August Arrives, Experimentation Ends

This marks the longest break I've had over here, but that had nothing to do with rest and relaxation. On the contrary! 

I put this site on private mode, redirected (hopefully) visitors to my Payhip site as my new home base, but that ended up as well as I'd expected, which was badly. That store, in its second incarnation (I had it up once a couple or so years ago and deleted it), sold nothing. No amount of marketing site-specific sales did anything other than attract bot traffic to it with zero conversions. And that store has been up since the start of the year.

I count that as my second strike, and I'm not going to attempt a third. I know when I'm beaten, and there's no help for it.

So I deleted that site and have sworn off direct sales at this point unless I somehow stumble across the secret to successfully attracting a massive audience of readers to my (extremely niche) books. For a writer who barely sells over at bigger, more established and popular online stores, selling direct is just not going to work. 

Also things have gotten even busier at the day job, believe it or not, and I just don't have any gas in the tank by the end of the day. I can't maintain a store and be creative in my marketing. I've tried just about every sale method and combination Payhip offers creators, and I still failed. So! No more direct sales. I just can't anymore. 

One final attempt at experimentation was setting up a really stripped down single-page site over at Carrd.co (a platform I highly recommend, by the way), but I found I do miss blogging, regardless of consistency. I mean, I'd love to be more consistent and post at least once a week over here, but that remains to be seen, doesn't it, with my day job being the way it is? 

(Not that I'm complaining about the day job, of course -- I'd rather be run off my feet than fruitlessly looking for a job in this economy)

At any rate, after a brief stint away from this dinosaur of a platform, I'm back, and I've once again updated all of the links all over this site and reverted back to my old Books2Read links. 

I did add a new moodboard to my main Book Gallery page, and it contains a mix of images highlighting the kinds of subjects I gravitate toward in my writing (i.e., ghosts, the occult, gay romance, liminal spaces, etc.). I'll also be updating around half of the moodboards in the individual gallery pages as well. 

In fact, I already have the moodboard I plan to use for Valérian's gallery page, but all good things to those who wait. Anyway, there it is. I do have a few writing updates to post this weekend, so stay tuned for that. 

Now Available: 'The Shadow Groom' (Plus Two Sales!)

It's out, it's out! Yay! Book number eleven in my Grotesqueries collection is finally here, and I can breathe easy.

All is well and perfect in the world because Errol Bricksworth and Edvin Loyola-Norikova are young (too young), in love (overly so), and betrothed at just nineteen (heaven help everyone). Their families aren't very keen on the idea, and with the help of Errol's beloved Uncle Sorrel, an arrangement is made meant to test the lads' resolve to have their happily-ever-after. 

It does require three months spent in an old, old gatehouse that's not only home to mismatched furnishings, art, and miscellaneous contents spanning centuries, but a few very active ghosts as well. Errol and Edvin are to be the gatehouse's caretakers while Uncle Sorrel, who owns the property, withdraws with his tiny staff to a cozy cottage tucked away in the wood. And for three months, both young men need to get their hands dirty, learn the rudiments of domestic life as a couple (learning how to cook helps), and get used to sharing space with lives long gone. 

Errol and Edvin's youth makes them brave and even reckless as they readily accept the terms, determined to prove those poxy adults wrong. Even those resident ghosts don't bother them, though not all hauntings, apparently, are made the same. Equal parts irritating and unnerving, the ghosts gradually force the lads to think beyond their tiny world of two either through spectral echoes of long-forgotten lives or the quiet guidance of a gentleman known only as "the shadow groom" to former staff. 

The Shadow Groom is a humorous re-imagining of the German folktale "The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was".

For some fun stuff, here's the gallery page for the book, where I share some fun tidbits about the fairy tale that inspired me to work on a re-imagining of it. 

To celebrate the wide release, I'm holding a BOGO-like sale for the book over at my store. When you purchase a copy of The Shadow Groom, you can get any book from my backlist for 60% off, including my long novellas that are usually priced at 99 cents. Getting my books from my Payhip store is the most direct way readers can support my work. This sale, moreover, will continue until my next book is released in November.

Everywhere else, you can go to the book page at Books2Read for all the links to different online bookstores for both digital and print formats. The e-book is priced at 99 cents, and the print book is $9.00 USD. 

