Marissa Farrar's Blog, page 9

Plans for 2013! Ending one Series and the Start of Another...

2012 was a great year for me. I saw a number of new novels published; the last couple of books in my Serenity series, together with a couple of stand alone novels. I rode the high wave of KDP Select, and came down on it too, much like many other authors! I've met some amazing new people - both other authors and readers as well. I've had my books hit the top 100 for their genre, drop back out again, head back in, and fall back down the list again! I've learnt new marketing techniques and given up on some old ones. I've figured out that a quick flash in the pan of sales is all exciting, but the slow and steady sales are the ones that count.

I'm hoping 2013 will bring more of the same. A lot of indie authors are complaining about falling sales, but the fact is being an author has never been easy. It's damn hard work, with lots of highs and lows. Just because the traditional gate keepers have been removed doesn't mean that all of a sudden anyone who can string a sentence together deserves to be successful. It takes time and dedication, often at the expense of personal or family time. I never started this journey with the ambition of being famous and hugely wealthy (not that it wouldn't be nice!), but simply that I would be able to work as a writer and not need to do a day job. I've achieved that now, which is amazing, so my new goal is to be able to support my family completely, and get my husband out of his day job.

I'm hoping the publication of my new series this year will go some way toward achieving this. By the end of January, I should have the first draft of the final book in my Serenity series finished, which will then be put aside to 'mature' for a couple of months. I'll then turn my attention back to editing and publishing the first book in  the Spirit Shifters series, 'Autumn's Blood.' My goal, though it may be an ambitious one, is to have three books in the new series done and published by the end of 2013.

2013, for me, will be all about the new series. I know many people (myself included) will be sad to see Serenity and Sebastian go (though don't worry, Elizabeth will be getting her own YA series, which Serenity and Sebastian may be making the occasional cameo appearance in!), but I'm hoping people will come to love the characters in the new series just as much.

I hope you'll all stick around so see how this year pans out!

Epic Kindle Holiday Sale - Win a Kindle Fire and $200 of Amazon Vouchers!

a Rafflecopter giveaway





I wanted to let you all know about the fantastic holiday giveaway I'm involved in this year! As well as being able to grab a holiday bargain read for either FREE or $0.99 on the 27/28/29 December, you can also win $200 of Amazon vouchers and a Kindle Fire. Visit this facebook page for more details.

http://www.facebook.com/EpicKindleGiveaway


Amazon US   $0.99



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Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone!

The Passage by Justin Cronin: Review

I was given the paperback of this novel by my mum, who told me to read it straight away because she wanted someone to talk to about it. I was doing NaNo at the time and was slightly reluctant to plunge into the giant brick of a book that is 'The Passage' but I'm so glad I did.

The Passage is a vampire story, but not one of vampires you would want to date. These are vampires who kill, in fact, not only kill but wipe out the world as we know it. The story spans a hundred years. Set it modern times initially, a group of government agents and scientists have discovered a virus which effectively turns people into vampires. To test the virus, twelve men on death row are brought to a secret government facility and turned into 'The Twelve'.

At the same time, a little girl named Amy is abandoned by her mother on  the doorstep of a nunnery. Amy isn't like other little girls. She is able to communicate with animals, and sometimes, it seems, the dead. Because Amy has no background, one of the government officials, Wolgast, is sent with his partner to collect Amy and make her part of the vampire experiment.

However, everything goes wrong and even though Amy is infected with the virus, she doesn't react the same way as the men. When all the vampires are released from the facility, Wolgast runs with Amy and hides her in a cabin the mountains.

Here the story jumps forward almost a hundred years. With most of the world wiped out, there is one containment left which houses a community of survivors. The place is surrounded by walls and lights to keep out the vampires - known as virals or smokes. The people living here - including a cast of young characters; Peter, Alicia, Michael  Caleb, Mausami, and Sara - know nothing of the outside world or the world before the virals took over. Every day is a battle to survive. But when a girl called Amy, who is now a teenage girl, shows up, they discover a beacon and a way of finding out what happened to the world all those years ago. They set off on an epic journey which sees lives lost and others created, to not only discover the truth but also see if there is a way they can fight the virals once and for all.

