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In my defense, I was dared…

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This is what happens when my friends provoke my juvenile sense of humor. Long story short, since the Rebel Court novellas will now be “official”, they need actual real covers, instead of the poor quality placeholders they had until now. Alas, the books are erotic romance, and there are limits on what I can do on the covers before the book world censors shut me down. My dilemma led to this text message conversation yesterday:

Me: *sigh* I think the covers will end up being man candies. It’s the only way to match so many of them in any sort of theme.

Happi Anarky (the best friend ever): Awww. Well, man candies do sell.

Me: Or… I could do dick pic covers.

HA: LMAO Won’t be on a shelf, though.

Me: But it’ll be in inboxes. 😉 Get it? Ha! Double pun!

HA: OMG LMAO Stop that madness right now.

Me: Dude, come on! Super close-up of an erection… no one would know! It would look like a veiny arm. With a tattoo.

*pause as inspiration strikes*

Me: OMG! OMG!!! What if I did mushroom pics? With tats…

HA: I dare you.

And that’s how this happened:

Yes, these are the official new covers, and they’ve already been updated at my distributor sites. Might take a day or two to update in some stores, but it’ll happen. I can tell you they’re already getting some great reactions LOL

For those of you on the Rebel Court mailing list, the first chapter went out this morning, which means the sign-ups are officially closed. If you missed the deadline, don’t despair! Sweetest Kiss the complete eBook is now available for pre-order at Smashwords.com, and will soon show up at all eBook sellers worldwide. 🙂

Missed the first two installments? Find them at your favorite eBook store (hint: you might find them discounted at Smashwords for the month of July 😉 )

1. catch me
How does a shameless skirt chaser like Haig Cavanaugh catch a legendary Huntress? Simple: he makes her want to chase him—and then lets her catch him.

CatchMe2

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2. dearest love
How does a Rebel hold out against the temptation of his childhood love? He doesn’t…

DearestLove

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Snow White’s Rebels Rebel

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Dear readers,

The most frustratingly rewarding thing to happen to a writer is when a story gets away from them. It’s frustrating, because nothing goes according to plan and, no matter how hard we try, we just can’t get it to behave the way we planned. But it’s also rewarding, because we get to discover the story as it evolves, the same way our readers do when they pick up our books for the first time.

The Rebel Court series is a poster child for this phenomenon. Originally, I’d planned for seven erotica stories to span roughly 20,000-25,000 words each. Quick little novellas I could churn out one after the other and send out to readers by chapters as they were written.

Obviously, that’s not how it happened…

What should have been a little side project now has a rich and complicated life of its own. Erotica turned into erotic romance, and my 25,000 word goal (ha…) became 35,000 for book 1, and 50,000 for books 2 and 3 respectively. I don’t regret a single one of those words. But I also have to acknowledge that they’ve become too cumbersome to send out on the fly as I’d planned to do.

The feedback I’ve gotten seems to support this. With the first book, the chapters were sent out once a week, and the wait was far too long. With the second, the chapters were sent out once a day, but my stats tell me that most of the recipients didn’t open the individual chapters until the very end. Clearly, a by-the-chapter format doesn’t work for stories of this size.

Here’s where I do the good news, bad news thing.

The good news is that Sweetest Kiss is ready for its debut and the first chapter will go out on July 1, 2018. If you still want to read it by chapters in your inbox, and haven’t signed up for the mailing list yet (or haven’t received the start date announcement email), click here to get in before that date.

The bad news is that this will be the last Rebel story to be shared this way and, once the sign-up closes, it won’t reopen. The Rebel Court mailing list will remain active to the existing members who will continue to receive exclusive VIP excerpts, teasers, coupons, and giveaways for this series as it grows, but the rest of these books will go straight to publication and distribution, just like all my other books.

Thank you to those who have stuck around with the series this long. You helped me try an experiment and, while it didn’t work the way I’d hoped it would, it turned into something bigger and better than I’d anticipated. 🙂 My commitment to Snow White’s Rebels hasn’t changed. I still plan to do an additional four stories, and possibly more after that, depending on how things develop, and I hope you’ll continue to follow the series to its conclusion.

