Cara N. Delaney's Blog, page 2

Pride sales galore! 🌈

This June, we have a lot going on in the Steals & Deals department. So let’s get right to it!

(All my individual sales are global, though the exact discount can vary from country to country due to pricing limitations).

First, for the entirety of June, we have the Indie Spotlight Pride Bundle over on Itch.io. It contains eighteen SFF and horror books by eighteen extremely cool authors, including yours truly. Yes, that is a brag, we’re all just that awesome. All of those amazing books c...

Writers, Self-Help, And Why Less Is Often More

Right, cards on the table: There is no way you haven’t heard at least some of what I’m going to mention before. Maybe most or even all of it. I want to talk about it anyway, because I feel like, as writers in this day and age, we’re uniquely pre-disposed to seek out this type of thing. Advice, systems and strategies that will help us be better, more productive writers without neglecting everything else in our lives. Because like it or not, writing, like most other creative pursuits, has been hig...

Writers, self-help, and why less is often more

Right, cards on the table: There is no way you haven’t heard at least some of what I’m going to mention before. Maybe most or even all of it. I want to talk about it anyway, because I feel like, as writers in this day and age, we’re uniquely pre-disposed to seek out this type of thing. Advice, systems and strategies that will help us be better, more productive writers without neglecting everything else in our lives. Because like it or not, writing, like most other creative pursuits, has been hig...

Writing, The 80/20 Rule, And You

No, I don’t know why you would be pushing hay bales around while you write. It sure feels like it sometimes though. Photo by Vlad Chețan on Pexels.com.

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Among those are a decent few writing and publishing podcasts, because of course. One of those publishing podcasts is Self-Publishing with Dale, which, as you may have guessed, is a podcast largely concerned with self-publishing and everything adjacent to it.

A few weeks ago, Self-Publishing with Dale had an ep...

Writing, the 80/20 rule, and you

No, I don’t know why you would be pushing hay bales around while you write. It sure feels like it sometimes though. Photo by Vlad Chețan on Pexels.com.

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Among those are a decent few writing and publishing podcasts, because of course. One of those publishing podcasts is Self-Publishing with Dale, which, as you may have guessed, is a podcast largely concerned with self-publishing and everything adjacent to it.

A few weeks ago, Self-Publishing with Dale had an ep...

Narratess Indie Sale: April 5-7

I’m very happy to announce that I am part of this weekend’s Narratess Indie Sale. From the fifth to the seventh, Saturday to Monday, the TOMB OF HEART AND SHADOW ebook will be discounted to just $1.99 (or a similar local discount) globally, alongside many other amazing indie books.

You can check them all out at Indiebook.sale, or take a look at the fancy pics below, courtesy of Jake Vanguard, to see a bunch of the queer entries in the sale in one place. You’ll find a variety of subgenres, sexualities and identities – there’s sure to be something for everyone!

Which ones are you going to pick up?

-Cara

Owning Your Stuff In The Age Of The Cloud

Let’s not mince words here: We live in an age of diminished ownership. Over everything. Our music and films are subscriptions. Our software is. Features in our damn cars are now tied to subscriptions, and don’t even get me started on HP’s printer nonsense. Fact of the matter is, we increasingly don’t actually own the things we buy anymore. And we also increasingly don’t own the things we create.

Yes, there’s LLMs and how they gleefully steal things left and right, with nary a consequence in s...

Owning your stuff in the age of the cloud

Let’s not mince words here: We live in an age of diminished ownership. Over everything. Our music and films are subscriptions. Our software is. Features in our damn cars are now tied to subscriptions, and don’t even get me started on HP’s printer nonsense. Fact of the matter is, we increasingly don’t actually own the things we buy anymore. And we also increasingly don’t own the things we create.

Yes, there’s LLMs and how they gleefully steal things left and right, with nary a consequence in sight. But it’s not just that. Specifically, I’m talking about writers, and how many of them too often and too easily give up ownership of their work to cloud-based services.

It sounds appealing at a glance. Write your stuff in Our Cool Cloud App, we automatically save it and you can access it any time, no need to worry about storage space and losing files. Until, that is, we shut down your account, or block access to certain files we don’t like, or decide to delete them because you haven’t opened them in a while. Which frequently happens. And usually, it takes people by surprise, and a nasty one at that.