What I came to think of as book one (before the virals) and book two (after the virals) are very different. Other than Amy (and a couple of very brief surprise revisits to characters), the whole cast of characters is completely different, which I guess is understandable considering it's almost a hundred years into the future! However, it did throw me at first and I found myself kind of missing the characters from the old book. This didn't last for long though as I quickly got into the new characters.

The virals are fast and strong, and there are some truly frightening moments in the book where the characters are literally fighting for their lives. There are some points in the book which are a bit slower, but considering the length of the novel this is hardly surprising. Overall, I wanted to keep turning those pages.

Probably my only real criticism was that I did struggle to connect with Amy in the second part of the book. Where in the first part, my heart broke for her and everything she'd been through, because she didn't speak much in the second part or show much empathy or emotion at all, I did find relating to her in any way difficult.

This, however, is my only negative point about the book and it's really only a slight one. Overall I absolutely loved 'The Passage', staying up reading because I didn't want to put it down.

This is the sort of book that inspires me to write: to write more, to write bigger, to write better. The moment I closed that last page, my mind was already working up an epic story which would probably take me years to write. But you know what, it doesn't matter if it takes years to write. If it ended up being the same sort of fantastic, inspiring tale that Justin Cronin created, it would be worth it.

I can't wait to read the sequel, 'The Twelve.'

Love Vampires? Cover reveal; Release by Nicole Hadaway

Today I get to be one of the lucky few who gets to reveal to the world the cover of Nicole Hadaway's novel,    'Release'. Nicole was originally published alongside myself with the small press who first published 'Alone'. She is now re-releasing the novel with the super sexy new cover. Check it out!


How hot is that? The artwork was done by Claudia McKinney at Phatpuppy Art, with type done by Ashley at BB Designs (Bookish Brunette). Phatpuppy Art are the same people who created Amanda Hocking's new covers, so she was certainly in good hands!

So has the cover got you interested? Here's the blurb:


For vampire Miranda Dandridge, using her supernatural abilities to rescue children from impossible circumstances is her means to be a part of the human world that she loves so much, despite the atrocities of WWII.
For doctor Ben Gongliewski, saving his fellow Jews from the horrific death camps is an end for which he risks his own life every day, hiding his Jewish heritage while feigning loyalty the SS.
Neither Miranda nor Ben expects to find love in World War II Europe, but that is exactly what happens as they work for the Resistance.  When the war draws to a close, it seems like the vampire and the doctor are free to start a future together.  But just how far the Nazis will go to further their own evil ends?
Desperate times make for ruthless men as loves and lives are threatened, but, Miranda and Ben know that their world cannot go to hell, not by any means…
RELEASE by Nicole Hadaway, to be published January 4, 2013 by Visionary Press Cooperative. Available as e-book and paperback from Amazon.com, and e-book for Nook at Barnes & Noble. Author profile:"As a lawyer, Nicole Hadaway knows all about bloodsuckers and deals with the devil. She currently lives in Texas where she pens such tales involving the supernatural, featuring her heroine, the vampire Miranda Dandridge." You can find out more about Nicole at her blog, The Dandridge Estate.

The Next Big Thing!

No, this isn't me blowing my own trumpet! I was tagged by the very lovely Libby Fischer to take part in the latest blog hop craze which seems to be sweeping through the blogging world, to answer a few questions about my latest WIP. At the end of these questions, I will tag a few more people to continue the hop. So here goes...

1) What is the title of your next book?

Autumn's Blood - Book One of the Spirit Shifters Saga

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

The initial idea came from a dream, though the details of that dream allude me now. I just remember dreaming about people who had spirit guides in the form of animals. I've wanted to write a werewolf story for a while now, but wanted to put an original spin on it, and these two ideas just clicked together.

3) What genre does your book fall under?

Paranormal Romance/Urban Fantasy

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a
movie rendition?

