Talon P.S.'s Blog, page 3

French Readers! Guess whats coming out in September

I first have to offer an apology for not having this post written in French, (I’ll try to get that done by the end of the week) But if you’re bilingual please read on and share the news, Juno Publishing will be releasing in September:

 Dominer l’Héritière 
The Dominion of Brothers Series book 1.5 !!

 

Because this site is still under construction follow us in Facebook for more up to date news.

 

 

STILL WORKING ON THE NEW SITE

Gee whiz this has turned into a major pain in my behind. WordPress has changed everything about them and now I cant do half of what I used to be able to do to design and manage the website. I really wish I had known how drastic it had changes as I might have gone with a totally different provider. But we’re here and we’ve yet selected a theme, because we want what we want and for some reasons we cant get it. Ain’t that life for ya? hahha

Nevertheless, as much as I’d like to have the site up and running, I’m not rushing to get it done as I am still trying to figure out the new wordpress mess that it is.

If you have questions or want to get in touch with us, hit that Facebook social media button up top and send you questions there; for now at least.

TPS Publishing ~ home for twins: Talon PS & Tarian PS

WELCOME TO THE NEW LOCATION FOR AUTHORS TALON PS’s & TARIAN PS’s WEBSITE.

We’re just now getting started on this so its still ‘Under Construction’ at the moment, but please bear with us, you know how we like to wow you.

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TPS Publishing ~ home for twins: Talon PS & Princess SO

WELCOME TO THE NEW LOCATION FOR AUTHORS TALON PS’s & PRINCESS SO’s WEBSITE.

We’re just now getting started on this so its still ‘Under Construction’ at the moment, but please bear with us, you know how we like to wow you.

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First blog post

WELCOME TO THE NEW LOCATION FOR AUTHORS TALON PS’s & PRINCESS SO’s WEBSITE.

We’re just now getting started on this so its still ‘Under Construction’ at the moment, but please bear with us, you know how we like to wow you.

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The Twins Celebrate Five Years in Publishing!!

I CAN’T BELIEVE IT, BUT ITS BEEN FIVE YEARS ALREADY!!
SO HERE WE ARE TO CELEBRATE AND GIVE THANKS TO YOU ON OUR
5th
ANNIVERSARY
In the publishing world.

It started with one very short book, we dubbed it “the little book that wasn’t’. It started off as just a fictional one created inside one of Talon’s novels, Becoming His Slave, where as one of the characters was a writer who had written a book called Dear Soldier, With Love and won a college grant for it. We’d thought about putting it in writing just for the sake of a freebie then Elora’s Cave put out a call for Valentine short stories for a valentine anthology collection. The premise of the story had to be around Love letters. Well to fast forward to the end, Dear Soldier, With Love was rejected by EC (thanks fully haha). It would also get rejected by three other publishers. It broke every rule of romance, of erotica and of contemporary fiction. So what were we going to do with it? Well, we decided to publish it ourselves and it was released on Veterans’ Day to commemorate all the soldiers out there who’d been given a Dear John letter.

That is how we got started and now five years and nineteen books later, we have so many still to finish up and get out there to you. But hey, let’s just pause a sec, take a breath and look back with a WOW. Because yeah this is pretty cool for us.

In case you’ve never come across us before Talon P.S. and myself, Princess S.O., are twins and writing partners. While Talon passed after a long battled illness in 2012, he left me with our books, purposely left unfinished, holding me to the promise of finishing them before I came to join him. We’d been writing since kids, but our endeavor to get published was more to save him, an escape from terminal life. Later the books were about saving me.

Talon and I have always been the eclectic type so one genre wasn’t possible. We’ve ventured from BDSM, Gay and Het Romance, Suspense, Sci-fi, Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy, and War Time Romance.

SO HERE’S TO FIVE YEARS AND LOOKING FORWARD TO ANOTHER FIVE!!!

