Bloodroom - an Amazon Kindle Exclusive

Bloodroom, a vampire novel of romantic suspense, quietly debuted this week as an Amazon Kindle exclusive and has since broken the Top 100 Bestsellers list in the category of Horror/Dark Fantasy. I am thrilled! I could write reams about my experience writing, working with a professional editor and book cover designer, or the influences that affected character development and setting for the novel. But for now, I'll let Bloodroom speak for itself, with its "back jacket blurb":


Turn to me, Natalie.

His mental call to her was dangerous, of course. Dangerous for him. Dangerous for her too, but she was in danger, anyway.

Look at me now.

Her gaze traveled slowly upward. With every moment, physical awareness stretched tauter between them. Her eyes wandered over Julian's face, over his slashing dark brows, down the ridge of his aquiline nose to his chiseled mouth.

“You're our angel!” The ballerina smiled.

The vampire smiled back.

She explained, “An angel is someone who makes an extremely generous donation to demonstrate his or her love for the ballet.”

“I do love the ballet,” Julian told Natalie fervently, his shadowed eyes fixed on her breasts. Their firm swells strained against the sweat-soaked fabric; buttons were undone to the moist hollow between them. God.

He didn’t have to kill her right away, did he?

I'm a Kindle Bestseller!

It's Official! The Entrepreneur is an Amazon Kindle Bestseller in the category of Horror Anthologies. It's a bloody sick little tale and I'm proud I thought of it.

A star pupil teams with the problem student on a business class project. But there’s more to this pairing than meets the eye, and soon the project is successful beyond their instructor’s wildest nightmares. There’s a market for anything, and demand can barely keep up with supply.

At 3,000 words and .99 cents, The Entrepreneur will creep you out for little money down and no time at all. (Available in non-kindle formats at Smashwords.)

I'm so dang happy :)

Naima, Inc Chugging Right Along

You might call it a Little Shop of Horrors...yuk, yuk, yuk! I have published four short stories from my upcoming anthology Night at the Demontorium to Kindle and Smashwords. More on that in the near future.

Bloodroom came back from the editor and I'm literally going edit by edit, choosing whether to accept or reject. Sometimes an edit is grammatically correct but it messes up the rhythm of the sentence. That's why I don't just hit "Accept All" or whatever Word calls it.

I just bought David Gaughran's book Let's Get Digital. The book is a collection of advice, articles, and essays on self-publishing e-books. It features many indie authors who've found success, and for that reason alone, I'm excited to read it. I like David's writing style and enjoy reading his blog. My immediate intent is to read LGD sparingly, because I've been suffering a little from information overload, what with all the experts I've been tapping into recently. However, that's like telling myself to nurse one glass of wine at a party. Oops, did I just tell on myself?

Helping Your eBooks Sell Your Other eBooks

My subscription to Steve Lewis' Taleist tutorials paid off again today when I learned how to make the last pages of an e-story direct readers to review, share, or tweat about the story (as well as buy another story).

I had just finished an e-book and gotten to the last page, a Before You Go page where I could rate the book on Twitter. I thought, how can I have that on my e-books?

The tutorial said 'Before You Go' is a feature for the latest Kindle that Amazon sets up for e-books automatically. Thanks, Amazon! Then the tutorial had example text I could incorporate into my story's html that might influence a reader to review my story on Amazon and possibly buy another. Directed thus, I created an About the Author feature with my photo, asked them to review, included a link to the story's Amazon page, and told them how very much I'd appreciate it. I also gave them a heads-up to the Before You Go page they were about to encounter.

I did all this in my short story, Sparky's First Day, before publishing to Kindle. As soon as Sparky goes live, I'll add the end matter to my already live e-stories and I'll add an 'If you liked, you'll also like ...' feature with links to the other stories. I'm trying to keep it all short n' sweet but still getting the most info to them I can.

What are some other techniques I can try? Suggestions?

No Such Thing as Small Writing

I finished writing the Greeley girls scene Tuesday night and like it very much.

Last night, I attended Shelley Hitz's webinar on creating and using Facebook fan pages. She showed us how to use the Notes and Discussions features to engage readers. She talked about the importance of having a tagline for yourself on your fan page and told us the tagline should be comprised of keywords so you come up in Internet searches. Our homework is to write our taglines. I intend to come up with several; I'll ask you guys which one you like best.

