I Have So Much To Do
Arrgh. It’s times like this that I look at my To Do schedule before the end of the month and wish I had children, because they would be teenagers by now and I could at least get them to do the cleaning and laundry.
- Photograph lots of new jewelry, put on Etsy site
- Pay bills and balance checkbook
- Finish manuscript editing for a friend
- Finish video editing for another friend
- Haul all the laundry upstairs and put it away
- Clean the house from top to bottom (a major undertaking as it’s a disaster area at the moment, we have five cats and I’m the only one who cleans)
- Put up Christmas decorations
- Finish Behind the Iron Cross, get off to agent
- Finish Cross Current, get off to Evernight
- Do ebook/paperback cover for client, format book interior
- Update website for another client
- Make character doll for customer
- Do food shopping, including cat food
- Rake leaves in front yard (I may have Ramón do this)
I hesitate to say I need minions because one time someone did offer to assist me, but I think he was thinking more of office work and I need more of a jack of all trades.
Wicked Wednesday Reads: Taking Passion By Storm (Weathermen 6)
Whee, it’s Wednesday! Never fear, for today I’m here with Ravenna Tate and the sixth in her sizzling Weathermen novels, Taking Passion By Storm, now available from Evernight Publishing and other online retailers of fine erotic romance.
When Nadine Jarvis’s father disappears in a tornado on the surface during his Storm Trooper duties, life-long friend Addison Carlyle puts together a search team. Nadine convinces him to let her come along, where she embarks on a journey that changes her life forever.
Addison is part of a group of friends financing the efforts to put a stop to The Madeline Project. The program now has a mind of its own, thanks to a virus called Tommy Twister. These men have power, resources, and money, but they’re as ruthless and possessive as the storms ravaging Earth.
They call themselves the Weathermen…
Story Excerpt
Addison brushed his hands down her back to her ass, grasping her cheeks. The gesture sent a gush of wetness to her pussy, and her clothes suddenly felt too tight. He released her mouth and planted soft kisses along her jaw line.
“You have on too many things,” he said softly.
“Should I have come here naked instead?”
“Yes.” His mouth brushed her nipple through the fabric of her tank top. “Next time, wear nothing.”
“What if your staff sees me?”
He kissed both nipples, and she gasped as they began to tingle, sending tiny electric jolts straight to her clit. “Doesn’t matter. Better yet, next time be in here already with me. You don’t need your own room, do you?” He grasped her breasts through the top and kneaded them, his expression full of hope.
“No.” She could barely think let alone speak. “No, I really don’t need my own room.”
“Good.” Addison lifted her tank top over her head and tossed it onto the floor. She hadn’t worn a bra on purpose, and was now glad she’d made that decision. “Because I don’t want you to leave my side. I may have to take you to work with me.”
“What about my job?”
He frowned. “Too many questions and not enough kissing.”
She clung to him again as he captured her mouth once more, shoving his tongue into it. In a move that felt bold, she moved her hands to his torso and rolled up the hem of his shirt. She was rewarded with a low, sexy groan as he released the kiss so she could remove the garment.
“Now my jeans,” he said.
She undid his jeans and slid them down, giggling when she realized he wasn’t wearing underwear. He was also barefoot, so that only left her shorts because she hadn’t worn panties or shoes, either. “Would you like me to take these off, or do you want to?”
His grin sent fresh wetness to her pussy. Before she could react, he lifted her off the floor and deposited her on top of the comforter. Then he dived between her legs and raked her pussy lips and inner thighs with his teeth, until Nadine was sure she’d go out of her mind. It took him way too long to remove the panties using only his teeth. By the time they were off, she was soaked and so ready for him it was ridiculous.
Where to Buy
Sometimes, Google amuses me
I was looking recently for pictures of adorable kittens (I know, like those are so rare on the Internet) and ran a search on Google with the search parameters “cute kittens.”
I was extremely amused to see the following:
Well, I guess Sherlock and John do sorta qualify as cute kittens…
In other news Empress of Storms continues to sell briskly, I’m working on Iron Cross and Cross Current at the same time, and the Christmas cleaning has begun, selah.
The Good, The Bad, and the Croggling
The Good: The Evernight Readers’ Choice Awards were held on Saturday and Deep Water was first runner up in Best Menage category, while Breaker Zone was first runner up in the Best Erotic category. Thanks so much to everyone who voted for me — I truly appreciate each and every one of you!
The Bad: I seem to be in a moderately bad mood today and I don’t know why. It could just be that I have a metric buttload of cleaning to do around here before I can put up the Christmas decorations and for reasons that I don’t understand a family member is stating on FB that I won’t have anything up this week. Whatever.
