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Category: My Books

The novels I’ve written and/or the characters in them.

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This week, March 6-12th, is International Read An E-book Week (RAE Week) and e-tailers all over the web are celebrating with special deals and give aways. If you own an e-reader this is the week when you can snag more free e-books than at any time in the year. If you miss this week's steals and deals you'll pay for it - literally - all year long. But as the week begins, lets take a moment and look back at the history of the e-book.

This is lucky year seven for the RAE Week celebration, which began in 2004. However, a lot of folks don't realize that while this week is the 7th birthday of the RAE Week celebration, it's the 40th birthday of the e-book. The e-book was born in 1971 when Michael Hart used a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer to create the first e-book - The Declaration of Independence. Fitting choice, wasn't it?

Mr. Hart believed that "the greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries."  The creation of that first e-book was the beginning of what became Project Gutenberg. It hosts 20,000 free texts on its site and over 100,000 are available through its partners and today over 3 million e-books are downloaded each month.

...continue reading "March 6-12 – Read an E-Book Week"

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Any bargain hunters out there? 

These days that question is funny.  Who isn't a bargain hunter in this economy?  Well, we at QA Romances have got a real deal for all the bargain minded Kindle owners.  The Forever Series - A Faerie Fated Forever, A Golden Forever and A Sixth Sense of Forever - have just been released as a bundle for Kindle. 

 And what a bundle it is.  It's priced as a BUY 2, GET 1 FREE steal of a deal.  That's right, for only $5.99, Kindle owners can download 1 bundle that contains all 3 books in my Forever series.  The bundle will migrate to SW and feel out to all its fine partners (B&N, Apple, Kobo, Diesel, Sony, etc) soon. But that will take a bunch of formatting and my hubby is tangling with taxes right now. 

Tax tanglin' time around the house is when I bury all sharp objects and hide the youngest under the bed.  So it isn't exactly the time when I'd walk into the torture chamber (our bedroom) and confront the wild eyed dragon (the hubby I love enough to die for) to ask for more formatting.  It'll come to SW soon, but for now, it's a Kindle exclusive. 

The Forever Series has faeries and curses and even a witch or two, but the focus isn't the paranormal.  It's about men who've been conditioned by life to believe a few things.  One of those things is that they'll always get what they want, when they want it.  Another is women are easier to catch than a good hand of cards.  And if one good looking card gets away, 'tis nothing to fret over.  There will be another along in just a skinny minute. What happens when those men meet women who teach them that they've been wrong about everything? 

It's about men who've been too spoiled to learn a lesson the easy way.  They'd rather send away the dangerous lady and keep their lives on a happy, carefree keel.  The men don't learn until it's too late that they can't get their old lives back because they're not the same anymore.  And maybe they can't live without that one particular lady.  What will they do to get her back?  And what will it cost them? 

The Forever series, from start to finish, is a roller coaster that takes you over the top and never looks back.  It's an outrageous, outlandish, modestly bawdy ride to regions where men in love act the way women have always wished they'd act.  It's a feast of outrageous antics for the price of a combo at Burger King or Wendy's. 

Besides, I had to do a bundle.  I love bundles.  Unfortunately, I don't own a Kindle, but when I go to the Sony Store to load up my reader, my first stop is always in the bundle section.  I like the value and the continuity of getting several books in one purchase.  We'll probably bundle the other 3 I have currently out soon, but 2 are contemporaries (E-mail Enticement, Griffin's Law) and the other is a Western/Historical (Brotherly).  So the title of that one will be a challenge.  I could borrow from Harlequin and name it "The Tycoon, The Professor and The Cowboy Bundle".  I could get cute and call it "Bundle - Love, The Law & Cowboy Boots."  Or I could describe the guys involved and call it the "So Sexy Bundle."  

All the naming fun of Bundle 2 is for the future, but not too far in the future. I like the value of bundles and hubby knows that there are lots of other ladies like me.  Label something Buy 2 and Get 1 Free and by God, it's probably going in a woman's real - or virtual - shopping cart.  And at QA Romances, we want to see lots and lots of our books being read and enjoyed by folks from all over.  If that happens, I might be able to write full time. 

Boy, could I turn out some books if writing was my day job. 

For now I have another day job, and in this economy, I'm lucky to have it.  With prices of everything soaring, I really wanted to put out a bundle at a value price that almost everyone can afford.  And now the Forever Series Bundle is available at Kindle, so I hope that if you own a Kindle or any PC or other device that processes Kindle ebooks, you'll wheel your virtual cart over and pick up my brand new Bundle. 

