Couple of random things…

First, I wanted to mention getting a good review on Rebbie Reviews for The Life and Death of a Sex Doll, and I wanted to thank the reviewer for giving my book a chance. They also bought a copy of Saving Gabriel, so I’ve got my fingers crossed that it works for them too.

I probably shouldn’t, but I want to point out that despite having nothing but glowing reviews, The Life and Death of a Sex Doll still doesn’t move many units. It’s ironic in that I used the term sex doll in the story to convey a certain prejudice against artificial companions, and that people in meat space seem to be opposed to reading this because they see Sex in the title and think “porn.” *Shrug* eh, people are still hung up on sex, I guess.

Moving on, the second thing I want to mention is, Friday, I got a message from a friend on Facebook that my former roommate is now accusing me of stalking someone, and of using their image on one of my book covers. Both of these claims are false. The person he’s talking about, I haven’t looked for or lurked around. I was told to leave them alone roughly ten years ago, and shock of shocks, I did. I do still think of them and miss them sometimes, but I also regret being a bad influence on them, and I don’t long for a reunion. They have their own life to live without my crazy ass making problems for them, and I hope that they’ve since grown up happy and healthy.

I do not have any photos of this person, and all my book covers were made using stock images from Shutterstock, where I have an annual membership to buy five images before I need to pay for a renewal. I would not ever use someone’s image without their permission, and I would NEVER use this person’s image because I respect their privacy.

Random April updates

So, I know blog posts are slowing down, and you’re all wondering, “Bitch, what are you plotting now?” Well I’ve been kind of busy. Last week I finished a new novel, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. It’s the first book in a spin-off series that will follow up on what happens to Alice Culpepper after the events in the final Peter the Wolf novel, Thicker Than Blood. (Which releases in June, by the way.) I’m working on the edits for Thicker Than Blood, and I’m also writing a non-paranormal romance novel, Third Wheel Romance Blues. Once I finish editing one book, I have to start editing the sequel to A Boy and His Dawg, a much darker story called Fangs, Humans, and Other Perils of Night Life, which will be released in July.

I also got interviewed by Rebecca Scarberry. So if you haven’t seen that yet on Twitter, go ahead and take a look.

I’m taking a two month break from promotions on Twitter, but it’s not done much for my nightmares problem. I’m now going on two straight months with no relief, and nothing I do seems to help get rid of the nightmares. Dropping promotions has helped to reduce my stress levels, and while my sales are kind of suffering for it, they didn’t die off completely. So there is that.

Plus, I sold copies of my flops, Bran of Greenwood and the Scary Fairy Princess, A Bard’s Tale, and Mmmm…Crunchy! And even more shocking, no one asked for refunds…on those titles, that is. Almost everything I sold in the UK Kindle store this month was returned. Which is a little depressing. I haven’t had this many refund requests before, and it’s not even the offensive books being returned. So I don’t know what went wrong. Maybe the straight readers got offended reading about trans and gay main characters. *Shrug*

Anyway, despite the slower sales and there being no improvement with my nightmare problem, I’m still not going to do any promotions for May. I really do need a break, and June will be hard enough on me when I have to start promoting Thicker Than Blood and the rest of the Peter the Wolf series. I just hope to have enough other projects done so I can devote most of my energy to the promotion push instead of dividing my time between writing, editing and selling.

And…I think that’s it for now. Along with everything else I’m doing, I’m also trying to catch up on my reading, and I’m starting my balcony garden again. I want to do another another video game review, but the last 3 Vita games I bought, I hated so bad, I dropped them too early to give a fair assessment of the games. But at least I’ll have some new book reviews relatively soonish.

Oh, right, thank you to everyone who bought books this month and didn’t get a refund. Really appreciate your continued support.