If you’re a career author, your files are your livelihood. So it’s imperative that you understand that, if all you have is this one Word doc, saved in Microsoft’s cloud, you do not actually own that document, and by extension, its contents. This is not hyperbole. The file can be deleted, your account cancelled, and there is nothing you can do. The file, and everything in it, is gone. Same goes for Google Docs, Notion, Scrivener, anything that puts your files in a cloud without giving you freely accessible local copies.

We want to keep this from happening. We want our files to be secure, backed up, and readily accessible to us whenever we want, subscription or no subscription. Here’s how we do that.

1 – We don’t rely on just one service
This is key. Redundancies exist for a reason in many systems, and we need them, too. So make sure you don’t just write and save everything in Google Docs. Keep local files accessible through an open-source software like LibreOffice. Download or export files and save them locally at certain intervals. Never connect all your apps and files to a single thing, be than an account or an email address (if you lose access to that one account, everything connected to it is gone, too, so avoid things like logging into everything with Facebook or Google). Always be prepared for an account to vanish over night, and act accordingly.

2 – We keep local copies
Step two in this process, after making sure your account setup is good, is to keep stuff on local devices. And no, your iPad doesn’t count, that’s still fundamentally “keeping stuff in an account”. You want a USB drive, an external HDD, or hell, even just add a separate internal storage device, so at least you don’t lose everything to random individual hardware failure, or a botched Windows update.

3 – We keep things off-site
This is the ultimate failsafe, in case your exploding computer takes the entire house with it (knock on wood). Never keep all your back-ups in one place. That doesn’t mean you need a safe deposit box in your local bank. It means that you make sure that, if one location is compromised, not all copies are affected. So keep a USB on your keychain that you take to work, or leave it in your car (beware heat and cold damage though). Stash one at a friend’s or relative’s house and update it when you visit, if that’s feasible for you. Utilise at least two different cloud storage methods that do not share an account (example: I email myself back-ups every month-ish, to four different accounts with two different providers; if your files are larger, use both Dropbox and Google Drive, or OneDrive and Mediafire, you get the idea).

4 – We use easily accessible file formats
This one isn’t to be neglected. You can do everything right in all the other steps, but if your stuff is locked into a proprietary format with only a single way to access said format, that still means you don’t own it. Scrivener’s proprietary format is like this. PDFs can be next to impossible to open and extract any text from. So choose a format that can be opened with many different softwares, such as .doc, .docx, .rtf or .odt formats. Also make sure that nothing you export has DRM on it, because again, if it’s locked and someone else holds the key, it’s not yours.

So here are your four steps to take today, if you haven’t already, to create back-ups of your work and make sure you don’t lose it to the whims of modern technology, and those who create it. Tech rot is not just a Warframe reference, it’s real and can cause irreversible damage to the unprepared. Don’t be unprepared. Back up your stuff right now.

– Cara

BLADE OF THE CROWN is available in paperback and through Kindle Unlimited! Get swept away with a princess and her royal guard as they find themselves stranded on a strange island, trying to find their way home – and into each other’s arms.

BLADE OF THE CROWN is available in paperback and through Kindle Unlimited! Get swept away with a princess and her royal guard as they find themselves stranded on a strange island, trying to find their way home – and into each other’s arms.

Adventures in Kindle Unlimited

Okay, let’s clear something up, considering the recent discourse around the subject: Yes, with the exception of my horror novella, I’m a KU-exclusive author. No, that’s not what this post is about. I’m not walking into that minefield.

This is about one reader’s first foray into the cornucopia of literature offered through Amazon’s subscription service. I’m not usually a subscription reader. I read slowly, and pretty evenly split between ebooks and paperbacks, so the price has historically not been worth it for my reading habits. However. In December, two things happened. I decided to read Mages of the Wheel, an as of writing five-book romantic fantasy series by J.D. Evans, and I spotted a special offer – three months of Kindle Unlimited for 99ct. Seemed like a match made in… heaven…? …so I took the plunge. Here’s how it went.

The first thing I read through KU wasn’t actually Mages of the Wheel, it was Ice Planet Barbarians by Ruby Dixon, erotic sci-fi probably best known for the titular barbarians’ creative anatomy. I have to confess, I do not understand it. It did nothing for me. If you’re into it, good for you, it just left me severely confused, is all (with a side of ‘that is not consent, what the hell’). I know the series is extremely popular, but for me, it was a big ole swing and a miss.

