A Status Update and Other Tidbits

Three posts in one day is a new record for me (it’s only been possible because I’ve been off on vacation from the day job this week).

As you’ll have seen from the last two posts, Intrusion is live and Frozen Prospects is now available as an audio book.  Those two tidbits were worthy of their own posts, but I also wanted to highlight a couple of other items.

First, Broken is now free on Amazon.  That means you can get it at zero cost on Amazon, iTunes, Smashwords, Kobo, Diesel, and Sony. B&N is still $.99 because I don’t have a great way to make it free there.

Amazon’s algorithms have recommended it tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of times to people, and tens of thousands of them are downloading it (It’s been in and out of the top 100 free books list on Amazon all week).  That’s particularly exciting to me because each of those downloads is a potential new fan and by now you know just how much I love the thought of being able to share Alec and Adri’s world with new people.  Now’s a great time for you to mention Broken to friends, family and complete strangers who happen to mention that they like YA Paranormal novels.  They can try it out with zero risk and every download helps push it up in the rankings such that Amazon is more likely to continue to recommend it to new readers.

Of course all of that goes for iTunes and the rest.  All indications are that Broken continues to do well at iTunes especially and as I write this it’s currently sitting at #107 out of all the free books there.  These are particularly exciting times for me for reasons which I’ll elaborate on more in the next few weeks.

Second, everything I just said about Broken is pretty much true about Frozen Prospects as well.  It’s been free for several months now everywhere but Barnes and Noble, and has likewise been downloaded thousands, if not tens of thousands of times.  I’ve been a bit hesitant to recommend Reflections to fans of The Guadel Chronicles and vice versa, but have recently had some readers reach out and tell me that they loved both series (thanks Claire), so I’m officially nudging all of you to try out whichever of the series you haven’t tried yet.  They are a bit different, so no guaranties, but they are both the kind of stuff that I like to read, so hopefully you’ll have an enjoyable experience.

Third, Splintered is now live on iTunes-apologies to everyone there for the delay.  It’s on my to-do list to look at the possibility of going direct there so as to eliminate the lag, but my to-do list is currently got a lot of other things on it as well.  As always you can purchase from Smashwords and sideload it onto your devices if the wait ever becomes too much.

Fourth, I’m getting quite a bit of questions (understandably so) about what comes next in either Reflections or The Guadel Chronicles, so I wanted to give you all a bit of a view into what I’m working on right now and what order I think I’ll get to the other projects presently on my docket.  I’m currently trying to finish off the audio books for Torn and Broken.  Once that is done, I’ll roll into trying to get Frozen Prospects into paperback and then I’ll proceed with getting my other novels into print.  To be honest, I’d much rather spend my time working on something new, but I’ve decided to prioritize print and audio for two reasons.  Many of you are reaching out and asking if you can get one of my novels in something other than e-book form, and exploiting these rights will provide another set of income streams which will put me that much closer to being able to do this full time while still being able to provide for my family.

While all of that is going on, Katie will be working on covers for two more books which are currently in the rough draft stage, and they’ll be going out to my editors and advanced readers.  One of those is another Reflections book that takes place just after Intrusion, but which focuses more on two new characters who will become more important later on in the series.  The other is set in the Reflections universe, but features a completely new cast of characters.  More to come on that one later as we get closer to having it done.

Once the audio and print versions of everything are done then the next project will be the third Guadel Chronicles book followed by another Reflections book which will pick the core Alec and Adri story back up.

That’s a large enough bundle of projects that for now I can’t give anyone any kind of firm release date for much of any of it.  Especially because I think I’ll probably sneak a couple of short stories in the mix somewhere and I’m currently in talks with someone to co-author a novel in a new universe.  I can tell you however that this will all go much more quickly than it has of late for a number of reasons, so don’t despair.

Lastly, (fifth) I’ve now put up suggested reading order diagrams for The Guadel Chronicles, and Reflections/Dark Reflections.  Hopefully that clarifies things for everyone.  I’ve come to realize that I’ve been a bit deficient, especially for Reflections, when it comes to delivering a clear message of what goes together and what order to read the various stories in.

As always, thanks for all you do to help get the word out-either actively through blogging, tweeting, recommending the series, or passively by buying the stories so that the retailers continue to recommend them to new readers.  There is quite a bit of fun still to come!

-Dean

Dean’s First Audio Book (Frozen Prospects)

The title of this post pretty much gives it all away, but I’m happy to announce that Frozen Prospects is now available as an audio book on Audible, Amazon and iTunes.  I had the pleasure of working with the talented Jack Chekijian on this particular audio book and he very kindly showed me the ropes on a project that ended up taking a lot more work than I’d realized it would at the outset.

Work has proceeded more or less in parallel on audio books for Broken and Torn, both of which should be finished up in the next couple of months so that you’ll have a full range of Dean Murray gateway drugs to give as Christmas presents to friends and family who prefer to listen to their stories :)

Here’s the Setup for any of you that haven’t read Frozen Prospects yet:
The invitation to join the secretive Guadel should have been the fulfillment of dreams Va'del didn't even realize he had. When his sponsors are killed in an ambush a short time later, he instead finds his probationary status revoked, and becomes a pawn between various factions inside the Guadel ruling body.


