Category Archives: Books
ISO ARC Readers for Typhoon Warning
As you know, Bob, Typhoon Warning will be released on June 2, 2026. Which means this is the time when I need to round up people who 1) like getting free books and 2) will leave an honest review at Amazon, Goodreads, B&N, or whatever their favorite review site may be and offer them an Advance Reading Copy of Typhoon.
Un petit problème—since it has been over a year since I released High Tide (or, well, anything), my readers have kind of scattered. I have a grand total of three pre-orders on Amazon for Typhoon (and if you’re one of them you are in my will), and despite my best efforts on social media and newsletters I’m not getting a lot of traction. I’m hoping that it will be easier to attract ARC readers—after all, it’s a free book and all they have to do is leave a review.
To that end, I’ve set up a signup sheet for ARC readers at the Google and will start sending them out on May 22. If you want an advance look at the final book in the Olympic Cove series (my editor says I’ve outdone myself with this one) and are willing to leave a review online, please consider grabbing a space. And to quote the old Bartles and Jaymes wine cooler commercials, we thank you for your support.
Rabbit Rabbit
Or as Justin Timberlake would say, “It’s gonna be MAY.”
Writing update: Goddess of the Nile currently stands at 20K words and I am having an immense amount of fun with it. Wordcount would have been more, but some sort of upper respiratory bug smacked me yesterday and laid me out but good. Mind you, I’m still not feeling all that great today but at least the room isn’t going “Whoosh whoosh whoosh” around me anymore.
Have I mentioned how much I hate vertigo? Because I hate vertigo.
In other news, I should get the edits on Typhoon Warning back from the editor this weekend, which means I can get started on that next week. She said it’s pretty clean—no glaring plot holes or confusing bits, just the usual array of weasel words that I need to cut out. That’s normal at this point in the edit so I’m cool with that.
The current goal is to get Warning in ARC shape by 5/11 and release it to my ARC readers … just as soon as I round them up. It’s been a while. Luckily I still have the lists for the other Olympic Cove ARC readers so I’ll send them an email and see if they’re interested in Typhoon Warning. Also, if you happen to read this before 5/18/26 and want to be an ARC reader, hit me up and I’ll send you an ebook ARC.
So what are your plans for the weekend?
I have made a Decision
(And yes, I know, I haven’t posted here for yonks. That is going to change, believe me.)
I’m making some business changes here at Chez Cameron — namely, no more free first in series books. Over the last five years I have given away 27,969 free downloads of Empress of Storms and 9,767 free downloads of Storm Season on Amazon alone. The reasoning behind this was, if I made the first book in a series free, it will prompt people to download it, read it, love it, and buy the rest of the books.
Yeah. That hasn’t quite worked the way I’d hoped. Mind you, I do get the occasional burst of purchases where someone gets the rest of the series, and that’s delightful. But I haven’t made nearly the number of series sales that I’d hoped for with this stratagem.
So, as of today, I’m setting both books at $3.99 on all platforms. That’s still a helluva deal in a world where ebooks are regularly $9.99, but more importantly it acknowledges the undeniable fact that readers are more likely to read a book that they actually pay money for. It’s easy to stuff your Kindle/e-reader with free books, but how many of us actually get around to reading all of those books? If you actually purchase something, however, there’s more impetus to read it than a book you got for free.
And that’s my in with these readers — get them to read the first books in the Olympic Cove and Two Thrones series, and hopefully they’ll buy the rest of the books in each series. We’ll see.
Mind you, I’ve also sold 6,625 copies of Empress of Storms since 2015, which just about squeaks it into bestseller country. It will be interesting to see how long it takes me to crack 7K copies sold.
Well, that was fast
Like others, I posted a goodbye video on TikTok Saturday. About an hour later I got the message saying that the service was no longer available for American users, but that they were in talks with TFG about re-establishing contact and thanking him profusely for the opportunity.
Yesterday morning the app was live again. It’s still not back in the Apps or Google Play stores, but current users still have access to the app and their videos. But things had already changed. I saw an ad in FB suggesting that I link my TikTok account to FB, and other reported seeing Meta ads in TikTok. As of this morning people are getting community violation notices for speaking out against TFG and content is being taken down.
