Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 40

I got a new book out…and I have some rants saved up

Having a new book out should put me in a better mood. If nothing else, having written two books in June should have helped. This month, I’m releasing book 2 in the Tobe White series, Fangs, Humans, and Other Perils of Night Life, and I wrote book 3 in the same series, Adventures in Trolling. Then right after I finished that, I wrote the second book in the Alice the Wolf series, the spin-off to the Peter the Wolf books. I was so stoked to finish A Wolf In Girl’s Clothing, although I did spend the last few chapters crying. (Really sad ending.) Alas, that happy feeling didn’t last longer than a day. Such is the life of an artist, I suppose. The longer you do this stuff, the less of a buzz you get out of finishing a rough draft.

Before I get to explaining why my mood sucks, I should show y’all the book blurb and cover for this month’s release:

Book 2 in the Tobe White series begins three years after the events in A Boy and His Dawg.

After moving out on their own, Tobe White and Keith Moon have settled into a quiet life of domestic bliss until five vampires stroll into the mall where they work. The coven is followed by a monster hunting militia, and choosing to side with the vampires, Tobe picks a fight with an unrelenting enemy eager to destroy him and Keith.

Forced to flee after their home is destroyed, Tobe accepts the vampires’ help in building a new life. But their first stop in Las Vegas pits them against other covens looking for fresh blood, and Tobe learns just how evil some vampires can be.

Both the vampires and the hunters hope to recruit Tobe, yet both sides are equally ruthless. Caught in the fight between the righteous and the wicked, Tobe tries to bluff his way to freedom, leading to one disaster after another. With every misstep, Tobe comes closer to losing his humanity. Even if he can overcome the corruption of his soul and avoid being used by both sides of the battle, he must answer a difficult question: what good is being right if it means losing everything he holds dear?

Despite some Twilight jokes, this second book is quite a bit darker than the first, with Tobe being pitted against monster hunters and some really evil vampire covens. You can find this episode on Amazon, Kobo, and my blog bookstore with Gumroad. It’s only $2.99, being a rather short novel. (Almost a novella, really.) And because this is a sticking point for some vampire fans, no, the vampires don’t sparkle without an application of body glitter. (Which they sometimes do when they go clubbing to make hunting easier, hence the Twilight jokes.)

I should have been pimping Tobe’s book in a blog post yesterday, except that even after I got the email from Amazon saying the book was available in the Kindle store, it wasn’t. I couldn’t even pull up the book by searching for the ASIN. It finally showed up with said search in the afternoon, but still can’t be found by the title or by searching using my name. Amazon is looking into it, and they’ll probably fix it in a day or two, but lately it seems like I can’t publish anything on KDP without something going wrong. The last three books have all had some problems on Amazon, but went through just fine on Kobo and Gumroad. But as Amazon is the only store where I get sales, this makes every launch a bit of a headache.

Not that it matters with the releases I’m doing these days. With so many calls for more diversity, you’d think a book featuring a gay black cheerleader would be snatched up eagerly. Totally not the case. I see dudes buying Orson Scott Card’s stuff or saying they will go see the Ender’s Game movie because they can overlook his homophobia and they have open minds, but it’s only open enough to read white dudes who are racist or sexist. For them, reading a queer author is just too open minded. This seems to be the case whether the book features straight characters or some gender/sex variant protagonist. I suppose it’s for the best, as if they did read me, they’d just get mad and claim I’m ruining their beloved tropes. But damn, I get tired of seeing pleas for more diversity. I’m like “You can’t find work much more diverse than mine!” And they’re like “No, we didn’t mean we’d read queers, LOL. We meant we wished white dudes would write people of color and mansplain race to us in a homogenized and non-threatening manner.” Well…all righty then. They don’t want actual diversity. They want token diversity so they can validate themselves as “color-blind.”

Let’s move on. I was already a bit down from the Amazon problem, and opening day ended without a single sale. So I checked my email in the hopes of getting anything positive, and then I found out my web host is shutting down. I JUST got my account a few months back, and already I have to go get another. So I have to go through the same hassles and headaches of moving the blog, possibly discovering that my next host is rubbish, or evil incarnate.

Which brings me to my next topic: I really wish people who aren’t creative didn’t throw “living the dream” in my face when I’m upset about creative projects not working out the way I’d hoped. I put out a book, and after a weak first month, yeah, I get a bit cranky. So I go on Twitter and someone not even following me invariably says, “Yeah, but you’re living the dream making your art. That should be good enough to keep you happy.”

Now look, every writer has different goals for their dream, but almost all of them want to be read/heard/looked at. I don’t know of any artist who wants to make art and have it be overlooked. When it comes to me, my dream is being able to make a living off my books. Not to become rich, or famous. (Or even Internet famous, though I do seem to be gaining some infamy for my big mouth and my checkered past.) I just want to have some disposable income because I can’t work a regular day job anymore. Hell, I can’t even walk my dog without needing a long lie down to recover. (Multiple sclerosis is a bitch, y’all. I don’t recommend it.) So it stings to know in advance that nothing I write is going to do more than recover the cost of the cover after a few months of constant begging. Some books don’t even do that. Add to this the headaches of vendor errors, the web host problems, and the frustration of seeing other indies boasting 75 five-star reviews when I can’t even get ten reviews at any rating, and then there’s nothing dreamlike about this gig.

