May's New Releases

Hey all! This month I have two new anthologies for you.

The first is Kink On Command: Five Erotic D&s Tales:

These five Just For Kinks short stories of dominance and submission will leave you begging for more. Contains explicit sex.

THE SUB FAIRY: Married bliss gets a kinky twist when one woman finds the courage to ask her husband to be her dom. Can dominance and submission find a place in their life?

WHEN IN ROME: Lovers Suzi and Myriah have had enough of their roommate Kimbra’s irksome behavior and decide to teach her a lesson—which is exactly what Kimbra has secretly been hoping for.

ENCORE: All Derrick wants is a nice subby roadie girl, but when bandmate Nate is willing to give BDSM a try, the guys discover a new favorite rainy-day activity.

HUSBAND’S LITTLE HELPER: Samantha and Ron’s 1950s-ish life style strikes some as misogynistic, but for them it’s about more than just sexual thrills.

CARE PACKAGES: When Shayla has to go out of town, Tamika doesn’t let a little distance stop her from keeping her submissive in line, courtesy of a very special care package.

Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Smashwords.


The second is called What I Want: Five Kinky Tales:

The characters in these five Just For Kinks short stories don’t shy away from what they want. Contains explicit sex.

FLOGGERS LAST LONGER THAN FLOWERS: Galina's looking for a date with more backbone, but is she ready to submit completely when she meets up with sexy top Stefan?

PIT STOP: A man with a vivid imagination has an unexpected encounter in a gas station bathroom.

WHEN THE BOUGH RAKES: Dillon’s a solitary masochist with who’s found a unique solution to his needs—a pine grove in a windy valley on his parents’ property. But when Dillon comes home for his first visit since starting college, his secret is discovered by a handsome new neighbor.

GOOD NEIGHBORS: All this woman wants is some sleep…until she hears her neighbors through the motel room wall.

BOUND BEHIND GLASS: Talia’s done kinky role-playing before, but she’s never had sex in public—and certainly not in front of a crowd of strangers. But when she’s hired to demonstrate her friend’s sex machine at a private kink party, she discovers a brand new kink of her own…and utter subjugation under the hands at the machine’s controls. 

Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Smashwords.

The Best Laid Plans...

I'll have another anthology with all the stories in What I Want and Kink On Command out in a couple weeks. A friend of mine died and I just didn't get the cover done in time. Stay tuned.


Lookin' Ahead...

Coming in June is a short weird fiction tale set in Boston called "The Granary Angel." It takes place at the Granary Burying Ground and was inspired by a tour I took there a few years ago.

Don't forget, you can get the full scoop every month delivered right to your mailbox by signing up for my monthly newsletter!

New Aether Vitalis Short Story

Hey all! This month's new story, Nine Nights in Haiti, is now available.

"In Haiti, the newly dead have nine days to make their goodbyes before the psychopomp Baron Samedi escorts them to their final reward. So when the ghost of a foreigner witnesses the raising of a zombie, he knows there isn’t a moment to lose. Can he figure out how to hijack a soulless body before the loa comes for him?"

Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Smashwords.

Holy cow, I'm going to a con.

If you're going to be in the Madison area on April 12 and 13, you can come see me at Odyssey Con. I'll be on three panels: "Madison Horror" on Fri, and on Sat I'll be on "What Happened to Ghosts?" and "History of Werewolves." Should be fun!

Lookin' Ahead...

May should see the release of three new anthologies: two five-story Just for Kinks anthologies, and one ten-story Just for Kinks anthology. The ten-story will have the same stories as the two five-story ones, but with a slight discount. I'll also have a new short story.

Last month I also sneakily published my first short anthology, A Taste of Mercy.

