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how to buy my books

Valor of the Healer

Valor of the Healer NOW AVAILABLE on an ereader near you!

Ladies and gentlemen, as the time zones of the world start rolling over past midnight, you know what I’m starting to see?

Valor of the Healer is now going on sale. It’s already live on Carina’s official page for it, and I’m seeing it live on B&N, iTunes, and Sony as well. Still on pre-order status at Amazon but we’re in the Pacific time zone.

For those of you who may have pre-ordered the book, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your support! If you ordered it from a site that auto-delivers to your ereading device, it should be showing up real soon now! If you pre-ordered directly from Carina, you should be able to scamper up to the site now and download the book!

If you haven’t bought the book yet and you want to, have at! I will get slightly more money if you buy directly from Carina, but as I’ve said before, really, just buy it wherever makes you happy and what’s easiest for you! Just as long as you buy it, I’m good!

All the places you can buy it that I’m currently aware of are listed on Valor’s official page, and I will keep adding more as I find them!

If you can’t buy the book immediately (though I DO recommend jumping on Carina’s super-cheap price of $2.99 while it lasts), then signal boosting would also be amazing! One of my fellow Carina people composes tweets for every author’s new releases, and here are the ones for mine if you’d like to grab ’em and tweet ’em:

The Rook, the Hawk & the Dove – the game is in play VALOR OF THE HEALER
@annathepiper @carinapress http://bit.ly/ZqKIl0

She is a half-elven healer with no control over her magic VALOR OF THE
HEALER @annathepiper @carinapress http://bit.ly/ZqKIl0

Post to Facebook! Post to Google+! Post to Livejournal and Dreamwidth and wherever else you think might be appropriate! Semaphore passing planes! Send out carrier pigeons! Whatever works to spread the word!

SO EXCITED. This book has been a very long time coming, and I am anxious to see how Faanshi, Julian, and Kestar’s story works for you all!

April 14, 2013 by
Faerie Blood

Faerie Blood temporarily unavailable on the Nook

Barnes and Noble is apparently overhauling its self-pub system–they’re rebranding it as NookPress and giving it a new UI and everything. So they’re asking all the PubIt! authors to move their accounts over into the new system as part of the NookPress launch.

Which is all very well and good except for the part where it’s apparently buggy as all hell.

I went through the steps to port my account over today, and right off the bat a big glaring UI bug leapt out at me. On the account login screen, when clicking the checkbox to have it remember my login information, I wound up with something that looked like this.

Pretty Sure It's Not Supposed to Look Like That

Pretty Sure It’s Not Supposed to Look Like That

But I was willing to live with that as long as I was able to get logged in and get at my data. Which was. Mostly. I had to re-add stuff like my payment information, and the category to which Faerie Blood was assigned–i.e., Fiction -> Fantasy -> Contemporary.

Then I ran into the bigger, even more annoying bug. When I re-entered my category information, I noticed a huge lack of anything obvious to click on to save that data. There was a “Put On Sale” button up at the top, which Dara proposed was supposed to be the new Save button. Except when I clicked on that, it threw up a huge (and uninformative) error that basically said “well, gosh, something’s broken! Damned if we know what!” And, of course, when I tried to click back to the Category dialog, the changes I’d tried to make were gone.

But you know what I do for a day job, people? I test web pages. And I immediately had a nasty suspicion that I knew what was wrong.

When I opened up Winnowill to boot into Windows 7 and fire up IE 9, I discovered I was right. The missing Save and Save & Continue buttons did in fact appear in Windows-based browsers, where they did not in the Mac-based ones.

Seriously not impressed by this. UI wackiness I can handwave, but big glaring functionality problems like that?! How did this get past their QA people? DO they have QA people?! I mean, seriously. Even aside from my annoyance as the writer trying to save her book’s data in this scenario, my professional pride as a QA Engineer is offended by that big a problem having been missed.

The long and short of it is, right now Faerie Blood‘s not available for the Nook. I think I got it successfully updated over in my Windows install, but as of this writing the book’s marked as “processing”. And I don’t know when that processing is going to complete. It may finish in another few minutes. It may not be done until tomorrow.

I apologize for the inconvenience to any Nook owners who try to buy the book and can’t find it. I will be happy to hand-sell any Nook owners the book myself in the meantime, for its current price of $2.99 USD, sent to my Paypal account.

