Dean Murray's Blog, page 14

Win an Advance Reader Copy of Hunted!

Just a quick post to let you all know that I want to reward the awesome fans who bought and enjoyed Bound.

The first 50 people to email me a link to their honest review of Bound on one of the major retail sites will get an advance reader copy of Hunted (my next book) a week or two before Hunted actually goes live on the major sites.

The fine print:

1. You need to have actually read Bound (I’m not sure how one would leave an honest review of something they hadn’t read)

2. Eligible retailers: Amazon, iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google Play, Smashwords.

3. For Amazon your review should show that you were a verified purchaser of the book.

4. If there isn’t a way to send me a link to your exact review, then you can link me to the book on the retailer and copy and paste your review in the body of the email.

5. All emails can be sent to my gmail address or my deanwrites.com address (deanwrites @ and dean @ respectively).

Ready. Set. Go!

Feb Status Update

I’ve got a bunch of other things that I should be doing right now, but I decided that it was time to get my status update for Feb written now, or I’m not going to get it done before I need to start writing my next book.

January was a tough month. I decided that I needed to write Isaac’s post Riven story (so a Reflections book). Some of my recent books have almost written themselves, but this one wasn’t like that. Partly that was because I needed to define a bunch more of the back story that up until now had either been very nebulous, or completely blank.

An awful lot of the backstory has just gradually come to me over the years, which is the way that I prefer the work. When it all happens organically it feels like there is less risk that I’m going to get something wrong, which is especially important when you start talking about the really big-picture stuff that tends to shape the major plot threads either directly or indirectly.

I don’t really believe in writer’s block, so that meant that I couldn’t just sit around and wait for the stuff I needed to come to me. I had to go out and actively start filling in the pieces I needed, and it was a stressful kind of activity to be doing on a deadline. I got a late start in January (I can’t really remember why now, but I think it might have been because of some editing I was doing), so there was quite a bit of pressure, but I managed to put another big swath of history in place and overall I think it will serve both series really well.

The other reason that I struggled was because I didn’t have much in the way of plot going into Isaac’s book. When you have a plot, then the history and world building tend to take care of themselves. When you have the history and the world building set out, then the plot takes care of itself. When you start without the need bits of either, then life gets tough.

The fact that I had to fit Isaac’s book into the framework of what had come before his book (including a conversation with Jasmin in Driven) added another level of difficulty, and there were some tricky parts when it came to what was going to happen with some supporting characters, but over the course of a couple days things slowly came together on my outline, and I was able to really get started on the rough draft on the 7th. I typed the last word 22 working days (25 calendar days) later, and the manuscript ended up being 119,762 words long.

I need to go back through it in April, I suspect that I’m going to find that it’s a little rough in spots, but I think I’m also going to find that it is some of my most solid writing yet. I’m thrilled to have gotten Isaac to where he is by the end of the book, and I wish that there was a way to get it out to all of you tomorrow rather than 6 or 7 months from now.

February was difficult for other reasons, mostly just the normal kind of life events that you deal with regardless of what you do for employment, but I did end up spending an extra few days that I hadn’t counted on when it came to getting Bound and Hunted laid out for trade paperback.

At this point Bound is live in e-book form, Hunted (Dark Reflections #2—Adri’s story) is queued up to go live at the end of March, Driven (Jasmin’s post-Riven Reflections story) is out with my advance readers, and Dark Reflections #3 (Which absolutely blew Katie’s mind) is undergoing its first editing pass.

In other news, the forum has incredible information on it. If you haven’t stopped by yet, I’d encourage you to do so. Jenine, Janelle and Lauren have asked some really insightful questions and they’ve got some interesting theories about what is going to happen next. I stop by there at least every few days and answer questions. It’s headed towards being the exact kind of place that I always wished existed for my favorite series.

There really is some great stuff in store for you all. I’ve never seen my advance readers this excited before. They are loving where the story is going and I’m excited to be able to share this journey with all of you.

