I’m going to be embark­ing on a blog tour for On Demon Wings a week before the release. As I’ll be send­ing the par­tic­i­pat­ing blog­gers ARCs of On Demon Wings ahead of time, I thought some lucky folks should share in the fun too.

(it’s early morn­ing as I type this, par­don me if I don’t make sense).

As such, I’m going to do a give­away. It will run from today (April 23rd) until Fri­day the 27th. This is for five e-format copies of On Demon Wings which will be emailed to the win­ners on May 2nd.

The only stip­u­la­tion is that these are ARCs — Advanced Review Copies — so ide­ally I’d like the win­ners to review the book on GoodReads or Amazon/B&N (though the lat­ter will have to go live there first on May 13th).

[Read more…]

I get this ques­tion a lot. Peo­ple ask where they can find or get or buy an .pub for­mat ebook of Red Fox (exper­i­ment in ter­ror #2) for Kobo or Nook (through Barnes & Noble).

Smash­words: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/66366

And until July 31st, it’s FREE.

 

 

 

 

As I was perus­ing the inter­webs today, I noticed that Soundgar­den was mak­ing the news. And so was I. A few pho­tos I took from my gig as a music journo and con­cert pho­tog­ra­pher have been mak­ing the rounds here: http://consequenceofsound.net/2012/04/check-out-soundgarden-live-to-rise/

and here: http://ology.com/post/67881/stream-live-to-rise-soundgarden-s-first-new-song-in-57-years

And man, do I love these pho­tos? My cam­era was always kind of shitty so I’m super glad these turned out well enough to be flounced around the world. Oh and I do love shoot­ing Cor­nell. I love talk­ing to him too, just check out this inter­view I did with him.

That top photo, plus the fol­low­ing two, also made it into Con­se­quence of Sound’s Best Pho­tos of the Year List!

If you want to take a look at some of my con­cert pho­tog­ra­phy, you can find them off of my arti­cles here or click this link to get a select few of my faves!

Yay, the Exper­i­ment in Ter­ror Series has some amaz­ing fan art com­ing in. Check out what these read­ers did below:

Dark­house Dex and Perry and Dex and His Tooth­pick are by the immensely tal­ented Stepha­lope (check out her Tum­blr here and her Deviant Art here — she does fan­tas­tic  draw­ings of all my favorite books too, like Hunger Games, etc!). When I saw these draw­ings, I nearly cried. Really, tears came to eyes. Oh, they are just so won­der­ful, it makes me feel so HAAAAAPPPPPY.

ALSO MAKES ME HAPPY. This beauty was done up by the won­der­fully kick-ass and cool Savan­nah. I loves it! Dex’s tat­toos! Gah!

And finally, I drew this lol. What? I can sub­mit my own art! Sur­pris­ingly enough, she looks like the art above. I guess I describe her pretty well!

Back in Decem­ber I thought I would try out the Ama­zon Kin­dle KDP Select thingy. You know, where you put your book exclu­sively (at least in e-format) for Kin­dle and in exchange, over the course of 90 days, you can offer your book for free for five days and your book is included in the lend­ing library (which you still get a cut of).

I fig­ured it wouldn’t hurt — after all, in MY par­tic­u­lar case the e-books being bought through Apple or Kobo or Nook were FEW. Kin­dle is where most of my sales were com­ing from.

Any­way, Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary, my sales were THROUGH THE DAMN ROOF. I gave thou­sands of books away for free and the inter­est­ing part was that my books con­tin­ued to sell well afterward.

Then March came, and, well sales are pretty slow. They are a mil­lion times bet­ter than they were back in Decem­ber (oy, all of last year was pretty dry) but com­pared to the fan­tas­ti­cal months of Jan and Feb, it looks pretty dis­mal. C’est la vie.

I think this hap­pened for two rea­sons. One, I’m hear­ing over all that March is a slow month for books. Two, I’m sure the mar­ket is now flooded with a shit ton of free books, most of which are actu­ally quite shitty, which in turn turns off poten­tial read­ers.  Also, peo­ple are just over­whelmed — I know I have gone absolutely bonkers with my Kin­dle, pur­chas­ing books left and right over the last month. And have I read any of them? I’ve barely made a dent.