The Croggling: I was looking for Empress of Storms reviews today and found one that, to be honest, had me o_0 at first, then laughing, then absurdly flattered. The reviewer, who is also a noted writer of SF and fantasy, had this to say about EoS:
“This book was so good-hearted I forgave it the things that bothered me, #1 of which was that I couldn’t tell if it was set in our world or a second world; all the names were definitely Greek and so were the cities, but the mythology was wrong and there was magic? But a political intrigue story with several twists in it, about a young queen affianced to an older king of another nation, and their relationship and how it affects their countries and their enemies. Definitely a fantasy novel, but the romance elements were strong; particularly, all the erotic scenes were explicit, and other than the first one (which establishes some important groundwork for the partnership) there’s no real plot reason for the rest of them. People who dislike explicit sex scenes for the point of explicit sex scenes will probably be annoyed.”
She then went on to review a MM contemporary romance, concluding with “Also explicit, but more pertinent to the plot (oddly enough) than the previous book, which wasn’t a romance.”
*goes back to check book notes*
*checks categories on Amazon, All Romance eBooks, and Smashwords*
*confirms that yup, I wrote a fantasy erotic romance*
I just read this to Ramón. He replied, “So let me get this straight. A member of SFWA read your book, which was an erotic romance with fantasy elements, and thought it was a fantasy novel with gratuitous sex. So essentially you wrote a romantic pastiche of high fantasy that worked so well it passes for actual high fantasy.”
Then he paused. “You realize this means it’s eligible for a Hugo.”
I think we scared the cats with our cackling.
A Slight More Balanced Thought About Piracy
*takes deep breath, lets it out through nose*
So yesterday I launched a rant about a certain site that was promoting illegal downloads of Empress of Storms. Pretty much everyone who read it and left a comment on social media sympathized with me, reassured me that a lot of pirate sites exist to get credit card information and thus karma would visit those who didn’t know how to use a library, and generally tried to make me feel better.
I appreciate them all. And I should admit that part of my rage was brought on by the fact that Ramón was laid off on October 31 and we are both scrambling for work and trying to figure out how we’ll be paying the December mortgage (Christmas isn’t even an option this year. Paying bills comes first). But the karma bit stuck in my head. See, I used to have a blog waaaaay back in 2001, long before WordPress or Blogger or even LiveJournal were on the scene. Had to hand-code each entry, change the previous entry so that it linked to the new one, and create/update the archive pages. You kids don’t know how lucky you are, with your social media crosslinking and your SEO tags. Now get off my lawn.
Anyhoo, since I knew that big block of uninterrupted text tended to turn readers off I had a habit of trolling the net for appropriate images, downloading them, and using them in my blog entries. I did not buy these. Back then, you didn’t even think twice about it. You found a picture on the net and you just used it. There was no question about reimbursing the artist who took the photograph or created the artwork. If it was on the net, it was free for use, QED.
So, if I am brutally honest with myself this may be karma doing a little bitchslapping of its own for using creative material that I didn’t pay for. And now that my blood pressure has settled, I do have to admit that having 612 downloads and 41 four- and five-star reviews is actually kind of flattering. At least 612 people liked my story enough to grab it from a torrent site and read it. 41 of them liked it enough to leave good reviews.
(I still wish they’d left those reviews on Amazon, but whatever.)
Seriously, though, if you can’t afford a copy and will frigging explode if you can’t read about Matthias and Danaë, don’t go through a torrent site. Email me and I will send you a copy for free. All I ask is that you leave a honest review somewhere, ideally Amazon but I’ll take Goodreads/B&N/iBooks/whatever. That way, karma blesses us both.
A rant about ebook piracy wherein I channel my inner Lewis Black
(ATTENTION: There will be a great deal of profanity in this post. You have been warned.)
Well, fuck me. I did my usual check for reviews this morning and stumbled across a pirate site called readpremiumbooks dot com that has Empress of Storms.
612 downloads. Allow me to repeat that — SIX HUNDRED AND TWELVE DOWNLOADS. And that’s just from this one site. That’s $1,709.32 that I lost, assuming that people would have bought it through Amazon. That would’ve been enough to pay our bills this month and have cash left over for Christmas presents (and things are really goddamned tight around Castle Cameron right now).
And you wonder why I despise pirates. Not all of us are bestselling authors who can blow off piracy as a left-handed form of promotion. For some of us that income means paying the bills, or the mortgage, or picking up necessary medicine. But apparently people think I don’t need that money — hey, I’m a writer, I must be rolling in it, I won’t notice one pirated copy.