Campaigns to think about…

So, after making a rambling comment on Twitter about not being sure how to meet our first stretch goal of $600 to pay my editor Tara for her work on Thicker Than Blood, we got ANOTHER $100 contribution. That’s 3 so far, for those not keeping score at home. Because of these ultra-generous fans, all backers will be getting a new ARC in their incentive packages, Fangs, Humans, and Other Perils of Night Life. This is a sequel to A Boy and His Dawg, which has been getting some good reviews over on Amazon after being free for a week. (Have I said woot yet? No? WOOT!)

I’m not 100% sure if the ARC will have a cover or not, but I have already contacted the artist who worked on the first book, D.B. Harris, and he’s willing to do the second cover too. Which is good, cause that way they’ll have a consistent style. I have all of April and part of June to scrape together funds to pay D.B. So I want to say that of course I’ll have a proper cover on the ARC for you. But I won’t promise this because I don’t want to lie to you if things don’t work out. But, for sure, I will be using a lot of this extra time to edit the book, and as ARCs go, it should be a relatively clean copy. (I edit because I love you.)

I said on Twitter that I’d have the incentive package out in April, but this is a math mistake on my part. Our campaign still has 36 days left, and so the packages won’t get out to you lovely peeps until May. The book will release in June, and this is another way of me saying thanks to you for preordering. I had plans to release other books before Fangs, but since I’ll already have it finished with a cover, I suspect it will be my July release. One of the joys of being an indie punk is, I never met a schedule I didn’t ignore to do what I wanted. (^_^)

Anywho, have I said recently how awesome my fans are? Because they really are. I may not have as many as the bigger authors, but da-yum, my fans know how to show the love. <3

Instead of signing off with butt smooching, I want to bring a couple of other campaigns to your attention, which I have no affiliation with, but which I still think you should check out. The first is a new party card game called Widget. The game maker asked me to check out last night. I did, and the word nerd in me went “Oooh! This has potential!” So I retweeted the link they sent, and then I chipped in a $10 to help nudge the game closer the stretch goals for expansion packs. The game has already met the minimum goal of $4,000, but if they can make $4,500, we’ll get vampires and zombies added to the mix.

And now for something less bitchy

I complain about a lot of stuff. Part of that has to do with how and where I grew up, and part of it has to do with my inability to shut up during mood swings. And sometimes I complain because I care, and I don’t feel like others care enough to make a difference.

The thing is, last night, after staying up a bit too late and being stupid sleepy, I got an invoice from Amazon for $47. This is in addition to the $35 I just got from Gumroad, and after doing some math, I realized, I’ve made over $200 in the first few months of this year. That’s all sales. It doesn’t include the two people who went, “Hey, Zoe, here’s $100 just because.” Yes! Seriously, people now just send me money. I don’t even have to sell them books, they’re just that generous. I honestly wouldn’t think I’d see that kind of generosity without growing some boobs and taking up a job in a strip club.

The other day, that dude who wrote The Piano was talking on Salon about how the cease and desist letter from Jack Daniels had raised his sales numbers and he was right up there with the big boys for a little while because he’d caught a lucky break. Then, get this; he says, “but after royalties and taxes and other expenses, I only made $12,000.” Oh, only $12,000. Okay. But no, he goes on to say that his previous self-published books only made $123.

Now I’m looking over my math and stuff, and I’m seeing that I made over $200 this year (after taxes, even!) The year’s barely started, y’all. I got new books in the pipeline, ready to launch, and my new book Sandy Morrison and the Pixie Prohibition, is starting to pick up new sales too. I’ve got 15 sales this month already. Yeah, it’s not nearly as high as the previous two months, but hell, that’s not a bad number at all. It’s even more amazing when you consider I went on vacation and stopped promoting my stuff. Didn’t matter, y’all still went out and bought my books anyway.