Now I am out of the 90 day con­tract with Select and I’m pon­der­ing when to go back to it (with Dark­house — the rest of the full books won’t be included, as I have no plans to ever give them away for free). Notice I say WHEN because the pro­gram has helped out my lit­tle series more than any­thing. Say what you want about Ama­zon and how they are a hor­ri­ble, unfeel­ing, cap­i­tal­ist con­glom­er­a­tion from hell, but this method TOTALLY. WORKED. FOR. ME.

Now I doubt I’ll be using all of my free days this time around — I actu­ally see a lot of return with the Lend­ing Pro­gram. But I’ll be re-signing up just the same.

But not yet. I’m going to wait until the Easter Week­end (approx­i­mately) until I do it. Until then, Dark­house will be back at Barnes & Noble for the Nook, back at Chap­ters for the Kobo, back at Apple for the iBooks. And of course, back at Smash­words for all of the above (and other for­mats too): https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/58699 <———-click here. do it.

I’m doing this to give other e-reader users a chance to read the book (espe­cially with its new cover) but as I closely watch my sales, I pre­dict I’ll see that a large per­cent­age of peo­ple don’t actu­ally use Kobo/Nook/etc. I invite you to prove me wrong of course, and if sales and inter­est shoot up, I may be inclined to leave the books out of the pro­gram. But until that hap­pens, Kin­dle is where I’ll be mak­ing an income. You have to go where the action is.

*of course, no mat­ter WHAT e-format Dark­house ends up being in, you can always buy the book in paper­back from B&N, Book Depos­i­tory, Pow­ells, etc. PAPERBACKS NEED LOVE TOO!

Ta-da! The shiny, sparkly, ethe­real cover of Exper­i­ment in Terror’s Book #5 - On Demon Wings (pub­lished May 13th 2012). (click on image to view larger)

 

I sup­pose it loses some of its magic if I tell you how I made it…but…I’m going to any­way. I’m pretty ter­ri­ble at keep­ing secrets.

First of all, I wanted some­thing that rep­re­sent­ing demon pos­ses­sion, because that’s really what the book is about. And what’s your first thought when you think of demon possession?

PEA SOUP! Thank you, Linda Blair.

OK, aside from pea soup vomit and bloody crosses (egad!) you think of levitation.

So I wanted my poor lil’ Perry Palomino to be lev­i­tat­ing. Only, how to do this?

First I chose a roy­alty free, free to use stock photo. I wanted some­thing pretty yet creepy, like this for­est.
Then I tweaked the photo myself with pho­to­shop to cre­ate this aqua green/blue colour I really wanted.
Then I super­im­posed some creepy stuff into the image (if you look for it, you can see it).
Then I took my friend, put her in a white dress of mine, made her bend over awk­wardly on her couch till we got just the right, believ­able posi­tion.
Then I took pho­tos, cut her out, inserted her in the pic­ture, threw in some font and sent it to my artist Bret Tay­lor, telling him I wanted the cover to look like this, but bet­ter, obvi­ously.
He went ahead, did his thing. I asked for MORE SPARKLES AND FIREFLIES cuz you can never have too many.
AND VOILA.

Per­son­ally, I think it’s the best book cover in the series

Some­where around the same time I started writ­ing the Exper­i­ment in Ter­ror Series, I became a music jour­nal­ist. This meant gal­li­vant­ing around the world cov­er­ing fes­ti­vals, con­certs and inter­views for pub­li­ca­tions such as Con­se­quence of Sound and Mxdwn. I say gal­li­vant­ing because even though it was “work”, let’s face it, 90% of the job is hav­ing a fuck­ing great time (the other 10% is tran­scrib­ing inter­views — HELL). There was a lot of pho­tog­ra­phy involved, more than enough writ­ing, and oodles of hang­overs, sweat-soaked clothes, and great sto­ries. GREAT stories.

Behold, geeky pho­tos of myself geek­ing out over peo­ple I admire (except Jes­sica Simp­son and that girl from Gos­sip Girl who I think looks like Ada Palomino…cuz I no haz admire for dem).