I don’t even know why non-creative people think just making art is a dream come true. Anyone can do that. You just sit down, open your mind up, and boom, art happens. Whether it’s good art or not depends on how often you practice, but anyone can do that. No, the real dream is getting people to interact with that art, regardless of the media form used. No band sits in their garage making the first album saying, “Just making this is good enough, so we don’t want any fans.” They don’t say, “It’s okay if we never recover the cost of producing this album, because the important thing is, we made it.”

This DOES NOT HAPPEN anywhere except in the imaginations of non-creative people. To every artist, there is no worse nightmare than releasing their creative efforts and have it go nowhere. Artists want people to react to their stuff. They want to hear from people who tried their stuff. They want progress reports to know if that new technique they tried worked for their audience, or if it bombed and they need to let it go and try something else. Art that gets no interest or reaction is as useless and frustrating as kicking a wall. It accomplishes nothing and serves no purpose. It might even be harmful, or at least damaging to one’s self-esteem or creative drive.

“But Zoe, you’re wrong,” you say. “You’re living the dream by making art. Lot’s of people can’t do that.” No, they can if they tried. They won’t try, and those who won’t try also don’t have the empathy to understand that failing to garner an audience turns the dream into a nightmare. If you think that creating something and investing all your time and energy into it only to watch it flop is your dream, then seriously, people, you need to dream better. Because that dream you’re foisting on me as something you think I want is dreary as fuck.

*Takes deep breath* And now I will conclude this post on a semi-positive note. On the first of July, I said I hoped I’d get a review sometime in the month. Two hours later, I got this 4-star review for the second Peter the Wolf book, Dogs of War. When I posted this on Twitter and thanked the reviewer, they replied and said they were going to start book three, Roll the Bones, the same day. They then said they really liked my writing style and my characters, and I was all giddy and smiling. (Of course that doesn’t last long. Praise is like crack, and after a while the same dose doesn’t keep you bumped up for the same length of time. Also like crack, one hit is never enough. You’re always fiending for the next fix.)

The thing is, I want you to look at that review. Please, it won’t take long to read. Finished? Okie dokie.

Notice how it isn’t long or very detailed? Well it doesn’t need to be. Some folks think of making reviews as if it’s a 500 word essay for their English teacher. Most people hated doing those book reports, and with good reason. You’re forced to read a dull book, and then the teacher wants you to write about the book and its themes like you gave a shit. You’re not allowed to say “I hated this book because…” In those essays you get graded badly for writing anything resembling a personal opinion. With assignments like that, it’s no wonder people develop an aversion to making reviews.

BUT, you don’t have to write a review like that. If you read a book voluntarily without someone forcing it on you, I guarantee you the artist would LOVE to know what you thought. They don’t want a master thesis, either, and most authors won’t grade your reviews. (I say most because I’ve seen some indies who call even a tepid 3-star review “bullying.” And those authors are sheltered assholes who haven’t got a fucking clue of what bullying or cyber-bullying really look like.) I keep going back to a two-star review on Goodreads that said, “Awful, awful book” to point out that a review doesn’t even have to be a paragraph if you don’t feel like it. It still says to the author, “I read your stuff, and I acknowledge it happened.” (Although that three-word example implies: “And now I need to shower to get rid of this scummy feeling,” but I digress.)

And yeah, it did suck to read that three-word, two-star review. It felt a lot better to read that single paragraph four-star review. But both reviews tell me that the writing reached them enough to cause a reaction.

I wish more people would understand that reviews don’t have to be book reports. Maybe if more authors and publishers pointed this out and we could get readers over their aversion to reviewing, we could get the percentage of reader reviewers higher than the 5% it seems to hover at. Then again, when even big authors like Anne Rice is willing to sic her fans on a bad review, it’s no wonder readers decide to hide out and say nothing. (Much as I like most of Anne’s books, the woman is a grade A asshole, and what she did to that reviewer was way out of line.)

Anywho, what I’m getting at is, when you buy something from a creative person, your review means a lot more to them than you might realize. That’s true whether we’re talking about an indie band putting out their first album, or a writer like me publishing their 42nd book. Other people will look at your review and maybe think about giving that artist a chance. So don’t think of it as an essay (like this blog post has turned into). Think of it as a short status update telling your friends what you’re up to. It can be one paragraph, one page, or three words. The length and tone are up to you. But please, don’t remain silent after trying something new. Nobody benefits from you keeping your thoughts to yourself.

And that’s it for this post. I’ve slowed down my reading because I wask banging out 8-10K a day on Alice’s second book, which is why I haven’t had any new reviews up. I like to practice what I preach, and I’m really going to try and pick the pace back up now that I’m in between writing projects. I’d like to finish at least three books before I start my next book. We’ll see if the muse will leave me alone long enough to make that happen.

Gab at you later…

Book review: Forever by Maggie Stiefvater

There’s a lot of things I could say to start this review, but I’ll begin with this: do you know what it feels like to be waiting for one sentence for an entire three books? There’s doubt and worry that maybe the writer won’t bring it up, or that when it comes, it won’t be phrased right. And then BAM, there it is, that one most important sentence, that one moment of utter brutal honesty that I’d been waiting for, for three whole books.

Forever is the concluding volume of the Wolves of Mercy Falls series, and it has a lot of ground to cover. It begins with Shelby murdering another wolf in human form, resulting in Tom Culpeper getting the clout he needs to take down federal protections and organize a wolf cull. As the book progresses, most of the story is about Sam and Grace trying to reconnect amidst all this chaos, and there’s the subplots of Cole St. Clair seeking a cure for the werewolf disease while also juggling his shaky relationship with Isabel Culpeper.