Ooh, I love this question. It always helps me get the image of my characters straight in my head as well. There are two main characters, but I can't help but mention a couple of the other characters as well as they play a big part and some of the book is told from their POVs.


Doctor Autumn Anderson played by Charlize Theron




Blake Wolfcollar played by 'The Rock'



Chogan Pallaton played by  Rick Mora


Mia Henderson played by Rachel Bilson





















5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

One sentence - that's so hard!

A scientist with an ancient legacy, and a man hiding from his past, fight to stop a Government Agency from using the paranormal to create an army to conquer the world.

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

This will be self-published unless I get an amazing offer for the rights to the series!

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

The first draft is pretty much done and was my NaNoWriMo project so took me a month, though I started planning it at the start of the summer! I'm hoping to have it polished by February and edited out and published by March

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I really have no idea!

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?

As I said before, I wanted to write a werewolf story, which I hoped would be the start to a new series. I wanted to make this series as different from the Serenity Series as possible, so while the Serenity series is essentially about three people, (Serenity, Sebastian, and Elizabeth) this series has multiple characters, government agencies, and is on a much bigger scale.

10) What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

I hope this will be the start of a five book series. The first three books are already planned!


And now for my time to tag other authors! I'm going to be tagging  Belinda Frisch, JoAnne Kenrick, Nickie Asher, and Cassie Rae!

