Audiobook Sale + Interactive Story Votes
A rare double email this month, just to make sure you don’t miss out!
First, let me say that I’m sorry to be sending two emails this month—I truly don’t want to clutter up your inbox, but I wanted to make sure that you didn’t miss out on these limited time things.
Audiobook Sale on Across the Universe
Much like with Give the Dark My Love, I wasn’t warned in advance that this sale would happen, and I have no idea when it will end!
Libro.FM: This audiobook program supports independent bookstores, so please use it if you can!
Chirp: This program features all kinds of sales pretty regularly; their email alerts are great!
Interactive Choices & A New Patreon
Blood and Feathers has had a fantastic launch, thanks to all of you! It’s stayed in the Top Faved list since it came out, and it garnered more than two hundred likes in less than two full weeks of being live!
However, there have been a few bumps in the road. Kindle Vella isn’t available outside the US, and it doesn’t allow for the comments and polls that it had originally said it would provide. Additionally, the Author’s Note area was very limited—it was shorter than I anticipated, wouldn’t allow for links or pictures, and didn’t provide any place for follow-up questions.
With all that, I finally got the motivation to start a program that I’d been meaning to try out for ages! Blood and Feathers is still going to be available on Kindle Vella, so if that’s your preference, by all means, keep with it!
But I’ll also be simultaneously posting the exact same chapters on Patreon—as well as longer Author Notes, full of links and pictures so you can get a better behind-the-scenes look at the story! Plus I’ve added some features just for readers and just for writers, and I’ll now be able to fully integrate the polling areas to allow for better interaction.
You can read about why I started a Patreon here. The short answer: I want to better be able to connect with you all (and also still pay the bills).
You can read an in-depth look at the behind-the-scenes of the first fourteen chapters—all available live now on Kindle Vella and on Patreon—here.
But Wait, There’s More!
The other cool thing about the Patreon is that it will enable me to build from the ground up a cool new writing project that I simply could not figure out how to do prior to this. Blood and Feathers is going to be interactive especially at the end—you’ll get the vote for tragedy or a happy-ish ending for the characters—plus you’ll get to vote on which characters get additional shorts and novellas written about them. I have a few other angles that will feature additional content as well.
But after this novel, the next one will be even more interactive. I first started toying with the idea when some friends introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons (shout out to Alix, Christine, Charity, and Jess!). And I had a lifelong fascination with the old-school Choose Your Own Adventure novels. But one of the bad things about the CYOA novels was how short they were, and how some choices could be reversed or didn’t really impact the story.
I’m still working on the groundwork for this idea, but I think it’s coming along in a really cool way. I’ll be launching it when Blood and Feathers is done (by the end of fall—a paperback copy of the novel will be released next year).
Currently the project is tentatively titled The Museum of Magic. And when I say this is a baby idea, I mean this is a baby idea—but I’m deep into planning the different ways I’ll lead the main character can explore her world. I’ll be adding dice rolls, tarot cards, and live videos as well as polls and input from you. This is absolutely going to be a story that won’t exist without participation…
…So please, join in!
But What About All the Other Books?
In the past year, I’ve written…a lot. Including a deeply researched 600-page historical novel that’s currently on sub to editors (wish me luck! it’s a strange one, but I love it dearly!), a rewrite a young adult novel into an adult that’s still on-going, a middle grade, a dream project that I’m so excited to dive into that I’m vibrating with joy, and more. I loosely estimate that I’ve written about two-thousand pages of fiction in the past year alone.
My traditional books are going nowhere. But I want to have some fun with y’all, and I wanted to have some projects that fill the gap between paper books. Publishing is slow.
But these interactive novels? They’re going to be so much fun.