At $5.99, like I said, it costs less than a lot of combos at fast food chains.  It has a lot less calories and you'll enjoy it for a lot longer.  How often do you get to see men in love behaving like you always imagined your man would when he fell in love with you? 

Pick up the Forever Series today.  It's an indulgence you can afford.

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To the few, the proud, the truly demented - I have Tweet News. Quacking Alone Romances is now on Twitter. You can follow me on Twitter @quackingalone by clicking the blue button in the sidebar. The button, like everything else on this site, was installed and designed by my amazing hubby who hasn't killed me yet - though I know he's been tempted, especially tonight.

See, until a day ago I was a Twirgin - a Twitter virgin. Not only had I never used the service, I'd never even seen it. But I heard that it was a great marketing and communication tool. In keeping with our plan to build sales and hopefully develop QA Romances into a full-time way to support our family, my hubby and I have been working on different areas. Hubby's busy bundling the Forever Series into 1 ebook we'll sell for $5.99. In the course of that, he discovered some formatting problems with Sixth Sense we weren't aware of so he had to go in and reformat the whole ebook. The bundle should be up very soon at Amazon, Smashwords and all of SW's great partners (Apple, B&N, Sony, Kobo, Diesel, etc.). The revised and re-formatted version of Sixth Sense should be up soon as well.

In addition to writing the WIP (The Duke of Eden), my part of the job is to work on marketing. Twitter was the obvious next step, but I took it with great fear and trepidation. It still scares me because I'm very confused about the whole thing. I got lots of advice that a good way to tweet was to have Facebook feed Twitter or maybe it was that it'd be good to have Twitter feed Facebook. Anyway, I understood something should feed something and I emailed hubby to ask him to work his magibytes and make that happen.

Understandably, he got a little confused by my e-mail and took the bold leap of coming in and actually talking to me about it. Did I want Twitter to feed my personal FB page or the QA page? Or, did I want my personal FB page or the QA page to feed Twitter?

First, I asked him what he thought. He growled and looked around for something to bite. I hid the youngest and asked him to please have the QA FB page feed twitter. He headed off to his magic cave to work his wizardry.

After a bit I thought about it and changed my mind. I grabbed a shield and crept down to the cave entrance and asked hubby to have Twitter feed the QA FB page. He emitted a stream of fire that destroyed the shield and seemed to be headed for me. I quickly thanked him again for the Twitter button on the pages and told him to hold off. For now, we won't have anything feed anything. So Twitter has random thoughts about writing, TV, my life, my insanity and other tidbits that you can't find anywhere else.

In my one day of tweeting, I've found the service is an interesting way to keep up with news and events in the world of romance and in the lives of some newsworthy folks. I'm already following about 53 tweeters, including a whole bunch in the romance world. I'm also following Shonda Sunshine (Rhimes) - the brilliant creator of Grey's Anatomy. This morning she tweeted a wish for everyone to enjoy the weekend. I tweeted an inane reply that I'm sure she never read. But it was a tiny (wee, miniscule and nearly nonexistent) way to communicate with someone I really admire. That's pretty darned neat right there.

I'm following Sarah at Smart Bitches and Jane of Dear Author and both have sent out some informative info. Season4Romance seems to have insight into everything, everywhere. Smexybooks has passed along some good info as has Reviewromance. I've just found a couple of others, including one that sounds right up my alley called Romancingrakes. I had to follow Amanda Hocking because I find her very inspiring (I don't care how much stuff she hoards in her living room).

I have 8 tweeters following me. Perhaps many of you who've been on the service a while find that number pathetically low, but for my first day I think it's okay. A big HOLLA at and thank you to the first 3 tweeter followers of QA - ChickLitandWine, BookClubWoman and Romancemama. I'm following them too. They look like great peeps to follow. Y'all should all check them out as well along with all the fine folks who have updated to follow QA since the blog post went public.

Of course, I'm hoping to connect to a bunch of readers through that great button hubby provided, despite my wishy-washy confusion about the whole thing. I've also added the twitter info to my author page at Amazon and at SW. BTW, the last few QA tweets do feed to the author page at SW. You can check out the rampant insanity there before electing to follow us on Twitter.

As I mentioned above, and yes, thanks to my indecision about having anything feed anything, for now, if you want bits and pieces of the daily zoo that is my world, you should sign up to follow Quackingalone on Twitter.

Come on, you know you want to follow us on Twitter - it's like watching the animals run the zoo.

