Faerie Blood

Faerie Blood Second Edition Cover

Faerie Blood Second Edition Cover

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About the Book

Faerie Blood is my very first novel, and was originally published in May 2009 by Drollerie Press. It’s intended to be the first of a trilogy, as well as the first of what I hope to make a whole set of inter-related works, including other novels and shorter stories as well. So far, these other works include “The Blood of the Land”, which appears in Defiance, and various character vignettes right here on the site. Faerie Blood‘s first sequel, Bone Walker, is currently in progress.

In the spring of 2012, I ran a Kickstarter project to re-publish Faerie Blood in a second edition, along with Bone Walker! I’m proud to note that the Kickstarter was successful, and so the new edition of Faerie Blood has been re-released for general sale.

Faerie Blood‘s second edition has had a new copyedit pass to bring its “present day” up from 2003 (when I originally wrote it) to 2012, and I’ve added Dedication, Author’s Notes, Acknowledgements, and About the Author sections as well. I commissioned professional cover art for it as well as the next two books of the trilogy, and my partner Dara Korra’ti did the new layout for the cover and for the print and PDF editions. We’re all really proud of how the book turned out!

Blurb

Kendis Thompson of Seattle thinks she’s as normal as the next computer geek, and up till now, she’s been right. But her world is about to turn on its ear, for she is the daughter of a Seelie Court mage and her mortal husband–and her faerie blood is awakening. Suddenly the city she’s known all her life is transforming before her eyes. Trolls haunt the bike trails. Fairies and goblins run loose in the streets. An old woman who is not what she seems and a young wanderer running from his past stand ready to defend Seattle–and Kendis–from magical assault. She will need those allies, for the power rising within her is calling her fey kin to the Emerald City to find her. And kill her.

Excerpt

“Shit,” I squeaked. Then I shrieked in mounting terror at the man sprawled on the trail, “Get up!”

He stirred. His eyes flickered, urgency warring with grogginess in his bearded features as he clued in that he was now up the proverbial creek, unequipped with paddle. But he couldn’t seem to make himself get out of the troll’s way, even when its next strike with the staff missed his skull by scant inches and pounded a hole into the grass instead.

Since he couldn’t move, I did.

Attacking a pissed-off troll with a Swiss Army knife was probably not the wisest thing I could have done. No, scratch that, it was definitely not the wisest thing I could have done. But wisdom wasn’t high on the agenda right then. What I saw before me was a guy getting the crap beaten out of him because he’d answered my scream for help—which made said beating my fault. And that bothered the hell out of me. I couldn’t leave someone to get his head split open like a piñata on my account without at least trying to do something to assist.

So I flicked open the knife and threw myself in a headlong rush at the creature. I’d like to say that a flash of brilliant inspiration gave me the best possible place to hit the troll with my laughably miniscule blade, and how to tackle it to knock it off of my downed rescuer. But I can’t. I can’t even say that I knew what to call the monster, much less how to fight it. My charge had all the finesse of an intoxicated farm boy trying to tip an armed and all too dangerous cow. I almost knocked myself out when I barreled low into my target, catching the staff between it and me before it could take another whack at the stranger.

Blindly I stabbed out with my little knife. I couldn’t tell where I connected; I could barely tell that I’d connected at all, thanks to almost gagging on the troll’s stench and trying not to faint as I got my other arm around it and held on for dear life. But the tip of my blade caught somewhere along its hide—caught and sank in and stayed there.

With another gurgling howl the troll let go of the staff, nearly choking me in the process as the carved wood jammed up against my throat, and started pawing frenetically at the place where I’d struck. It writhed violently, knocking me sideways, away from the tall figure spilled along the trail. And as it writhed, it began to change.