How to Make a Living as an Author

Let me start this post by saying that this will not happen overnight. If you’re someone who wants a ‘get rich quick scheme’ then find something else. Being an author is a long, hard struggle where you’ll receive the sort of feedback and plain derogatory put downs that would have the unions up in arms had they been received in any other workplace.
If you’re serious about working as a full time author, you need to grow a thick skin, be a total workaholic, forego any other hobbies, and be happy to live in a total pigsty for a large portion of the time (unless you make it seriously big – in which case, hire a cleaner!).
Are you still here? Okay, good.
My story, like many, began a long time ago. I decided I wanted to be an author just out of university, when I realised I’d spent my whole time studying (Zoology) trying to find time to write. However, it wasn’t until seven years and several novels and numerous short stories later that I eventually got published.
I loved what I was writing (Paranormal Fiction) but when a fellow author approached me to see if I’d be interested in writing some erotica for a paid for blog page – Everything Erotic – I jumped at the chance. My royalties from my vampire novel, Alone, were pretty miserable (read non-existent), and after having my second daughter, I was starting to line up job interviews to get back into a job I hated.
It was now early 2010 and I was starting to get some decent erotic short stories together. Under the umbrella of Red Hot Publishing, I put my short stories together and released them as my first erotic ebook under my maiden name, M.K. Elliott. This collection was called Rescued and this was also when my life changed. Within two weeks, Rescued began to climb the chart of Barnes & Noble. At its peak, it hit the #1 spot for erotica and was selling over 400 copies a night.
Needless to say, my hunt for a new day job ended right there.
In the months that followed, I put more erotic titles out with Red Hot Publishing, several of which sat on the Amazon best seller list for Erotica for months. In this time, I also got the rights for two of my paranormal novels back from the original small publisher and decided to put them out myself. I now self-publish the majority of my work in both name (M.K. Elliott and Marissa Farrar) under the umbrella of my own publishing house, Warwick House Press.
While I’m certainly not rich or hitting the big time, I do earn enough money to support my family and put any thoughts of a day job far behind me.
But it hasn’t all been plain sailing. I used to think that when a book started selling, it would continue to sell, but that’s not the case. Even mainstream authors will see a peak in sales for their new releases and then the sales will start to drop again. Occasionally you’ll get a stroke of luck (or you’ve done some smart marketing) and your book will climb again, but chances are it won’t stay at the top. This is why you’ve got to keep writing to keep ‘filling the funnel’ to keep those average book sales up.
So what I expect you’ll all want to know is how you can actually earn a decent income from writing, so here are my tips:
            Do you only have one book? Are you spending several hours a day blogging, facebooking, tweeting, just trying to get people to read it. Well don’t. Stop it right now. Any time you’re spending on the internet, you’re not writing. Wait until you’ve got more titles out before you spend any time promoting. You need people to read one book and then move onto the next. If you’re still six months away from the next title, people will read your one book and then forget all about you.      Mix things up. If you write horror, fantastic, but why not try writing a thriller or a paranormal romance, or dare I say it, some erotica! You never know, you might even be good at it. Why not create a pen name and try something completely different?           Keep mixing it up! The great thing about ebooks is we’re now free to write whatever length story we want and get it out there. The more title you have out, the more visible you’ll be – even if those titles are only .99 short stories. So write your novels, because they’ll always be the best-sellers, but also try your hand at some short stories or novellas.       Be clever with pricing. Yes, low priced books are easier to sell because people will take a chance on them, but getting smaller numbers of sales at a higher royalty makes a big difference as far as keep a decent base rate in your earnings. I love it when my $0.99 erotic titles take off, but its the steady sales of my $4.99 novels that bring in my regular income.      Try out KDP Select. This has its good and bad points, which I won’t go into now. If you do decide to go into KDP Select, do it properly! Make sure you’ve hit all the big free book sites before hand (Pixel of Ink and E-Reader News Today). Getting one of the big guys to feature your book will make the difference between a couple of hundred downloads and a double-digits of thousands!       Write a series. The big earners in ebook publishing are generally educated women who write a series of romance novels! Now if you’re not a romance writer (or a woman!), that doesn’t mean you can’t write a series! I have one series almost finished now, one in progress, and another in planning. My stand alone books sell, but nothing like my series books.       Figure out what word count will work for you and stick to it. When I'm writing a first draft, I try to write at least 2K a day. However, I do tend to hop between projects, so often that 2K ends up split over a couple of books. As long as each of those books gets finished and published  then that's fine, but don't start what you're not going to finish or have too many going at once or you'll never get anything out there!      Make sure you have a good editor and book cover. This is basic, but so true. If you don’t have these basics then there’s no point in bothering to do anything else.      Run a sale! And advertise it! There are plenty of sites now which will allow you to advertise a sale for as little as $50. Make sure you put in your product description that the book is on sale for a limited time only (fear of loss, so people purchase right away).      Above all, be hard on yourself. You’re tired? Tough luck. This is your business now and you’re the boss. Imagine if you went into work complaining you were tired and you couldn’t do what you were paid to do. Would your boss pat you on the head and tell you to go home and take a nap? No, he’d tell you to shut the hell up and get on with what you were paid to do. If you want to earn money from this gig, you’ve got to do the same thing to yourself.
I hope this helps and you’ve picked up some tips or ideas. I know I live in fear of my sales drying up and finding myself down the local supermarket looking for work. So in the meantime, I’ll keep working my butt off and pray that people keep buying my books!

NaNoWrMo 2013 - Some (hopefully) Helpful Tips!

This is my third year taking part in NaNoWriMo. The first year was hard, with lots of complaining on my part and vows never to do this thing again. The result was a woman's fiction novel with a difference, which is still sitting unedited and untouched on my laptop. Year two was much better. I wrote the vast majority of the third book in my Serenity series, Captured. That book was finished, edited and published by March the following year and has now sold several thousand copies! Happy days!

This year, I've been looking forward to getting started since the summer! I've had my novel planned (at least the first few chapters - I don't plan out whole storylines as I don't like the ruin the surprise). It's the start of what I hope will be another five book series and is coming along great. I have to be honest though, if I didn't have the writing experience I have, I would probably still be in the swearing, cursing, vows to never do this again, early days.

