The second book in my II AM Trilogy of vampire novels is FREE today (Weds) and tomorrow (Thurs) on Amazon.com. This means that along with The Blood That Bonds, which is always free, you can get 2/3 of the trilogy for the low low price of zero dollars!

Already own Blood Hunt? Well, it still makes a great gift for the book-loving people in your life, especially combined with TBTB!

You can snag Blood Hunt for free right here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005JDGUS4

And The Blood That Bonds here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002R5B0WI

And if you want to complete the set, you can get The Children of the Sun for $2.99 here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009ZCSDA8

After careful consideration of my sales numbers, I’ve come to the following conclusion: few people are buying my books on iTunes or Barnes & Noble.

So, I’m going to try an experiment. Amazon offers a program called KDP select in which authors can add their books to certain promotions that may help to increase sales. The catch: they require exclusivity. This means I have to take any books that I want to enroll in their program off all of the other sites that sell them.

I’m not super-fond of this. I think it’s a sleazy attempt by Amazon to acquire a monopoly in the eBook industry, and I have resisted going this route for a long time for that reason. However, as sales on Nook, iTunes, Sony, Kobo and the rest have dwindled while my Kindle sales remain strong, it has become more and more apparent that Kindle is the dominant eBook platform of our times. In fact, even a large chunk of my iPad/iPhone readers use the Kindle app, rather than buying through iBooks.

With all that in mind, and since I know all of my most-loyal readers have already picked up Blood Hunt and The Children of the Sun, I’m going to give Amazon’s KDP Select program a shot with my vampire books.

This will not affect The Broken God Machine. That book, when it comes out, will be available for all platforms simultaneously, just like my other books have been. This is strictly about the II AM Trilogy. Update: this will also NOT delete any copies that have already been bought. If you own a II AM Book on the Nook or from iBooks, you will retain it.

I’ve begun the process of removing the books from other services. Once they’re gone, I’ll enroll in KDP Select for 90 days and see how it goes. Then I’ll reevaluate and decide whether I want to put the trilogy back on the other websites or not.

Wow, how has it been two months since I last posted here? Time flies, my friends, especially when you’re working on a bunch of different stuff. Let’s cover all that work, shall we?

The II AM Trilogy

With the exception of an upcoming contest, I’ve put the II AM Trilogy to bed by creating a compilation eBook that contains all three titles in one file, and by redesigning the website. Note: if you’ve already read TBTB, Blood Hunt, and TCotS, there is nothing new in the collection and you should not feel any need to buy it (unless you want it all in one file for some reason). This is just a way for interested new readers to get the whole thing at once instead of having to download/buy three different ebooks. It’s not intended as a cash-grab from people who already paid for my work.

You can get more info at the new II AM Trilogy website. There’s also a FAQ, the full historical timeline (starting at 5000 BCE and going all the way to present day), and some other fun stuff.

The Broken God Machine

I’ve completed the final draft of The Broken God Machine, making substantial changes to the narrative that I think really help the book. It will shortly be going out to my advance readers for one last, quick round of feedback, following which it will head for my editor Lauren. We’re looking good for an early fall 2013 release! I’ve also engaged a very talented illustrator to do the cover. You should check out his website!

More on TBGM in the coming weeks.

Monster Hunters

The original draft of Monster Hunters is a fun book and I like it a lot, but it’s severely flawed from a structure standpoint: basically the climax happens in the middle and the whole last third of the book is stuff that really should take place before said climax. This is what happens when you write a novel in 30 days with very little thought put into it beforehand beyond “this girl kills a werewolf and gets recruited by a school that trains monster hunters” …

So I’m restructuring it, basically by cutting and pasting the chapters and then reading through and changing stuff that no longer makes sense (like the climax happening in February when, in the new order of things, it should happen in June). After that, it’ll go out to my advance readers for their first round of feedback. I have no idea if I will ever release this book, let alone when, but I’d like to at least advance it along the stages.

Also I’m renaming it from “Morgan Skylark and the Monster Hunters” to “The Monster Hunters – Book 1: The Werewolf at the Window” … but since the name’s never been official anyway, it really doesn’t matter much!

Non-Fiction

HUGE gin roundup coming to Primer soon. I submitted it at the end of March so it’ll probably be up in late April or early May. Sixteen gins with full tasting notes, plus I did a martini test for each one. It’s a fun, informative read (I think).

The Future

With The Broken God Machine about to leave my hands for a couple of months, my thoughts are turning to starting a new book. I’ve spoken before about a revenge thriller set in a partially flooded, future Brooklyn, and that’s what I’ll likely be working on next. It should b a standalone book, like TBGM, and I’m expecting it to come in at about 95,000 words, also like TBGM (that’s a bit longer than The Blood That Bonds). Sometimes these projects have a tendency to grow, though, so we’ll see. At 1,500 words a day, I should be able to crank this thing out in about two months. Which is just about the amount of time Lauren needs for editing TBGM. Serendipitous!

That’s it for now.

I’ve officially opened up ordering for signed copies of The Children of the Sun, as well as my other two books. These editions will only be available in limited quantity and for a limited time, so if you’re interested, it’s a good idea to get your order in ASAP. Once they’re gone, I won’t be offering any more. I’m making the entire trilogy available because I want newcomers to my work to be able to get all three books.

Want to buy a book or two (or three)? Head over to the order page on the II AM Trilogy site to get started. You can order one, two, or three books and I can ship them pretty much anywhere in the world!

