Hard at Work

Hello everyone. I know I've been MIA once again, but rest assure I've been working my tail off.

The *new day job has been keeping me quite busy in all the un-fun, non-writerly ways that day jobs do. But I'm not giving up on writing. I'm working on the second book in my Perpetual Creatures series, titled Beauty & Power, and will be sending it off to the editor real soon. I hope to have it out around the first of the year, then I'll start writing book 3.

I would love to be able to pump out a new book every three months, but to do that I'd have to write by day and do all the editing/marketing at night. I'm not quite there yet. I still need the day job to keep the wolves away. That being said, I'm shooting to have book 3 out sometime late spring/early summer.

We'll see how that works out.

In the mean time, I'm running another Kindle Countdown Promotion for my short story collection Contemplations of Dinner. It'll be on sale for $0.99 from now until December 21st. Have at it, and don't forget to spread the word.

Thanks.



*I've been there almost a year, so "new" is a relative term.

Predatory Animals $0.99 Countdown Extravaganza!

From now until September 15th you can get PREDATORY ANIMALS for just 99 cents.

In the town of Shadeland, people are vanishing.

The Pummels, a most beloved family and benefactor to the exotic cat rescue center, are guarding a secret--one they will kill to keep quiet. Stranger still, retired Marine Casper Brown suffers a near-death accident that gives him a deep connection to three stray dogs while filling his nights with dreams of unearthly creatures.

Something is hunting the townspeople of Shadeland and nothing in Casper's training can prepare him for what he finds lurking in the shadows.

 

You can pick up PREDATORY ANIMALS here. And if you are so inclined, sign up for my New Release Newsletter. It should be at the top right. I promise no spam, either of the email type or the weird canned meat. I will be releasing my next titled any day now, so you don't want to miss out.

Better Late Than Never

This is more than a bit late, but I want to announce that my novel Predatory Animals is free until midnight PST.  You can find it here.  Feel free to grab a copy, "Like" the page, and once you read it leave an honest review.

This is the last of my free days from Amazon KDP Select.  I've enrolled my other books in Select before and I didn't see the huge uptick in sales like others have.  I weighed whether or not to enroll Predatory Animals.  I hadn't sold a single copy on Barnes & Noble, Kobo or Smashwords, so I figured what the heck.  This time around I decided to do it not for the prospect of increased sales, but more for the opportunity to land some reviews and increase the "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" section.

Lofty goal, I know.

Funny enough, this time around I have noticed increased sales.  Not the crazy numbers of some other writers, but enough to make me smile a bit.

I've also been in the process of splitting up the stories in my collection Contemplations of Dinner into stand alone shorts, while submitting them to the Kindle Singles Program.  The first two out are The Mask of Deslow Mansion and Romeo's Kiss.  You can get both for $0.99 each or get all ten shorts in Contemplations of Dinner for $2.99.

This along with my normal writing, working three jobs, chasing two kids, doing damage control for two dogs and trying to fit in some sleep has left me a bit frazzled.  And now it's snowing and schools have already been delayed tomorrow.

These are the salad days.

Contemplations

I've mentioned in earlier posts about the Kickstarter program I was hoping to use to fund my next two books.  I've also mentions how it was a crash and burn event.  I saw the hand writing on the wall early on, so I started to come up with a backup plan.

I had wanted to use professionals for the covers, editing, formatting and all other bells and whistles.  I would still like to do all of those things for my novel Predatory Animals, but it's going to have to be done as I scrape the money together.  The collection of short stories, however, I decided to go ahead and publish.

I found a guy on Fiverr who was creating covers for $5.  It wasn't quite the cover I was looking for, but it was cheap and better than I could do on my own.  All things considered I think I got more than my money's worth.  Most of the stories have been published in various magazines or e-zines so they have been through at least a basic round of editing, so I decided to give it all one more read-through and then send it out into the world.  Originally I wanted to publish the collection on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.  I found a blog post that detailed an easy way to convert a Word document into a .prc file.  I may publish the collection on B&N and Smashwords later on, but I make most of my sales on Amazon so we'll see.

With that being said, Contemplations of Dinner is now available for sale on Amazon for $0.99.

"A secret hidden in a freezer. A lonely woman takes solace in an ancient cat. A boy is trapped in a barn with a gang of killers. An open grave awaits an occupant. A man is encouraged to kill by a long lost love. And more.

Here lies ten eerie tales from the mind of author Gabriel Beyers."

I hope you'll stop by and have a look.