Jain's never known any life but that of a Guadel in training. She'd thought herself reconciled to the idea of a loveless marriage for the good of her people, but meeting Va'del changes everything. Their growing attraction flies against hundreds of years of precedent, but as wide-spread attacks threaten their world, the Guadel have no choice but to use even Jain and Va'del in their fight for survival.

Here are the links:
Audible
Amazon
iTunes

Thanks for stopping by to see what’s happening in this particular corner of the web.

-Dean

Intrusion is Live!

This post is more than a little late, but I just wanted to let you all know that Intrusion is officially live.

Here’s the setup:
Jess awoke to a world she doesn’t really understand, hounded by impulses that are quite literally more than any human could be expected to control.


It’s painfully evident that her friends and family are doing everything they can to help her regain her footing, but she can’t help resenting the fact that none of them lost as deeply as she lost in their last confrontation with the Coun’hij.


More than anything she wants to turn to Alec for help. The alpha of the pack should be a constant source of strength and reassurance, but in his own way he’s nearly as damaged as she is. What’s worse, a new threat has just arrived in Sanctuary and Jess is starting to wonder if Alec will sacrifice her as the weakest link in a crippled pack.

Those of you who’d signed up for my mailing list before Intrusion went live all got coupon codes to go get free copies of it, I’rone and Handoff as a thank you.  A few people that I saw actively promoting Reflections on Twitter got sneak previews of Intrusion a couple of days before it went live-also as a thank you for their efforts to help spread the word.

I can’t guarantee that I’ll always manage to get the thanks out to everyone who deserves it, and in fact I can guarantee that there are many, many of you out there helping spread the word in ways that I’ll never see, but I’ll continue to try and provide little perks here and there where I can.

Here are the links for the various places you can purchase Intrusion, apologies to all of the Apple, Kobo, Sony and Diesel users out there.  Unfortunately the aggregator I’m using to get books onto those sites takes a little while to get them pushed up to those particular retail stores.

As always, thank you everyone that tells a friend about Reflections or the Guadel Chronicles.  Your efforts are appreciated.

-Dean

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Smashwords

Intrusion Cover Reveal!

Katie has finished up the cover for the next installment in the Reflections Series and I have to say I think it's absolutely the best one she's done yet.  It always amazes me how she can take a bunch of different stock photos and combine them into something so incredible.

Without further ado...

I don't want to spoil anything, but I will tell you all that this is a short story told from Jessica's perspective.

There are a couple of finishing touches that need squared away before Intrusion will go live on the usual retail sites, but I hope very much to have it up fairly soon.

Apologies for the wait, but some of you may be excited to hear that it's at least partially occasioned by the fact that we've been hard at work on getting audio books produced for Broken, Torn, and Frozen Prospects.  I'll post a bit more about that as we get close to those projects wrapping up.

One last thing, if you haven't signed up for my mailing list please consider doing so the next mailing is going to be really exciting!

Thanks,

Dean

Splintered is Live!

Just a quick update to let all of you know that the next book in the Reflections series is now live!

The setup:

Most girls would have killed to be in Adri’s shoes, in fact several people think that’s exactly what she did. Of course life with a pack of shape shifters isn’t quite what she expected. The time with Alec is great, but now that the rival pack is out of the picture, Alec’s wolves are all starting to turn on each other, and Adri is finding there is less and less she can do to help hold the pack together.

Alec’s determination to keep her at arm’s length physically is just as frustrating as always, but his ongoing refusal to explain the larger world the pack is operating in is starting to become more than just something that keeps Adri up at night. It’s starting to look like something that could get them all killed.

As of right now you can get Splintered on:

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Splintered-Reflections-ebook/dp/B007R8PZAS/ref=sr_1_sc_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1333594836&sr=8-2-spell

Barnes and Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/books/1109923957?ean=2940014195621

Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/113289

Smashwords will eventually push it out to Sony, Apple, etc. but that will take a few weeks.

I’ve dropped the price of Broken to $.99 on Amazon/B&N and free on Smashwords in association with Splintered going live, so now is a great time for people that haven’t tried the series to give it a shot.  I have a bit of hope that Amazon will price match to free at some point in the next few weeks.  If that happens I’ll post a brief update so that you can share the good news with friends and family who you think might like the series, but who haven’t been willing to take a chance on it yet.

Thanks for all you do to help spread the word about Alec and Adri as well as Va’del and Jain.  I hope you all enjoy Splintered as much as I enjoyed writing it.  Don’t forget to sign up for my mailing list if you haven't already.  I've got a treat on the way for everyone on the list.

Thanks,

Dean

A New Review of Broken

Another review of Broken just went up at Rather Barefoot.  Big thanks to Sandra for taking the time to read and review Broken.

http://ratherbarefoot.blogspot.com/2012/03/book-review-broken-by-dean-murray.html

Why Mailing Lists?