But of all the events explored in this final volume, what I needed to see, more than anything else, was Grace calling her father out for his hypocrisy. And she did, and that one sentence she used was brutal and cut straight to the bone. I was deliriously happy to finally see that from her, and for me, it brought closure even though there was a seventy or so pages to the end of the book. Everything else would have meant nothing if Grace hadn’t found the strength to confront her father. I think he got off too light in the end, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers.

I loved all the characters in this story, as usual, and even Tom Culpeper, I could identify with. He’s not an evil man. He thinks his son was murdered by the wolves, and he’s on a quest for revenge. He’s Adrian Quinn from Jaws, but this book is set from the perspective of the animals he hunts. Which makes him unique, an antagonist who would have been the hero in another book. I really like that.

I loved Sam and Grace. I loved their reunion, and their big romantic scene passed the “wet test” even with a fade to black. (What can I say? I’m a fan of good kissing scenes) I loved Cole’s slowly emerging maturity, and Isabel’s too, though hers almost comes too late. She’s spent three books telling others “You have to do something,” and finally it dawns on her that she needs to do something and stop ordering others around. And I seriously missed Rachel, and when she at last showed up, I was grateful to see her, even if her scene felt too brief. There was very little I didn’t love about this last volume.

Having said that, I have two HUGE complaints about the book, and while they don’t take away from my overall enjoyment of the story, I don’t feel any review of mine would be complete without me pointing to the stuff that bothered me.

Complaint one is about a scene with Sam recalling his early childhood with Beck, and Beck’s advice to him about his abuse can be summed up as “Lock it away, and don’t ever talk about it again.” Present day Sam then says, “And after that, I was all better.” The hell he was, and this problem with a dishonest resolution is two-fold. First of all, telling an abuse victim to stop talking isn’t therapy. It’s denial of a problem to ease the “suffering” of the advice giver. It’s what people say because they don’t want to hear bad stuff, so they make the victims shut up. This is the sort of thing we need to stop telling abuse victims, but it just gets regurgitated over and over like we haven’t already seen how much damage it does.

Secondly, Sam’s statement isn’t even remotely close to the truth, as has been shown in all three books. The poor guy can’t even go near a bath tub without losing his shit, and everything about him suggests a broken person who is only now beginning to come to terms with what happened to him in childhood. That he’s healing now is BECAUSE he’s talking to Grace about these things, and that he’s thinking about what happened to him. He’s healing because he stopped living in denial. So all that “put it away” crap is what led to him remaining damaged for so long. It didn’t make him better, and that particular scene’s blatant lie really rubbed me the wrong way.

Complaint two is with Shelby, who is a non-entity through all three books. We’re only told throughout the series that she got abused, and it messed her up. Well that’s frankly not good enough for me. We never find out what her old life was like. We never find out why Beck chose to turn her at such a young age. The only scene we get of flashback for her just reinforces that she’s psychotic, but again, there’s nothing to provide context. Okay, she snapped. WHY DID SHE SNAP? It’s not important enough to explore, apparently.

The prologue of this book is told in Shelby’s perspective as she’s killing another girl, and I guessed who it was long before the reveal. But what bugs me is, this death wasn’t needed to advance the plot, and all it really does is say, “Shelby is such a bitch.” Tom losing his son could have been the catalyst he needed to authorize a hunt. All it takes is one dead human for the rest to panic attack wild animals in real life, so I didn’t buy the stone cold bitch role Shelby was given. To be perfectly honest, looking back, the entire series would have been better if Shelby was edited out.

The thing about Shelby that gets to me is, everyone else in the story has a chance to show their motivations. Everyone else has a personality. But Shelby is a plot device, the mean bitch who hates everyone and everything, and who supposedly likes being a wolf, but is trying to kill just about everyone in her pack. She’s never a person, and in a series where even the antagonist is humanized, that lack of detail stands out and is that much more glaring.

But, these two problems do not do anything to diminish my enjoyment of the book, and that’s why I’m giving Forever 5 stars. I would recommend the series to fans of paranormal YA who are looking for something without a “save the world” plot, and which for the most part manages to bypass a lot of the cliches of the genre. I really enjoyed this series, and will be reading The Raven Boys very soon to get my next Stiefvater fix.

Book review: Odds and Ends: An Assortment of Sorts

Odds and Ends is a hard nook to fit into any category or genre, and is composed as a collection of flash fiction pieces. For me, short story collections are a hard sell, but flash fiction isn’t really the same animal.

If I have any complaints, it’s that a lot of the scenes feel like something cut out of a longer story. They give just enough to establish a scene, but leave me guessing at what might come before or after the brief glimpses.

But the writer’s style makes each of these snippets compelling, and I wouldn’t care what happens next if not for the engaging way the narrators of each piece pick at my curiosity. Many of the works are dark, but nothing comes across as being done for shock value. So for me, this is a great collection that’s a fast read, perfect for picking up when you’re in a rush and just want a quick reading fix.

I give Odd and Ends: An Assortment of Sorts four stars and recommend it to anyone interesting in well written dark flash fiction. And if that isn’t enough to interest you, you can get the collection for free from the Raw Dog Screaming Press site in mobi, epub, or PDF.

Stuck in a rut much?

