, now I just need to structure it into readable form. The character bios are finished, the main story has been formatted and line edited (again) for e-book specifications, and I should be ready to set it up on Smashwords for pre-order sometime next week.

I am also going to offer signed copies of Breach for pre-order. This probably won’t happen until early November, since setting up the print version takes more time, but I estimate that since it’s a shorter book than BW by 50k words, I can offer Breach for $10.00 + S&H. I’ll make another post once I know for sure, but that’s something to keep in mind.

Oh, yeah, I said there was going to be an excerpt, didn’t I? Bear in mind, Honeymoon continues from the end of Breach, so if you haven’t read Breach you might want to skip it (unless you don’t mind being spoiled as to whether or not the two main characters end up together (which I doubt is much of an issue, but you never know).)  Honeymoon excerpt

And remember, there will be a new chapter of Moonlight on Monday! Hope you’re having a great weekend. ^_^

A new place to read it

So, I was going to an end-of-the-month update, but I did a pretty good job of updating my blog this past month, so I’m going to skip the update. Now, about Broken Wings…

A couple of weeks ago, I heard a rumor that FictionPress was enforcing their no adult content rule and was wiping stories off the site that violated that rule. Apparently, this was just a rumor, as I haven’t seen any evidence of it, but just to be safe, I copy-pasta’d every chapter of BW over to my wordpress website, so if FP ever does pull it, it’s still available to read. You can find the link on the Broken Wings book page, all the way down at the bottom.

Pricing changes

I also did some research into book pricing and it would appear that I have significantly under-priced BW, as far as market value of comparable titles goes. Books over 300 pages are priced higher, and books of erotica are priced higher. BW is both. Other self-published authors suggest a formula of production cost * 3 = list price, but that would put it between $18 and $20, which is too much, if you ask me. Now, I’d prefer to leave it as low as possible, but market research suggests that under-pricing gives the impression of it being of lesser quality than comparable titles. Plus, Amazon is discounting it further (at the time of this post, it’s 21% off, down to $9.45), so that really makes it look cheap.

So, I’ve decided that I’m going to raise the price on October 15th to $14.95. If Amazon applies the same 20% discount, that will put the price at around $11.60. It can take Amazon up to a week to make changes on the webpage to reflect a new price, so it will probably be a few days after that before it takes effect, but I won’t raise it before then, if you’d like to order a copy and haven’t been able to yet.

Autographed copies

I am going to order ten copies for myself. I know my aunt and my cousin want one, but the rest I’d be willing to sign and offer for sale. Since I get a discount on multiple copies, I can offer these for $12.00 plus S&H, to any location in the US. I’m going to make a trip to the post office in the next few days to see what the shipping will be, but I don’t imagine it’ll be more than $5.

If you would like one of these copies, you can send me an email at katicalocke(at)gmail(dot)com. I’ll need the payment sent to my PayPal account before I mail the book, and I’ll need a mailing address to send it to, but that can be arranged via e-mail.