April 9, 2013 by
Valor of the Healer

About buying vs. preordering Valor of the Healer

userinfoalinsa just laughingly informed me this morning that Carina Press makes it way too easy to buy things. And that the link to my book might have accidentally been clicked on, and that the site might have accidentally been registered for, and that credit card data might accidentally have been entered, and, well! One can see how these things might happen.

But on that topic I was then asked by userinfotechnoshaman about whether there are any best things to do about buying the book, e.g., during release week and such like. So this is a quick post about that.

Many authors will ask you to specifically buy their book during release week, with an eye towards whether they can make it onto the New York Times bestsellers list. Honestly, I don’t operate nearly at that level. At the level at which I do operate, my goal is any sales at all! And getting the word out about me.

So by all means, if you want to preorder the book now, do that. If you want to buy it when it comes out, do so! I will note though that the one argument for “sooner rather than later” here is that Carina is doing a thing with the pricing, where through the end of May, Valor‘s price is going to be pretty low. It’s $2.69 right now on Carina’s site and will probably boing up a bit to $2.99 before May is out. After May I’m likely to go up to $4.99 or $5.99, depending. So if you buy sooner rather than later, you’ll get that cheaper price.

Also, buying directly from Carina will get me slightly more money, because other ebook vendors will take their cut. I do like the ‘more money’ part of that, so I’d encourage you to buy from them. On the other hand, I’m also a fan of convenience! So if you’re an owner of a particular ereader and you like to buy directly from their site, please feel free to do that too.

Valor is currently available for preorder on Amazon, B&N, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play. And I’ve done a link roundup of all the rest of the places I’m aware of where it can be bought on the book’s official page, including links for international readers.

Note as well that no matter where you buy it from, Valor of the Healer is completely DRM-free. And I particularly encourage international readers to consider buying straight from Carina, in case your ebook site of choice complains about your not being in the States!

Last but not least, I’ve been asked this before but will note again: for the time being, Valor will only be available digitally. Carina is investigating print possibilities but nothing definite is in place yet. If you want to improve the book’s chances of eventually making it into print, though, the best thing you can do is buy it!

And the second best thing you can do is tell all your friends. Post about the book. If you’ve read it already, review it! (And if you would actually like to review it, I have plenty of review copies I can make available to serious interested parties.) Because again, at my current stage of the game, the goal is spreading the word.

To all who have already bought the book or who plan to do so: thank you from the bottom of my heart for your support. And I hope you enjoy Faanshi and Julian and Kestar’s story!

ETA: P.S. While there is not going to be a print version soon, I CAN note that there WILL be an audio version! I don’t have a release date for that yet, but the instant I do, be assured that I WILL be trumpeting that far and wide. Watch this space for further updates!

April 3, 2013 by
Faerie Blood

Faerie Blood availability update!

With the help of the lovely folks of Book Universe at Norwescon, I sold three copies of the print edition of Faerie Blood in addition to the ones I hand-sold myself.

This means I have a total of eight copies left in my current print run. Previous prices still apply for these copies: $15 if I can hand-deliver them to you, $20 if I need to mail them.

Also, I didn’t sell any of the ebook bundle CDs I had left. Which means, O Internets, that I’m going to make them available TO YOU! What’s on these CDs:

  • EPUB, PDF, and MOBI of the Kickstarter edition of Faerie Blood
  • EPUB and PDF of the Drollerie edition of Faerie Blood
  • EPUB, PDF, and MOBI of the short story “The Blood of the Land”

I’m asking $5 for each CD.

However, I will also cut people a deal if they want a print copy AND one of the CDs! If you buy both together, I will waive the mailing cost, so it’s still $20 straight up for both of them.

If I hand-deliver the items, I will give you a two-dollar discount, so that’ll be $18 for a print copy AND the CD.

This offer will be in effect until I run out of CDs. And if I run out of print editions first, it will apply to however many more copies are applicable in the next print run I do.

Any takers? Talk to me! And if you already have copies of the book, signal-boost to others! Thanks all. 🙂

April 1, 2013 by
Faerie Blood

HI NORWESCON!

