Nevertheless, she persisted.
OK, NookBook folks! Lord Ruin is now available for your Nook. Lord Ruin on Nook.
I’m definitely going to be setting up a new webpage with some of the things I’ve learned about publishing my backlist. I owe a lot to the authors who have gone before me and so generously shared their knowledge.
Today was a better day. The bar was low, but hey. Yesterday is over. My computer is working as expected. I went to my local RWA meeting today which is always inspiring, and then I met up with someone I met on Twitter along with another friend of mine — who lives near me but who I also met via Twitter. The first person was in town from Minneapolis. We hooked up and went to Chocolatier Blue where we had hot chocolate, bought chocolate and shared a devilishly good ice cream in a chocolate chip cookie cup topped with caramel and chocolate sauce and talked about interesting stuff.
Then I came home and published Lord Ruin to Nook myself. It should be available by tomorrow. I’ll provide a link when it is. Yay!!!
See? Happier post today!
Lord Ruin is now available for purchase in multiple formats at Smashwords. $4.99, no DRM, no geo-restrictions. Smashwords should be populating the file out to several vendors as well (Barnes and Noble, Sony, Apple etc) so, yay!!
My 2002 historical, Lord Ruin, is now available on Kindle. $4.99. No DRM. No geo-restrictions and with a spiffy new cover! I’m working on other formats and hope to have them up shortly, but it’s as time permits given I have a book due and it’s a fair amount of work to get the files clean and read.
If you’ve been trying to get your hands on a print version of this book, that’s in the works too, as a POD.
Reader and fellow resident of Sonoma County SonomaLass found this written in her used copy of my historical Lord Ruin:
Oh. Well. Um. OK!
If you feel the urge now to overindulge, this might be a good time to mention again that I have my rights back on this book and hope to have it available for digital download early in the new year. I’m just waiting on my cover artist to be available. Find out more about Lord Ruin here. You can also read the first chapter.
In other news revisions for My Dangerous Pleasure are going pretty well. Just about done. And speaking of, back to it!
P.S. Yay for my San Francisco Giants!
I have received my rights back for my two historicals, Lord Ruin and The Spare. This means, among other things, that the publisher no longer has rights to my characters and that all the pesky legal issues that made the possibility of sequels kind of difficult are now removed. Now the only issues are what to do with the rights. I think reselling them would be difficult and unlikely, but I suppose worth asking about.
In all honesty, the decision for me will be whether I try to resell the books myself say, via the Kindle, or simply give them away as free eBooks. I know EXACTLY who I would want to do any cover art, though. Then I’ll have to think about how, when and if I can do the sequels to Lord Ruin so many people have asked about every year since the book was first published.
Also, today I received Czech language versions for Scandal. In Czech, my last name is Jewelova. In case you were wondering.
As you may know if you’ve dropped by here before, my 2004 Historical The Spare is being re-issued. My agent had nothing to do with the sale of this book. I did email her about the re-issue because the new cover mentions Indiscreet and Scandal, books she sold for me. In my email to her, I said, gee, if only they’d re-issue Lord Ruin, since to this day I get emails about that book.
Well, she said she’d email my old publisher about that, and she did. The upshot is that it’s now possible (possible, only) that Lord Ruin will be reissued. And wouldn’t that be lovely?
The Next Historical is picking up steam, which is awesomeness in the nick of time. I’m liking my hero a lot. League play for my son’s soccer team is over (they won league!) which means I have my weekends free again. Less sitting in the car to write. I need them. Now it’s just practices and the occasional scrimmage until the big tournament in January.
Scandal is officially on sale February 3, 2009. And I’ve seem some preliminary indications of good opinions. ARCs arrived Thursday and I’ve started reading through to make sure there’s nothing terribly amiss with the copy. Wow. I was surprised by how strong the story seemed. Lord Ruin has a special place in my heart for being the book where I learned how important it is for me to write from a state of instinct. I am, I’ve come to realize, almost frighteningly analytical. (Stop laughing!!) But I cannot analyze myself into the kind of emotion a story requires. Lord Ruin was the book where I learned to let go.
Interestingly enough, there have been other times in my life when I have been under enormous pressure — the kind where there was not time to analyze. I could only let go. The first time involved geometry. I needed under some rather dire circumstances to calculate an angle so as to end up with a precisely drawn triangle of a certain shape. And I stared at this bit poster board (this was for a court hearing the next day — if I failed I’d probably be fired) and for a moment thought Carolyn, you got a D in geometry in High School. (The only grade I ever got below a B) How in heck are you going to get this triangle correctly drawn? I took a breath and had to let go of my fear and doubt and I swear that I suddenly knew EXACTLY how the formula worked. I got to work and holy heck if it didn’t come out exactly and precisely the way Pythagoras said it did.
The second time also involved a court hearing, with the added bonus that the messenger was waiting for the exhibits which the copy service had just brought to the office incorrectly bound. Miss your filing and you notify the company’s malpractice carrier, and of course we were right at the edge of maybe not enough time for the messenger to get to the courthouse. I looked at the copy guy and said, that’s not how I asked for them to be bound. (All the exhibits had to be bound in one HUGE insanely thick stack, and they had divided them up according to the height of the two-hope top prongs.) And he says I didn’t know how! Well heck, me neither because that was his job. A legal copy service is supposed to know all the tricks. So with my job and the company’s future flashing before my eyes, I let go of the panic, looked at the exhibits and the little fasteners and just knew how to fix it. And did. In the nick of time.
The same thing happened with Lord Ruin I was sitting there knowing that the book currently had spots that were just dry and boring, and I was feeling kind of panicky about that. So I just let go. I just started writing, without caring about what was coming next. I fixed what I was looking at right then.
Oh, long digression there. I need to get cracking! Off to work.