Another Indiegogo update…

This will be a shorter post, as I just wanted to let you know how we’re doing on our Indiegogo campaign to get my editor paid for her work on Thicker Than Blood. It’s been just six days since the campaign started, and we’re already past 80% funding with $420. We’ve already blown past what we made last year on our campaign for Roll the Bones, which collected $380 after 30 days. This year, we’ve got over 50 days to hit our goal and then move on to pimping for stretch goals. We didn’t even think we needed stretch goals when we launched this campaign, and only two days later, we were like “Whoa, we need to add extra bonuses?! How it that possible?”

The response this year is just stunning. Two contributors chipped in $100, and another offered $50. We’ve got four contributors at the $25 level, and two more at the $15 level. Just…wow.

None of this would be possible without Twitter. And it really is all on Twitter. I don’t know what’s up with Facebook, if it’s just that people don’t see my updates because of how the site works, or if they’re ignoring me. But either way, I can’t get anyone to share my stuff on Facebook. Like, ever. But Twitter has been AMAZING for the number of RTs we’ve had. All our contributors seem to be coming from Twitter as well. Y’all are like the kings and queens of social sharing. You are true indie supporters as well, and I am blown away by all you’ve done for me and my editor.

Whether you contributed or just shared our links, I owe you many thanks for your help. I believe we will be able to hit $600 before the end of the campaign, maybe even $700. So Tara will have money to help pay for her college courses, and I will be able to sleep better knowing she got paid for all her hard work on the series.

Thank you. A thousand times, thank you. Your generosity and support is what helps keep me going, and now, you’ve helped support my editor as well. You’re awesome people, truly the cream of the crop. <3

Denying reality, but demanding a false realism…

This last two months, I’ve been working a lot harder than I should, and the stress is starting to break me. I’ve not been able to go a day without fatigue attacks, whether I’ve worked or not, and now I’m suffering from a number of MS-related issues in addition to having bouts of insomnia.

The problem with the fatigue is that when I drop, I’m not getting restful sleep. I’m just shutting down and collapsing. Obviously, this makes me moody, and it’s been extremely hard to stay positive and focused on my current projects. When I do finally get to sleep, I have nightmares, and I wake from them feeling ill. So I sit up and try not to go back to sleep, lest I go right back into the same nightmare.

This week, I’ve got myself worked down to only one project to promote, and I’m hoping to put off the muse from any new writing projects so I can recover some energy. This project is my editor’s campaign for her work on Thicker Than Blood, and it’s been going fairly well so far, with contributions up to $350. All the contributors thus far have been regular readers of mine, and several are fans of the Peter the Wolf series. I’m still struggling to connect with any new readers though, and if we want to reach any stretch goals, I’m going to need to work on that. I suspect, however, that this post will not help matters much. Ah well, such is life.

During this last year, while I’ve made preparations closing out the series, a number of child abuse cases have come to light, and they all follow a familiar pattern. People in positions of power have abused children, and because of their authority, other adults didn’t just look the other way, but actively worked to silence the victims and cover up the crimes. The most recent allegations are about old abuses, with the victims now coming forward as adults. There’s the Elm House pedophile scandal, and an orphanage in Jersey where politicians went to molest and rape children who had no one to protect them. The whole system failed these kids. Cops did nothing. The government actively worked to close investigations, and even now, they are working to bury the stories.

Despite the loud outrage that comes out after these stories break, nothing really changes. People growl and snarl about what they’d like to do if they had five minutes alone with the abusers, but that’s about the extent of their concern, which never actually extends to the victims. It’s a bit of saber rattling to ease their guilty conscience for not giving a shit, and once they’ve vented, the abusers are pretty much free to move on to their next victims. This is how modern society treats all problems, actually. We yell “That’s not right!” and then we let the crime go on anyway. Sometimes, we even continue to support the people committing the crimes. “Name one example!” you shout. The Catholic church. You’ve seen how complicit they are in abuse cases, how far reaching the cover up goes. But at the end of the day, when the Pope goes on a world tour, people throng to see his parade. They support the abusers, and they ignore the victims.

