Category Archives: Business of Writing
Folks, I need a favor from you
I just got my 3Q royalties statement from Evernight, and after I stopped flailing like a happy Muppet I sat down to study the numbers. Storm Season, unsurprisingly, has been my best seller to date, and I love each and every one of you who bought a copy.
Thing is, I need to sell a minimum of 25 copies through Evernight’s website in order for it to be considered for a print run, and I’ve only sold 20 copies so far. It’s a stupid egoboo thing, I know, but I would so very much love it if this was available in print. If you haven’t purchased Storm Season yet and want to find out how the whole Olympic Cove saga began, I would ask that you head over to the Evernight website and get it directly from the publisher. Plus, today is the last day of their 40% off everything sale, so if you buy it today you’ll get it on sale as well!
I thank you for your support!
Well, that was a good Thursday
- My guest post “Beautful Yet Cruel: Reasons to Make Your Villain Attractive” went up at Buffy’s Ramblings and attracted a fair amount of attention, based on the number of entries in the Amazon GC giveaway (yes, by the way, I’m giving away a $20 Amazon gift card on this blog tour, so go over to one of my stops and enter).
- I got the acceptance email for my short story “In His Name,” which will be in Evernight’s HIM: Strength Meets Innocence Manlove Edition anthology (the blurb for the story is, “Father Sean Halloran is a priest in crisis who must choose between his vocation and his growing desire for Matt McCormick, a Unitarian minister with a secret.” I am so going to hell for this one — but it’s tastefully done, I swear). I’m also trying to finish the story for the MF antho version at the moment, so with luck I may be able to make this a twofer.
- A bunch of lovely people started following me on Twitter and Facebook — hi people!
- I started weightlifting again last night. My body decided I was insane, and insisted on a 5-hour nap. When I woke up, Ramón had pizza waiting for me. Yay pizza!
So, yeah, that was a good day. I still have two more guest blog posts to write, the MF antho short story to finish, a short story for a steampunk magazine that is being patiently waited upon by the editor to finish as well, an Etsy sale to mail off and a couple of podcasts to edit. Happy Friday, y’all!
To quote my friend Roger, “Well, this is jolly.”
Storm Season released on Friday. As of now, I’ve gotten 3 five star reviews on Goodreads, a five star review on Amazon, a five star rating in All Romance Ebooks plus a killer hella good review, I’ve made it twice into three genre bestseller lists on Amazon.de and once into a genre bestseller list on Amazon.com, and the general impression seems to be that it’s a good book and the start to a good series.
Which is a fucking relief.
I can hear you out there — “Dramatic much, Nic?” But it’s my first book, it’s the kickoff to a proposed series that I really, really want to write, and I’ve learned over the years that what entertains me doesn’t always entertain normal people. And I’ll admit, I was worried about the reception Storm Season would get from the reading public. Yes, it’s MMM erotic romance, but it also has a strong mystery subplot, a fantasy/paranormal setting, and includes some big ol’ science fiction elements (as you may have guessed, I have some problems coloring inside the lines).
And readers don’t always like it when a writer mixes and matches genres as extensively as I did here. I was concerned that they might feel I pulled a bait and switch on them, which was never my intention. So to find out that Storm Season is getting a good reception and readers are enjoying the genre mashup (at least so far — I rest assured in the knowledge that I will get reviews questioning my literacy, my humanity, and my general right to exist) is a pleasure that renders me somewhat lightheaded. One reviewer at Goodreads who doesn’t read nontraditional romance even said, “I was completely in awe of this book … So unlike anything I had read in a long, long time.”
And I was compared to Spielberg. Whoa. Still grinning over that one…
Nicola Cameron Reviews: Slow Surrender by Cecilia Tan
The Cinderella story is a classic fairy tale that lends itself particularly well to retellings in a variety of genres; perhaps too much so, considering how many romance novels use the “poor girl meets rich man, loses him, then gains him again after a search” trope. With that in mind, Cecilia Tan takes the familiar fairy tale and turns it on its head, reimagining it as a grand, lush erotic romance set in New York that sets you on a slow, captivating burn.
Slow Surrender follows the developing relationship between Karina, an art history grad student who is more familiar with the pre-Raphaelites than what she wants from life, and James, a handsome, mysterious businessman with issues of his own and a taste for sensual BDSM. No, this is not 50 Shades Yet Again, thank Cthulhu for small favors. For one thing, Karina is intelligent, quirky, and has a backbone and no inner goddess. And James is a sexual sadist with a heart of glass and a secret past — emotionally fragile as he is intensely dominant, he’s as much the Cinderella character as Karina is. Their developing courtship is full of secrets and discoveries, and is deliciously kinky as well as emotionally satisfying. You’ll be rooting for both of them to find their happy ever after together, despite the odds.
