i really, truly can't say enough about how awful this book is. and it's a series. it has almost a five star review on amazon. i read the back blurb and was so effing flabbergasted that i thought i just had to read it, it couldn't be that bad (like so bad it's good... or a good, old fashioned hate-read). and i was right, it isn't that bad. it's so, so much worse.
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in case anyone is interested, this is the description on the back:
New York Times bestselling author Sandra Hill continues her sexy Deadly Angels series, as a Viking vangel’s otherworldly mission pairs him with a beautiful chef who whets his thousand-year-old appetite . . .
Once guilty of the deadly sin of gluttony, thousand-year-old Viking vampire angel Cnut Sigurdsson is now a lean, mean, vampire-devil fighting machine. His new side-job? No biggie: just ridding the world of a threat called ISIS while keeping the evil Lucipires (demon vampires) at bay. So when chef Andrea Stewart hires him to rescue her sister from a cult recruiting terrorists at a Montana dude ranch, vangel turns cowboy. Yeehaw!
The too-tempting mortal insists on accompanying him, surprising Cnut with her bravery at every turn. But with terrorists stalking the ranch in demonoid form, Cnut teletransports Andrea and himself out of danger—accidentally into the tenth-century Norselands. Suddenly, they have to find their way back to the future to save her family and the world . . . and to satisfy their insatiable attraction.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062356542/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o08_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
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It's in three parts - unfortunately, it's too long for here. It was 11 days ago, so you'll see it if you go back there.
Alternately, I invite you to grab a copy :-) I THINK it's 99 cents - might be free if the trial is still going on.
https://www.amazon.com/Bittersweet-Macabre-Tales-Love-Loss-ebook/dp/B07BJG9FRB
How nuclear do you want to go? I've never actually read this book but reading the back cover literally made me decide to start writing again (because if THAT got published...)
Read the back. Please.
I'm an editor IRL for a trade journal, and I came from the newspaper world. I write for a living, so I wouldn't hesitate to call myself a "writer."
But those articles/stories/etc I write for money. The writing I do for myself is what I consider to be my "real writing."
That's where I take my identity from. It's not the bylines on my work stuff - it's the stories I have tucked away or up on Amazon. If I were to quit being an editor and pay the bills driving a truck or lifting boxes or anything else - I'd still consider myself a "writer" as long as I still told myself stories and sought to share them.
I just put a new collection of short stories out - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BJG9FRB
The free offer period expired yesterday. I gave away about 100 copies and I have a stack of review requests waiting out in the ether. I've made a grand total of $0.70, so far, and only had one posted review. But that confirmed me as a "writer" more than the hundreds of thousands of words I've written (and been paid for) in the years of my day job.
I’ll expand it, soon. This is a short distilled from a longer story I want to tell.
In the meantime, there’s more like it in my collection - The Sands is very Lovecrafty.
https://www.amazon.com/Angel-Wore-Fangs-Deadly-Angels/dp/0062356542
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I misremembered, she was a chef, not a cupcake baker. And the Viking Vampire Angel also was a cowbow, briefly.
I suggest Burn for Me, which was the book recommended to me by one of my female friends. It's written by a couple, native Russian wife and a husband who used to be a former communications sergeant in the U.S. Army. The setting is a bit sci-fi and the plotline revolves around chasing a dangerous superhuman in a world where superhumans with magic exist.
I will warn you though, that the characters have an mildly antagonistic relationship to start and that the first book is much like Jill in season 1 of BADIK, much of the romantic development doesn't begin to pick up until the second book.
The free book promotion goes live tomorrow - any of them are up for grabs, just drop me a line. I'd just ask writer's credit.
"The Sands" is my favorite and would probably work best - it's a Lovecraftian body-horror bit with a sweet scene at the end :-)
I like the Hidden Legacy series by Ilona Andrews - although it lacks the historical aspect of ADOW, it's an urban fantasy series where magic is real and families form dynasties based around their magic talents.
Burn for Me is the first book in the series, the covers are cheesy romance, but they're a fun read.
I have a short story collection up - a few have been narrated, but they’re all free to use. I can’t gift copies on Amazon but I can mail you one. Pirate away. I just ask for a link and a mention in your description.
https://www.amazon.com/Bittersweet-Macabre-Tales-Love-Loss-ebook/dp/B07BJG9FRB/ref=nodl_
Fates Parallel is a coming-of-age/Xianxia story with good progression and some nice twists, and a fairly slow burn romance subplot. It never overshadows the main plot, but it's a very important element of the books, as is progression.
Magic Bites is not as free, and the main character starts older (early 20s) but there's a strong progression element and romance throughout the series, and the humor is on point. As is the action. One of my favorite series of all time.
This insanity is a real, published, paperback book.
The author is a NYT bestseller, and that’s the book they wrote. I don’t mean that in a bad way at all. That sounds like ridiculous, awesome fun.
Sometimes you have to let go of being “”””good”””” and let your enthusiasm become infectious.
Not Another Vampire Book by Cassandra Gannon. The h is a book editor who falls into a terrible vampire romance novel. The H is the villain of the terrible romance novel, who is sure the h is the destined bride of the vampire king, who is his greatest enemy. So he kidnaps her. But then he falls in love with her himself.
If you don't mind some romance thrown in with your magic, Ilona Andrews' Hidden Legacy books (starting with Burn for Me) might appeal.
