Posts Tagged ‘The Spare’

Historical Romance Sale: Three Books, One Low Price!

Saturday, August 13th, 2016

Historical Romance Sale!

I put together a boxed set of three of my historical romances, and right now for a limited time, the boxed set is on sale for $0.99. That’s three full-length historical romances for one low price! Because you guys are my favorites. The price is good pretty much everywhere. Go forth and read historical romance.

3D cover of Historical Jewels because everyone knows digital books have a shape.

A Great Deal!

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The novels included are: The Spare, Scandal, and Indiscreet. That’s 300,000 words (roughly) of historical romance. Indiscreet won a Bookseller’s Best award. Scandal was a RITA Finalist. Links below! Sale lasts through August 28, 2016.

Amazon | iBooks | Nook | Google Play | Kobo | All Romance

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THE SPARE

She’s missing a day from her life. He thinks she may have killed his brother.

A delightful battle-of-wills romance, tinged with suspense. (Kathe Robin, Romantic Times)

The Spare is a Regency romance murder mystery. If you like well-plotted tales, engaging passion, and a touch of gothic, then you’ll love Carolyn Jewel’s steamy and mysterious novel.

SCANDAL

A proper young widow. A reformed rake. Let the game of love begin.

WOW. Simply, wow. That is the only word I can use to describe this masterpiece. (Romance Novel TV)

Scandal is a Regency romance novel featuring a complex and dysfunctional pair. If you like intense passion, deep emotions, and unpredictable plots, then you’ll love Carolyn Jewel’s pulse-pounding and wonderfully-written tale of love.

INDISCREET

A woman disgraced by a lie. A beast of a man with a cold heart. Their love will transcend continents.

Indiscreet moves from Regency England to the exotic locales of Turkey and Syria in the midst of the Napoleonic wars. The winner of the 2010 Bookseller’s Best Award for Best Short Historical Fiction, it features fast pacing, simmering chemistry, meticulous research, and strong central characters.

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The News Post of New Stuff you Didn’t Know Probably

Monday, September 1st, 2014

All righty.

Things I have been doing:

1. Uploaded A Notorious Ruin for pre-orders at Amazon, iBooks, Google Play, and Kobo. The publication date is September 23, 2014. I’ll post the pre-order links as they come live.

The files are final enough that I would not be totally horrified if they delivered now. They’re missing a couple graphical elements that would spiffy up the file, that’s pretty much it.

Side note: Aside from other proofeading, I ran A Notorious Ruin through an on-line grammar checker that highlighted some typos and points that needed clarification, and the WordPerfect grammar checker that highlighted OTHER typos and points that needed clarification.

Side Side note: Grammar checkers are pretty much useless for actually checking grammar. But they are very good at finding typos or other slips.

Side Side Side note: Next, I will do a visual proof on the iPad (see below) AND have it read back to me.

2. I have started uploading the new covers for Scandal and Indiscreet. That goes along with some updated links and formatting (always tweaking!) They’re live most places, actually.

3. I approved the new cover for Stolen Love and have the final files.

4. Took a look at the new cover for The Spare and asked for a slight tweak.

5. Went back and forth on the main images to use for Passion’s Song and Moonlight. Found a couple more to consider.

6. Contacted my go-to guy for typopgraphy and logos etc about doing some work on a logo and graphical elements to use inside books. Yes, that latter one would be easy. If you aren’t me. But I am me. So.

7. Loaded the proof iBooks file for A Notorious Ruin to the iPad. I find this a very very useful proofreading tool. I’ll also find any formatting glitches, of course.

So, been busy. How about you?

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My Frustrating Last Two Days . . .

Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011

(P.S. There is a happy ending. . . )

So. The afternoon of May 2 I get this email from Dorchester Publishing:

Dear Carolyn:
With the return of your signed reversion letter, we contacted the online vendors we distribute through, instructing them to suppress/remove the following title(s):

Lord Ruin
The Spare

If any of these title(s) were in e-book format, they will be suppressed by the vendor directly. All vendors have their own timetable for removing titles once receiving notice to do so; for example, Sony usually takes a few days, while Amazon has unfortunately proven to take a few weeks. Please note, the electronic rights to the above titles will legally revert to you at the end of this month. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.

I immediately emailed back and reminded the sender that my rights reverted in August 2010 and that in any event Dorchester never produced an ebook of those titles. I noted that I had self-published both those titles under new ISBNS and asked that they contact the vendors right away and tell them the request was an error.

That night, about 10pm I got an email from a reader who asked if I had Lord Ruin or The Spare available for Kindle.

I said, sure! But then I went and checked and yeah. The books were gone.

To me, this is really, really coincidental.