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Recent days at Casa De Quack have been a hodgepodge of working on my WIP (The Duke of Eden) and monkeying around with marketing. I've made no secret of the fact that I'd love to write full-time. My last post, Digit Envy, made that pretty darned plain. In a lot of ways, I guess this post is a follow up to that one. It's to tell y'all about my trials and tribulations along the path of making my dream come true.

I think a dream becomes a reality in stages. It's a lot like going to sleep or waking up. Unless there's a real jolt, a real emergency, we don't drop off to sleep the second our eyes close and we don't wake up the second our alarms go off. Both are processes and I've decided that turning a dream into reality is a process too.

Often - but likely not often enough - I give myself a hard time. But part of the process of figuring out how to get enough of it right is to recognize what I got right already. I have got some of it right - stop it; don't make that face; do you want your face to freeze like that? My first step to getting it right was to gather the courage to put my work out there. It does take courage. While your books are on your hard drive, they're still yours. Put 'em out there in the world, and they belong to the reader - not just the words, but whatever the words may reveal about who you are or why you are whatever you've become so far. Writing is an intimate act and every time a writer shares her work with another person, the writer is sharing a very personal, very private experience with the reader. Yes, putting your work out there is the first step. If you haven't taken it yet, I encourage you to try.

Get your book formatted. Download GIMP and design a cover or go to Createspace or Lulu and use their cover formatting software. I was lucky enough to be married to a graphically gifted computer guy. But even if you lack that advantage, I bet you know someone good with art and computers. Offer an illustrator credit for the first cover or give it a shot yourself. You may find another hidden talent. But get a good cover because it matters. And format your manuscript right. Again, my hubby is a big advantage for me, but you can format for Kindle and Smashwords and Createspace. Those three are the keys to the world. They'll get your book everywhere in ebook and paperback format.

...continue reading "Boogling From Dream to Reality"

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Published on 4 Comments on Digit Envy

Hot off the press from Amazon comes a late Christmas gift to indie authors everywhere. The company has announced that during the last 3 months of 2010 ebooks outsold paperbacks.

The trend continued this month, with 115 ebooks sold for every 100 paperbacks. It encompassed all of last year with Amazon selling 15% more e-books than paperbacks.  In July of 2010 Amazon reported that it had sold more ebooks than hardcovers. By year's end the etailer had sold 3 times as many ebooks as hardbacks. And yes, Virginia, that figure excludes free ebooks.

And you know what? Amazon sells lots of stuff. All kinds of stuff. If it's legal to buy and sell, it's probably sold somewhere on Amazon. Despite all of that, despite all of the gazillions and God-help-me trillions of items that Amazon sells now and has ever sold - you know what? The Kindle is Amazon's best selling item in its 16 year history.

What does it all mean to authors? It means that new indie writers will start getting directions that sound something like this - Yes. You know where those Castle walls used to be? Well, you go that way, and ...

It means that times aren't just "a-changing." It means that they've changed.
There are indie authors everywhere selling enough books to quit their day jobs. Guest blogging over at Joe Konrath's place, Robin Sullivan posted a list of VERY successful indie writers that she and Derek J. Canyon compiled of indie authors December, 2010 sales numbers.  There's more detailed info over at Derek's blog.

Okay. That was transference. It doesn't say that all the writers on the list have quit their day jobs. I believe that Konrath has (hero-worship much?) and he's mentioned that before on his blog. Yeah, it's the kind of fact that sticks with me. The list is of December sales numbers of some very successful indie authors. It may be just the ebooks on Kindle (I was a little unclear about that). Most of them never had a previous print deal with a major publisher. These are folks selling in the thousands every month. And yeah, if I were selling Joe's numbers, Stephen Leather's numbers (over 40,000 in December) or - Lord Love A Duck - Amanda Hocking's numbers (over 100,000 in December), then I'd surely quit my day job.

...continue reading "Digit Envy"

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I had an experience last week that has me thinking about life in general.  The experience may not have been earth shattering for anyone else, but it sure means a lot to me.  I got my mojo back.

At first I didn't realize it was missing.  I was still writing, wasn't I?  Well, sort of.  I still wrote.  I still opened my laptop and kept plugging along on my WIP, The Duke of Eden. Okay, I was plodding than plugging but I was writing.  Every weekend and a couple of nights a week I made myself write.  Made myself write? Yeah, I did.  I realized that I wasn't writing for the joy of it. I wasn't writing because I had to write.  I wasn't writing because I couldn't NOT write.  That's when I knew it was gone.

