Michele E. Gwynn's Blog, page 24

Deep in the Heart Author Event 2016

Plan to winter in San Antonio, Texas next February (right in the middle of our annual rodeo!), and attend the 2016 Deep in the Heart Author Signing Event at the Colony Banquet Hall on Colony Dr.

I will be one of the many authors meeting fans and signing books, so plan to come on by and say hello!

Get tickets here on the DITH 2016 webpage. See you there!

Get Exposed for FREE this weekend!

The presents just keep coming! Did you know you can get my book, Exposed: The Education of Sarah Brown FREE this weekend? Just follow the link and download the first book in the Kriminal Erotic Series. Enjoy!

#‎FREE‬ 3/27, 3/28 & 3/29 Exposed: The Education of Sarah Brown by Beau Coup Publishing's Michele E. Gwynn  http://amzn.to/1Ea4BG5 ‪#‎beaucoupllc‬ ‪#‎suspense‬ ‪#‎romance‬ ‪#‎mystery‬

FREE All Day!

I am just having a good time giving away FREE downloads! Earlier this week, it was my alter ego's erotic short, A Royal Scandal by Xaviera Snow, which is now in the hands of the sexy people who love free books. Now it's time for my horror/science fiction fiends.

Book II in the Harvest Trilogy, Celluloss , is FREE All Day Long! Go grab your free download and experience the horror as a government coverup from 1962 comes back to threaten the citizens of Schertz, Texas today. Secrets never stay buried....and when they come back, they're angry!


DOWNLOAD FROM AMAZON HERE!

If you haven't yet read the first two books in this trilogy inspired by a TRUE event, then now is your chance. Harvest , book I, is now permanently available for only $0.99 on Amazon.com. Check out where it all begins....in the town of Farley, Oklahoma. (Book III, Census, will be out December 2015)

Harvest is available in eBook, paperback, and audiobook on Audible.com, Amazon.com, and iTunes.




Are you a fan of crime novels? How about crime novels with an erotic edge? Crime novels with an erotic edge situated in European cities? If your answer is "YES, please!", then you need to immerse yourself in my Kriminal Erotic series, Exposed: The Education of Sarah Brown and The Evolution of Elsa Kreiss. Travel to Berlin and explore the erotic underground, but be careful, danger lurks in the dark hearts of men who desire that which they cannot have.

Exposed: The Education of Sarah Brown:   The Dangers of Sex

Sarah Brown sets out on a journey to sexual self-discovery and falls face first into danger. In Barcelona, Anthony de Luca, an author and photographer unleashes the full force of his charm that threatens to steal her heart, a prize he openly admits he doesn’t want. Still, she can’t resist him, and finds herself experiencing the heights of ecstasy and the lows of heartbreak as her lover leaves without a word. In Berlin, Paul Christiansen, a handsome Dutch lothario with a sordid past works his wiles to seduce her body; while in the shadows, a predator stalks a young boy close to Sarah determined to get what he wants or kill anyone who gets in his way. One of her two lovers has led a dangerous criminal straight to her door, but which one? And who can she trust? Will Sarah survive or will she lose both her heart and her life to desire?

The Evolution of Elsa Kreiss:  New Career, Same Kriminals.

From spanking bad men to arresting them, Elsa Kreiss’s life takes a sharp turn from enforcing the rules of her dungeon to enforcing the rules of law after she joins the German police force. An unsolved case of three missing girls from Charlottenburg pulls her mentor, Kommissar Joseph Heinz, back into the dark abyss just as love finds him. While he searches for a killer, she fights an attraction to a very bad boy. Lukas Trommler is everything she likes in a man; cocky, confident, and hot. An art buyer at a local gallery, Lukas exudes culture with an edge of danger. He invites her into his world where she comes face to face with a familiar monster, Yuri Ivchencko, one of the most powerful and wealthiest men in the world with ties to the Russian mafia. His obsession with the sick and twisted side of human nature expressed in art offends Elsa, who doesn’t hesitate to say so. Her outburst lands her squarely on his radar.