Color leeched out of its form, turning greenish-brown skin, black tufts of hair, and tusks the stained yellow of old ivory to an overall rocky gray. Flailing arms and paws began to slow, their motions increasingly sluggish, till the troll fell over onto me with one fist still reaching for the knife and the other jabbing clumsily against the ground beside my head. One great foul blast of breath from its maw nearly made me retch before that maw, too, began to freeze up and change color inside as well as out. Its screeches of pain dwindled down to a few burbling gasps, then cut off with an unmistakable finality. Before I grasped what was happening, the weight pinning me to the earth had transformed from monster to monster statue.

The troll had turned to stone.

Sample Chapters

All of these links are to PDFs of sample chapters I made available to my Kickstarter backers, and which I’ll share with you all here!

Reviews


Buy the Book

Kindle

Amazon.com | Amazon UK | Amazon FR | Amazon DE | Amazon ES Amazon IT | Amazon JP | Amazon CA | Amazon BR

Nook

Nook US | Nook UK

Apple iBookstore

Faerie Blood has been deployed to all of the iTunes stores I have access to via their self-pub system, which means a total of 32 stores! They’re all listed here:

US site | Canada | UK site | Australia | Austria | Belgium | Bulgaria | Cyprus
Czech Republic | Denmark | Estonia | Finland | France | Germany | Greece | Hungary
Ireland | Italy | Latvia | Lithuania | Luxembourg | Malta | Netherlands | Norway
Poland | Portugal | Romania | Slovakia | Slovenia | Spain | Sweden | Switzerland

Kobo

Faerie Blood is available for Kobo readers right over here!

But here are some other links where you can buy the book, via Kobo! Third Place, Elliott Bay, and the UW Bookstore are all fine Seattle-area bookstores, and I encourage supporting them with your ebook purchases!

Chapters/Indigo | Powells | Third Place Books | Elliott Bay Book Company | University of Washington Bookstore

Smashwords:

If you don’t own a particular e-reading device, if your device is older, or if you’re an international customer, you can try the Smashwords edition of the book!

There’s some duplication of formats here–specifically, you can get EPUB, MOBI, and PDF from this page, even though EPUB and MOBI are also available on Amazon and B&N and the iBookstore. Note though that the versions sold on Smashwords are created by their automated system and are not the same files that I created as part of the Faerie Blood Kickstarter. If you’re a reader of a Smashwords edition of the book and you see any problems, do please let me know!

Note also that the Smashwords PDF is a very bare-bones version, with minimal formatting!

Other Sites:

These are known sites where the book’s been deployed via Smashwords:

Coming Soon:

Faerie Blood is on a few other sites via Smashwords, and I’ll be updating this page with those links as I find them. Please watch this space for further details and new links as they happen!

Print copies will also eventually be for sale via Third Place Press and I will post that link on this page as soon as I have it!

Buying From Me:

If you don’t own an ereader, if you specifically prefer to avoid the device-specific vending sites, or if you’d just like to buy the book in any form directly from me, I’ll be happy to hand-sell it to you. The best way to pay me is via Paypal to my gmail address, annathepiper.

If you don’t have a Paypal account, I will also accept equivalent amounts of credit anywhere I can buy books or ebooks. Good choices to consider: Amazon, B&N (eGift cards as I’m a Nook owner and my ebook wishlist for the nook is ginormous), the iTunes/iBookstore, or Powells.com or Thirdplacebooks.com (indie bookstores are love).

I will also take personal checks, but that’s the slowest option!

I have EPUB, MOBI, and PDF copies available, all without DRM, and the price for any of these formats is $5. Note that the EPUB and MOBI versions I have are the ones I also deployed to B&N and Amazon; the PDF is the Kickstarter edition, all 8MB of it, with Dara’s gorgeous layout and retina-display-ready, high-res versions of the front and back cover art along with a bonus extra black-and-white illustration!

For the print copies, if you are local to me or if I can otherwise hand-deliver the book, I ask $15. If I need to ship it to you, I normally ask $20 to cover the cost of postage and packaging. But for the entire month of December 2012, I’ll be waiving the shipping charges, so I’m asking $15 from everybody!

Drop me a line via my Contact page, email, or the various social networks if you’d like to make arrangements to buy the book!

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