So here are some of my tips to keep that word count going:


Set aside time each day. If you normally watch tv in the evening, switch off the box and spend that hour writing instead. Working a day job? Take a notepad to work and scribble in your lunch hour.Plan at least a chapter ahead so you know where you need to go when you sit down for your writing time.Don't think too far ahead or you will get overwhelmed. Break the challenge down into measurable chunks. Remember this is not a race. The people who have written 20K in the first three days may end up blocked and struggling by the end. Slow and steady will get you to the end!Break down the words you need to get. 500 words during the day, and just over a 1000 in the evening will mean you'll hit your goal.Get involved in some word wars. Focus, uninterrupted, for twenty minutes at a time.and see how many words you can write. I can generally manage around 500 in that twenty minute period which means I can pretty much get my word count in an hour.If you start to get stuck, jump ahead and write a scene which is playing in your head, or that you really want to write -- a great conversation between your characters, a revelation in your plot, or a seriously spicy sex scene!Again, if you're blocked, switch mediums or locations. If I loose track of where I'm going with a story, a piece of paper and a pen will often see me through. I create spider charts with all the different characters and elements and try to see where the story is heading.And if you're REALLY stuck, kill off a character. That will always give you something to write about, even if it doesn't happen until later in the book!I hope that helps somewhat. And remember that it doesn't matter if you fall behind early on. There is plenty of time to catch up!
***Want to stay updated about Marissa Farrar's new releases? Sign up to the 'new release' form at the top of her blog***

Dominion, Book Four in the Serenity Series is Out Now!

Whoo-hoo! Today is my official release for Serenity's book four, Dominion! Though the book went live on Amazon over the weekend, today is the day I had planned for my release. With that in mind, I have lots of giveaways planned over on my facebook page today, starting a little later today when people across the pond are out of bed. I'm going to giveaway signed copies of my books - including paperbacks of Alone, Buried, and The Dark Road, personalised jewellery, and even a C.D. of the music I write to.

On top of that, to celebrate my new release, the rest of the Serenity series is on sale! Alone is free, Buried is down from $4.99 to $1.99, and Captured is down from $4.99 to $3.99! So if you've not already started the series, now would be a good time to stock up on the books at a low price.

So head on over to Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk to grab your copy of Dominion! In a few weeks, Dominion will also be available on Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and Sony, but in the meantime you can purchase various formats which you can load up onto which ever e-reader you have from Smashwords.

In other news, it's NaNoWriMo next month! I will be taking part and this is my third year, though I'm still undecided about what I'm going to work on! Though I had planned on writing the first book in a new series, Serenity's book five, Endless, keeps calling to me. The characters keep having conversations in my head, so I'm wondering if I may end up having to write that one instead.

Are you planning to do NaNo this year?

***To stay updated about my new releases, make sure you fill in the new release form at the top of my blog!***

The Vampire Diaries - Season Four Review

I was late coming to The Vampire Diaries. When I first saw the adverts of Elena stumbling around in the woods with the 'vampire' (who randomly could walk in the light) vanishing when she cut her ankle, I actually rolled my eyes.

I've loved vampires from my teenage years. My first introduction was a birthday sleepover involving lots of giggling girls and 'The Lost Boys'. After that was the dark, brooding and ever-lastingly lovely Louis from 'Interview with the Vampire'. So when I saw ads for 'The Vampire Diaries', I rolled my eyes and went back to writing my stories - where vampires were actually scary!

However, one night while spending my usual evening in front of the computer,  the television was on  in the background and the show came on. We were onto series two by now and strangely my interest was drawn. Once I actually stared paying attention to what was happening, that was it. Show over... at least on my part. I was hooked.

Unlike in Twilight, these vampires kill! They also have sex - and hot sex at that! I watched a couple of episodes and soon went back and rented out series one to watch each episode back to back (cue several late nights and crabby mornings, though they were all worth it...)

So, here in the UK, the fourth season has just aired. Wow! What a fantastic start.

I have to be honest, initially I thought Elena becoming a vampire was a cop-out (see here for my earlier post) but the way it was handled was excellent. I loved how the production team worked in all of Elena's heightened senses so we felt them for ourselves, and also how she remember the things Damon had tried to glamour from her memory.