A note signed by none other than Ivchencko is delivered to her hands. Their worlds are about to collide, and not everyone will survive. Can Elsa trust Lukas or is he far more dangerous than she imagines? What does Ivchencko want of her, and how is he connected to Lukas? Who is the killer, and who will be killed? Time is running out, and Elsa must embrace her inner dominatrix to save her friends and family.

And if you love a murdery-mystery, check out the short story kickoff to my new series coming in December 2015, The Ghosts of Cardiff - Murder in the Vale: The Beginning .

In between folklore and evidence, a forbidden attraction develops as the handsome priest, Father Cai Sayer, and the jaded detective, Sheila Leeds, find themselves sucked into a forty-five year old murder mystery. Who killed Jameson Putnam and Philippa George in Llandaff Cathedral, and why?

Get your FREE erotic short story!

It's spring and everyone is in the mood! 

Xaviera Snow wants everyone to feel the urge to merge, the desire to feel a-fire, the passion to be smash-in. Oh, heck. She just wants everyone to get some! So hop over to Amazon.com and download her third book, A Royal Scandal, FREE March 22nd - 24th.

Download your FREE eBook here!
The naughty nanny has been swept off her feet! 

A broken heart can often lead to bad decisions, but really good sex! Xaviera gets the itch to travel and lands in London as the new nanny to the Barrington girls. There, she meets Carlo, an Italian prince who sets his sights on the naughty nanny. Their affair endangers plans for the line of succession, and a royal scandal is born. How ever will she extricate herself from his bed when he conducts a sexual symphony on her body on par with an Italian opera, and how will she survive another broken heart as she realizes she's fallen for Carlo?

The nights are getting hotter!

With spring comes warmer nights and frisky feelings! So why not encourage the mating game with a Kindle Countdown Deal?

For ONE WEEK, The Erotic Diary of Xaviera Snow will be available for ONLY $0.99!Download here!  Hop over to Amazon.com and download your copy of ALL THREE VOLUMES of the saga. The book includes three additional sexy essays guaranteed to make you want to re-enact the hot scenes with your special sweetie.

Price guaranteed March 20th through 27th only.

What does an author have to do?

Perhaps a better title would be Who does an author have to write about sleeping with to get noticed? Haha. I do my best thinking at night, the middle of the night, to be precise. Subsequently, that's also the time when I'm most creative and the magic happens that I call 'writing'. I began as a journalist. I still write articles, but I've moved on to books because I'm just full of stories. Well, I'm full of something, and since I can't sell that inside a book cover, I sell stories instead. The good news is, my stories don't stink. They're actually really good, but in today's self-publishing market, there is a veritable sea of excellent authors all vying attention.

I began as an Indie published author. I still am although two of my series are under a small boutique publisher, Beau Coup LLC. They are pretty darn awesome, but publishers run into the same difficulties as independently published authors, i.e., navigating those seas full of other authors. Honest to God, it's like that scene in Titanic after the ship sank and all the passengers are just dog-paddling trying not to drown. So what must an author do to get noticed? How can we get our books out to the general public so that enthusiastic, avid readers might find us?

There is no simple answer to that question, but there are definitely routes to take, and routes to avoid.

The one thing I see a lot of are services that offer to review your book (for a substantial price). These services say they will read your book (if they accept it, and often, they won't unless it has a particular number of reviews already), write up a review, and with no guarantee that the review will be a professional critique, favorable at all, or even any kind of a guarantee of refraining from a complete hack job. I say if you have to pay someone to review your book, you're traveling the wrong route.

What every author wants are organic, real reviews from readers who've taken  an interest in, and the time to read your book. Hopefully, these readers are not persons who have nothing better to do than write up a trash review, but that's the risk all authors take. I've read some trash reviews and you can always tell when it's from someone with nothing better to do, and probably didn't actually read the book in the first place. Anyone with basic reading comprehension can tell the difference, and will mentally discard that review and move on. I actually had one that gave my book two stars because, and I quote, "It had too many paragraphs." Uh, yes. It's a book. It has a LOT of paragraphs. My apologies for not including pictures.