Sincerely,

Alianne

PS: If you missed the first two installments of The Rebel Court Series, you can find them at your favorite eBook store:

1. catch me

How does a shameless skirt chaser like Haig Cavanaugh catch a legendary Huntress? Simple: he makes her want to chase him—and then lets her catch him.

Smashwords
Amazon
Barnes &Noble
iBooks
Kobo
Other

2. dearest love

How does a Rebel hold out against the temptation of his childhood love? He doesn’t…

Smashwords
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
iBooks
Kobo
Other

GDPR Compliance Stuff

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This is my fault for not paying attention sooner. There’s a new EU regulation going into effect on May 25, 2018 to protect user data and privacy. I’m not based in the EU, but I do have readers and subscribers there, so I don’t want to risk incurring the massive penalties they’re threatening for non-compliance. I sent out a couple of emails this week to my newsletter and Rebel Court subscribers, and some of them reached out to me asking if the email was spam. Not the ideal response LOL

So this is my official confirmation that the emails that went out via MailChimp are NOT spam.

If you are subscribed to receive my Newsletter, and/or The Rebel Court novellas, and you want to continue receiving them, please click the button in the email to update your preferences. You will be taken to your (very brief) profile page on MailChimp, which will list the information you already submitted. Please check the box to consent to continue receiving emails from me and click the Update Preferences button to confirm. The two lists are separate, so you’ll have to do it for each one separately, and you’ll also have the option to unsubscribe, if you’d prefer (although I hope you’ll choose to stick around!). Shouldn’t take more than 5 seconds.

In order to be compliant, I’ll only continue sending emails to those who make the update and give consent before May 25, 2018. If you miss the deadline, you will be automatically unsubscribed from the list(s) and may need to subscribe anew to get re-added back in. It’s a bit of a hassle, but I prefer staying on the safe side. 🙂

Thanks to everyone who already made the update! ❤

The Royal Wizard: Coming Soon to Audio

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No one knows this, but I’ve wanted to get an audiobook produced since about 2014. That was the year Wolfen came out and my brother, a huge fan of all things zombie, informed me he would only “read” it if it was on audio. But as I looked around at my options, they all kind of sucked, so I put it on hold for many, many moons and, true to his word, my brother never even cracked the cover.

Fast forward to 2018 and a series of seemingly unrelated events that I now believe might have been a form of frustrated divine intervention. Why frustrated? Because it took me so freaking long to catch on and do something about it. A random conversation with my then-manager which included an offer to find me someone to record my audiobook, got filed into the back of my mind. A Facebook ad for an article on audiobook production appeared in my newsfeed at least fifteen times before I clicked on it (and it hasn’t reappeared since). And finally, the last one which refused to be ignored: an email from Smashwords, announcing their partnership with Findaway Voices.

The night I got that email, I logged into Smashwords, linked my account to Findaway Voices, and started snooping around. I figured it was my chance to get a more in-depth look and check things out. I kept telling myself, “I’ll just take one step and see how it works. Maybe one more after that…” and I kept going until I heard Rachel Hine narrating a five-minute sample of The Royal Wizard. That was the clincher right there. Once I heard it, there was no going back. I had to follow through to the end, just to hear my book narrated by her.

Of all my books, The Royal Wizard feels like the most natural choice to start with–it was inspired by a childhood dream of mine, and actually reminds me of fairy tales I used to listen to on the radio back in the day. Mind you, I had very specific ideas about how the book should sound, and I honestly thought my standards were too high but as it turns out, I just needed to find the right producer…

I think I found the right producer now. 🙂

So that’s my big announcement for this post. The estimated date of completion I got at the outset was July, but things happen (as they do), so the official publication and distribution date is still up in the air. I’ll share updates as I get them. My hope is to get all of my books out on audio eventually, but that i$ a ma$$ive undertaking that’ll take $ome time. For now, I’m testing the waters with this one and, if all goes well, Dragonblood will follow. I’ll get to Wolfen eventually, too. Once I figure out what the heck to do with it…

Until next time!