Just a reminder—billionaires don’t care what happens to you. And foreign billionaires really don’t care what happens to people here in the US. TikTok’s return was never in doubt, but now it’s been co-opted into the right wing media platform.
Which is not great, but billionaires are gonna billionaire. And I can still vote with my feet, so I will. You can find me on Bluesky and Youtube if you are of a mind, and I still have my newsletter and this blog.
Headphones
So, I’m a little slow at times.
Some relatives stayed with us last week for New Year’s, and one of them brought a pair of Bluetooth headphones with her. She’d pair them with her phone when she wanted to walk or work out and would cheerfully march along listening to her music.
Now, I love my music and podcasts, but for some reason it never occurred to me to get a pair of Bluetooth headphones. I have a pair of Bluetooth earpods but they’re not very comfortable and one keeps cutting out so I don’t use them very often. When I’m sitting here at my desk working I usually rely on a pair of corded headphones, and if I want to listen to something while I’m walking I just crank the volume on my phone.
But watching S toodle along with her pretty cream headphones got me thinking—it might be nice to have a set of cordless headphones that I can put on and just, you know, leave on. Wear them when I’m working, wear them when I’m walking around the house, wear them when I’m cooking or cleaning. The plus side is that I’d never have to worry about interrupting Ramón with my music or a podcast while he was on a call.
So I hunted around and found an inexpensive pair of Helix headphones at HEB. Took them home, charged them up, then paired them to my phone and went for a walk. My first impression—they were ever so slightly tight and made my ears hurt after an hour. But plastic can be stretched, and after leaving them wrapped around one of my mannequin heads for a day I tried them on again. This time they fit well enough, so I paired them to my desktop, turned on some Zoe Keating, and got to work.
People, I haven’t taken them off all day. I’ve gone downstairs multiple times to get a drink or lunch, I’ve gone on three walks around the house, I even went out to get the mail (they disconnected just as I reached the mailbox, then reconnected once I was within the house’s Wi-Fi range again), and I’ve had constant soothing cello music in the background all the time. I know the 10 hour runtime might seem a bit limiting, but we have USB-C chargers all over the house and I can charge the headphones at my desk while I’m cooking dinner or watching TV. Now I understand why so many people are wearing these things.
First full workday of 2025
After some thought I’ve decided to go back and do a re-read of what I’ve done of Typhoon Warning so far. I know, I know, but I’ve been stopping and starting so much that I’ve lost the feel for both the characters and the story, and that ain’t good. I need to get everything more firmly settled into my mind before I completely hose the plot, and doing a re-read of what I have will help with that.
And yes, I may do a bit of editing here and there, but just to smooth out the occasional infelicitous phrase or misspelling. I’m not going to bother with a full edit until the whole damn thing is done. That being said, I am very pleased with the way the book opens and Chiron’s meeting with the fates in Chapter One. I always enjoyed writing those characters, mainly for the snark they bring to the game, and putting them all in one room has been a huge amount of fun.
Hopefully I can get the read-through done by Wednesday or so, and then I can start back in on actual writing. Of course, I have other books calling at my writing brain, especially when I’m cleaning or cooking, but I need to get this one done first. Then I can play.
In the meantime I’m also keeping a weather eye on the, well, weather (it’s cold here in the clavicle of Texas at the moment, but Anita Gigawatt looks like she’s going to hold so we just have to keep the house warm for the kitties and make sure no pipes freeze) and the events going on in Washington. Ain’t gonna make any predictions at the moment, but this is going to be an interesting day, no doubt about it.
Oh, right, I have a blog
I am going to be more regular about posting here—dunno if anyone still reads this, but I have no problem yelling into the void.
So, 2024 was not a horrible year for me. Yes, there were bad points—I lost my cat Jessica in July to thyroid lymphoma, and then there was the whole michigas with the election that still makes me want to throw things at the screen. But my writing income continued to increase despite the fact that I only released one book, and I got thisclose to finishing Typhoon Warning. I know, I know, but that book has been fighting me like you would not believe, to the point where I had to start working on other WIPs just to keep my writing muscles loose.
I suspect that part of the block is due to Warning wrapping up the Olympic Cove series. It has a lot of threads that I have to tie together, and it’s kinda freaking me out. Yes, writers can get freaked out by their own work. I just don’t want to screw up the dismount, you know? Storm Season was my first novel and Olympic Cove was my first series, and I want to finish it in a way that pays tribute to both the characters and the readers.
