Where to begin?!

All right, I’ll start by announcing that the print edition of Action Figures – Issue Eight: Crawling From The Wreckage is now available on Amazon. I’ll be adding direct print edition sales on the website in the coming weeks. Of course, you can also get the e-book version at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Kobo – for now. More on that in a minute.

Next, on the audiobook front, you might recall that I lost my Well-Behaved Women – Awakening narrator Darci Cole and had to find someone to step in for the rest of the trilogy. Well, that’s done and Heather Auden, who did the killer narration on The Adventures of Strongarm & Lightfoot – Scratching a Lich, will be taking over on WBW.

Next, the New England Speculative Writers Conference was this past weekend, and what a great event it was! The conference (or “convergence,” as it was re-branded in the eleventh hour) offered a full day of presentations about the business of being an independent author interspersed with networking and general shenanigans (as seen at right).

It was an extremely informative day, and it’s led me to make some decisions about my own indie author business (and yes, being an independent author is absolutely a business).

For starters, I’m going to scale back my newsletter releases to biweekly so readers don’t feel quite as inundated — and I will be asking subscribers if they want to keep getting this newsletter to trim any dead wood from my mailing list.

The more notable change will be my withdrawal from Barnes & Noble and Kobo. I “went wide” — expanded beyond Amazon exclusivity — over a year ago in the hopes of expanding my exposure and capture new customers. Not everyone likes Amazon, after all.

In giving up perks like Kindle Unlimited, which allows users to “borrow” e-books, and the ability to do sales and giveaways, I sold all of three books each at B&N and Kobo. From a business perspective, that’s not a decent trade-off.

So I will be phasing out B&N and Kobo by the end of the month. If you want to grab the e-book versions of anything before I put all my eggs back into the Amazon basket, now’s the time to do it.

Well-Behaved Women: Book two, Transition, is fully edited and formatted and is now awaiting its cover art.

The Adventures of Strongarm & Lightfoot – book four: Still cranking away. I am hoping to have it out this fall but I’m treating that as a soft deadline. Life too often gets in my way, and in the ways of my editor and cover artist, so I’m not going to force it.

Action Figures – Issue Nine: Hell Hath No Fury: First draft in progress.

Action Figures – Issue One: Secret Origins (audiobook): Review completed, final editing in progress.

APPEARANCES & EVENTS

• The Connecticut Renaissance Faire – Saturday, October 5, Lebanon County Fairgrounds, Lebanon, CT: I’ll be back again to sell and sign books as part of CTRF’s Local Authors Series!

The New England Speculative Writers group has a new preview book for newsletter subscribers. Pick it up and read the opening chapters to Well-Behaved Women – Awakening and other stories.

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