The other day, I saw a blog post where someone was complaining that they didn’t find vampires, werewolves, or zombies scary anymore. Their theory was that these monsters represent an external threat that we can neutralize, and that it takes away some of the fear. Well I think they’re wrong, and I could point to some stories in all three genres that have scared me. But there’s a whole lot more fiction featuring these monsters that are boring, and the real reason is, the monster horror genre is in a rut.

Some of you will say “Nuh-uh! I love these new stories.” Yes, but when you read one, are you scared? Are you ever really horrified? No. You get excited because someone is stroking your nostalgia boner, and this new story you love is just like that one story that did scare you when you were a teen. So what changed? Absolutely nothing, and there’s the problem.

Regardless of which monster you look at, writers fall back on a formula that will take the story to the same places we’ve always gone, reveal the same “secrets” we already know, and will resolve in the same ways we’ve seen over and over for more than three full decades. You have got to do something different to scare me.

You want an example? Let the Right One In scared me, but it wasn’t the vampire who did it. It was Hakan, Eli’s guardian. Here we have a “reluctant” pedophile who thinks it’s morally wrong for him to have sex with kids, but has no trouble murdering teenagers for Eli to drink from, all on the possible condition that one day Eli might let him have sex. Hakan sees Eli as a perfect answer to his problem, a child body with an adult brain. Guilt-free sex is what he’s after, and for this, he’s willing to murder slightly older children. That’s one scary monster, but he’s scary because he’s playing on real fears of the skeezy guy hanging out in the park. In a book full of monsters of various kinds, Hakan is scarier than a vampire because his motivation for killing is not to survive. He kills to bribe a vampire child for sex.

But the moment at which the book was scariest is Hakan pouring acid over his head in a suicide attempt. Here’s a guy I understand is a monster, and yet all the way up to the reveal, I was muttering, “Please, God, let him be dead.” That he lived was scary shit. I felt this fear for the worst character in the book. That’s the skill of a great writer, being able to generate pity for someone who doesn’t deserve it. Lindqvist is one of my favorite horror writers right now because he can scare me with any monster. In Harbour, his monster was the sea.It should be so huge and ambiguous that it has no effect on me. Yet there were scenes in the book so scary, I got freaked out and had to turn on all the lights in the aprtment.

Let’s compare Let the Right One In to the carbon copy vampire hunter stories. The vampires all have about the same lack of personality, and the same centuries-long killing streaks that strangely don’t leave behind trails of evidence for cops no matter how gory they get. The hero will win in the end, and while each story might find a different path to that conclusion, after reading 10-20 stories on the same theme, you really can’t be surprised or scared anymore. There’s no shock left over to feel for gore and dismemberment. You might still enjoy the story for validating your ideals that good wins out in the end, and it will still be well written. But the story being scary isn’t possible because surprise isn’t possible.

The same could be said for supernatural serial killers. I’m reading a story right now where the killer can get to anybody, anytime, anywhere. He can shut off security cameras with his mind, power down the lights in a store, and teleport inside to kill everyone before slaying his true target. The whole thing is boring. The problem is, once you’ve established in the first few chapters that the killer can do whatever he wants, you can’t build tension for anyone else in the book. It’s a forgone conclusion that they’ll die horribly.

I’m reading another horror story where the monster makes the main characters feel claustrophobia, and sometimes he calls their name. He’s able to manipulate computers and lights, and the impression given is that he can strike at any time. Yet 100 pages in, he’s still a faceless predator with no personality. The book isn’t helped by the main characters, not one of whom is interesting. I don’t care if they’re likable or not, but I need some motivation to feel for these people, and instead the story is taking the most boring, uninteresting people and facing them off against a monster that seems content to go “booga booga” and wander off to pester someone else.

This is not to say there aren’t some original takes out there, or that all horror is boring. But to scare me, you’ve got to get me out of the mindset that I’ve seen this before. You need to shake me up so that I can’t rely on my past experience to predict where you’re going with your story. You can’t do that if your story is a retread of someone else’s great idea.

A June writing report…

Today I put down the last words in the rough draft of a third book for Tobe White’s series, this one called Adventures In Trolling. I’ve not even released book two, Fangs, Humans, and Other Perils of Night Life, so I can’t say anything about this third episode without massive spoilers. I will say, though, that I’ve decided to make Tobe’s series open-ended like the Sandy Morrison books. Tobe’s story is too interesting to restrict myself to a trilogy, and this third book ends at just the right point for me to ask, “But what comes next?” And that will hopefully motivate my lazy butt to bang out the next episode this fall and get another book out in the spring.

If you haven’t read A Boy and His Dawg, you can find it on Amazon, Kobo, or Gumroad for $2.99. It’s a fast read and should be perfect for your summer reading list if you want something fast paced and a little romantic. Book two will be out early in July, so if you like the first volume, you won’t have to wait long to get another fix.

My next writing project will either be the last Zombie Era novella or a third episode for Sandy Morrison, which I’ve already titled Sandy Morrison and the Kidnapped Kitten. Those of you who read Sandy Morrison and the Pixie Prohibition will know why already, and hopefully the title will whet your appetite for the next installment in the series.

In other news, I’d picked up a bug last week, and I’m slowly getting over it. I have to consider myself lucky, as I’d gone through all these cold months without catching anything. And while this bug kicked my butt and gave me a nasty cough, I’ve had worse in previous years. So, I can’t complain much.