>The world is ruled by magical dynasties, powerful Houses, who marry for magic, maintain private armies, and own global corporations. Ruthless and cunning, like the aristocratic families of Medici or Tudors, Houses unleash devastating magic on their opponents. They spawn tornadoes, breathe life into constructs, and exhale torrents of fire.
>
>In this world, in the city of Houston, lives the Baylor family. Three sisters, Nevada, Catalina, and Arabella, their two cousins adopted into the family, Bernard and Leon, their veteran mother Penelope, and their Grandma Frida. Together they run Baylor Investigative Agency, except for Grandma Frida who has her own business fixing mobile artillery for Houston’s magical elite. The Hidden Legacy chronicles their lives, relationship, and adventures.
Yeps, two pen names on Amazon. One’s blue, the other’s a mishmash but mainly short horror and fantasy.
That’s my best - https://www.amazon.com/Bittersweet-Macabre-Tales-Love-Loss-ebook/dp/B07BJG9FRB/ref=nodl_
Thank you! It's my hometown (though I'm up in Erie, now), so most of my stuff is set in and around there. Ironically, Pittsburgh just gets a shout-out - but not a setting - in the book I have up on Amazon right now.
Buying a copy always, always helps - but I can shoot you a PDF in an e-mail if you promise to pass it around and encourage others to buy a copy :-)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BJG9FRB
The shout-out is in "Live Action." The rest has kind of a greasy, dirty-water vibe, like Lovecraft took a trip South.
That means a lot to me!
...if you want to read the stuff that I really, really am proud of, it’s here. Not horror or romance - kinda in-between.
https://www.amazon.com/Bittersweet-Macabre-Tales-Love-Loss-ebook/dp/B07BJG9FRB
I've had a lot of luck recently with allowing some of my Reddit short stories to be narrated on a few horror channels. I wanted to gift you my latest short story collection in pdf, epub or mobi format. I invite you to narrate any of the stories in it and hopefully leave an Amazon review. All I ask is that you plug the name of the book, "Bittersweet: 14 Macabre Tales of Love and Loss" and include the link to the Kindle store page so folks can download a copy.
https://www.amazon.com/Bittersweet-Macabre-Tales-Love-Loss-ebook/dp/B07BJG9FRB
Let me know if this is something you'd be interested in, and I hope to hear from you soon!
Because they are bad urban fantasy novels... only without the bad part. They're written by a husband-wife team (Ilona and Andrews is a portmanteau of their names) so the romance, instead of being high on the long looks and bodice ripping, is high on snarky interplay and the two characters actually building a relationship and their weird world.
If the shapeshifters/magic/post magical apocalypse setting turns you off then I say don't go any further, but if you can take magic and fairies and stuff, then it's the best. Magic Bites is where to start, name pun with the werelion fully intended. Eh, you know what, I'll just borrow from the first Amazon review:
>It was and is a treasure. I love Kate. I love Curran. And Julie. And Derek, and Jim, and Mahon, and Roman (his PJs game is ELITE), and Ghastek, and, well... all of them. My husband and I talk smack while we listen to what the various characters say. We tried to kill Hugh like, I don't know, five times for any number the things he's done in Roland's name. But that is what makes this series so good! We GET these characters, and we can geek out about them because they act like people we know (I'm personally convinced that members of my family are part of Clan Wolf (which ones and why are for me alone)).
It's just fucking hilarious. Also I'm pretty sure they had like no input on the covers for their novels, their newer works tend to have more fanciful/silly stuff.
I'll tell you how I liked the Three Body problem when I finally get to it, but I admit it is kind of last on my list (also The Fifth Season begins with "Let's start with the end of the world, why don't we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things" so that's just begging to be top of the list)
One of the most popular series on Kindle Unlimited right now is "A Shade of Vampire", which is comprised of 14 novels for a total of roughly 4,000 pages.
At the moment, a single fan binge-reading the entire series would make the author around $20—clearly on the low side, even if it's twice what a reader pays for a month of KU.
At one cent per page, that same genre-gorging glutton brings in about $40 for the author. A major improvement, and probably not unreasonable from Amazon's point of view—even if it means they're taking a sizable loss on subscribers like that.
In other words, if you write popular series of genre fiction novels, then the change will probably boost your income a fair bit.
I accidentally hit "yes" to the book on Kindle Unlimited. I was pleasantly surprised. Not Another Vampire Book...it runs more satire, but if you ever want to tell your more typical romance heroes to fuck off, it's an oddly satisfying read.
Maybe this is the opposite of what you're looking for, since the tech and magic are at odds, but I really enjoy the Kate Daniels urban fantasy series by Ilona Andrews. It's modern times, but magic has crashed into the world so that technology kind of comes and goes. So you have pretty advanced technology sometimes, and lots of magic other times, and everything is just barely holding together. It has some post-apocalyptic themes, but also how people can take advantage of the new state of the world.
Unless I absolutely can not under any circumstances get past the first couple of pages (girl with a dragon tattoo and agatha christie books are the notable ones) I stick with it for about 100 pages, or 1/3 of the way through. ONE Notable exception- Sunshine, by Robin McKinley. I tried, tried to finish it. I really did, normally I LIKE her books. I got halfway through and had to stop. It was too inane and prattling for me. I hadn't even heard of Twilight yet, but looking back upon it, that's exactly what it is like, Twilight for ages 18+ (and now there is a YA version of the book, blech).