Dawn over at Day Dreaming (mildly NSFW) has posted a nice review of Blood Hunt. She enjoyed the book and recommends it highly! Here’s an excerpt:

I’m going to be completely honest here—because that’s what authors and readers alike want—I’m an HEA story kind of girl, which book #1—The Blood That Bonds—was not. I was a little miffed and felt somewhat let down about a certain character’s death, and I have to admit that I wasn’t all that motivated to read book #2. I’m a total dope…I COULDN’T PUT THIS DOWN! If I was flexible enough I’d kick my own arse (as Stephen would so blatantly state). I’m happy to say there were no problems with the name “Two” for me this time around; it was much easier for me to grasp as a name.

You can check out the entire review over at Day Dreaming. Thanks, Dawn!

I’ve polished up The Broken God Machine and begun querying agents about representing that manuscript. I’m pursuing traditional publication for this one because I’m still curious about that world, and about whether I can the same success working within the industry that I have outside of it. We’ll see how that goes. If I don’t get any bites after a while, I’ll make some tweaks and see if they help. In the end, I can always publish it the same way I have my vampire books. Advance reader feedback has been really good, and I think you guys will enjoy it!

With TBGM out of the way for now, I’m moving back to The Children of the Sun. It’s time to start draft 2, and in this case that means cutting. Lots of cutting. My goal is to slash 25,000 words out of the book (which would bring it to right around the same length as Blood Hunt). I think that will make it leaner and meaner, more fun to read, and also address some of the issues that my trusted readers brought up with the first draft, one of which is that this book about Two just spends too much time not featuring Two!

TCotS is flabby right now, as evidenced by the fact that I managed to trim more than 9,000 words off of it this weekend by hacking out some sections that just aren’t integral to the story. I liked them. I’ll miss them. But they had to go.

This is a necessary part of revision — there are bits of The Blood That Bonds and Blood Hunt that never saw the light of day, either. I’ve never had a book this long, so I’ve never had to cut this many words before, but I think it’ll be good for me and for the novel! The whole point of a first draft is to just get the damn thing out and written down. That’s done. Now it’s time to make it good!

Oh, on one other TCotS-related note: the thumbnail ideas for the cover are starting to come in. You can see one of them in this very post! More on that soon.

Well, I decided to give video blogging a shot. The result seems to be ok — I think fans of the II AM Trilogy will find it interesting. If you’ve read both The Blood That Bonds and Blood Hunt, you should check it out. If you haven’t read those books, I would suggest avoiding this blog, as I do casually mention some fairly big spoilers here and there (note: the are ZERO spoilers for The Children of the Sun). I filmed it under the assumption that the people who would be interested are up to date with the books I’ve put out.

It was an amusing project. The camera angle’s not perfect (I’m too low on the screen), I don’t look at the camera enough, and I do things like scratching my head too often … I guess I could have re-filmed a few more times, but I kind of like leaving it a little rough. If I do more of these, it will be interesting to see if the professionalism level evolves and improves.

Hope you find it interesting and enjoyable! Let me know what you think in the comments, or on Facebook or Twitter.

I think I’m going to try an experiment with this blog — I’m going to ask if you fine folks, my readers, have any particular questions for me. They can be about my writing process, or about the II AM Trilogy, or pretty much anything else you can think of. Ever have a question about one of the characters or events in Blood Hunt or TBTB? Ever wanted to know where I do my writing, or when I work, or how I come up with these zany ideas anyway? Now’s your chance!

Just visit my contact form, and ask. I’ll put together the MailBlog entry in a week or two, depending on how many questions come in! Hopefully I’ll get some interesting queries!

I’ve recently been fortunate enough to receive not one but two reviews of Blood Hunt. Both reviewers liked the book quite a bit, which is always a big plus! I’m glad that people are finding it enjoyable, and are looking forward to The Children of the Sun. I’m working hard to make sure it lives up to the first two books.

The first review to come in was from So Many Books, So Little Time. Here’s an excerpt:

I really enjoyed it, it was great to get more depth on the vampire history and how the story unravels now it has these new twists. There is still violence, fighting, sex(some of it graphic but you should be used to it by now), blood and love and twists and turns throughout the book, it is just different paced from the 1st one but it still works really well.

You can read the whole thing over at SMBSLT.

The second review is an extensive one, and it comes from the awesomely-named blog Bitch Factor 10. It’s a little spoiler-y, though, so beware! Here’s a quote:

I like that we get to find out about the vampire caste system here, and Buecheler does a splendid job of establishing the various vampire worldviews. Abraham, the big baddie from BtB is ever-present in the decisions the American vampire council must grapple with, and we get to meet the movers-and-shakers– namely, Naomi, Jakob, Malik and Stephen (who provides an outsider-insider’s view). The little anarchist in me was thrilled that there were dissidents– I was mildly sympathetic to the plight of the Burilgi, but per usual, their leader is batshit crazy (but hey, that’s way of subalterns, no?).

If you’re not scared of the spoilers, you can check out the review in its entirety over at Bitch Factor 10.

Thanks to both bloggers for taking the time to read and review!

The results are in! I’ve drawn winners for all of the prizes in the II AM Trilogy “I Want a New eReader” Contest. Thanks to everyone who entered (more than 1,100 of you!) and congratulations to those who won. I’ll be holding more contests in 2012, including one for an early look at The Children of the Sun, so stay tuned!

Here’s the winner list:

Grand Prize

• Tiffany Tillman

First Prize

• Joiceann Fromm
• Clinton Ferreira
• Tammy Grice
• Fiona Cox
• Nanang Denny Vagustira

Second Prize

• Tyler Holland
• Brooke Jennings
• Sadie Samways
• Nadine Nel
• Luke Wolf
• Diane Ellison
• Richard Cook
• Julie Murray
• Caroline Massey
• Ginamarie Calix