Beyond the Pages of Ashbury

 I finally have something worthwhile to share with you all. The 20th of September was my birthday and for that I offered up both of my e-books for free on Amazon. This promotion made me hit some major milestones as an author. I will gladly share all of the details from my promo, but first I want to share the milestones that I hit. First, both of my books reached the Top Ten Best-Selling in two different genres. More Than Human hit #10 in the genre Dark Fantasy Horror and More Than Wolf hit #10 in the category New Adult & College Fantasy . Once my books reached the top 25 on the first day, they both stayed there during the duration of the promotion. They fluctuated, of course, but never went above 25! I "sold" over 300 copies in the first three days of my promo. That is a lot of new readers! And because of this promo I have officially surpassed the 500 mark for total books sold and am quickly approaching the 1k mark! Did I make any money from this? No, it was a free promo

 *Takes a deep breath*  I had planned this book release months in advance. I got everything in order and scheduled from editing, to cover, to ARC readers, to signings, to book orders and swag stuff to sell. Everything meticulously thought out. Then, it all came crashing down on me. I checked the status of my book order for 30 copies of More Than Wolf, and it disappeared. It was as if I never made the order. I'm fairly certain that was my fault - I had unpublished my book too soon after making the order. Lesson learned. Needless to say I went into full-blown panic mode. To realize that my planning had been brought down by something so stupid wrecked me for a good hour. I pulled myself back together and figured out what I needed to do next. First, I had to re-order my books, add extra cost for expedited shipping, and see if my order would arrive in time for my signings. Well, Amazon calculated the delivery for more than a week after my first signing on release day. Damn. So, I resche

Well hello everyone! It is Monday and I feel like Garfield. "I hate Mondays."  I am still in the first editing stages of my second book, More Than Wolf. I am nearly finished with the first run-through, then I will be re-reading it over to myself aloud before sending it off to my wonderful team of editors. I, personally, think that the more eyes you can acquire on your project, the more mistakes can be found, and the more flawless the finished product can be. I'm not saying that my book More Than Human is flawless, perse, but it went through the ringer and I fixed the issues brought to attention. Now, if you find anything else in More Than Human that is incorrect, frankly at this point, I don't care. I will probably revisit the book and make a second edition with adding some details and rephrasing some things, but for now I just don't care. It's good enough, to me. I had my first podcast interview the other day. It lasted for over an hour. I wasn't too happ

 The last few days have been rough for me... but I'm not going into detail on the matters that occurred, rather I'd like to move forward and focus on things happening this week. Coming Up! This evening I have my first podcast interview! I will share the link to the podcast in my next blog (or maybe the comments in this one). Looking forward to it but I'm not quite sure what to expect... Not only am I an author, but I am also a freelance photographer. I have been involved in photography since I was very young, using disposable cameras until upgrading to a digital point-and-shoot, then studying film photography in high school. Film photography has been one of my absolute favorite things to learn so far in life. Not only does the image depend on how you frame it when you initially take the shot, but the effects you make to the paper while treating the image as well. So many different possibilities with the same image in the dark room, with such hands-on methods. Honestly, I pr

 Hello everyone! I am giving this blog thing another whack! From here on out, I will be trying to make blog entries at least every week, providing writing and life updates to whoever reads this. Starting with today: NEWS!! My audiobook just released on the 9th and I have made 51 sales so far. Between publishing the audiobook and today, it has reached the top 100 spot in two different categories. I have since dropped in rank and am now over 100 and even 200 in those categories. Oh well. It was a nice, fleeting moment of excitement and pride. Maybe it will reach the top 100 again? Who knows... In relation to the released audiobook, I have several UK codes for free listens through Amazon! So, if you'd like a code for a listen (in return for a review) let me know! You have to be a UK Amazon customer to redeem.  Book 2 Update: I have redacted about 14k words of a flashback state in my current book. I felt that it was exceeding the proper word count and would take away from the main stor

  In the last year since publishing my book, More Than Human, I have learned tremendously. I would like to share with you what my experience has been. Publishing a book is not cheap, by any means. It’s expensive in both time and money. Sure, you write a whole book (by the way, it took me about 6 years to get this book out of my head, piece it all together, and complete it), but through writing you’ve made subconscious typos and mistakes. Therefore, you have to read it over again and again and again, catching new errors every time. Then, you’re too familiar with your own work to find all of the inconsistencies and misspellings, so you need someone else with fresh eyes to look it over. Sometimes this takes several people, which is why having beta readers is a phenomenal asset. Once a few other people have read it over and made their suggestions or corrections, you need to read it over yet again. This takes a lot of time. Reading a 50k word novel can take at least 8 hours for most reade