Again, thank you for your support, and I hope you enjoy the book! 

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JULY SALE AT SMASHWORDS 

There's also another sale, but this time an exclusive one over at Smashwords. My entire Arcana Europa, Curiosities, Masks, and miscellaneous collections are 50% off with coupons throughout July. It's not a part of their sitewide sale, but something I specifically put together to coincide with it because I don't want all of my collections to be part of their summer sale. So if you have a Smashwords account, go here to my author page to see what's on offer.

Oh, Hello. There I Am.

I didn't realize I've only posted twice this month. Yikes. But then it's that time of the year when I step back and ease off the gas pedal -- at least where online activity's concerned. Or blogging, anyway. This month's been surprisingly productive off-screen, if you will, with Valérian coming along pretty well, and the notes (and growing number of images for the book's future gallery page) are giving me a lot of fuel for the story's forward momentum.

Oh, hey, it's Roland! (image from Pinterest)

The story's being told from one POV this time a la Doppelgänger, and it's just as dark as said book. With any luck, I'll be able to get all of the creepy stuff out of my system by the time Camera Obscura comes around because that book's supposed to be another comedy (a complete 180 turn from the original story idea).  

I have been pretty busy scouring around for image prompts, and as mentioned before, Pinterest has been a goldmine as far as what I'm hoping to tackle after Liminal Child (in addition to other books in my queue). 

But I've also run across a few sites that have several story prompts based on genre, and I'm hoping they'll still be around once I'm ready to get started on brainstorming and note-taking. I tend to go nuts whenever inspiration strikes, and before I know it, I've got half a dozen story ideas lined up with book covers already put together. Talk about optimism, right? But those book cover images actually light the fire under me, and if I hold on to them, they're always there to remind me about whatever plotbunnies are waiting their turn to be turned into full-blown books.

As of late, I realize I've been saving images of cemetery statues -- not of angels, but something like the ones I posted previously that have gotten me going with Valérian. 

One of a dozen-plus for A House of Profane Gods (image from Pinterest)

The difference, though, is that the images (there are two) that I set aside for Valérian are strictly a solo thing, i.e., the statues represent only one person in the story. But the newer obsession I have involve multiple figures in a variety of poses that run the gamut between sad, creepy, and grotesque. And I do have the germ of a story inspired by those images; however, we're looking at a publication date that's two years from now. Will that idea stick around that long? I've already committed to the next four books on my calendar. I haven't bothered to look beyond them. In fact, I made myself stop.

But, uh... cemetery statues. They need a story.

And there's also that Cupid and Psyche retelling that I want to tackle even though I haven't gotten around to coming up with how best to do that. Too many ideas, I'm telling you, and there's only one of me.  

Next Up: Valérian

So when I said "soon", I clearly meant "in a week, yo". 😶 Yeah, life happened, alas. 

Anyway, I've just started work on Valérian, which is enjoying copious notes-spawning in my notebook. I'm really looking forward to this story as it's been getting pretty expansive in my head, and I've also got some pretty effective musical and visual inspiration for it. 

This image, which I'll be using in the gallery page for the book down the line, has been lurking in my hard drive for a good long time, and it's finally making itself "heard". I know it's most likely AI-generated, but I couldn't find anything else just as fantastical and creepy as hell that's from real-life cemeteries, so I apologize for its usage (to be honest, a lot of the images I've used for my gallery pages were AI-generated, which seems to be the thing now over at Pinterest, my go-to place for visual prompts). 

Then there's this song, which pretty much encapsulates the subject of the book:

I talked about that song as well as "Daniel" in an older post, and as with the image above, they're finally getting the story treatment. When the time comes for the gallery page to be made, it's going to be an embarrassment of riches for me regarding the images that can be used for the moodboard and other things. 

Yay, progress! 

'The Shadow Groom' Gallery Page Now Up

As I'm up to my ears in errands and chores, this'll be a short and sweet post. The gallery page for The Shadow Groom is now up, and there's quite a bit of background stuff I'm sharing with visitors there. Head on yonder for the goodies. 

And I'll be back soon. Maybe not today, no, but soon.