Stay tuned for another blog post sometime in the next few days.

Dean

Dean’s Forum

Just a quick update to let you all know that there is some great discussion going on right now over on my forum. If you haven’t stopped by to check things out, you’re missing out.

I’ve been adding a few comments here and there to the discussion, and there are some pretty big hints about where the series is going if you know what to look for inside of a few of those posts.

Dean

Bound is Live!

I’m pleased to announce that Bound (previously called Disillusioned), the first Dark Reflections Novel, is now available for purchase at all of the major retailers!

The Setup: 

The only thing worse than having no family at all, is having a family that is out to hurt you. That would all be bad enough for a normal 17-year-old, but it’s even worse for Alec Graves. A shape shifter’s pack, his family, is the only thing stopping the other preternatural creatures out there from killing them.

Alec’s pack isn’t just neglectful, he’s pretty sure that his father wants him dead. Alec is about to be sent to the front lines of a war between his people and everything else that goes bump in the night. His only chance of survival is to convince everyone around him that he’s the perfect soldier, but there are lines that Alec won’t cross, not for any price.

Publisher’s Note: Dean Murray’s ongoing Reflection Series has been a stunning success with hundreds of thousands of copies in circulation, and a rich, complex world where choices—right or wrong—have real, profound consequences. Unsatisfied with the restrictions imposed on him by writing inside of the conventional series structure, Dean has returned to Sanctuary and the characters so many fans have fallen in love with.

Bound is the first in Dean’s new Dark Reflections novels, an alternate timeline set in the same world and featuring many of the same characters, but with a profoundly different backstory.

Dean finally answers many of the questions that his most dedicated readers have been asking themselves for years. What would have happened if Alec’s father hadn’t been murdered by the Coun’hij, how would Adri’s life have changed if her family hadn’t been shattered in a horrific accident?

The answers may surprise you, but one thing is for sure; you’ll see new sides of familiar faces and when all is said and done, you’ll never be able to look at some of them the same.

Readers new to Dean Murray’s writing can start with Bound in the Dark Reflections Series or Broken in the Reflections Series.

Buy Bound as an Ebook (only $3.99 or local equivalent for the first week):

From iTunes

From Amazon US

From Amazon UK

From Barnes & Noble

From Smashwords

From Google Play

From Kobo

I’m personally thrilled with how the Dark Reflections books are turning out. I think that Bound is both a great addition to Alec & Adri’s story, and a great start point for people who may not have had a chance to read any of my work yet. My advance readers are telling me that they think Hunted (book 2, due out in March) is the best thing I’ve ever written, and I think that book three is going to blow everyone away.

I hope you all enjoy Bound as much as I enjoyed writing it! I’ll be paying more attention than normal to my forum over the next few days if you want to swing by and discuss Bound at some point.

Dean

Cover Reveal/Voting for Bound (Formally Titled Disillusioned)

So the title to this one sums things up even better than usual. I’ve gone ahead and decided that the title for the first Dark Reflections novel has to change.

I’m starting to wonder if there are any writing and publishing mistakes that I’m not going to make before all is said and done. I hope so, but I guess only time will tell–I’m certainly on track to make a lot of them.

Katie and I have spent a lot of time over the last week trying to come to something we both like that could serve as the cover for the book we’re releasing on the 23rd (maybe I’ll do a post later with more of the background behind what’s been going on over the last few weeks to put us so far behind our usual schedule).

We’ve looked at several thousand fonts, separately and together, and Katie has mocked up something like two dozen different covers, but nothing was working like we thought it should. I’ve also recently looked at scores and scores of covers for other urban fantasy and paranormal romance books in an effort to get a better feel for what is typical for those genres, and Katie has done the same.

In the end I just kept coming back to the fact that at 13 letters long, the title itself was part of the problem, so Disillusioned will instead be released as Bound.

I’ve learned some lessons from this exercise. I’ll be sticking with titles that are shorter (probably 8 or 9 letters max) and I may very well hold off announcing a title until we have a cover done when it comes to future releases.