A Boy and His Dawg update…

Yesterday was the last day of my 5-day free promotion for A Boy and His Dawg, and I’ve kept the numbers to myself while waiting to see how this would turn out. I didn’t want to influence anyone with guilt trips if the numbers were low, and besides, ALL numbers seem low to me while I’m in the middle of a promotion, so I tend to be a leeetle biased.

Before I begin breaking down the numbers, I want to mention that a few writers on Twitter have mentioned over and over “sure, you can get downloads, but those are meaningless because they won’t lead to new sales or reviews.” Look, I didn’t do this to promote my other books, and although I’d love some reviews for Tobe’s story, I didn’t release the book free in exchange for reviews. People who’ve been with me long enough to remember when I was a WebLit groupie know that I had tried to make that request over and over, and I got SLAMMED for “being entitled”. Oddly enough, three years later, I see pro authors saying the same things I said, and readers ain’t listening to them either. (You would think most readers suffered from chronic arthritis with how reluctant they are to write a review, even for books they liked.)

No, my only goal in this promotion was to get more people to pick up one book which I did not expect to sell well. After a week of my usual pimping and begging, it had only 7 sales, and that was pretty much all I could expect from my current audience. Which is sad, but what do I want? It’s a gay YA romance in a world of readers afraid of catching Teh Gei by reading about Teh Gei. *shrug*

No, this time around, what I needed was to get the book in front of people who weren’t a part of my crowd, and maybe entice them to try something they might not normally pick up. If later, I get reviews out of the readers, that’d be nice, and I’ll be happy. If it leads to more sales because those freebie readers liked what they saw, that would be awesome, and I’d be happy. But all I wanted out of this promotion was bigger numbers.

So, did I get them? OH HELL YES. 647 downloads worldwide, with 507 in the US and 88 in the UK. But, along comes the real surprise: 43 in Germany. Which is awesome because I only sold two books in Germany before now. I got 3 downloads each from France, Italy, and Canada, and was completely ignored in Spain, Japan, and Brazil (This will affect my Christmas card list, you guys.)

Thicker Than Blood update

I really did not expect to be making an update this quickly, but there was a response to the first day of the Indiegogo campaign that’s nothing short of jaw-dropping. In our first day, we’ve earned $150 from only 5 backers, making over a quarter of our initial goal. WOW.

This is an amazing response, and given that Tara opted to go with 60 day campaign, we both realistically expect to go over the goal this time. But I’d like to push and see if we can entice more readers to preorder, and to do that, we’re bringing in some stretch goals So, if we can get over $600, I will send every contributor an ARC copy of Fangs, Humans, and Other Perils of Night Life, the sequel to A Boy and His Dawg, which I just recently completed. As an ARC ebook, there won’t be a proper cover, but I will work to get most of the typos out, and you can get the file in ePub, Mobi, or PDF to fit your ereading needs.

But that’s not all! For each $100 level we break over $600, I will write another short story set in the Peter the Wolf world. So, if we break $700, I’ll do a story with Peter’s sister, Heather, and Jake Forrester, the weredog Peter loves to hate. (Perhaps set between events in Dogs of War and Roll the Bones.) If we break $800, I’ll do another story featuring Peter’s enigmatic best friend Pi after the events of the last book, and at $900, I’ll write a story about Cassandra the child vampire before she met Peter.

Part of me says, “Eh, it’s not likely we’ll break $600.” But that part of me also said “No one is going to donate $100 for cookies.” And yet, someone did! Let this teach us all never to underestimate the powers of homemade cookies.

I’ve been on a recent butt-smooching frenzy on the blog, but y’all deserve sincere thanks for all your support. As I said on Twitter tonight, I don’t have many fans, but the ones I do have blow me away with the amount of support you give. I know a lot of the time I’m a cranky old lady who complains a lot, but these last two months, I’ve been very happily surprised by the responses to my projects. I’m sure eventually we’ll get back around to the complaining, but for now, I just want you all to know how much you mean to me. Thank you for everything, and I hope to have more new stuff to keep you entertained as a reward for your continued loyalty and support.