A Taste of Mercy includes the following short stories:
EMPUSA: A Greek daimon whose lovers usually don't live to tell the tale sinks her teeth into a trio of love spells…and the Greek household who cast them.
THE POWER THAT DREAMS HAVE: A woman finds safety in the arms of the daimon who is slowly killing her when Xerxes descends on ancient Athens.
THE PRINCESS AND PEONY: A princess and her maid conspire to create the bruised and sleepless effects of a pea in the bedding with the help of the maid’s flogger.
A KISS BEFORE COFFEE: A terminally ill woman travels to the Asclepion of Kos to petition the god in person.
GEARGIRL: A cyberpunk mercenary with a passion for automotive tinkering discovers a very personal connection with her vehicle.

Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Diesel, and Smashwords.

Don't forget, you can get the full scoop every month delivered right to your mailbox by signing up for my monthly newsletter!
 

New Release: The Twelve Huntsmen

March's new release is a retelling of a classic fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. The original "the Twelve Huntsmen" had some issues with it, to my mind. For one, there was no real point in there being twelve huntsmen. Second, the ending was a let-down. Not only was it anti-climactic, but it weakened what had been one of the few strong princesses in the book. (To be fair, I've only read about a third of the stories so far. I'm talking the Household Tales, not the shorter versions of the book.)

So I "fixed" it to bring it in line with what a modern reader expects out of a story. The result is a tale with all the classic rhythm and atmosphere you remember from the Brothers Grimm, but with consistent characters and a plot that nicely wraps up all the fun fairy tale tropes introduced in the story.

"The Twelve Huntsmen: a Short Fairy Tale" is the first in a new series I'm calling "Grimm as it Should've Been." It's available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Smashwords.

Just checkin' in

Hey all. It's been a little while since I posted. (Duh.) So here I am for a random hello.

Two new stories have been released so far this year. The first was Disobedience, an erotic Aether Vitalis vampire short story. I really love this one, because it's all about one of my favorite things: really unbalanced, unhealthy relationships! And vampires. And kink, and m/f, and m/m. So much fun.

This month I released a new Just for Kinks story called Bound Behind Glass. The story involves a girl roleplaying as an android bound inside a glass sex machine, and a club full of people with access to the controls. Need I say more?

March's new release will be for a brand-new series of short stories. Stay tuned!

So, back to me. I'm currently slightly sick, sore throat mostly. I'm downing hot sour soup and irish hot toddies like mad. Slept until noon, which is very unlike me. It's one of the ways I know I'm actually sick, and not just having some sort of psychosomatic depression-induced illness.

I just finished a 6-week cover design workshop from Dean Wesley Smith and WMG Publishing. I really liked it. The first couple weeks were mostly review (at least, for me anyway), but after that it got real in a hurry! So now I'm looking at rebranding all the Aether Vitalis and Just for Kinks covers. The JFKs will look more or less like the cover for Bound Behind Glass. Here's a preview of Scent and Shadow's redesigned ebook cover:

I'm also going to be taking a short workshop on Audacity soon, which will remove one of my major mental obstacles regarding the Scent and Shadow audiobook. Yes, I could probably find all this info on the internets, but frankly I'm shorter on time and energy than money on this one. I bought my microphone last year, so once I have a feel for the software I think I'll be much more confident about getting started. I'm hoping to have the podiobook up later this year. (Of course, I said that last year too...)

And I'm finally, finally making progress on Empire's Shadow! I'm picking away at it in tiny chunks, but it's still progress, and today will be day 16 in my streak of writing every day. Woohoo! I couldn't have done it without the Magic Spreadsheet. I even wrote 255 words when I was down in Chicago with friends this weekend with the help of Doc² on my iPod. I'm in love with the system I've got going at the moment. Now to slowly increase my daily word count goal, and hopefully add in a second short daily session so I can have one for Empire's Shadow and one for the monthly short story...

2012: The Year in Review

Ok, I've finally made time to do the 2012 roundup. (BTW, happy 2013 everyone!)