I’m reading four books at the same time right now, so I expect to have more book reviews for y’all soon, probably leading off with what should be a positive review of Forever, book 3 in Maggie Stiefvater’s Wolves of Mercy Falls trilogy. And with that last bit of news, I’m done with updates and will run off to celebrate another completed story with pizza and beer. Have a good weekend, folks. =^)

How I feel about Amazon…

I mentioned in my last post that while working on the omnibus edition of Peter the Wolf, Amazon’s search listing had replaced the first book with the four-book collection. I emailed Amazon, and their first response didn’t help. That, however, was my fault for not providing clear enough details about the problem. So I sent back a reply with a better explanation, and the tech said that yes, that’s a problem, and because they had similar titles, the computers thought the books were the same and linked the two editions. He unlinked them, and about 12 hours later, everything was showing up as it should.

It’s things like this that make me feel so very conflicted about Amazon as a vendor. Y’all may not remember this, but a couple years back, I yanked all my books from Amazon because after a big publisher launched a vampire book with the name Blood Relations, my own vampire book of the same name vanished. Amazon said they would investigate, and they never got back to me. At the time, I found someone working in one of Amazon’s warehouses who could still find the book in the system, and it was flagged to be hidden in search. I brought this up to tech support, and they said, “Oh, it’s a glitch. We’ll investigate.” And…no answer. So I left for six months.

Before that, I’d had another flip the vendor cart moment when Amazon blocked GLBT books from search, which was eventually blamed on “some guy in France” who set a flag on all gay books as “adult.” None of my books had been affected, but I thought it would only be a matter of time before one of my books got pulled for one reason or another. Despite the later incident with Blood Relations, this never came to pass. Even my most controversial books were never pulled from Amazon, while Smashwords yanked three of my titles, leading to me dropping them. (To this day, Smashwords will not remove my author profile, even though I requested it several times. So I have a page there that says “Zoe has not yet published any books.” Nice, huh?)

Both times, the reason why I came back to Amazon was the same. They were the only vendor with a built-in audience willing to read my stuff. More than that, Amazon is the only online book store with a built-in free promotion engine for my stuff. When a reader buys a vampire book, Amazon’s computers alter their logs and then when that reader comes back to the site, the main page has a bar of suggestions based on what they’re already reading. So that ad is saying, “Hey, you read this vampire book, so maybe you’ll like this vampire book too.”

Month after month, Amazon’s customers are buying my books in higher numbers than I see on my other vendors. I might get a sale every two months on Kobo, and a sale every three months on Gumroad. But Amazon usually gets me around 10-15 sales a month. When I got a record 45 sales in a month, Amazon made up roughly 95% of those numbers.

This is the mental trap I find myself stuck in whenever I read some new blog post about Amazon, whether it is about their random and ineffective attempts to curb sock-puppet reviews, or their seeming plans at selling used ebooks, or their arbitrary policies that remove certain books because they’re “offensive” while leaving up tons of books featuring rape porn, incest, underage sex, etc. (To be clear, I’m not saying the other books should be removed. I just think that if you’re willing to let some books with offensive material sell, you shouldn’t randomly choose one book and say, “Oh no, this is too much.”) Yes, it bugs me a lot that Amazon is the biggest game in town, and that they dictate terms to everyone from the littlest indie up to the biggest publishers. I don’t think any vendor should have this much power. But…the sales.

I think the main thing that gives Amazon all this power is their customers. Amazon Kindle readers are willing to look at complete unknowns and still buy their stuff if the price is reasonable, and in this way, they’re the most active supporters of indie fiction online. No other market can come close to touching Amazon’s numbers, and I can tell you from experience, Amazon’s customers are loyal to that market. So they won’t go searching other stores if your book isn’t on Amazon. They’ll just look for something else to read.

And then there’s Amazon themselves, who play hopscotch with their tech support quality. One month, I might have an issue easily resolved, and their tech is helpful and friendly, and I have a warm fuzzy feeling from a good customer support experience. Then the next month, I’ll have a problem that gets ignored and everyone I talk to runs around in verbal circles without addressing my complaints.

I’m a Kindle reader even though I don’t have a Kindle. I use my phone to read, or my PC, and that “buy with 1 click” button is really damned convenient. BUT, one of the reasons I started buying Kindle books was that my print orders either took months to arrive, or when they did arrive, the books were warped or outright mangled. When I bought Linger from Amazon, the first copy showed up so damaged and water-logged, the first fifty pages were illegible from ink bleeds. Amazon sent me another copy and told me not to worry about sending back the damaged copy. Well, the tech didn’t tell the computer that, so I got billed for a second copy because I’d never shipped back the first. Eventually we got it all sorted out, but it does tend to discourage me from buying print unless I think it’s a book hubby will read too. (Hubby is a Luddite who hates using ereaders, and who only reluctantly switched to a smartphone this year after I prodded him for three years about his little grey brick breaking down.)

To me, Amazon is the online Wal-Mart. Yes, their policies bug me. Yes, I dislike their growing power and the abuses that come with said power.

But as a customer, I like being able to find what I want and get it delivered 10 seconds later. As a customer, I like when Amazon’s promotion engine says, “Oh, you finished that series? Well here’s another series you might like too.” As a customer, I like the layout of their store, and I think they’ve got the best design of any vendor, hands down.

As an author and publisher, I like KDP making the publishing process less painful. I like seeing a new book pick up sales from people I don’t know, and I love knowing that Amazon isn’t just tucking my shit off in the back corner; they’re actively promoting my stuff to their customers based on their reading habits. Amazon isn’t spam bombing everyone with random books. They’re doing targeted promotions to the people most likely to read me. How can anyone not like that?

