Kat Parrish's Blog, page 7

Another new boxed set...

 

Hexes and Heiresses. 

The call for submissions had me at "Witch Queens." I once wrote a historial novella about Catherine the Great being a queen, and I keep thinking about giving QEI the same treatment. I like research, so that would be fun. But it woul also be fun to set a witch queen story in my mythical fantasy worl of the Twelve Realms. I even have a cover for it. I like the cover for the anthology. You can preorder it here.

Grady Hendrix is a genius!

 

One of the things that makes my day job so interesting is that in addition to reading scripts, I also read books. Even a bad book is often better than a mediocre script, and in the course of my job, I've been introduced to a number of wonderful writers. I still can't believe I get PAID TO READ. My grandmother never understood this job. "So you're paid to write book reports?" She didn't think a job was a real job unless you dressed up in a skirt and jacket outfit (accessorized with heels and discreet pearl button earrings, which she called "earbobs") and sat in an office all day with maybe an hour off for lunch. I work way more than 40 hours each week--112 hours on average. I work from 8 a.m. to 12 a.m. seven days a week, but that counts breaks for social media or watching YouTube videos or whatever. Anyway, my job is wonderful and that's where I first read Grady Hendrix's My Best Friend's Exorcism. (Which I didn't know had been turned into a television series. I haven't seen it yet, but it's on my TBW list.) 

If you haven't discovered his writing, please let me introduce you to him.

Here's his website. His tongue-in-cheek "About" section on his site is hilarious.

Here's his bio on Wikikipedia.

Here he is on Goodreads.  

Boys and balls!

 

Balls, Bats, Pucks, And More.

It’s all part of the game.

Watch as these guys battle the biggest game of their lives. Winning the hearts of the ones they love.

Some of your favorite authors have come together to celebrate two of our favorite things: love and sports.

Whether it's friends to lovers, brothers best friend, or midlife romance, these couples are going to score -- on the field of love AND in the bedroom.

Preorder Bases loaded now. Exclusively on Amazon.

 

Happy Birthday Stephen King

 

The first book I read by Stephen King was not Carrie. I'm not sure what it was. Maybe 'Salem's Lot. I do know that I was reading It by my dying mother's bedside (she died a couple of days after my birthday and the book had been a birthday present). I read The Stand and was blown away. And the experience was even more bizarre because I think I had the worst cold of my life while I was reading it. I loved the original miniseries that was made from it. I didn't see the remake. I thought the first one was perfect. The casting was superb. Terrible wig on Laura San Giacomo. Jamey Sheridan was terrific. The late, great Miguel Ferrer was great. Ruby Dee. Ossie Davis. Matt Frewer. Gary Sinese.  Kathy Baker and Ed Harris in cameos. Just so much fun.

I think King is the Dickens of our time. And I say that even after reading Insomnia. The less said about that, the better.  I hope he lives to be a hundred.  

More promos...

 If you're watching House of Dragons and just can't get enough Dragons, then this is the promo for you.

Urban fantasy (dragon shifters), fantasy, epic fantasy. It's all there. And with an extra helping of romance to make the books extra tasty.
There's even an alien dragon king. (And those three key words together probably ensure the author gets a lot of traffic!)
Next up is shifter romance. I am still bemused that werewolves morphed into "wolf shifters" at some point. They were a lot more frightening back when they were werewolves but they're a lot sexier now. I'm an outlier, I know, but I prefer the scary version. You can find the books here. I am curious though. What are the favorite shifter aniimals? Wolves. Bears. I've written a tiger shifter and a lion shifter as well as the usual wolves.
In my novella Reszo, my character belongs to a clan of Russians who can shift into creatures called byks, which are a sort of Minotaur-like bull creature.
Fae romance is a lot of fun. I'm in a couple of boxed sets with fairies as the main characters and I realized that we don't really know what fairies can do. Or elves, either, for that matter. They seem to be creatures that protect the woodlands. And we all know about the Fairy Godmother, but how powerful are they? Find out in the books collected here.  
I'm actually in four of the box sets promo'd here. A lot of them are available for 99 cents, some are on preorder. This is another mixed bag with everything from sweet romance to paranormal romance to alien sf (blue abs!)  

Book Promotions for September

 I love book promotions because they're always a great way to grab a bunch of new books at once. Sometimes you have to enter your email address, sometimes you can just snag them. As a writer, looking at promotions is a fabulous way to see who else is writing the kinds of books you're writing. It's a chance to evaluate your cover next to the other covers out there. I like to study blurbs and keywords to make sure I can maximize my own work. But basically, I just really like getting books.  Some of these book promotions feature books that are pruced $2.99 and lower. Find them here.

Here's another promo that's more focused on sci fi.  I'm writing a sci fi novella for Aliens on Earth this year and am excited to see the books in this one. 

Sespite the banner, the books here are an eclectic mix of genres, from straight up sci fi, space opera, fantasy, epic fantasy, and beyon. You can browse through them here.

And finally, here's a promo of books that are all action/all the time. I am particularly drawn to the apocalyptic Los Angeles ones. I love L.A., I truly do, but it's the kind of city where you expect an apocalypse to start. Check the books out here.