HINT: Never engage (respond back to) a trash reviewer. It never ends well. It's best to just ignore it and move forward. I did.



Then there are those who seek to swap reviews author to author. This is another bad idea. What if the person's book you're asked to review is not good? What if it's really bad? Then what? You can always focus on whatever good you got out of it, but how honest is that? How does it help an author to be told their book is good or even okay if it's not professionally edited, if it's clear that English is not their first language, or the story is full of holes? Then you just feel bad, and no one gets what they really need. Worse, the other person either hates your book and says so while you're hesitating writing a review for them, or they simply do no review at all after you've taken the time to do one for them. It's a bad deal. Walk away.



Giving someone a FREE book in exchange for an honest review. Sometimes this works. Sometimes you get an actual review that says what the reader loved, and what they didn't. This is fine except for one problem. On Amazon, reviews by persons that cannot be verified as actually purchasing the book don't count in their ranking algorithm. Well, that sucks!

So authors are left trying hard through social media to advertise their books to a public already flooded with advertisements of all kinds, and then crossing fingers and toes that readers will take the time to review what they read. With the changes going on over at Facebook, achieving organic reach in substantial numbers is no longer possible. They want your ad dollars, and even then, there's no guarantee that your page is reaching the demographic your books target.

Blogging helps, but again, the internet is overflowing with authors with blogs trying to find YOU, the reader. Yes, you. The person reading this now. Sadly, independent publishing is a double-edged sword these days. If you already have name recognition, you're golden. Amazon will put you at the top of their list because with name recognition comes sales, and they love sales. Don't we all?

I remember back in 2011 when I first ventured into self-publishing with my horror/sci-fi short, Harvest. I had no idea then that I would be bitten by the writing bug and go on later to produce several series. No, sir. Then, I published out one small book, didn't even advertise it (because I knew nothing about such things then), and it sold over 400 copies in one month. That was when Kindle was new, and there weren't many authors publishing yet.

Now, I'm lucky to hit numbers like that after several consecutive months, and only with endless work marketing. So how in the world can an author get lucky enough to have someone like Oprah read their books? Or one of the awesome reviewers from HuffPost Books, Washington Post Reviews, New York Times? Well, I don't have an answer yet, but I'm working on it. And when I find a path in that direction, I'll be sure to blaze a trail and fire a flare so you all can follow.

Oh, and DO join other author groups. Cross-promoting with each other does help increase reach, and everyone learns from each other what works, and what does not.

March Book Madness

Spring is about to, well, spring! And with spring comes all things new like two brand new releases from author Michele E. Gwynn.

From the Angelic Hosts Series comes the second installment, Camael's Battle. The saga continues from the anthology novella, Camael's Gift. Get acquainted with the angels. They don't always follow the rules!

And from the best collaboration of authors ever comes a fun and fantastic new cookbook, Cooking With The Crazy Lady Authors from none other than...the Crazy Lady Authors! Yes, Michele is proud to be counted among their numbers. This unique cookbook not only shares the recipes from each author's own kitchen, but the hilarious spills and mishaps, too. It makes a great gift for Mothers Day, birthdays, house warmings, Groundhogs Day, Presidents Day, Tax Day....you get the point! 

Buy Now A percentage of purchases will be donated to the World Wildlife Fund


WIN A PAPERBACK COPY!

Win your own paperback copy of Cooking With The Crazy Lady Authors simply by replying back to this email! Respond back with "I'm In!" A winner will be chosen March 31st by Random dot org, and notified. At that time, your mailing address will be requested so that your book can be shipped. Your information will not be shared out and your privacy is respected at all times. (If you're not yet subscribed to my newsletter, sign up on the right hand side of this page, and then reply to this post with "I'm in!" Make sure you use the same email to comment as you do to sign up so I can notify the winner and get a mailing address)