It’s a juggling act. They have convenience and numbers on their side, but their size and power often makes them finicky or even belligerent. I’d be remiss in not mentioning how the KDP Select program is forced on authors by way of cutting the royalties to certain markets. Amazon is saying “Okay, you jumped through the flaming pricing hoop to get 70% royalties, but unless we’re your ONLY vendor, you will only make 35% in certain countries.” But while that irritates the piss out of me, I go back to the reminder that no other vendor comes close to their sales. If I shut down my blog bookstore and pulled my titles from Kobo, I’d be missing out on a sale once every few months. Dropping Smashwords meant missing out on 2 sales a month. It’s not the same thing as dropping Amazon and going from monthly sale to nothing at all.

I want to be an ethical anti-corporate artist, and I want to give people options about where they can shop. But like any author, I also want to get my books out in front of readers. No other vendor does that so well as Amazon.

So, in conclusion, Amazon is like that one extremely rude sales manager at your job. Everyone hates him because he’s a jerk, and yet, no one is going to fire him because he brings in the numbers that keep the company going. To wish he would get fired is to wish that your company would fail, so you grin and bear it as best you can. I grin and bear Amazon’s more crass and arbitrary choices because the alternative is selling nothing and being an even bigger unknown than I am now.

Which of course makes me a sell-out. But hey, you go and write a book, and then you put it out on 2-4 vendors. Then when you make 20 sales with Amazon and 0 with the others, you tell me that you could ignore your sales and pull your books from Amazon based on your principles. I really did it, twice even, and it didn’t work out so good for me. Which is why, even if I have problems with my Amazon partnership, I won’t dare leave. I need them far more than they need me.

New release: Thicker Than Blood

The final book in the Peter the Wolf series, Thicker Than Blood, arrived on Amazon, but you can also check it out on Kobo, or through my blog bookstore on Gumroad. Here’s the blurb:

After escaping a life of sexual slavery, lycanthrope Peter Holmes has fought weredogs, a golem, and vampires, and he’s won his freedom from a term of indentured servitude to a harpy. Yet even with these victories behind him, he has yet to tame his inner demons and come to terms with his animal urges.

His return to Dallas, Pennsylvania also brings new problems with the weredogs and his adoptive family, and his muddled sexuality forces him to reconsider his relationship with Alice. Even as he struggles to behave, Peter’s wolf becomes infatuated with his enigmatic best friend Pi, who thinks that becoming a skinwalker is romantic. But biting Pi will mean war with the weredogs, and expulsion from his family.

Spiraling down into the depths of his addiction, Peter meets a strange werewolf who reeks of death. Chasing down this deadly wolf, Peter learns more dark secrets about the weredogs, and he sees in this revenant traces of what he may become if he can’t gain control of the monster inside him.

Faced with this unavoidable moral dilemma, Peter must decide where his loyalties lie. In this shocking conclusion to the Peter the Wolf series, there are no easy answers, and no victories gained without painful sacrifices. Will Peter accept that he is a monster and help destroy the weredogs? Or will he find the strength to be the hero that everyone expects him to be?

If you haven’t read any of the series, you have a couple options. First, as I mentioned a few posts back, you can get a zip file with all four books in four different DRM-free formats for only $7.99, or roughly half the cost of the full series if you bought them separately. But you can also pick up all four books in one combined omnibus edition for the same low price at Amazon, Kobo, or Gumroad. The omnibus editions have a table of contents file, so in theory it should be easier to navigate this mega-tome.

One minor headache has come up with the release of the omnibus: Amazon has temporarily (I hope) removed Peter the Wolf (Book 1) from my search listings, and they’ve applied the reviews from the first book to the omnibus. I’ve emailed Amazon to try and fix this, and if you’re looking for book 1, you can still find it here. So Amazon didn’t erase the book or anything dire. It’s just gone missing from search. Oy.

I expect I’ll be trying to ballyhoo the last book and the omnibus a bit over on twitter, but before I forget, I would like to politely ask readers if they would review of rate Thicker Than Blood and the Peter the Wolf omnibus edition. I’ll be the first to admit the story is a hard sell, being a dark tale of a young werewolf and victim of sex abuse who develops a relationship with an underage neighbor. A lot of people are going to look at a description like that and say, “Uh…I’m gonna wait to see what the reviews look like.” Totally fair, and of the 5 reviews I have for the first book on Amazon, only one reviewer felt like I’d tricked them into reading filth. The rest gave the story high marks and high praise for being challenging and full of hope despite the main character’s worst flaws.

There haven’t been that many reviews for Dogs of War or Roll the Bones, and those were all blog reviews, so I’ve not yet got anything to show Amazon readers for the rest of the series. I really could use your help on this. So if you’ve read the first three books but haven’t yet posted a review, please, consider doing so.

And that’s it for now. I’ve stalled a bit on reading while getting these books ready, but I should have some new reviews soonish.