So! Here I am on my first night of Norwescon, and all, repeat, all of my remaining postcards and posters for Kiri Moth’s awesome Faerie Blood cover art have vanished off the freebie tables where I left ’em. And at least one person appears to have bought Faerie Blood on Amazon today, and I have picked up a couple new followers on Twitter as well.

If you’re coming by because you found those posters and postcards, and you see this before the end of the convention: special offer! Come find me and I’ll sign that postcard or poster for you, and also give you $1 off either the print edition of Faerie Blood OR the CDs of the ebook that I have with me! Blonde chick. Brown hat. Great Big Sea hoodie. Can’t miss me!

Asking $15 for the print editions, and $5 for the ebook CDs–which contain not only the EPUB, PDF, and MOBI formats of the current edition of the book, but ALSO the EPUB and PDF of the original Drollerie Press edition. And I’ve thrown in the EPUB, PDF, and MOBI editions of the Warder universe short story “The Blood of the Land” as well. I have 17 copies of these discs, and they’re a Norwescon exclusive. Get ’em from me while supplies last!

ALSO: I have arranged with the nice lady who runs the Book Universe table to have four copies of the print edition on consignment for the con! If you can’t find me and you want a copy of the book, look in the dealers’ room for the Book Universe table! I buy books from them every year just because they’re awesome.

ALSO #2: Special shoutout to Tiger Gray and Vivien Weaver at the Hard Limits Press table in the dealers’ room, who turn out to know my most EXCELLENT editor at Carina, Deb Nemeth! I bought the two books they were selling on the grounds of that, and we had an awesome conversation about each other’s book covers, and publishing under pen names. Note also: Hard Limits Press is taking submissions. Fellow writers, go look ’em up.

March 28, 2013 by
Valor of the Healer

Another writer milestone I didn’t really want to hit

So there I am googling ‘valor of the healer angela highland’, just to see if I find any interesting links that might be talking about forthcoming April releases in the SF/F or Carina realms and such–and I did in fact find one, a link with a roundup of titles due to be released in April. I’m on that list, which is of interest since this woman is a bookseller in Canada (in Toronto, even), but is also specifically calling out Carina SF/F titles!

But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about two other, less amusing links that came up in the same search results. They live at a couple of domains that look like they’re pointing at pretty much the exact same kind of page–and in both cases, they are pretending to offer a free download of Valor of the Healer.

“Well, shit,” I said. Had I really been pirated? Over a month before my release?

I dug into the suspicious pages a little further, though, by doing a View Source command on them in my browser. (View Source IS the friend of the QA web tester.) In both cases what I saw in the code were a bunch of links actually going off to amazon.com–but with a lot of extra parameters on the URLs that make me think that they’re trying to mooch off of the Amazon affiliate system.

I’m told that this kind of thing is actually quite common, affiliate sites pretending to be torrent sites. Which strikes me as simultaneously hilarious and kind of sad, really. And for all I know these two sites–or maybe one site, since both of the pages had pretty much the exact same layout and text to them, except for differing domains–may be legitimate Amazon affiliates.

But I kinda doubt it.

Long story short, when in doubt, check my Valor of the Healer page for the roundup of all the official places selling the book. It IS available for preorder on practically all the major ebook vendors’ sites now, though it has yet to show up on the Sony bookstore. And if you have any doubt whatsoever about where’s best to buy the book from, go straight to carinapress.com!

March 4, 2013 by
Valor of the Healer

Valor of the Healer page updated!

I’m starting to see the book showing up now on more places where you can pre-order it! Behold, links on Amazon Canada and Google Play and Diesel eBooks!

Most happily, I point you to Carina’s own shiny page for the book, right over here! Isn’t that pre-order button shiny and tempting? And did I mention shiny? ;D

All of these links have now been added to Valor‘s official page. I’ve also added the small excerpt Carina is using on their official page for the book. I will continue to add other links to places you can buy the book as I find them. And once the book shows up on Goodreads and LibraryThing, I’ll add links there too.

As I said on the book’s page, if you’re wondering about where the best place to buy the book is, I’ll actually get the most money if you buy it directly from Carina. However, don’t let that stop you from buying it on Amazon or B&N or Kobo or wherever you please, if you happen to have an ereader or app that’s hooked into a particular store you favor! As long as you buy and enjoy the book, I’m good. And I thank you in advance, no matter where you may choose to click on shiny buttons!

February 27, 2013 by