I’ve just released A Lick of Flame, my new urban fantasy series. To those of you who are new to this newsletter – or my writing in general – I usually release a whole series at once. It’s for a few reasons. One is you get to read the whole story arc in one go. The other is I get to write it in one go. I’ve learned over the years that’s way better for my workflow.
A Lick of Flame follows a sarcastic witch with her wise-cracking fairy assistant as they struggle to uncover clues in a dangerous case. She’s soon sucked into working for the man she’s investigating. It’s a lot like my other bounty hunter/ exorcist books. So expect a lot of action and snarly wit.
A Lick of Flame is available at all my usual retailers. And you can get the first book for free here on my website.
Amazon Kindle | Apple Books | Barnes and Noble | Google Play | Kobo | Smashwords
In other news, I’m soon going to expand my audiobook offerings. I already offer my whole catalog on Google Play – but that’s only because they have an auto AI-narration option. I vastly prefer real narration, but I can’t afford it; my catalog is far too big. But I’ve been looking into putting AI-narrated audiobooks on more retailers, including my website. I’ll be using Eleven Labs to make them. Unlike Google, it isn’t free. But they do make a nice product. My first job has been to update all of my new 500+ covers into audiobook covers. Which as I’m sure you can imagine, is taking a while. I’ll be done with that in a week or so. Then I’ll work on creating the audiobooks. When I finish with the audiobooks, I’ll offer some – or all – of the first-in-a-series free books on this website for free download. It’ll depend on how many downloads I get as to whether all of them stay up (I’ll be paying for the hosting, which might get a bit expensive). I’ll let you all know when the audiobooks become available. At this stage, I intend to publish them to Kobo, Apple Books, Spotify, and some of the other retailers that accept AI-narrated audiobooks.
If you’ve never listened to an AI-narrated audiobook, they vary in quality. I personally only listen to audiobooks at 2-3x speed, so I never notice, but AI-narrated audiobooks absolutely contain pronunciation and cadence mistakes. The audiobooks I’ll be creating won’t be treated as premium products. They’ll be 1 dollar more than the equivalent ebook price, and that’s only to accommodate the much larger royalty share the distributors take on audiobooks. Hopefully by my next newsletter, I’ll have a couple of freebies for people to try.
If you like well-read, well-acted audiobooks, they definitely won’t be for you. If you’re like me, and you listen to things at high speed anyway, they’ll be worth checking out.
As for what I’m writing now, I’ve been working on a fun new vampire book in the vein of Your True Vampire, but with a twist. He’s actually a demon! It’s been a while since I’ve written a pure sassy book, and it’s been tremendous fun. It’s also a chase book, so the action literally doesn’t stop. Those are always fun to write (and hopefully read!).
That’s it from me this month. I hope you’re all well, and happy reading.