Surprise, motherfucker. I notice. So do my creditors. And I can’t even send these RPE fuckers a DMCA takedown because they advertise themselves as an “external affiliate” who cannot guarantee the presence of a particular file because they draw from third-party sites.
But losing income actually isn’t the most irritating thing about this. Want to know what’s really chapping my ‘nads? EoS has 41 fucking reviews on this site, all of which appear to be five stars. I can’t get people to leave me reviews on Amazon, but pirate sites? No problem. Goddamn it, I offered the book FOR FREE if people would just leave an honest review in return. Not one nibble did I get. But they’ll go to a pirate site that could be loading their ereaders with Cthulhu knows what sort of malware to get reading material AND LEAVE REVIEWS THERE.
And people wonder why I drink.
I’m big in the UK
So I’ve been checking my Kindle Direct Publishing dashboard, as you do when you’re a nervous self-pubbing author. While I was there I noticed an upwards swing in sales for Empress of Storms today, which is awesome because money around the holidays is always a good thing.
And then I dug into the stats a bit deeper. It seems that the bulk of the recent sales have come from amazon.co.uk. This pleases me as Ramón is in fact an Englishman and it’s nice to know that some of his countrymen (or women, as the case may be) are digging my work. So if any of you lovely British bookbuyers are reading this, thank you and please spread the word to your friends. I wouldn’t mind becoming a smash hit in the UK at all, especially if I could whomp up the funding for a book tour.
Keep all sharp objects away from my reality bubble. I’m allowed to dream.
Meanwhile, NovelRank is reporting that I have sold absolutely nothing in December and my only sales have been within the US. So bugger to you and your bizarre sales determining algorithm, NovelRank.
Oh, the weather outside is frightful…
Happy December! Of course, what that means in the Cameron manse is that I have to clean this place from top to bottom and get it decorated for the holidays (which in this house usually means Christmas, although I have been known to observe Festivus on occasion). And what with five cats and an absent-minded husband who has a tendency to leave things strewn around the house, that’s a lot of cleaning to do, plus there’s the fact that I kinda skipped a lot of cleaning during the Empress writing marathon and NaNoWriMo and Lord, you would not believe the cat hair buildup in my office…
But I digress. Holiday preparations here means putting up the library tree and the smaller one in the kitchen, draping lights over every surface that can taken them (the picture at left is a total and blatant lie — it rarely looks that nice, I can assure you) and switching out the seasonal garland over the door for a poinsettia chain. My sister goes all out at her place — it looks like Santa Claus had sex with Martha Stewart. So what are some of the holiday things you want to do this month? I’m always open to suggestions!
Oh, and since I did win this, I probably should put it up. Go me! Now I just have to get it edited and off to the agent, then go back to work on Cross Current, write the Christmas bear shifter story that my bitch of a Muse decided to drop on me yesterday, get a few other projects done and out to their patiently waiting owners, and start putting together swag for Wild Wicked Weekend and RT next year. Whee!
Empress of Storms 25% off at ARe! @allromance #cybermonday #sale
I’m still running that 25% off sale on Empress of Storms at All Romance eBooks, so if you haven’t picked up a copy yet you should go and do it now! For everyone who has already purchased a copy, thank you SO much. Your interest in my first foray into high fantasy erotic romance is truly appreciated.
Now that the holidays are winding down, however, could I ask you a huge favor? I really, really, REALLY need reviews for the book, ideally on Amazon but I won’t say no to Goodreads, B&N, or any other online retailers. I’ve reached the point where my social media self-promo is getting a little redundant and I don’t want to annoy people with repeated ads. I’ve purchased advertising on various sites, but right now reviews are desperately needed to promote the book, bump it up in Amazon rankings and pull in new sales.
Also, as I’ve mentioned before if you’re stony broke and just can’t afford an ebook right now, contact me with your preferred ebook format and I’ll send you a copy. All I ask is that you leave an honest review for me — and yeah, if you read it and absolutely hate it, then go ahead and say that. I know Empress isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, and I’d rather have someone saying, “Yeah, sorry, this bites” than someone blowing smoke up my ass.
Okay, back to work!
Black Friday? I got your sale right here!
Not only is All Romance eBooks running a 25% off sale on Evernight titles, I’m also running a 25% off sale on Empress of Storms because I’m a giver. So if you want to load that new ereader up with some awesome titles, go forth and splurge!
Nicola Cameron Writes 