Can't wait that long? Grab your copy of Cooking With The Crazy Lady Authors in ebook or paperback by clicking the link above:  The Crazy Lady Authors aren't just cooking up plots in their books, they're also cooking up tasty vittles! Hey, we're 'crazy' about you, so we're 'dishing' our best recipes out in this awesome cookbook. It's the CLA's way of helping you serve up outstanding dinners in between reading any one of our published works. We know how easy it is to get lost in the pages. Before you know it, the hours have flown by and it's time for dinner. The hubby is hollering, the kids are complaining, and even the dog wants treats. We figure it's all our fault so why not help you maintain peace and harmony in your home by providing this amazing book of easy recipes to keep your clan well-fed? We do, however, stop short of coming to your house to cook it all up for you. We're writing our next novels, after all! Don't be greedy. Bon appetit!

  Camael's Battle, The Angelic Hosts Series Book II Now Available on Amazon.com and Kobo.com.

When an angel falls in love, his heart forever belongs to that one soul. For Camael, loving Hannah Adams has been the blessing of his very long life. The only thing more amazing is the fact that he is going to be a father. However, his joy may be short-lived as the forces of darkness plot to release Lucifer from the pit of a thousand years unleashing hell on Earth, and they plan to use Hannah and her child as the key! With the goddess, Astarte, orchestrating her fallen lover’s release from hellish incarceration, secrets long buried are revealed causing chaos and throwing obstacles in Camael’s path to rescuing his true love. Even with help from the rebellious Gabriel, and reluctant Michael, he might not make it in time. Can Camael save Hannah and their unborn child or will Lucifer rise to lead an army of darkness into battle for dominion over the heavens and the Earth? Welcome to the Angelic Hosts, the New Adult series of short stories by Michele E. Gwynn. (Heat level: Sweet, romantic & spiritual action and adventure)

Angelic Hosts Series New Release Camael's Battle

***NEW RELEASE*** In the continuing saga of the Angelic Hosts comes book II, Camael's Battle.

Sanctioned by the Almighty to fall in love with a human woman, Camael experiences bliss beyond compare. His heart is full of Hannah Adams and now his cup runneth over as he finds out he is going to be a father! But the forces of darkness conspire to steal his happiness. The Dark Ones, under direct order from the self-proclaimed goddess, Astarte, herself, one of the fallen, plot to kidnap Hannah and use her and her unborn baby to open the pit of a thousand years, freeing Lucifer from his prison and unleashing hell on Earth. Can Camael stop them? Can he save his love and their baby? Even with the help of a reluctant Michael, and rebellious Gabriel, will they rescue the mother of the second coming in time?

Get Your Copy Here at Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ULL7YG6
or Order from Kobo
https://store.kobobooks.com/search?Query=Camael%27s+Battle
Haven't yet read the first book? Grab a copy of Camael's Gift and get introduced to the Angels. (Books I and II will be available in one paperback next week!)

We can cook, too! Crazy Lady Authors Cookbook is live

Cooking With the Crazy Lady Authors makes a wonderful gift for house warmings, birthdays, Mothers Day, Groundhogs' Day, Fourth of July, President's Day, Secretaries Day, Daylight Savings celebrations, Christmas (in both July and December!), Fridays, Saturdays, Box Day, ....you get what I'm saying.I am so excited to share with you a gorgeous, fun cookbook authored by a group of amazing lady authors, The Crazy Lady Authors.

Yes, Cooking With the Crazy Lady Authors is now LIVE in Kindle format, and the paperback will follow in a couple of days. Filled with tasty recipes from the grande dames of fictional writing, this cookbook is a one of a kind. Ever wondered just what the authors of romance, suspense, science fiction, erotica, and paranormal stories feed their families? I can confirm there are wild dishes like Rack of Moose Ribs, Cuban Pulled Pork, and Holiday Fruited Brie! Oh, my!

The recipes range from fancy to easy-peasy, and all goodies in between, and we all share our embarrassing kitchen mishaps, too. Yep, you will not only get some outstanding recipes in this book, but also comedic entertainment.

We are so proud to be able to share this with you all, and I'm honored to be a Crazy Lady Author. Grab yours. They're going like hot cakes, baby!