Kleopatra with a K

 

Kleopatra by Karen Essex is the first in a series of juicy historical novels giving us a new take on everybody's favorite Egyptian queen. This one focuses on the child who became that queen and she lives in such a treacherous world that it's a wonder she made it to adulthood. The story opens with the death of Ptolemy--even a blind Armenian healer cannot prolong his life--and three-year-old Kleopatra sitting vigil with her sister and half-sister. The little girl is her father's favorite--he calls her his "piece of joy"--and up until this moment, her life has been charmed. But the king's death is going to unleash a bitter contest for his empty throne, with the other contenders playing ruthlessly. 

This first book has everyting a reader could want--history, pageantry, sex, betrayal, great characters. The only thing its missing is dragons. (And you won't miss them.) Kleoatra's time was so far in the past that even the ordinary feels magical. This is an extremely satisfying book.

It's almost autumn

 

Fall is my favorite season. Summer is nice but Fall has it all. Stephen King's birthday (Next Wednesday, the King will be 75). Halloween. Thanksgiving. Most of the run-up to the winter holidays. I grew up in Washington DC where the autumn color is pretty nice, but my paternal grandmother lived near the Blue Ridge Highway and Skyline Drive, which is one of the premiere places to find Fall color. Lately, the foliage hasn't been quite as spectacular because ofthe droughts everywhere but it can be glorious. The Pacific Northwest, where I lived for five years, does Fall even more spectacularly. In Bellingham, in a little plaza right beside my grocery store, was a trio of trees, one golden, one scarlet, and one brilliant orange. They were spectacular. This is a picture from Deposit Photos but there was a park near where I lived where the trees looked just like this. 

Vote as if your life depends on it, because it does...

 I don't make a secret of my politics. Bu telling you to register to vote has nothing to do with who I vote for. It's one of the duties of being a citizen. The country doesn't ask much of you. Occasionally you might be summoned for jury duty. And every so often, they ask you to vote. If you aren't registered, visit this site. The mid-terms are important. The presidential election is important. The city council elections in your home town are important. VOTE!

I am cheered to see that celebrity influencers are geting involved too. Normally I just roll my eyes when I see a TikTok star or an Instagram influencer talking politic. But the lousy turnout of millennials shows that the regular messages are reaching them. So pieces like this are welcome:  https://youtu.be/V2cYnsYqlZE

I love book covers and I cannot lie

 One of my favorite things about being an indie author (and I've been traditionally published) is hat you have control over what your cover looks like. In trad publishing, even heavyweights like King and Patteson don't have that much say. But as an indie, you can have exactly the cover you want. (That doesn't prevent a lot of indie covers from being awful, but you could say that about a fair number of trad published books as well.)

A cover will make me want to pick up a book. The cover of Mexican Gothic, for example, is so beautiful it looks like a piece of art I want to put on my bookshelf facing out. (It's a wonderful book, but that cover is what snaggedme.) If ou haven't seen it, I urge you to look it up. I couldn't post the cover because it's protected by copyright, and I couldn't. 

When I started publishing 11 years ago, you could buy a lot of covers for under $50.  There were a couple of designers who specialized in inexpensive covers. They all used the same photo sources--Deposit Photo, Shutter Stock, Dreamstime--so you started to see the same faces over and over. (I have the same model on several books. His name is Gunther, and his images are up at a site called Period Images. Another of their models, Karl, is on a couple other books. 

Prices have gone up, but you can still snag some bargains if you cruise the sites. The one I use most often is Book Cover Design. They have tons of designs and one of the things I like about them is that they don't accept covers that use AI-generated images. I've seen a lot of posts touting how writers can make their own covers quickly and freely using sites dedicated tojust that. Right now, honestly, they mostly look awful but in a few months, who knows? (This is different from covers using characters that designers have patiently created on their own.) But the way AI images are created involves a kind of "sampling" from other images, that are the property of the designers who created them. In other words, depending on how you look at it, it's sketchy or it's stealing.  

Designers have to make a living too. Both my mother and my sister were artists. They made a living from their commercial art (working for department stores and thelike). I would hate to think that someone was stealing their art. (Piray of books is also a huge issue. I've seen my work on pirate sites. A lot of people say, well--I don't have the money to buy your book. Except, they're mostly all on KU, so you could spent $10 and get thousands of books for free. And don't tell me you don't spend at least ten dollars a month buying fancy coffee.Onw of my books has been downloaded so much that if I actually got royalties, I could actually cover my monthly expenses with my writing.) But I digress. We were talking about covers.

I have stockpiled a lot of covers, which turned out to be a good investment when prices started going up. A lot of designers I bought when they were just starting out are now in the $200-$300 range per cover. But there is one drawback. Styles in covers change and what looked like an awesome cover back in the day looks hopelessly dated now. Or you bought covers for a series you planned and now find yourself writing in another direction. (I have a number of covers for horror stories and I don't really write those that often.)

And because I have so many covers, I keep vowing that I'm not going to buy any more unless they fit a story I have that's written but needs a cover.  And mostly I stick to that. But when I saw that Kimberly of KDS Cover Concepts had a fantastic sale on her covers, I just had to snag this one. The cover instantly suggested a story I can fit into my Ostrander Witches series and it was just so cute and playful. And the price was absolutely right. I bought it as  birthday present for myself and I'm well pleased.