One of the things that has added to the stress this time around is the fact that we’re trying to brand the series more tightly. We’re trying for more homogeneous cover art and we’re hoping to settle on a standard font so that down the road a reader will be able to pick out one of my books from a lineup without having to actually read my name on the cover.

I think we’re both finally in agreement on which cover we want to use, so without further delay, here is Bound:

The Setup:

The only thi ng wors e than having no family at all, is having a family that is out to hurt you. That would all be bad eno ugh for a normal 17-year-old, but it’s even worse for Alec Graves. A shape shifter’s pack, his fami ly, is the only thing stopping the other preternatural creatures out there from killing them.

Alec’s pack isn’t just neglectful, he’s pretty sure that his father wants him dead. Alec is about to be sent to the front lines of a war between his people and everything else that goes bump in the night. His only chance of survival is to convince everyone around him that he’s the perfect soldier, but there are lines that Alec won’t cross, not for any price.

Publisher’s Note: Dean Murray’s ongoing Reflection Series has been a stunning success with hundreds of thousands of copies in circulation, and a rich, complex world where choices—right or wrong—have real, profound consequences. Unsatisfied with the restrictions imposed on him by writing inside of the conventional series structure, Dean has returned to Sanctuary and the characters so many fans have fallen in love with.

Bound is the first in Dean’s new Dark Reflections novels, an alternate timeline set in the same world and featuring many of the same characters, but with a profoundly different backstory.

Dean finally answers many of the questions that his most dedicated readers have been asking themselves for years. What would have happened if Alec’s father hadn’t been murdered by the Coun’hij, how would Adri’s life have changed if her family hadn’t been shattered in a horrific accident?

The answers may surprise you, but one thing is for sure; you’ll see new sides of familiar faces and when all is said and done, you’ll never be able to look at some of them the same.

Readers new to Dean Murray’s writing can start with Bound in the Dark Reflections Series or Broken in the Reflections Series.

I think that Katie has created a number of really gorgeous covers, but out of all of them, the cover for A Darkness Mirrored has been my favorite.

You’ll see some common characteristics between A Darkness Mirrored and Bound. Negative space off to the side where the spine is/will be, and a single individual as the focus of the cover.

I had a hard time letting go of the font that Katie used on A Darkness Mirrored, but ultimately I think the fonts on the cover for Bound are a better match for other books in the genre(s) I’m trying to write in.

Here’s the runner up cover and the runner-up back copy:

Alec Graves has lived a life of privileged luxury; at least that’s what it looks like from the outside. The truth is that all of the money in the world can’t make up for an existence where he doesn’t know who to trust.

If that was the worst of things Alec could have learned to adjust, but as a shape shifter, he also has to constantly worry about being dragged into a dominance fight by one of the other alphas in the pack.

It’s only a matter of time before Alec gets sent down south to fight in one of the many border wars currently raging against the vampires or the jaguars. If Alec is killed in the fighting then his friends and sister won’t last the month.

Publisher’s Note: Fans of Dean Murray’s Reflections Series will enjoy this alternate timeline novel that examines what would have happened if Alec’s earlier life had gone differently. In this timeline Alec’s father wasn’t murdered by Agony and the pack wasn’t broken into multiple pieces. In this timeline Alec’s dad joined the Coun’hij and nothing has been the same since.

I suppose this isn’t a vote in the traditional sense, but I’d love to hear from all of you in the comments on this one. Do you think we chose right with the cover and the blurb? Do you think that the ones we are going with will make new readers want to pick up the series? I certainly hope so, I have some really big plans for Bound.

Thanks,

Dean

Quick Status Update

Wow, it’s been a rough couple of weeks. I’ve added a new page to the blog (Progress tracker). Hopefully having my daily word count numbers up there where everyone can see them will give me the little extra push I need to get moving on Isaac’s book.