Some of my high­lights include being back­stage with Faith No More in Fin­land, hang­ing out on the Slayer tour bus in Seat­tle, swoon­ing dur­ing Mondo Cane in Poland, Inter­view­ing Chris Cor­nell, catch­ing an inti­mate Queens of the Stone Age show in Seat­tle, hav­ing drinks with two of the biggest man­agers in the indus­try (and lis­ten­ing to them blab­ber about every­one you could imag­ine), fan­girling over Jerry Cantrell, annoy­ing Danny Devito, hav­ing cof­fee with Liz Phair, being able to have a one-on-one convo with Mike Pat­ton for 30 mins, almost get­ting in a fight in the Slayer mosh­pit, ran­domly hang­ing out with James Mur­phuy after LCD Soundsys­tem, being on stage at FNM a few times, going for din­ner with Dub Trio, watch­ing Brian Pohsen fangirl(boy) over Rob Zom­bie (after I did the same), get­ting John Stanier to sign my copy of Red Fox, and then him ask­ing me to sign his, dis­cov­er­ing that most musi­cians are actu­ally the coolest peo­ple ever…

But noth­ing com­pares to the great­est moment of my life.…

baha­ha­ha­haha. oh MAN. JUST LOOK AT MY FACE. I hate weddings.

Any­way, if you’re inter­ested in read­ing some of my (other) writ­ten work, you can find oodles of it here: http://consequenceofsound.net/author/khalle/

Hope­fully I’ll find the time to do more of it in the future

Well here it is, the new cover for Dark­house!

My thoughts:
Isn’t it pretty? Pretty and spooky and creepy and a whole bunch of things. Like PURPLE!

Why I did it:
Well, though I liked the orig­i­nal cover a lot, it didn’t con­vey the youth and fresh­ness (and some­times, silli­ness) in the novel. I wanted some­thing that would say “Hey, look at this book it’s all sparkly and fun but I’m kind of scared and intrigued. Must pick it up!” I’ve been get­ting a lot of com­pli­ments on it, so I know I’m on the right track.

Dark­house also got edited. Yes, I edited it before — as did a few beta read­ers — but I’m a shitty edi­tor (I can see most of you nod­ding your head) and my GOODNESS is it tough to edit your work! But Dead Sky Morn­ing and Lying Sea­son were both edited pro­fes­sion­ally by Robert Helle and I think he did a great job, so I decided to give Dark­house a lil makeover (Red Fox is next).

Self-pubbed books get a bad rap, mainly because many writ­ers don’t bother with an edi­tor (or they can’t tell a story, which is another issue for another time) but I really didn’t want to add to that with Dark­house. I wanted some­thing to be proud of, inside and out. It’s a tough, cruel world out there and I needed every chance to stand out.

Sure, Dark­house is not for every­one. Some read­ers will be irked by her voice, her way of look­ing at things. Perry Palomino is who she is and she’s unapolo­getic about it. But I didn’t want to give read­ers a headache with bad edit­ing. I mean, it’s your money and it’s your time and I wanedt to do my hard­est not to waste it.

So a big, BIG thank you to every­one who has already read Dark­house and — gasp — liked it enough to read Red Fox and the rest of the series. I get a lot of feed­back from fans here and on my Face­book page (see side­bar) and it means a lot to me that you’ve weath­ered through my debut novel, con­tin­ued on with the series, and have gone on to become big fans. Thank you for tak­ing a chance on me, Perry and Dex. Seri­ously, I really appre­ci­ate it.

How I did it:
The cover design process is SO much fun! Well, for me, not for my graphic artist Bret Taylor.

Me: Use this light­house stock photo! Add in Perry! Make her look more organic. How about we add stars! Now I want light­en­ing around the name! And clouds! And neb­u­las! I want more stars on the bottom…she’s in a place in nei­ther time nor space! Now I want eyes on the cover, Dex’s eyes, really faint! Now I see eyes every­where, scary. Oooh that’s pretty! Can we jazz up the spine? Let’s put stars on it!! More stars! ALL THE STARS IN THE WORLD.

Yeah, it goes some­thing like that. The man has the patience of a saint!

When it’s available:

The new ver­sion of Dark­house should be avail­able on Ama­zon and other usual retail­ers next week. I’ll let you know. Mean­while, the Kin­dle ver­sion is ready to go!

What else?

ON DEMON WINGS cover will be revealed on March 14th at the fol­low­ing blogs:

See­ing Night Reviews
Unput­down­able Books
Attack the Stacks
Hacka­roos reviews
Tales of an Inner Book Fanatic
Paw­ing Through Books

There might be an ARC give­away for On Demon Wings at a few of them too

I am also super, duper excited about this one. And yes, the man­u­script is com­ing along. Scary stuff here peo­ple, scary stuff.