I also got Aunt Téa's Addiction accepted for publication at Smashwords, by which I mean that it was vetted and found not to be in violation of their style guide. BUT -- they're out of free ISBNs and without an ISBN, the story won't be available on Nooks, iPads, and Sony devices. A new batch of free ISBNs are expected to be available today. I'm afraid there will be a run on those suckers and I'll miss out. I'm going to be checking Smashwords' Update page obsessively today.

Last night I wrote the description blurb for my next published story, He Dreams in Yellow. But I'm concerned it contains a spoiler. The story is more stylish than shocking (as my other stories tend to be). Malcom walks around a lot and is visited by friends. Not very shocking, eh? How do you make a blurb out of that? But the shocking horror part comes later and I have to be careful or my blurb will give it away. I'm awful at small writing like bios, blurbs, taglines, and story titles. It's like by the time I get to that, my head is too worn out to think. John Urbancik gave me the title to He Dreams in Yellow. I couldn't think of a title. When he did, I was like, "Love it. Done."

Success!

I have my first short story packaged and uploaded to http://kdp.amazon.com, ready to publish! Daniele Serra (www.multigrade.com) designed the cover art. The whole time I was complaining about the difficulty of packaging a story for Kindle, I just needed to follow the tutorial I'd bought to the very end. The tutorial is available at http://content.taleist.com and was created by Steven Lewis, a prolific and successful author/publisher of Kindle books. It is a peculiar habit of mine to think, "This task is instinctive. I can wing it." This usually leads to frustration; you would think I'd learn. The tutorial is very detailed and thorough, with downloadable exercises and demo videos. I used the html editing tool Steve uses for PC; a 30-day trial is available at http://www.e-texteditor.com/. It's better than the one I was using, because it opens the web preview in a pane next to your html pane and any changes you make to the html immediately show up in the web preview pane. The tutorial takes you from preparing your Word document for formatting, through packaging your e-book using Amazon's free mobi-creator software, to viewing it in your Kindle. Let me tell you, the moment I saw my story in my Kindle I did a happy dance in my computer chair! I even have the cover art in my Kindle! The one thing I want to do before publishing is find out how to put my short story in the Kindle Singles marketplace, so that shoppers looking for Singles can find it when browsing. I have two more short stories ready to format and publish after this. So I'm on my way!

Onramp to Normalcy

This morning, we suddenly got a lovely rain outside. The sun was still shining bright. I felt happy, which is so weird. How can I be content on the couch, watching the rain, with a cat curled up on my feet, when at the same time I miss my babies so much? How can I feel grateful, as I do? But it's a good life. There's no denying it.

I wrote Tuesday night the scene where Gilbert comes in. I like it very much. I'm going to write tonight and tomorrow night. Saturday, I'll catalog and network on www.librarything.com. Sunday, I'll try to publish to Kindle again. Last night I tried this a second time and still my short story previewed in Amazon's viewer not as story text but as straight HTML. This is maddening. If I can't publish a 4-page short story, how will I ever publish an entire novel? I remembered that I vowed to pay someone to do anything I found to be a pain in the ass. I took the vow back because I worried about mounting costs. But now I feel ready to reconsider the vow. I really understand Amanda Hocking's decision to be NYC published despite her success self-publishing. She said on her blog (http://amandahocking.blogspot.com) that she'd made the decision partly because of her frustration over time-consuming publishing chores. She said she'd once spent an entire day trying to get a program to give her the right page margins. She'd rather write and social network with readers. I know just how she feels. Writing brings me joy; wrestling with publishing tasks does not. And publicizing through social networking results in new friendships, which is just wonderful.

My friend Maria, who is a powerhouse consultant, sent me two cover ideas she'd designed for a book on marketing she intends to self-publish. I'll tell her which one I like best. I think I'll tell her to drop the "by" before her name; no one seems to use it anymore. And I could warn her about her title, which is something like "Leadership Uncensored". It had better be uncensored if she promises it. What does she mean to tell them? Her failures? Client mistakes? Will she name names? Mostly, I should say to her "good for trying". Really. Good for us. We could be passive consumers. Lots of people opt out that way. An epitaph on every tombstone should read, "Here lies so-and-so. Good on her for trying." Life is beautiful but so damn difficult.