The cover for Disillusioned has been a real beast for a number of reasons that I’ll hopefully get into tomorrow. I think we are just about there though, so hopefully tomorrow’s post will have a cover reveal component to it. Which reminds me that I need to go take another stab at writing the back copy for Disillusioned.

I hope that you are all having a much better week that we are having here at the Murray house.

Dean

 

Mailing List Update (number 2)

Hi, everyone.

Another quick update to let you all know that I didn’t give up on the mailing list and resolving the issues roughly a third of you were having with the signup process. My apologies that things have dragged out this long, I’ve been sick since Christmas Eve, so I’m not firing on all cylinders. Nothing that some rest won’t fix now that Katie convinced me to go in to the doctor this morning.

I’ve got a question in to tech support, which will hopefully help, but from experience in my past lives I know that intermittent problems like this are always the hardest to troubleshoot. Because of that, I’ve gone ahead and changed the e-mail list over to a single opt in configuration. That means that there isn’t any confirmation e-mail to worry about. Once you enter your e-mail address into the form on my site, you’re on the list and you should receive the e-mail with the coupon codes for Torn and Thawed Fortunes a few minutes after that.

That should fix the problem of people not being able to sign up, which only leaves the question of what to do about everyone who tried to sign up over the last two weeks but had problems with the confirmation link.

I don’t want anyone who tried to sign up for my mailing list to miss out on the free books that I promised them, so I’m going to go ahead and manually subscribe everyone who has tried to sign up for my mailing list but has not completed the e-mail confirmation step. Once that is done, I’ll send them an e-mail with the coupon codes on it and hopefully at that point everyone will be sorted out.

Thanks again for your patience during this process,

Dean

Mailing List Signups

Hi, All.

Just a quick post to let everyone know that the new mailing list seems to be ticking along more or less as planned, but there are some people who have only completed the first step of the signup process.

My list is a double-opt in list, so if you haven’t received a confirmation e-mail asking you to click a link that points back here to my site, or if you haven’t received your e-mail with the coupon codes for Torn and Thawed Fortunes on it, then you aren’t actually signed up yet.

Manually adding people is a little work on my end, but I’d much rather do that than have someone miss out on their copies of Torn or Thawed Fortunes. Just e-mail me (dean (at) deanwrites com), let me know what e-mail address you were trying to get signed up with and I’ll do my best to get you squared away.

Thanks,

Dean

Merry Christmas

For all of you Christians out there, Merry Christmas.

For everyone else, Happy Holidays!

I hope you all have a great few days and a wonderful new year.

Dean,

December 2013 Status Update

I’ve been meaning to get another status update written for a couple of weeks now, but today is really the first chance that I’ve had to stop for long enough to sit down and take stock of where everything stands.

As you’ve already notice if you’re here reading this, this month I set up a new blog (which promptly fell over and had to be rebuilt). I also set up a new mailing list, which is superior to the old list in nearly every way and unlike most of the alternatives I was looking at, won’t cost me hundreds of dollars per year.

If any of you happen to be looking for a mailing list solution you should consider Sendy. You pay a one-time fee for the software, load it up to the web server that hosts your website, and then it uses Amazon’s infrastructure to actually send out the emails at a cost of just $1/10,000 emails. The real test of my installation will obviously come at the end of January when I announce the official release of Disillusioned, but so far everything seems to be working very well.

If you’re not very technical, Ben (the owner of Sendy) will install Sendy for you for a fairly modest fee.

In other news, I’ve loaded most of my titles up to Google Play, so that is an option for those of you who prefer to get your books there.

In writing news, November was National Novel Writing Month and since I was due to start another book the first of November I went ahead and participated in NaNoWriMo (or NaNo-Rhino as my oldest daughter calls it) this year.

Knowing that I was posting daily word counts where other people could see them was an incredible motivator and I finished Ben, Jasmin and Geoffrey’s book in record (for me at least) time. The rough draft weighed in at 105k words and I typed the last word on the 19th. Since I don’t write on Sundays that meant I completed it in just 16 working days for an average production of 6,500 words per day, which is the highest sustained writing production since last December when I was desperately trying to get Forsaken finished up before Christmas.