It’s time for a bit of an update.  My blog will probably continue to be something that generally only gets updated once a month or so.  I’ve got an extremely demanding day job in addition to trying very hard to sneak in time to get new stories written, but occasionally something will come up that needs to find its way onto here.

Broken went free on Amazon Dec 28^th and when the dust all settled, we’d seen a bit over 6,100 free downloads and I had a renewed appreciation of the power of Amazon’s algorithms.  The ability to let Broken go free for that 5-day period meant I had to accept delayed release dates for the rest of the retailers like Barnes and Noble, but it was a calculated risk I felt was worth taking.  That being said I wanted to explain the logic to my fans that tend to buy from somewhere other than Amazon.

When Broken went free, Katie and I reached out to all of our friends and family and asked them to help spread the word.  They responded like real champs, but I’m pretty confident that they didn’t manage to contact 6,100 people.  Even if they had, not all of those 6,100 would have gone out and downloaded Broken.  What they did do though was make enough of an impact for Amazon’s recommendation algorithms to take notice and start pushing Broken to other customers.  Broken also spent a bit of time ranked in the top 10 on one of the romance lists which I’m sure helped some as well.

I’m sure that most of those 6,100 people won’t ever get around to reading Broken, but since it’s gone back to paid we’ve sold another 60 or so copies of Broken and 88 copies of Torn.  We’re seeing some positive reviews go up on Amazon and Goodreads and we’re getting a trickle of purchases of some of my other 9 titles.  Nobody in the Murray household is getting ready to quit their day job or anything yet, but that’s a marked increase over our run-rate of sales from before Christmas.

There’s still always the chance that some of those who read Broken and Torn will turn into the kind of ‘rabid’ fans (pun intended J) that every author hopes for and Broken will pick up additional steam over the next few months.  But even if Broken and Torn just trickle along at their current rate it represents a big win to the extent that people continue to enjoy them enough to wander over here out of curiosity.  Some percentage of those fans will decide to subscribe to my mailing list and that’s where the magic will really start happening.

Some of you who are writers might have spent some time over at Dean Wesley Smith’s blog(DWS from here on out-there’s too many Dean’s here otherwise J).  He’s got some very interesting things to say; and while I don’t agree with all of his positions, in most things he talks a lot of sense.  One of the really interesting things he highlights is the fact that ten years ago a writer had a very short window in which to sale each new book.  The book stores would stock a bunch of copies of their new title, and after six weeks or so most of the copies that were left were sent back to the publisher or destroyed.

It’s just one of those economic kinds of things.  Book stores don’t have room to stock dozens of copies of every title out there, they have to try and match up with people’s buying patterns.  A new book generates a little or a lot of buzz.  A bunch of people come to buy it and then things slow down.  An author who sold a few copies and then needed a bit of time to build word of mouth might have found that by the time their early readers had told a few friends and the friends started looking that there weren’t any copies of the novel in question in the bookstore.

DWS calls it the produce model of book distribution.  You’ve got to move a lot of books in a short time because they go bad if left unsold.  In the new world of publishing your books don’t ever go bad.  They don’t ever have to be out of stock, they can always be just a click or two away from finding a new home.

As a long-term pro who probably saw dozens of books he’d put his heart and soul into go out of print, I can understand DWS being frustrated with the produce model.  Frankly, I’m very excited that books aren’t forced into the produce model, but I’m equally happy that we can still get the benefit of the produce model at the same time.

Let’s say two books were released, each from authors with 1,000 fans who were absolutely going to buy the authors’ work…eventually.  Book one moves 1,000 copies in the first two days.  Book two moves 1,000 copies over the first two years.  I would argue that book one is the winner all other things being equal and the reason is the algorithms.

Amazon and the other retailers will flag the book that sells well and quickly as being something people are excited about and will tend to recommend it to other potential customers.  People will see it at the top of genre lists that they are interested in and decide to take a chance on it.

That’s where my mailing list comes in.  I’m hoping, to reproduce a bit of the distribution spike we saw with Broken for all of my future stories.  It lets me reach out to some of my most excited fans and let them all know within a short time that there’s a new story available that they will probably like.  As each new story jumps, even briefly onto the lists, top selling, also bought and otherwise, it will help put Alec and Adri, Va’del and Jain, and a host of other stories in front of thousands of new potential fans.

Ultimately that’s a win for everyone.  Amazon makes money, the readers get enjoyable stories that hopefully stay with them after they finish the last page, and I get one step closer to being able to write full time which means more stories for everyone.

If you’ve been on the fence about signing up to my mailing list please give it another thought.  I really won’t spam you with a bunch of stuff you don’t care about.  You’ll get announcements when I put a new book up for sale and maybe the occasional other Dean Murray writing development that other fans are telling me should go out in the next update.

I wouldn’t feel right closing without saying thanks to all of the people who are helping to spread the word about Adri, Alec and all of my other stories.  I’m really excited about what comes next and hope you all enjoy the ride as much as I think you will.

Thanks-

Dean