 

And to show our thanks to readers like you, who are the reason why we are here, we’re giving away one free copy of each of our titles, (one title is not available in the giveaway due to being pulled for editing). Here’s how to win: visit all of our blogger friends to find them all. Each blog host will be giving away 2-3 different titles, so go to our website to get the schedule and tour them all to find a book that interests you, then leave a comment there to say hello for a chance to win!!!

WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF TWIN AUTHORS: TALON P.S. & PRINCESS S.O.

DEAR SOLDIER SERIES:

Dear Soldier, With Love (already Free to read at all major ebook retailers)
Dear Soldier, With Love II: A Lost Soldier Named Grey

Quantum Mates: What Torin Wants

Bond of the Lycoan Concubine

Feral Dream (already Free to read at all major ebook retailers)

DOMINION OF BROTHERS SERIES

Becoming His Slave
Domming the Heiress
A Place for Cliff
Rough Attraction
Taking Over Trofim
Right One 4 Diesel

THE TEDDY BEAR COLLECTION

Their Plane from Nowhere
Big Spoon & Teddy Bear
Ivan vs Ivan
TIME: Wounds All Heal

Muse Me Only

FRENCH TRANSLATIONS

Un Havre pour Cliff
Inspire-Moi Seulement

COMMENT BELOW FOR A CHANCE TO WIN ONE OF THESE THREE TITLES
Becoming His Slave    ~    Bond of the Lycaon Concubine    ~    Big Spoon & Teddy Bear
Other titles are being given away at guest spots so go check us out at The Kimi-Chan Experience, MM Book Escape, and at TN Tarrant’s web page for more chances.

Can’t pick just one? We’re available in ebook and print at all major book retailers: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Smashwords, All Romance Ebooks, Createspace, and Kobo.

 

THANK YOU FOR FIVE WONDERFUL YEARS!!!

 

 

 

 

 

Two Writers Rambling – GUILTY without Trial!

GUILTY without Trial

That’s what Amazon does when out of the blue a reviewer gets an email stating:

“We have determined that you have violated our Customer Review Creation Guidelines. As a result, we have suppressed all of your reviews, and you will no longer be able to post reviews on Amazon.com.

We made this decision after carefully considering your reviewing account. This decision is final.”

In some cases, it’s the author who gets this frightening (you’re fucked) email claiming Amazon has determined the author has been manipulating either the KU program or the review policies, then are informed there are here by banned from publishing through Amazon ever again.

When was the trial? Why is it no one ever receives a letter in advance to inform them they have been flagged for suspicious behavior? I understand Amazon is not a public domain and therefore can conduct business as they see fit. However, they are also a customer related business that relies solely on vender supplied products. Amazon is a retail conductor, not a retailer producer. So why is this incredulous behavior their standard for handling issues they are clearly not capable of handling? Which brings me to the why this is happening. Fraud, fraudulent reviews and scamming the KU system. But wait, in the recent announcement of Amazon’s new review policy, did that not come back to amend that the new policies were not intended for Book reviews? So why are we still seeing mass genocide of book reviews?

I wish I had an answer. I wish I had a even a suggestion, but I don’t. In fact, I discovered last night I had lost 6 reviews scattered over 6 of my books. Having heard of a popular book review site Bikers N Books, was struck down by the ‘Zon last week (one of my favorite send to reviews for my Teddy Bear Collections), I could only assume another reviewer or two got the guillotine which would explain the recent mass killing of reviews on my books. I say mass killing because when you only have four or six reviews to start with and then you lose one, you feel it.

Should authors stop publishing with Amazon? I wish I could say “let’s do this” but we’d only being shooting ourselves in the foot. Amazon is still the 900lb gorilla we have to sleep with if we want to sell more than a handful of book copies. I’m just saying— that now the gorilla is farting in the bed.

It just plain STINKS!