I had hoped to make 2012 a year of writing. Unfortunately, much like 2011, 2012 was a year of publishing, but not so much of writing. However, unlike 2011, I now have a year's worth of sales data. :)

Sales numbers tell an interesting story. I sell more titles on Barnes & Noble than anywhere else. In fact, I sold more titles at B&N than at Amazon (all stores), Kobo, Smashwords (just them), and Sony combined. However, I make roughly equivalent dollar amounts between Amazon, B&N, and Smashwords (including Apple, Kobo, etc). Below is a sales chart showing titles sold, as well as some of the data for the free titles:

The top portion includes only sales for which I received money. The bottom portion is for "sales" that were free, either price-match or promotion. Apple and Kobo apparently do not report their free sales to Smashwords. I had some free sales through other Smashwords outlets, but I didn't count them here because they didn't result in any dollar sales through those outlets.

Dollar-wise, here's how those sales translate:
      Amazon US: $227.60 (didn't figure foreign sales as it is a hassle)
      Barnes & Noble: $233.29
      Smashwords (all channels): $299.60

For Amazon and Barnes & Noble, those are the royalties generated for the 2012 calendar year. For Smashwords it's a little trickier because of the delay in reporting and receiving; I basically added up the royalty payments for the calendar year (one of which hasn't gone out yet, of course, but I can see the numbers).

My best selling title is Scent and Shadow (yeay!) at 95, followed closely by "The Sub Fairy" at 88. My three most consistent sellers are Scent and Shadow, "The House That Pip Built", and "Geargirl"; each of those had at least one sale a month across all channels. (Heck, S&S and Pip had at least one sale a month just at B&N; Geargirl missed December or that one would have as well.) The story with the best average sales per month it's been available is "Cry Wolf."

I did manage to publish at least one title a month, which was a goal of mine from 2011. I didn't get any anthologies put together, but I have one that just needs a cover and another that should be ready in the next couple of months.

2012 (not counting unfinished projects):
Short stories written (final drafts written 2012): 4
Short stories sold to tradpub: 2 (one submitted in 2011)
Short story submissions to tradpub: 10
Short story rejections (including revoked submissions): 13
Short stories traditionally published: 1 (one forthcoming)
Total self-published word count (final drafts written 2012): 49,122


The four stories I did this year were Demon's Asylum, Night's Acolyte, "Husband's Little Helper," and "Care Packages." Demon's Asylum was mostly written before 2012, but I obviously didn't count it in last year's total, and the final draft was finished this year, so there you go. I'm not sure how to count The Once and Future Poet, since a large portion of it was, obviously, written over many years. But if we count all of Poet, that brings my writing total up to around 93,622, which isn't too bad.

I didn't get anywhere close to my 4000 words/week goal from last year. Frankly, making writing time is much harder than making publishing time, for some reason. I want to try and keep up my one-title-a-month trend, but I know that's going to be much harder this year. Last year I had stuff sitting around, and titles that had rights coming back. This year, I have only one finished short story (at least, that's long enough to be published as a single) available to pillage, and one title that will have the rights revert late in 2013. So I have at least 9 months to fill up. I might get to use anthologies for a couple, but I'm hoping to not use those as the "new" releases if I don't have to.

My big goal for 2013 actually isn't writing-related at all. I need to start working out consistently, and I need to make that a bigger priority than writing. That being said, some new software for my iPod is making it much easier for me to capture writing time, since I can save doc files between the iPod and my computer now. I got 250 words done the other day while The Husband was in the grocery store, for example. I've also discovered I write better when I can't see how much of the page is left to fill. That's a mental hang-up I didn't even realize I had until I started writing on the iPod.

My big writing goal for 2013 is to finish the first draft of Empire's Shadow. Ideally, I want to publish it this year, but I'm keeping my goals on the small side for now. Depression kicked my ass last year, so I don't want to stress myself out. I write less when I'm stressed about not writing. Weird, no? There are also a handful of print anthologies I have my eye one, so between those and my self-publishing I'm shooting for 10-12 finished short stories this year on top of the novel.

Oh, and I want to do the Scent and Shadow podiobook this year. I have the microphone and the recording space. I just need to suck up learning Audacity. Or maybe I'll hire that part out. (Hmm, if I tell myself that I'll hire it out, I'll be much more likely to start working on it... Writer, know thyself.) But first, I must record!