As you can probably tell, I’m pretty excited about how well this latest book came together. The extra 10 days or so of time in November was a big part of why I was able to take some time away from editing so that I could get the new website and mailing list up, so a banner production month like that couldn’t have come at a better time.

The other thing that I began experimenting with on this last book was splitting my writing up into 25-minute sessions and tracking my progress on a session by session basis. I’ve always tracked my daily production, but it did seem to make a difference to monitor my writing at a more granular level.

It probably sounds like I’m sharing all of this to brag (maybe a little, but I know there are lots of people out there that blow my production numbers out of the water), but the primary reason for sharing it is that it raises the possibility of more than 6 books per year. It’s still not set in stone, but the possibility is there. The other reason for sharing this particular accomplishment is that I know some of my readers have aspirations of finishing books of their own, and I thought it might be helpful for that crowd to see some of the things that are helping me get more work done in less time.

Changing gears again, Disillusioned (Dark Reflections 1) will go live on January 23rd and I think it is going to be a real treat for everyone. Some things are the same as Broken and Torn in the Dark Reflections timeline, but there are a lot of things that are incredibly different and all of those differences stem from one thing, one incredibly important difference that has changed the course of Alec and Adri’s world in profound ways.

Part of me wishes that I could just come right out and tell you all exactly what that difference is, but that would ruin half of the fun that I have in store for the series. There are still a lot of layers that I need to peel back before all is said and done.

I hope to be able to do a cover reveal post for Disillusioned a couple of weeks before the release date.

March 17th (don’t worry this is all listed on my New Release Schedule Page) will see the release of Hunted (the second Dark Reflections novel). Disillusioned was primarily about the differences in Alec’s life, Hunted is all about Adri.

I can usually tell how good of a job I’ve done on a given book based on my wife Katie’s response after she reads it. When I told Katie that Adri was going to get her own Dark Reflections book there wasn’t much excitement on Katie’s part, I think because she was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to keep a full-length novel about a ‘normal’ human exciting. I’m happy to say that the final product vastly exceeded Katie’s expectations.

She basically read it straight through, stopping only grudgingly to eat dinner and go to bed for the night. It’s been a while since one of my books grabbed Katie out of the gate like that and refused to let her go, so I think I’ve managed something extra special with this one! I can’t wait to see what all of you think of Hunted.

I’ll be releasing another Reflections book on May 29th, and this one will advance Ben and Jasmin’s storyline at the same time that it introduces Geoffrey to some of our favorite shape shifters. I’ll be dropping some pretty key hints in this book as to some of the things that are still in store for the series.

The next release (August 8th) will be the third Dark Reflections novel. This is the book that I just finished, so the jury is still out on it (I need to go back through it again before I give it to Katie to read) but there are some pretty important things that take place in this one as well. I made some good progress on strengthening one of the key relationships in the Dark Reflections books. That relationship is actually one of the main reasons that I initially set out to write the Dark Reflections series, so I’m incredibly excited to see it start to come together.

I also drop a major hint at the end of this most recent novel, a hint that reveals one of the layers of intrigue that I’ve been wanting to tell all of you about for more months than I care to think about.

I think that my book ‘pipeline’ is as strong as it has ever been and I’m looking forward to where the series goes from here.

I still have a major plot hurdle to work my way around, but I think that my next book will be Isaac’s story, after which I’ll either do the fourth Dark Reflections novel or I’ll write Jess’ story and peel back the curtain that has been hiding Wyatt’s origins.

Simultaneous to all of that, I’m working out what is going on with Alec, Adri and Rachel. Needless to say that I’m starting to worry that it’s all going to get hopelessly snarled in my head, but so far so good

I hope that you all are able to spend next week surrounded with friends and family and that you have a merry Christmas, or whatever the equivalent holiday is for you.

–Dean