Oh, no, wait, one other writing update. As you may know, in July I’ll be releasing book 2 in the Tobe White series, which is entitled Fangs, Humans, and Other Perils of Night Life. Well I’ve already started writing the third book in the series, Adventures in Trolling, and after a scant 3 days, I’m already up to 20K. The first day, I slammed out 11K, and the story is flowing very easily. I’m not sure if it’s that I’m more comfortable with Tobe’s character, or if I’m just really hot on this plot about a stolen baby and dimension hopping heroes. But either way, the rough draft should be done by this weekend. So, if you’re liking Tobe’s first book, A Boy and His Dawg, there will be two new books out for you in the near future. And if you haven’t read the first book, please give it a shot. Yes, its got gay romance with a vastly different wolf mythos, but there’s no sex, and it’s been picking up good reviews on Amazon so far.

Right, that’s really it now. I’m back to the Twitter mines to beg for sales.

Book review: Silence by Becca Fitzpatrick

It’s rare for me to read series books one right after another, but after the cliffhanger ending in Crescendo, I was too curious not to see how Silence would resolve this inescapable confrontation. Turns out, the answer is amnesia. Part of me wants to say “How convenient,” but as mind control is an ongoing theme in the series, this particular plot twist isn’t all that surprising or disappointing either.

In Silence, Nora wakes up three months after the events in the second book with no memories of the past five months. The life she comes back to is full of inconsistencies she doesn’t understand, and at the back of her mind is the insistence that someone is missing from her life. Despite everyone suggesting that she get on with her life, Nora begins to dig for her past, bringing with it all the revelations from the first two books as well as some new discoveries about the growing war between nephilim and fallen angels.

This third installment is perhaps the strongest of the three book thus far, perhaps because there was no need to ramp into the story. From the moment Nora wakes up in the cemetery, the story is more tense than the previous two books, and there’s none of the filler scenes of dates or parties. The book is almost all plot this time, and even abandons Nora’s wacky hijinks with Vee.

I think it also helps that the guys aren’t nearly as creepy or secretive this time. Scott was much easier to relate to in this outing, even when he begins making some bad choices near the end of the book. And then there’s Patch, who this time doesn’t keep his secrets as closely guarded, allowing a chance to see what’s been going on behind the scenes. His wing scars allow Nora to tap into his recent past, and these flashbacks do a lot to bring clarity to the story, where in the previous two books, the same flashbacks might come off as intentionally confusing.

The conclusion brings some closure, but still manages to end on a tense decision that has to be made soon, or the war Nora and Patch hoped to avoid will happen anyway. I might try to clear some current reads out before I move on to the last book, Finale, but I do expect to read it soon. I’m just too curious to see how Nora handles her newfound leadership and abilities.

I give Silence 4 stars and recommend it to fans of paranormal fiction about fallen angels. Patch still doesn’t do anything for me as a romantic lead, but his history and Nora’s story are interesting, so I don’t mind if the romantic angle kind of falls flat for me. Your mileage may vary, but I’ve found the first three books to be entertaining in a “don’t think too hard” kind of way. I look forward to the last book, and I think the series builds strength from the first book to the third. Definitely worth your time if you’re into paranormal YA.

May field report and update

May closes with me catching a case of brain drain right as I finished another novel, this time a three-way romance novel of 106K. No telling when I’ll fit it into the schedule for edits and publishing, but now that it’s done, I’m taking a short break from writing anything new. I’ve been cranking out words since before the start of the year, and now I need to step back and see what I want to work on next. Or I will as soon as my brain reboots and I can dress and feed myself more reliably. Brain drain is so much fun, yo.

I’m close to finishing another series if I can write the last Zombie Era novella after my vacation, and I’ve decided to release the final three novellas in a single volume. This is more because I only need to come up with one cover, but as the stories are all related, it may be easier to sell them as a single three story block. I hope.

It’s only a few days until the release of the fourth and final Peter the Wolf book, Thicker Than Blood, although the folks who contributed to the Indiegogo campaign should already have copies. At the same time that I publish the last book, I’ll also be releasing an omnibus edition of all four novels in one huge edition. These will go out on my blog bookstore, Amazon, and Kobo, but for readers who want the files separately, my blog bookstore also has a four book zip file which has mobi, epub, lit, and PDF files, all DRM-free so you can use them on whatever reader or tablet you prefer.

July will see the release of Fangs, Humans, and Other Perils of Night Life, and I wish I could say I knew what was taking the August spot, but I don’t yet. I do know there will be a book. I just don’t know which will be ready by then.

May was the last month I was taking a promotion vacation, and it was also the slowest month I’ve had all year, with only 8 sales total on Amazon, and no sales on my other vendors. I didn’t advertise, so that’s a large part of it. I have to be grateful I got the sales I did, and there were thankfully no refunds requested this month. So thanks very much to the people who bought books in May.

I do have one final favor to tack on for readers who’ve gone through the whole Peter the Wolf series. After you finish Thicker Than Blood, I would appreciate it if you would consider making a review of the last book, or of the series as a whole. Now that the series is done, people will wonder if it’s worth the investment of time in four books, so reviews might help convert some curious new readers.

Speaking of reviews, J.L. Forrest reviewed The Life and Death of a Sex Doll. This is a second recent positive review for the two-novella sci-fi ebook, and I’m grateful to both reviewers for checking it out.