I got an inter­est­ing phone call the other day. I won’t say much about it, but it made me do a pre­ma­ture happy dance (no, my shoes did not fly off). If even greater news comes out of it though, I’ll be sure to share.

So what’s new? Well I’ve been doing a lot of “think­ing about writ­ing” and then some actual writ­ing, which is great. The last book I wrote was The Ben­son and that was a shorty, so it’s tak­ing me some time to ease back into the writ­ing game. But I have big plans for this year in terms of what I’m writ­ing — lot’s of fun stuff com­ing down the pipeline. You just need to take that first, tiny, but very impor­tant step.

Don’t worry, On Demon Wings is still com­ing. Judg­ing by the com­ments and reviews I’m get­ting, I think I’d have to fear for my life if I didn’t deliver.

There’s also some news about Dark­house — it went through a pro­fes­sional edit and is get­ting a new cover next week which I will reveal here. Per­son­ally, I do like the cur­rent cover and I would love to have that option avail­able if peo­ple pre­fer that cover over the new one. But I know what direc­tion the future cov­ers will go and I’d like all the books to look the same. As for the edit, even though Dark­house was edited a mil­lion times by moi and beta readers…it’s not enough. It never is. And while I can write, edit­ing my own stuff is damn hard. I suck at it. So I extended the cour­tesy to that all impor­tant first novel (Dead Sky Morn­ing and Lying Sea­son have been pro­fes­sion­ally edited), because I want to be proud of it and I want read­ers to be happy. Any­way, I’ll talk more when I reveal the new cover next week, but just a head’s up.

I’ve been doing a lot of read­ing lately. It’s vital as a writer. Though I’ll never be a book reviewer (I don’t write very good reviews and there are lovely review­ers out there who do a much bet­ter job than I ever could), I do like to read and com­pare notes.

This is what I got from the library this month:

The Lantern by Deb­o­rah Lawrenson(I’m a BIG fan of Daphne Du Mau­rier, so I know I’ll love this)
The Girl in the Steel Corset by Kady Cross (First foray into Steam­punk)
Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake (Obvi­ously I like ghosts, want to see what the fuss is about)
This Dark Endeav­our by Ken­neth Oppel (Cana­dian, FTW)
Before I Fall by Lau­ren Oliver (I read a bit of Lisel and Po, think she’s an amaz­ing writer)

The last few months I’ve been buy­ing Kin­dle books if they are a good deal or free. But I don’t have a Kindle.

UNTIL NOW.

Well, until I dis­cov­ered the Kin­dle app for my iPhone. Sud­denly, all these books appeared in my phone! Man, I sound like my mother when she dis­cov­ered the internet.

Any­hoo, I decided my wee phone would be the per­fect place to try out a lot of self-published works, cheap books, or books I’m unsure of. I LOVE buy­ing books and putting them on my actual shelves, so if there is a book that I love, I will buy the paper­back. But it’s good to try it out first. One thing I’m find­ing with Kin­dle as I wrap my old-fashioned brain around it…I can’t spent over $5 on a book. Some­times you have to if it’s Kin­dle only, but if I’m going to pay over $5 for a novel, I want the phys­i­cal object in my hand. I want it to occupy my home. I want to look at it for­ever. Funny, that.

Here’s what I have on my Kin­dle — I really want this to be the place where I read a lot of GOOD self-published work that might be over­looked. It’s actu­ally quite fun dis­cov­er­ing the indie gems:

Hol­low­land by Amanda Hock­ing
With­er­ing Tights by Louise Ren­ni­son
Descended by Blood by Ange­line Kace
Everblue by Brenda Pan­dos
Ethe­real by Addi­son Moore
Telsa — The Covenant Keeper by Lani Wendt Young
This — A Vam­pire Cure for For­ever by Shaun Roundy (really not a vamp fan but love the title! Please cure us all!)
Stained by Ella James
Dai­mon — A Pre­quel to Half-Blood by Jen­nifer L. Armen­trout
A Job From Hell by Jay­den Scott
Dirty Blood by Heather Hilden­brand
Jenny Pox (The Para­nor­mals) by JL Bryan
Unearthly by Cyn­thia Hand
Angell­fall by Susan Ee
Entwined by Heather Dixon
Jessica’s Guide to Dat­ing the Dark Side by Beth Fantaskey

In other news, I AM BANNED FROM BUYING MORE KINDLE BOOKS.

You can fol­low my half-assed reviews at: GOODREADS