Browsing Tag

crowdfunded books are awesome

Site Updates

Some items of interest, including a crowdfund!

Some of y’all may have noticed that I’ve rearranged the look of the main book pages for Faerie Blood, Bone Walker, Valor of the Healer, Vengeance of the Hunter, and Victory of the Hawk–not only the individual novel pages, but also the overall Books and Rebels of Adalonia landing pages. This is to finally take advantage of some functionality I brought in with my current theme, but also some plugins I’ve installed to get some Bootstrap fun going on.

You’ll see this new functionality in the various buttons on these pages. This all lets me clean the pages up considerably, make them shorter and better organized, and less of a “huge collection of links”. Plus, I get to better emphasize the various blurbs and immediate calls to action at the tops of each page.

I also removed the sidebar from those pages, since the sidebar is something I wanted to keep specifically for the blog section of the site. This change is for two reasons: one, to make the book pages less busy, and two, to make them render more nicely on phone-sized screens.

I may continue to tweak the layouts of things, so if you see something suddenly start to look different, don’t be surprised by that! And if you see anything that actually looks broken, please let me know.

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I’ve been working on an updated version of the short story “The Disenchanting of Princess Cerridwen”, since the version currently on the site is out of date now that the Rebels of Adalonia trilogy is complete. The new version will have an editing pass, and some tweaks to correct details that were specifically mentioned in Victory of the Hawk.

I’m hoping to do the same thing with this story that I did with “The Blood of the Land”, and release it as a standalone download to the various places I sell my titles. But first, I’ve got to get it some proper cover art. More bulletins on this as events warrant!

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After seeing one of the best-selling Carina authors post results of a survey of her readers, and specifically noting how a bunch of them reported that Facebook is a source of data for them about finding new books, I’ve been doing an experiment this month. Namely, I’m running ads on Facebook to promote the Rebels books as well as Faerie Blood.

I know, I know–I wince at the idea of actually throwing money at Facebook, but it is important to note that I have had a significant uptick in daily traffic around here with these ads being live. And a notable, if small, uptick in sales as well. So far, this experiment does appear to be valuable. And if Facebook actually can result in me selling books to people who haven’t previously discovered me, hey, I’ll get over any willies about throwing money at them!

ALSO: if anyone reading this did in fact come over because of finding me at Facebook, hi there! Do please feel free to say hi.

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Last but not least, I’ve just thrown a contribution to this IndieGogo campaign for an anthology to celebrate ten years of The Future Fire. I follow their Twitter account, and moreover, my pal Su J. Sokol, who I’ve featured on Boosting the Signal, will appear in this anthology.

So consider checking this out, won’t you? Thank you!

(Speaking of Su, I owe her book a review. I hope to get that posted soon, so keep an eye out for that!)

Books

The post-surgery I may have no brain but I got me some ebooks roundup

I’m not up for juggling my own words tonight, but I have been at least up for putting a dent into my backlogged email. Which of course means that I’ve got some book acquisitions to mention to y’all, since I’ve got a couple of pending receipts as well as notices from various crowdsourced projects I’ve been supporting!

Acquired via crowdfunding:

  • The Old Races Short Story Project, by C.E. Murphy. She’d been doing this as a non-Kickstarter crowdfund, and finally deployed epub and mobi versions to her backers. I’d already had the PDF but still haven’t read the pieces, and since the epub and mobi are new acquisitions, I’m counting this as a work obtained this year!
  • A Series of Ordinary Adventures, by Stevie Carroll. Digital copies of Kickstarter rewards from Candlemark & Gleam, and I should have a print copy of this on the way as well! Hurray for supporting the work of LJ friends!

Acquired from B&N:

  • Blackout, by Mira Grant. Picked up in both epub for the Nook AND in print, because when it comes to anything by Mira Grant, that is JUST HOW I ROLL.
  • The Old Races: Origins, again by C.E. Murphy. I think this in fact contains most of the same stories in the aforementioned Old Races Short Story project, but I’m buying it again just to show Kit some love. Because again: HOW I ROLL.

Last but not least, sent to Dara and me in print:

  • Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, by Seth Grahame-Smith. I’d had half an eye on this one anyway just because we did just see the trailer for the forthcoming movie, which looks sublimely silly and very likely required viewing. Also, it was written by the same guy who did Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which as y’all know, I did quite adore.

71 for the year!