I’m reading other peoples’ stuff during this vacation, so you can probably expect more book reviews soon. I was going to hold off on Silence for a few more books, but damn that cliffhanger ending in Crescendo suckered me into book 3, and I’m reading it almost as fast. I might just go ahead and whip through book 4, Finale, since it’s sitting there on my shelf too, and I can see the appeal of having a complete series all together. If it’s really good, I can read all of them back to back. If only my budget would allow me to buy more books. *Le sigh*

Or more than I already buy, as I have an order in with Amazon for Forever, the last book in Maggie Stiefvater’s Wolves of Mercy Falls series, Insurgent, book 2 of Veronica Roth’s Divergent series, and Kiss of Life, book 2 in Daniel Waters’ Generation Dead series. Definitely on a reading kick for episodic books. Standalone books are still good, but I like the stories that make me say at the end, “Okay, but what happens next?” Even better, sometime the series go in directions I wasn’t expecting, or they answer questions I still had left over in the first book.

Anywho, that was May in a nutshell. Thanks for the sales, and for reading the blog.

Book review: Crescendo by Becca Fitzpatrick

The sequel to Hush, Hush, Crescendo follows the usually bad story of Nora Grey, who is like 1/16th Nephilim. Her boyfriend Patch is a fallen angel who wanted to sacrifice her to become human, but decided against it and convinced the archangels to give him back his guardian angel status. So now they’re in love. And that’s the premise of Hush, Hush in a nutshell.

When Crescendo opens, Patch reveals that it’s against the rules for guardian angels to have relationships with humans, and so Nora breaks up with Patch. For the rest of the book, a pattern is set up where Nora is mad at Patch, and then runs into him somewhere. Then by running into him, Nora decides to make the worst possible choices, almost all of them aimed at getting back at Patch. Which is sad, because as it comes out, mostly she’s attacking Patch because he’s trying to do his job as a guardian angel.

Having said that, Patch is a secretive bad boy type, and he can never answer a straight question. Nora is left to hunt for answers, but Nora is not the brightest character in YA. If there’s an easy way to get information, Nora will try to find the dumbest way possible, get caught, and STILL not understand what she’s found. If she comes to any conclusion, it will be the exact opposite of what’s really happening. So you’ve got a bad boy angel boyfriend with secrets, and a neurotic, slightly dim-witted girlfriend. With a combination like this, it’s easy to see where their relationship falls into a spiraling pattern of trust issues.

Crescendo also introduces a new bad boy, Scott, another Nephilim who Nora has a shared childhood with. Scott was a bully back then, and the things Nora remembers about him makes him out to be a self-centered brat. The teenage Scott isn’t much better, actually. Nora, however, begins to notice that Scott is possibly Nephilim, and she decides to investigate despite Patch’s warnings that Scott is dangerous. In fact, Patch’s concern is what drives her to use some really lousy plans in the course of her investigation.

Add to this backdrop that Nora is seeing her dad, who was shot and killed a few years before. She isn’t sure if this is a ghost, a Nephilim mind trick, or if her father is alive. But each time she sees him, he disappears around a corner. Nora also receives a message that the Black Hand killed her father, and some of the information she gets suggests that Patch may be the Black Hand. You’d think asking a direct question might be the best way of sorting out a complex issue, but in the Nora Grey school of amateur sleuthing, the best way takes a tortured, painful route. And it involves stealing a vehicle.

These various strands are interesting, but the way the story gets to these points is less a graceful jaunt through a world, but a bumbling stumble taking the less well lit back route. Nora’s leaps of logic often sound stupid the moment she’s said them, so for the first two-thirds of the book it’s safe to assume that anything Nora “knows” is probably wrong because she’s the lousiest detective ever. But it is kind of fun watching her stumble, and some her worst decisions are entertaining, to say the least.

Patch still doesn’t do much for me as a romantic lead, and the few romantic scenes in this book were just as flat for me as they were in the first book. He is an interesting character, and I like finding out what the simpler real story is near the end of the book. But I’m not feeling his hawtness just yet. He’s like a creepy boyfriend type that makes mothers nervous, so it’s no wonder Nora’s mom initially endorses Scott as a possible replacement. (Which was creepy as hell, and I had to put the book down a while after that chapter. But once she realizes Scott is scum, Nora’s mom backs off her endorsement FAST, so that helped ratchet down the WTF factor.)

Crescendo ends on a big cliffhanger, but it’s okay, as I have the rest of the series on my shelf already. Despite the character’s head-scratchingly bad decision making, I rather like the story and the world-building. The romance aspect doesn’t work for me, but as it’s a smaller part of the larger plot, it’s easy to forgive.

Also, there’s no school of writing that says the character always has to be the smart guy, or that a story always has to be about making the best choices. But some of the ideas that Nora and her friend Vee come up with…wow, they’re bad. Not like bad writing. Like cringing and thinking, this is stupid and it will never work. But I gotta give kudos to the writer, because these plans don’t work, and she explores a way out of these corners Nora keeps getting herself trapped in.

So, it’s a fun, fluffy read which starts out about as creepy as the first, circles around in a holding pattern of mirrored scenes with Patch and Nora fighting, and then gets down to clearing up why Nora was totally, completely, utterly wrong. Again.

There’s still two books left in the series, but even if this pattern holds, I can’t say I mind. Nora does dumb things, but I still wonder just how dumb her next plan can possibly be, and what she will do when the whole thing blows up in her face.

I give Crescendo 4 stars and recommend it to fans of paranormal YA with angels, demons, and nephilim. It’s a summer reading kind of book, the kind of thing you take on vacation when you don’t want to think too hard. It’s like a mystery where all the clues are given to you, but the main character pulls you away from the conclusions with her own red herring leaps of logic. Can you sort out the real story before the ending? I didn’t, but then I wasn’t trying. I was just turning pages under the morbid curiosity to see what Nora would bungle her way through next.