The usual brotherly tension was also prevalent in this episode, with Damon angry at Stefan for following Elena's wishes and letting her die. Damon would have saved Elena first, whatever she wanted. But I had to wonder, did Damon want to want to save her humanity because he wanted her to be human or was it because he didn't want her to remember the times he'd told her he loved her and that he'd met her first?

However, even though I love Damon (and really who doesn't???), it was also lovely to see Elena and Stefan growing close again. Perhaps this will be the end of the love triangle for a while?

There were a couple of other story lines which ran alongside Elena changing - that of Klaus taking over Tyler's body (which I couldn't really see the point of) and the council getting all of the Salvatore Vervain and planning to rid the town of the vampires and all those who help them. Also, witch, Bonnie, attempted to help Elena, but at the same time welcomed in some 'dark magic' so I'm sure that will be a featured storyline during this season as well.

So this season really does look like it's going to be different from any of the others. With Elena now a vampire, and a whole heap of people not only out to get them, but to also expose them for what they are, Season four will be one to look forward to!

Low Priced Indie Books... Did they Ruin Things for the Rest of Us?

The other night, I managed to get into a debate over the same thing twice - the price of ebooks!

In the early indie days, the $0.99 price tag was a jumping point for several now indie publishing rock stars, most of which have now signed up with one of the New York big boy publishing houses. But while they've all jumped off the indie bandwagon, they've left the rest of us floundering around in a market place saturated with low price (and often low quality) indie books. That in itself is fine - everyone has an equal right to publish in this day and age - but the affect it has had on the readers is more important. Readers now expect to pay no more than a couple of dollars for an indie novel, yet will happily compare that indie novel to one of the New York published novels which would set them back $10 and more!

I read a post on Amanda Hocking's blog that one of the reasons she took a big publishing contract was because she knew, however hard she worked, the editing would never be good enough unless she had someone who was at the top of their game working on her books. I can understand this thinking, especially when readers pick up an indie book and read it expecting the same sort of editing that the book would have received if published by a big house.

I am a big believer (now) that a book shouldn't be published unless it's been edited professionally. An author should try to save every penny to pay for the editing. However, I didn't always have this opinion. When I first got on the indie train I thought just having another author edit my work would be perfectly fine. It wasn't.

So what is the right price to charge for an ebook? Let's look at the costs. (The following are an approximation and obviously do vary!)

Editing - $300 - $500
Proofreading $75- $150
Cover design $120
Isbns $30 (for two - one for ebook, another for paperback)
Paperback upload (Lightning Source) - $60
Advertising/email subs/website/hootsuite etc. (optional, but neccessary!) $100 per month approx.

Before the book is even published an author is looking at an outlay of up to $760, and then another $100 a month going forward. If an author prices their book at $0.99, they would need to sell well over 2000 copies just to break even. In the indie world, with so much competition, most indie authors don't even earn $500 a month!

So what is the right price for an indie novel and did those early pricing strategies set the rest of us up for failure?

Yes, and no. Unfortunately pricing is still the biggest tool indies have against the mighty power of the big six. I price my novels at $4.99, but I don't think I would put them much higher, even though traditionally published indie books charge more. Is this because I think my books are worth less? In a word, yes, I do. I'm not saying that my story or writing is worth less, but I'm not dividing my profit between a number of people. Once my costs have been paid off, the profit goes in my pocket, unlike a traditional publisher who have on-going costs including paying staff and royalties to the author.

So do I think $0.99 is too low a price for a novel? Yes, definitely. $0.99 should be a price reserved for short stories. I even think $2.99 is too little, but I can understand authors using that pricing in the hope people might try out the novel of an author they've never heard of.

Pricing will continue to be an issue, with some readers steering clear of low priced ebooks because they automatically think the books will be poor quality, and some readers even refusing to pay for an ebook because there are so many free ones out there. (This actually happened to me - someone read one of my books, loved it, and then actually laughed at the idea of paying for another one... like authors don't deserve to be paid for their work, unlike any other industry out there!).

What do you think is a reasonable price for an ebook? If you're a reader, do you tend to try out the cheaper books, or try to steer clear?