~ Rant over ~

Random things of Kindness & Beauty

Something I saw that was so aweful today forced me to go digging to rediscover this video again. It’d been one of Talon’s favorites and we’d shared it here before before the website crasj inicdent and we’d lost it. So I have found it again and once more sharing it, because sometimes we need to see with our own eyes there is still good takingplace between the bad we see too much of.

Two Writers Rambling – Amazon is Blanket Bombing Again

Amazon is Blanket Bombing Again

I had an article in the works about how Amazon is becoming the new Walmart and I plan to still finish that one, but the recent activity in the past couple of days has altered my course to discuss another issue about the ‘Zon

As I mentioned there has been a considerable amount fresh activity going on with Amazon. They’re back on the war path and like all the times before they’re blanket bombing in a poor effort to put an end to ‘Reviewer Rule Breakers’.

The mighty ‘Zon can’t seem to get a handle on the real scammers but by god they can take out their frustration on every legit, honest small author by keeping them getting reviews ever again. Its so much easier this way since the honest author isn’t in hiding much like the scammers who take own their accts every few months and to click bots dispersing their activity around to include legit authors as well [read more about this over at the Digital Reader]

Let’s ponder this a moment. Amazon was a small little online shit 5 and half years ago. Then they had an epiphany: “Let’s allow authors a chance to self publish and bypass staunchly publishers.”

It was a great idea, not only for writers who didn’t fit inside the box of traditional publishers, but it also rocketed Amazon into space, becoming the largest online retailer out there. But the climb to fame and fortune has corrupted Amazon’s brain turning them into a mindless, heartless conglomerates who forgot where they came from and WHO it was that boosted them to where they are. Amazon makes no remorse when it decides to stomp on its own people.

Yet authors continue to support them by remaining exclusive to Amazon. Standing, idly by, watching as the few competitors degrade until finely closing their doors. I have often pointed this out several times both directly and indirectly to authors and often with the same responses. “Not my problem.”

Let me put this as clearly as I can YES, IT IS YOUR FUCKING PROBLEM!

Its everyone’s problem, if you want to have a place to sell your books. Sure, Amazon isn’t going anywhere but in case you haven’t noticed they are near as much handing us our hate. Taking away every possible method avail to you to promote your book and get it out there in front of the eyes of readers. Indy authors made Amazon what it is today, but it is clear that Amazon holds no love or even any kind of gratitude. It said nowhere on your Amazon contract that you would forever have a seat at the table.

When you take a step back and look at the big picture, one has to wonder if Amazon has become the new Walmart on bully pills. Let’s look at the Kindle Unlimited for instance. From Amazon’s view point this looked like a great idea. It rides right alongside ‘On Demand’ and ‘Netflix’. They’ve even managed to suffocate the life almost completely out of ‘Scribe’. For authors, KU, when it first started, was not so great depending on the size of your books. Novellas were making bank and authors started shelling out more shorts, while authors of large size novel were getting taken for granted receive a measly $1.35 for a book that normally sold for $7.99. Then came the scammers and ruined it for the novellas writers. Amazon changed the pay out to $0.005cents (that’s half a penny) ‘per page’ and while there was a discrepancy of what was a ‘page’, novel writers were finally getting a better share. Novellas writers were pissing and moaning over it. Despite the previous gains they had been getting. They’d become spoiled by the prior pay out. This may have to do with why they refused to see the bigger picture of the damage KU does to the industry or for authors to remain exclusive to one retailer.

But still the scammers seemed to catch up rather quickly. Taking all those horrible shorts they wrote and put them into one big book, again and again, shuffling them about so that one story was THE main story and the rest bonus reads. The scam was to place a link for a free something at the start of the book. The link redirects the reader to the back of the 3000page book which, according to Amazon’s system, was an instant full read and scammers have been making bank ever since. Once such fake author has 88 books like this and there are hundreds of scammers like them. It only took me a mere few minutes to find a dozen of them. They stay ahead of Amazon by closing their acct every two months, reopen a new acct using a new TIN#, and reload all the books again.