In conclusion, y’all rock, and I couldn’t do this without you. Go you. (No, really go. That’s the end of the post. =^p)

Indiegogo campaign for Thicker Than Blood

I tell ya, I picked the wrong week to give up speed. Sorry, old Airplane joke. But this is going to be a busy week for me. I’m still in the middle of promoting A Boy and His Dawg, which is free on Amazon until the 5th, but I’ve also got word from my editor Tara Frauendienst that she’s ready to start the Indiegogo campaign for the fourth and final Peter the Wolf Book, Thicker Than Blood. If you participated in the last campaign, you’ll find new ebooks being offered as incentives this time. There’s also an incentive level to pick up all four books, so if you haven’t started the series yet, this is the best way to get all four in one zip download.

In addition to asking for funds, I also need your help getting out word to new readers. Conveniently, right under the cover for the book are several buttons for sharing the campaign on Facebook, Twitter, and G+. Last year, our campaign hit $380 and I was able to pay Tara the rest to cover her fees. We would not have reached this level without people sharing the tweets, and fully half the contributors were not regular readers. This is why it’s vital that we get your help with promotions, because you probably have a lot of friends who don’t follow me and who might be interested in helping if they knew about the campaign, even if it’s just to do another signal boost.

We’ve already got our first contributor for $25, and the campaign minimum is only $500 to cover Tara’s fees for editing the book. Any additional funds would be awesome, and would help Tara pay for her final college courses to graduate. But whether we make $510 or $1500, all the proceeds still go to Tara. I’ll make my own funds off the regular sales when the book hits the vendors.

One last thing: contributors get access to the book a few weeks earlier than the final release date. This preview is both a thank you to y’all, but also a polite request to consider reviewing the book when you finish it. Obviously, you don’t have to if you don’t feel like it, but it would really help out in my early promotions if I had some reviews to show to new readers. (This is of course assuming you read it right after buying it, and I know some of you probably have huge to-be read piles like me. And that’s cool.)

I’m having to once again push back the release on Revival of the Magi, so April’s release will be Sandy Morrison and the Pixie Prohibition. So, that’s my week in a nutshell: promote one free ebook, promote a fundraiser for my editor, and get an ebook ready for release in two weeks. And you better believe I’m going to feel splattered by Saturday. =^/

Okay, that’s the news for now. Thank you in advance for y’all folks who contribute to the campaign or share links, and to those of you downloading A Boy and His Dawg. Really appreciate all your support.

Free for a limited time only…

Before I ballyhoo the free book, I need to update my sales for February. Between Amazon, Kobo, and my blog bookstore, I racked up 42 sales. Douglas Adams would know why I find this a good and proper number. Besides being a favorite number for nerdy reason, it’s also my highest sales month ever. And yet, I find myself hoping I can break it in March. =^D

But, for the next five days, I have a free book on Amazon, A Boy and His Dawg.

Um…wait, that’s it? Well…

No, there is something else. See it just so happens that the same day that A Boy and His Dawg started this free promotion, I finished writing a sequel for Tobe’s story. The new sequel is tentatively title Fangs, Humans, and Other Perils of Night Life. It’s going to be a short, fast novel, and if you like A Boy and His Dawg and want to see more of Tobe and his wolfish boyfriend Keith, I’m happy to say there will be more coming soon, possibly even this year. =^D

I’ll also have a new release out later this month, some interviews, and a few reviews. If March is as good as January and February were, this could shape up to be one of my best years ever. Good sales, lots of productive writing, decent reviews. Yep, all good stuff.

And though I’ve already said it a few times recently, I couldn’t do this without y’all. So thank you again for buying my books and visiting my blog. Your continued support is what makes it so easy to keep cranking out new books like a woman possessed. <3