So here we are in 2025, my sales for the month so far have been excellent, I’m running a 99¢ sale on To My Muse for the rest of January, I retitled/recovered Behind the Iron Cross and it’s now on sale as A Seduction in Berlin, and once Warning is done I’m finishing off the rest of the Paladins of Crystal series, then I’ll be focusing on the Hidden Empire and Two Thrones series.
Also, I’m looking for a day job to cover the bills in the meantime. So yeah, 2025 is gonna be a busy, busy year. But hopefully it won’t be as bad as I’ve been fearing. We’ll have to wait and see.
Still Early Days, But…
I woke up this morning to five book sales in Australia. This was a complete read-through of the Olympic Cove series and a purchase of Breaker Zone, which is #2 in Olympic Cove so I can hope that the reader will like it enough to buy the rest of the books in the series.
As I said in the title of this blog post, it’s still early days into this change and I don’t want to be cheering just quite yet. But in 2023 I made US$43.47 in royalties from Australia and US$58.27 from Canada. The bulk of both those amounts came from KU reads, not actual book sales. As of today I’ve made US$41.96 from Australia and $US30.84 from Canada, and the bulk of that money did come from ebook sales. Seeing as it’s only July 2, I find this significant.
Oh, and I’m $54 away from passing last year’s Amazon income. Once again, it’s only the second day of July. Seeing as I just released a book, will be releasing another one in August as well as the series omnibus, and will (please God) release two more books in the Paladins of Crystal series this year, I don’t think it’s impossible to think that I may well double last year’s income.
Looking Back at June
I’d mentioned in an earlier post how I changed my book costs in Amazon’s Canada and Australia markets to be numerically identical to my US prices (e.g. if a book costs US$4.99 here, it costs CAN$4.99 in Canada and AU$4.99 in Australia).
I checked my end-of-month numbers and whaddya know—I had 355 downloads of Storm Season from Canada thanks to the Stuff Your Kindle/eReader Day, AND I’ve had 5 purchases for Olympic Cove books, including one complete read-through of the series except for High Tide (but that read-through happened yesterday so I’m hoping they’ll come back for High Tide).
As for Australia, I had 252 Amazon downloads of Storm Season from Australia due to SYKeD—no sales yet, but an Aussie author on TikTok said that she’s going to spread the word about my lowered prices so we’ll see. But it’s not fair for Amazon to have all the bennies so I’ve also gone into Google Play and Draft2Digital and changed my book prices for Canada, Australia, and New Zealand there as well.
TL;dr—This has been my best-selling month this year to date thanks to SYKeD, changing book prices, and the release of High Tide, and I’m hoping to bump that up even more next month with the release of Hurricane Warning and the omnibus edition of Olympic Cove.
The Promo Whirl Begins
Firstly: High Tide is live on all major ebook retailers. The print version will come out on Friday.
Secondly, this is how my release day is going so far:
- Got up at 3:11 AM, checked that High Tide had gone live on Amazon, grabbed the ASIN link and added it to the book file’s Olympic Cove Series and Other Work pages, and republished it.
- Checked that Draft2Digital had processed the book file and generated an ISBN, grabbed it and added it to the book file, and republished it.
- Checked that Google Play had processed the book file, grabbed the store link and added it to the book file’s Olympic Cove Series and Other Work pages, and republished it.
- Went back to bed for a few hours.
- Woke up and checked that High Tide had republished at all retailers. It had, yay!
- Updated the book page’s buy links here.
- Submitted High Tide to BookBub and added all the required links.
- Finished making ad graphics (I needed pull quotes).
What I will be doing for the rest of the day:
- Creating a promo packet that can be distributed to author buddies for inclusion on their blogs.
- Creating an AMS ad.
- Promoting High Tide on all appropriate FB book groups.
- Creating a TikTok promo video for High Tide and uploading that.
- Promoting High Tide on other social media.
- Sending out a newsletter with buy links.
- Setting up the book on BookFunnel so that I can send book links to my Patreon members
Once that is all done, I may relax with a well-deserved rum and coke. Or I may work on Hurricane Warning, who knows?
Nicola Cameron Writes 