It’s right there in front of Amazon’s face. Yet they don’t see it or don’t do anything about it.

A new scammer surfaced in the last 60 days, creating unauthorized books as ‘Reader Guides’ based on series from well-known authors. Using the series titles and author’s name on the covers to promote them. Most are mainstream, but a few are from the smaller genres like Bestselling Author Nicholas Bella, who is well known to his reader fans for the ‘Chained in Darkness’ and ‘House of Théoden’ series and a few others. In fact, the scammer put up 155 books in the last two months, a few of them are ‘How to’ books encouraging readers to turn their books in for full refunds after reading them so they can read for free. While Nicholas with the help of his fans did manage to get the ‘Read Guide’ based on his series taken down, none of the others were. You’d think Amazon would get a clue and figure out if one was fraud so too would the other 154 books.

Watching this play out gave new perspective. Amazon doesn’t contain enough brain cells to operate common sense. Nor can they decipher a real scammer from a legitimate honest author, so they blanket bomb the rules and effective take out a number of little honest authors. Perhaps more of them then the scammers actually. Guilty only because They Say So.

The latest mind sweep being reviews again. Any review that mentions “received a free copy for honest review’ or received ARC for reviewing’ are now the target o the ‘Zon. Making it worse is reviewers and authors are apparently getting flagged in the Amazon system with a “THIS IS NOT UP FOR DISCUSSION”, which translates into ‘No matter how many times you email us, this is what is going to get sent back as our response.”

This is one such response an ARC Reviewer received today:

Author Abby Hayes posted on Facebook last night, she’d received a similar email from Amazon where as she claims she hasn’t posted a review in sometime. So it would seem not just recent reviews are being garnished.

When emailing Amazon for an explanation, one gets the feeling nobody in charge is getting any feedback. The customer service responds with a general scripted response and no matter how many times you email back, that is all you get. And since little ever changes its doubtful the staff is talking to their supervisors of the effects or outrage coming from legitimate reviewers and Authors who depend on them. It would also seem Amazon supervisors are slacking off on the memos. You see Amazon changed their review policy banning ‘free product’ for reviews. This included ‘free copies’ and ‘ARC’ books. Somehow the ‘Zon got the message from authors this time, so the policy was quickly altered to exclude books from the new rule. Only, no one got the memo on this apparently, because authors and reviewers have been getting emails by the hand full in the last two days stripping reviews and even suspending some reviewer’s accounts with Amazon.

So what is an author do to? Well, I can only go back to what I have been trying to tell you for years. NEVER give a retailer exclusive rights. Because when all other retailers go under because we don’t help support them by putting our books up on their retail shelves, then all we will have is Amazon and if you think its sketchy now? Wait until there isn’t any threat of competition. I am not suggesting boycotting Amazon entirely; we have to come to terms that the 900-pound gorilla is in our bed to stay if we’re to see our books gain any sales at all as 70% of book buyers buy from Amazon.

Another thing you might want to do is not lay down passively with Amazon. Write out a well thought out letter explaining how Amazon’s mind sweeping tactics are doing more damage to their legit honest authors than it is to the scammers. I mean seriously WE know what is going on. If we can figure it out, why the hell can’t they? Don’t get cold feet about this, you can do this, you’re an author for god’s sake, you know how to write out thoughtful dramatic letters just as easily as you do stories.

Now send it. Every week until someone in the staff sends it up to the supervisor’s desk.

Then start pulling books out of KDP and KU. Maybe they’ll start to get the message when the only books remaining in the KU will be the scammers and their fake books. And if what I am telling you isn’t enough to convince you. Read this article you may have missed. Its right up there with a true Halloween scare: Innocent Authors Are Getting Burned in Amazon’s Fight Against KU Bot Farms

 

Stay tuned as more on the ‘Zon is coming up here with Two Writers Rambling

Talon’s ManCandy Monday – Household furniture never looked so well accessorized

Talon’s ManCandy Monday
Household furniture never looked so well accessorized