by Charlene Teglia | Mar 18, 2011 | Uncategorized
Sometime between going fetal last night and cracking eyelids this morning, A Rock and A Hard Place went live on Smashwords. And it was already getting downloaded, so, um, cool.
I kind of laugh about the “new ebook world” news going around, because Sasha and I were doing this in 2004, and we weren’t pioneers then. But that said, many things are new and different now, which is why we decided to experiment with a DIY ebook.
Why not try to sell our fabulous idea to a traditional print publisher? Well, anthologies are a tough sell. And we wanted to write tie-ins to existing series we had, and to cross-promote to readers of ours who had read one but not the other. The chances of getting a deal for an anthology that ties in to a series published by another publisher were nonexistent.
Why not try to sell our fabulous idea to one of our established epublishers? Because we probably wouldn’t have gotten a release date this year, for starters. And because something really is new now, and we wanted to experiment with that.
What’s really new, then? The author-to-reader direct distribution opportunity for ebooks. In 2004, if you didn’t sell to a big name epublisher, you were not going to reach readers. Even two years ago, this was still pretty much true. But with the advent of Amazon’s Kindle publishing, and B&N’s PubIt, and Smashwords with distribution to all major etailers (including Diesel, Apple, Sony, Kobo), that changed.
It is now possible to reach a lot of readers on your own. And we wanted to see what kind of results we got trying that out.
That said, the amount of work involved in publishing that is not writing is enormous, so it’s not something to just leap into. The time we’ve spent in discussions, working with a cover artist, getting formatted files, learning the upload process, not to mention time spent seeking out private editing and going through the process, has not been a small investment.
But we did it. And now we have an ebook. And I expect we’ll learn just as much from the next few months as we have up to this point in publishing it.
Best of all, we got to write something together, which we have not managed to do before in 6 years.
by Charlene Teglia | Mar 14, 2011 | Uncategorized
The Mammoth Book of Hot Romance is now up for
pre-order. Which means I need to add a book page and an excerpt. But in the meantime:
Wolf at the Door
copyright 2011 Charlene Teglia
Karen parked by her cabin overlooking Lake Crescent and nearly ran from her car to the front porch. Once she had the heavy wooden door bolted behind her, she did a quick visual check of the cabin’s interior. The woodstove sat at the center of the open floor plan. Her living space circled it, beginning with the kitchen area that gave way to a trestle style table with two benches on either side, then a faded couch next to two tall and overstuffed bookcases.
Nothing looked out of place. She checked the bathroom that was pretty much a closet on the far side of the kitchen, the only room with a door. It, too, was empty except for a small sink, toilet and shower stall.
She climbed the ladder up to the half-loft that served as her bedroom. The big log bed covered with a bright quilt, night stand and dresser all looked just the way she’d left them before she’d headed out for a hike in an effort to find some peace or at least wear herself out. On impulse, she opened the deacon’s bench at the foot of the bed. Tucked under neatly stacked clean sheets and an extra quilt, an antique dagger rested. She covered it back up and closed the bench, exhaling relief.
The cabin and its contents had been left to her when her employer, an eccentric collector and historian, passed away. Jobless and bereft at the loss of the man who had been more like a grandfather than a boss, Karen had left Seattle for the rustic location to mourn and regroup.
When she’d taken possession, the post office had delivered the package they’d been holding for her. A package addressed by the man she’d just buried. She’d found the dagger inside, along with some notes about its history that read like the wildest fantasy.
Maybe Cyril Foster had started to suffer some insidious erosion of his brilliant mind towards the end of his life. Or maybe he really had left a genuine bone-handled Damascus dagger from the 1500s that contained the soul of a mad German werewolf in her keeping.
Since he’d also promised her that she’d be protected by a wolf guardian and warned her of dark forces that had hunted the dagger through the centuries, Alzheimer’s seemed more likely. Except that she’d just been saved by a guardian wolf.
Coincidence? Maybe. But the odd phone calls with nobody on the end of the line that ended with a disconnection, the men who had been waiting by her car and the frequent sensation of being watched that had dogged her since shortly after she’d arrived at the cabin meant something was going on, and that dagger was probably in the middle of it.
Cyril’s collection had been accounted for in his will. As his personal assistant, she’d helped catalog it. This piece hadn’t been included. She’d seen the dagger for the first time when she’d opened the package Cyril had mailed to the cabin the week he died. If nobody knew he’d had it, who would come looking for it? Somebody who knew it was in his possession, somehow. A piece that old, with a history that colorful, somebody must have known something about it. Maybe somebody suspected Cyril had kept it hidden even after his death.
“If you’d bothered to explain any of this while you were alive, it would make my life so much easier,” Karen said out loud.
But he hadn’t, and now he was beyond reach. She couldn’t ask him to explain, couldn’t demand that he tell her what was really going on. All she could do was carry out his final instructions to her and keep the dagger hidden.
The incident in the parking lot made her wish she’d rented a safe deposit box to stash it in. It had seemed safe enough hidden at the cabin before, when she’d believed nobody else knew about it.
She regretted her failure to find a more secure hiding place even more when the sound of an engine outside was followed by the crunch of booted feet on gravel and a knock at her door.
by Charlene Teglia | Mar 12, 2011 | Uncategorized
Swiped from Elizabeth Bear, because I love the idea of encouraging the growth of the rest of the story.
First lines from Works in Progress:
Red Queen:
The sun was shining. The birds were singing. I curled my lip in a silent snarl.
Kiss of the Demon
Neviah Thomas looked at the tarot card depicting a lightning-struck tower and knew she was in for a bad day.
Channeling Cleopatra
“I want you to seduce her.”
Nick Morgan, former Army Ranger, experienced operator in the world theatre of international terrorist hot spots, leaned back and thought, this is what your life has come to.
Mystery Hill
The gargoyles on the library roof watched me.
Black Magic
“I don’t do love spells.” I narrowed my eyes at the rumpled suit seated across from me.
These are actively-in-progress, I’m not counting my SF/horror short Black Water or a para I haven’t decided what to do with (Wishmasters). Grow, grow!
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