I emailed Dorchester, told them my Amazon eBooks had disappeared from sale and asked that they address the issue immediately. I also emailed Amazon and asked that the books be restored to sale.

By morning, Dorchester had emailed me saying they would look into it right away. I contacted Amazon two more times and got two flavors of sorry, we can’t help you that’s another department and they don’t have any phones, here’s an email address for you. The second person said she had to fill out a form and took A LOT of information from me. But I still had no assurance that anyone at Amazon cared or was going to do anything.

I called the NY State Attorney General who told me, quite reasonably, that they only handle consumer fraud (and an author is not in a consumer relationship to a publisher.) So that was a no-go.

I emailed my US Senator (Diane Feinstein) to complain about the lack of due process in IP claims. I’ve been meaning to do that anyway.

I emailed my agent, of course, and cc’d her on some of the emails.

I called RWA who asked for a written statement and documentation (which I will pull together tonight) as they are looking into legal options.

I didn’t call the Author’s Guild because they ignored me the first time around and I, very seriously, think they don’t think much of Romance/genre authors. That’s probably an unfair assumption but it’s based on the fact for all the years I’ve been a member, I have never ever ever seen them interview or seek input from a Romance author. Other genre authors have been. I’ll probably email them so I can be ignored again for my $90 yearly dues.

Later, I asked Dorchester to confirm that they had contacted Amazon and a bit later heard that they had.

Then a little later Dorchester emailed to say they’d spoken to their Amazon rep and that he had discovered there was a “technical glitch” and that my files would be restored today.

I just got this email from Amazon:

I checked and assure you that your books “Lord Ruin (sexy Regency Historical Romance)” and “The Spare (Sexy Regency Historical Romance),” have not been unpublished per Dorchester’s request.

It appears to be a technical issue, I’ve now reported the issue to our Technical team and will get back to you with an update in 2-3 days.

Thanks for using Amazon KDP.

I have two main observations:

1. Chris Keeslar at Dorchester took this issue seriously and really did take action.

2. None of my non-Dorchester titles were affected by this “technical issue.”


Lastly, the good news is that as of 5:44 PM Pacific, Lord Ruin and The Spare are back in the Kindle store.
I’m hoping they stay there, as do all the other versions at other vendors.

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The Spare – Available on Kindle

Sunday, March 27th, 2011

News!

The Spare


The Spare, my 2004 historical, is now available for download on Kindle. Amazon hasn’t connected the Kindle version to the MMP version yet, though I hope they will. It seemed to happen automatically for Lord Ruin. In the meantime, if you read it, I would be grateful for a review, whatever your opinion might be.

I’ll let you know when it makes it to Barnes and Noble. I uploaded the files at the same time, but B&N is a bit slower than Amazon it seems.

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Good News!

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

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.

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News about The Spare

Monday, June 14th, 2010

My historical The Spare is going to be reissued in October 2010. Well, gosh! That was a bit of a surprise. I found out today when I came home to find a package from Dorchester Publishing. I thought huh, maybe they’re sending me the Dutch editions they told me about a few years ago. At last. But no.

It was a pile, a really big pile, of book covers. Great, I thought. Someone at Dorchester must have been cleaning out their desk and decided to send these to me. What do I do with— Hey. Wait a minute!

The covers, I realized, were not quite the same as the original. The same image, yes. But the colors were different and my name was really REALLY big compared to the title. And over my name, it said Author of Indiscreet and Scandal. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a publisher pimping books by a different publisher right there on the cover.My photo of the 2010 cover of The Spare

Here’s a picture of the original cover. More pink, as you can see and my name is a lot smaller. Glossy, as opposed to matte and embossing on the words. Original (2004) cover of The Spare

What I think would be awesome is if they were to re-issue my other Dorchester historical, Lord Ruin. Considering how many emails I still get about that book– it came out in 2002 and I’ve been getting several emails a year ever since — and considering that it’s almost impossible to find even used, I think readers would be very happy. So would I, actually.

If anyone would like a signed copy of the cover flats, I have some of both and would be happy to send signed ones upon reasonable request and while supplies last.

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The Early Post

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

Couple of things:

First, in writing news, I think the chapters for Scandal are ready to go. The synopsis needs more work, but I know what I need to do so I’m not utterly cast down.

The Spare is being translated into Italian. Go figure! Very nice. I think Dorchester Publishers‘s new president is being more aggressive about monitizing their books, which is good for authors. Now all those Italians who requested bookmarks from me will be able to read something of mine in Italian! Some of the emails, by the way, were entirely in Italian. Bablefish made a hash of translating them, but I have enough French to muddle through, plus the context was pretty apparent. For all I really know, though, some Italian is even now looking at a bookmark for A Darker Crimson and saying the Italian equivalent of WTF?

I had something else, but I forget. I’ll remember later.

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