After that one, I read Reign & Ruin, the first book in Mages of the Wheel. You guys, it sucked me in so bad. Love the world. Love the magic system. Love the couple. Love that we’re getting a shadow daddy archetype who isn’t a huge prick. Very refreshing read.
I went through the series not in one go, but pretty much alternating with different books. I enjoyed Storm & Shield nearly as much, and while it took me a while to warm up to Amara and Cassian in Siren & Scion, I ended up liking the book more for the way it expanded the world, so it didn’t matter much. I unfortunately didn’t really vibe with the prequel Wind & Wildfire, which explores the story of how Naime’s (Reign & Ruin’s protagonist) parents met. It fell a little flat for me, and I’m not really sure why. I’m on Ice & Ivy now, and I’m much more invested in that story.
Overall, Mages of the Wheel is a fantastic series sitting smack in the middle between fantasy and romance, and I highly recommend it to any fan of the genre. I’ll probably end up getting the series in paperback at some point.

A sapphic fantasy standalone in-between was Dragon Queens by Kathleen de Plume. Intriguing concept, but I had a hard time warming up to the characters. There’s just something about Gwen and Ava that didn’t work for me, though I can’t pin down what that was, and you might not even get what I’m talking about if you read it. Cool take on dragons though, and the cover is to die for.

Next up: From the Grave of the Gods by Alan K. Dell. It’s the opener to a sci-fi series, the Augment Saga, and it does a pretty good job of that. Fun setup for the rest of the story, even if I didn’t really vibe with either of the POV characters (that’s a me problem though, it’s just harder for me to click with dudes most of the time).
I also read the series’ prequel novella The Re-Emergence, and my god, that was a ride. I actually liked it better than From the Grave of the Gods, and I think the alien POV characters have a lot to do with that. I don’t find that sort of thing a lot, and The Re-Emergence did it extremely well.
I still have the rest of the series on my Kindle (it has since left KU), but I’m not sure I’ll have the time to get to it. It will definitely stay on my list though!

Lastly, I went ahead and downloaded a book by Carissa Broadbent: Slaying the Vampire Conqueror. She’s been on my radar for a while (primarily for her War of the Lost Hearts series), but I’m always hesitant to start a series, mostly because it tends to take me forever to get through one (and I’d already committed to Mages of the Wheel). Slaying the Vampire Conqueror is a standalone fantasy romance set in the Crowns of Nyaxia world, so it seemed like a good introduction to her writing. Unfortunately, it didn’t really hook me. Maybe that’s because I haven’t read the rest of the series (though it says it can be read independently). I just ended up not invested enough. I did read several reviews though that specifically mentioned that Crowns of Nyaxia is markedly different from War of the Lost Hearts, so I’ll keep that on my list for the future.

That’s the ones I read, though I’d like to shout out some of the ones I downloaded but likely won’t get to. My subscription runs out in a week, and the next act of Destiny 2’s Heresy arc just dropped, so I have my doubts

Anyway, here’s to Phobetor’s Children by MG Mason (historical horror), Sea of Souls by N.C. Scrimgeour (folklore fantasy), How We End by LM Juniper (post-apocalyptic fiction), Reality Check by Dave McCreery (military sci-fi), Into the Darkbower by MC Burnell (dark fantasy horror), The Last Outlaw by Lee Hall (horror western), and Crowns & Swords by J.L. Meyrick (sapphic romantasy). All of those are still on my TBR, whether that’s buying them or binge-reading the lot of them if I decide to re-sub to KU for a month when I’m on holiday.

As per usual, all of this is my personal opinion, and you may just end up loving something that I could just not get into. Tastes vary wildly, and if any of these sounded good enough for you to pick up, I’m happy! Stay reading, and I’ll see you next month!

– Cara

BLADE OF THE CROWN is available in paperback and through Kindle Unlimited! Get swept away with a princess and her royal guard as they find themselves stranded on a strange island, trying to find their way home – and into each other’s arms.

Finding Success, Growing Your Audience, And Accepting Bad Reviews

Image by Gerd Altmann via Pixabay

Getting a bad review sucks. I’ll say this right now, I get it. That’s why I don’t really read reviews anymore. I used to, over a decade ago, but not these days. Why? It’s no use. People will think what they think, they can review at their leisure, and there is nothing I can do to influence either their opinion or their review behaviour. Nor should I be trying to. The purpose of reviews is to present reader opinions across the whole spectrum, and that spectrum...