Outtakes!

I was on vacation in California last week, visiting my friends (and cover artists) Vita and Bryan Hewitt. Behold: Outtakes!

It's a nice reminder that work can occasionally be fun, especially since I'm back to work tomorrow.  Ugh.

30 Special

I know, I know, it's a .38 Special, but I'm not quite there yet.

I thought it would be a bit bigger...

It's my birthday next week.  You guessed it, I'm turning 29 (plus a year of experience.)  To celebrate, Chance Assassin will be $0.99 for the rest of the month of July.  You can pick up a copy at Amazon as well as Barnes and Noble.

Happy reading!

Author Interview

Writing is a process.  There's the initial inspiration, the hours spent at a computer (or if you write by hand, hours with a pencil before you even start typing it up), endless editing, formatting, and editing some more.  If you self-publish you don't have to wait for tons of rejection letters, but the one thing that all writers do have to consider, regardless of how they're published, is marketing.

I'm not good at marketing.  I'll be the first to admit it.  I'm not on many social media sites, I'm terrible at updating this blog, and I still have a hard time telling acquaintances that I write at all, much less what I write about.

But in this age of social media, I've been absolutely blessed by word of mouth from readers.  Through Goodreads I've been able to connect with people who love reading, and who are interested in my book.  Lisa T is a book reviewer who was kind enough to invite me to do an interview on her fabulous Attention is Arbitrary blog and help get word out.  You can read the full interview on her blog here.

A huge thanks again to Lisa and to everyone for reading, and if anyone visiting my blog hasn't joined Goodreads yet, I honestly can't recommend it enough.  You can connect with other readers (and writers) and get recommendations based on books you enjoy.

YES!

I am truly proud to be an American today.  What more can I say?  The Supreme Court made the right decision, the JUST decision on DOMA and Prop 8. 

The Fourth of July has never been my favorite holiday.  I hate the summer, and I'm not a fan of fireworks. But next week I'm going to celebrate the fuck out of Independence Day!  Happy Fourth everyone! 

Exclusivity

For those who aren't familiar with it, Amazon.com has a great program called KDP Select, where self-published authors can enroll their work in the Amazon lending library as well as give away copies for 5 days during the 90 day enrollment period.  Sounds great, right?  Yes, and no.  The main problem with KDP Select, is that in order to enroll you have to give exclusive rights to them for your ebook.  You can't sell your ebook anywhere else, and you can't even give it away outside of their site.

Amazon.com has their reasons for demanding exclusivity, and while I don't entirely agree with it, I have been extremely satisfied with them thus far.  That being said, I did not choose to re-enroll when the 90 day period ended.  I gave it a lot of thought, and I want to make it more widely available.  Starting today you can pick up a copy of Chance Assassin at Barnesandnoble.com.  You can also continue to buy it at Amazon.com, and the paperback version is still pending for those readers who prefer an old fashioned physical copy (myself included.)

Thanks again, and happy reading!

Updates

So it's been awhile since I posted here.  I'd say it was one part procrastination, one part being busy working on the sequel to Chance Assassin, and about 6 parts of me being not very interesting.

I get that some people use social media to update the masses on each sneeze (actually, I don't.  I don't understand that at all.  Why do people do that?  Does anyone care?) but that's not me.  I started this wournal (I refuse to call it a blog because blog is a revolting word) to drum up some interest for my book, and as a way to connect with people who are interested in my writing.  I do try to update on a weekly basis, but alas, my hermit life is not very noteworthy.

                  For anyone who's interested, this is what I've been up to:

My tax day giveaway on Amazon.com went extremely well.  I honestly didn't have very high expectations, but even if I had medium expectations, those expectations would've been blown out of the water.  Thank you to everyone who picked up a copy, and to those who did a bit of advertising on my behalf from their websites or from goodreads!

The sequel.  Chance Assassin was my first book, but that's not to say I wasn't working on other things while writing it.  The events of the sequel were already written in the stars so to speak, and I hope to have it out next year.  It takes place a few years later, and ***spoiler alert*** mostly in France.  It's larger in scope than Chance Assassin, and isn't completely in our previous not-so-humble narrator Vincent's point of view.

So there you have it.  Sorry for the delayed post.  I'll try to update more regularly in the future.

Nothing is certain but death and taxes

Taxes.  Everyone pays them.  Well, everyone except for the ridiculously wealthy with their ridiculously well paid accountants.  At any rate, death is definitely certain.


In honor of my book having quite a bit of death (and the ridiculously wealthy...dying) I'm doing a giveaway on Amazon.  From April 12th until April 16th, Chance Assassin will be available as a free download.  Enjoy.  Tell your friends.  And if your friends happen to be ridiculously wealthy, wait until April 17th and tell them then.  Have them buy a few copies. Happy reading!