The question is, will they? I warn you, this is a trilogy (don’t blame the author — that was a publishing decision, not hers) and ends on a cliffhanger. But with a story as captivating and well-written as Slow Surrender, you’ll love the agony of waiting for the next installment.
Available from:
And Now, A Quick Look At The Sales Numbers
Using the nifty neato-keen Novelrank.com website, I can keep track of how many copies of “A Boon by Moonlight” sell on the various Amazon websites. According to the site, someone just bought the book in the last hour (thank you, whoever you are!) and my total number of sales for the month of March across all Amazon sites is…
…21 books. Twenty in the US, and one in the UK (hello, my British chums!).
And that, my friends, makes me freaking ecstatic. No, really, it does.
Yes, I know you’re sitting there thinking, “But Nic, that’s only 21 books. I mean, that works out as pretty much a book sale a day. It’s not exactly like you’ll be drinking Cristal any time soon.”
True. But let’s take a really good look at me — I’m nobody. Seriously, I am. I have a short story out in an anthology, and “Boon,” and that is the entirety of my published work in erotic romance to date (we shan’t discuss the SF career at the moment). And let’s not forget that I write in a genre that is hit with a tsunami of new material every single day. The fact that 21 people, faced with this morass of choices, decided to take a chance on my work makes me feel pretty damned good.
And those numbers don’t include sales on Evernight’s site, All Romance E-books or Bookstrand. Since “Boon” is an ARe category bestseller and keeps slowly climbing in the rankings, I have to assume that I’ve sold more than one book there. While I don’t have data on Evernight or Bookstrand, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to project that I’ve sold another 21 books or so through these three sites.
So let’s call it a projected total of 42 sales, 20 days after release, for a novelette written by an unknown author in an incredibly tough genre. Now you understand why I’m happy. The major ER review sites haven’t reviewed it yet, either — that will most likely start happening sometime in the next two weeks or so. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for decent reviews (my editor at Evernight and an independent reviewer both said that “Boon” made them cry, so I’m assuming that means it doesn’t stink), which can only help sales. Hell, sometimes even a bad review can mean sales, depending on how badly you’re savaged.
What all of this is, is a start. A very good start. And it’s a start on which I fully intend to build in April, when my full-length paranormal erotic romance Storm Season comes out. And that’s only the first in a long line of novels I hope to be writing in this genre. Muwahahahaha.
Now if I could just persuade people to leave reviews at Amazon…
Busy, busy, busy…
Most of today was spent putting together the general outline for Behind the Iron Cross, then shifting around various chapters and chapter contents to fit said outline. I’ve come up with the Act One and Two climaxes — still working on how to present the Act Two midpoint, when Friedrich has his little come-to-Jesus epiphany about what he’s doing with Sam and Kat, but it’ll all work out. And once again, I am so damn glad I spent out and bought Scrivener — it’s just so much easier to compare/contrast, shift stuff around, and keep detailed notes about each chapter than with Word.
Of course, some of Scrivener’s features can get you in trouble. Frex, the husband walked up behind me last night while I was working on Cross. Scrivener has a split screen feature that allows you to load whatever you like into each screen — different chapters, different sections of a chapter, or reference pictures. In my case, I had a rather nice topless picture of the actor whom I mentally cast as Friedrich. So when the husband came up behind me and went quiet when he saw Tall, Blue-eyed and German/Irish, I thought, “Uh-oh.”
“It’s just for inspiration,” I explained.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” I said.
“I mean, I’m old enough to have babysat him,” I added.
The husband chuckled and kissed me on the head. “He’s pretty. Have fun writing.”
Heh. I have the best damn spouse in the world.
I also got a very nice review for “A Boon by Moonlight” from Love Books! Book Reviews, plus I made the reviewer cry a little at the end. She’s the third person who cried while reading “Boon” — I wanted a little drama and tension, yes, but I swear to God making the readers cry wasn’t my intention when I wrote it!
Break out the dancing boys!
Just signed a contract and submitted the cover art/blurb sheet for my novelette “A Boon by Moonlight,” which will appear in Evernight Publishing’s Romance on the Go line sometime this year. Huzzah!
And to whet your appetite, here’s the blurb I sent in with my cover art sheet:
Ex-Marine Zach Mayhew is willing to do anything for his dying grandmother. When she asks him to find a fairy ring in the forest and beg that she be allowed to spend her last days in Faerie, he obliges her (even though he thinks it’s nuts). But when a gorgeous Sidhe noble steps out of the ring and asks for a night in his bed in return, Zach learns that history has a way of repeating itself, and a boon asked by moonlight can have unexpected consequences for his heart.
Nicola Cameron Writes 