The night my mouth pulled the pin and dropped a bomb.

Have you ever just lost your s**t with a complete stranger? I have, and I couldn’t believe it when it happened. It was like a bomb went off that I couldn’t outrun. My mouth pulled the pin, and my legs could not run fast enough. I lived in a nice apartment in the small town of Universal City, Texas. I was literally located directly across the street from the police station and fire department. In all, a pretty safe place to be. I’d seen residents across the hall from me come and go, but a new neighbor got under my skin in a way that led to that mouth-bomb moment. You see, she was a young mother, a drunk, and a drug user.This young mother had a three year old daughter. She also had a boyfriend who had his own small child from a previous relationship, another toddler. This young couple would get drunk, fight and scream at each other, pass out, and leave the front door wide open. Their little ones would be out in the hall in the middle of the night, in dirty pajamas, running wild. I hated to be that nosy neighbor, that Mrs. Kravitz, but children were involved, and so I called the police. They came around, but by the time they arrived, the kids would be back inside so they were simply told to close their door and keep it down. This went on for several months with neighbors from above and the other side also calling police or phoning it in to the complex manager’s office.I came home late after a night out with friends. It was around 1 a.m., and cold out. As I parked and got out, the couple also arrived home. They were carrying the kids in. One was crying, and neither was dressed for the weather. In that moment, I lost my s**t. I could see it happening like an out of body experience. My mouth opened as they passed and I let loose.“Are you seriously just now bringing those children home? And why are they not dressed warmer? What the hell is wrong with you two?” This litany of question flew out of my chops faster than I could comprehend that I’d just openly challenged and chastised this couple. I was shaking from head to toe. I felt ill. I was actually afraid I’d just pushed them too far and could, easily, get hurt. Did I mention yet that I’m physically handicapped, and despite this, as feisty as a Chihuahau? My bark is loud even if my bite isn’t fatal, and still I foolishly barked on.The girl was stumbling. She was obviously drunk. My anger went up five notches and took over. He started to speak, but I heard only the young mother who tried to tell me it was none of my business. Since I was nearly twice her age, I let her know that was not the case when two small children were involved. I went off on her and cited every single time police had to come out because she was drunk, drugged, her kids were unsupervised, filthy, cold, running around at night outside while she was unconscious, and were subjected to the constant fights between her and her boyfriend. It seems when I unload, I have an arsenal of things to say. She went into her apartment, and I went into mine. We both called the police.She lodged a complaint that I’d verbally assaulted her. I lodged a complaint that the young mother was once again drunk and dragging her young kids around in the middle of the night – meaning she and he were driving drunk with children in the car. I also apologized straight away to the police for my outburst to the woman stating that I knew it was wrong, but it all popped out before I could take it back. Police officers arrived, two to her place and two to mine. Here I was, a known local journalist, in tears, saying how sorry I was for possibly speaking out of turn, but not sorry if it helped those kids. The officer told me he understood my concern and was aware of the history of calls from several residents about this young woman. They went across the hall and met up with the other two officers who were already calling Child Protective Services.It seems that once they entered the apartment, they were shocked. I heard one officer loudly berating the young mother and father for the filthy state of the home. His voice raised, he literally yelled at her about the dirty clothes, the empty food containers all over the counters, dirty dishes on the floor including in the children’s bedroom. He went on to point out the two little ones were dirty, cold, and that she should be ashamed of herself. She was ordered to put the kids to bed and be prepared for an early visit from police and CPS in the morning. Sure enough, they were back at first light, and the children were taken out of the apartment. I saw the officers later who told me I’d done the right thing. I still felt bad. I felt bad for the kids who would be scared and confused. I knew that they were in better hands, and I sincerely hoped the young mother and father got the help they needed, that the whole incident was a wake-up call to pull their heads out of their butts and get themselves together. I’ll never know for sure since they were evicted from the complex – three months behind on rent. It was certainly a moment I’ll never forget…the day I completely lost my s**t and went off on two strangers.