But lots of things are gone these days. Perhaps life changes, reduces, contracts, but it goes on.  I think we've all learned to walk away from things.  We've let them go and kept walking because that's what we had to do.  So even if my writer's mojo had left me, I didn't need it.  I'd keep walking and I'd even keep writing.  I'd keep going forward until it got better.  Because if I kept going, it would get better, wouldn't it?

Except lots of time passed and it didn't get better.  I kept moving forward but I never got anywhere.  The holidays went by and I adored having my family together and my eldest home where he belongs.  But there was lots of time for me to write over the holidays.  I couldn't spend every moment in Zack's room staring at him sappily while he played World of Warcraft.  (Eventually he'd kick me out.)

When I'd get evicted from Zack-watching I'd go by and pester John and then stop in to pester my youngest, Sam.  All of them stay fairly ensconced at a computer somewhere. So I'd head back to the den where my Toshiba Satellite sits on a nice little folding table I got for Christmas a few years ago from my hubby.  I'd sit on my end of the love seat and spend more time watching TV than working on my book.  Whole days would pass with me cranking out a paragraph.  On a good day, I might write 2 paragraphs.  That should've been a sharp wake up call for someone who used to laugh at people who said a writer's prime was about 6 pages a day.

...continue reading "Sometimes You Have To Go Backwards To Go Forwards"

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Published on 1 Comment on Romancing Your Ereader Without Spending A Fortune

A big ole' welcome to all of the lucky folks who found a new ereader under their trees this year.  When you charged up that device and logged on to download your first ebook, a magical thing happened to you - you threw off your shackles.  Did you feel 'em fall away? 

I bet you didn't even know that up to the point of that first ebook download you'd been a prisoner for your entire life.  You'd been chained to the taste, the choices and the whims of big publishing.  You only thought you were deciding what you wanted to read.  In reality, you were picking only from the crop of what the NY castle dwellers decided was "acceptable."  But no longer.

Your ereader bought your freedom.  Now the world that the publishing royals fought and held away from you for so long is yours.  You just fired the gatekeepers.  There are no more literary agents or publishing companies between you and what you read.  You're now the gatekeeper and there is a bunch of fine indie writing you can enjoy that was never open to you before. 

But not all of the big companies fought the erevolution as hard as the NY royals.  And some of those companies are flourishing in the e-age and they should be rewarded by customer loyalty.  On our shores, the big e-winner is Harlequin.  Overseas, it appears to be a company that (to me, which means little in the scheme of things) looks a lot like Harlequin - Mills & Boon.  I know that Harlequin's opening its doors so early to the e-changes was likely a natural growth for the company.  Harlequin didn't require gatekeepers to the same extent as the NY royals.  Harlequin already took unagented submissions for a bunch of its lines.  Harlequin adapted before the e-age arrived and made further changes and now it's one of the reader's and writer's best friends.

Now that you've got that new ereader, you've likely also acquired a new hobby - filling it with free, or low cost ebooks.  Hopefully, most of those are romance ebooks - that's what I write, of course.  After you've gone to your favorite etailer and bought the entire catalogue of Quacking Alone Romances authored by yours truly, Mary Anne Graham, you'll be looking to add some other books to your device.

...continue reading "Romancing Your Ereader Without Spending A Fortune"

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Some of the hot news this week promises hotter sales in 2011 for crafters of HEAs, like yours truly.  Yes, Virginia, Bowker says  it.  The New York Times says it. Even Smart Bitch Sarah Wendell says it. And if the Smart Bitches say it, then it must be true - "Romance is now the fastest-growing segment of the e-reading market, ahead of general fiction, mystery and science fiction, according to data from Bowker, a research organization for the publishing industry." 

Industry honchos say that the "discreet power" of the e-book reader mean that "romance novels are now enjoying a renaissance."  The popular wisdom is that e-readers allow their owners to read whatever they like privately, without displaying the covers of the books.  Romance novel covers have long been a platform for showing long-locked bare-chested lads with rippling abs embracing a longer-locked lady with a low cut bodice or a silk gown tight enough to show off her pebbling nipples.

Those-who-know-these-things say that lots of ladies have been hesitant to indulge in lovely, lusty tales because of these cover images.  In the NY Times piece a CFO of All Romance quotes e-reader customers who've said they can now indulge their love of romance novels - without having to "show my husband what I'm reading."  The switched.com piece says mass-transit commuters with e-readers are downloading romances in record numbers because they don't have to worry "about a fellow traveler casting a judgemental glance" at the book cover.   

I have trouble identifying with any of this.  I've never cared what anyone thought of my romance novels - covers and all.  Whatever romance novel I was reading accompanied me to college and law school classes.  The only time I ever had a professor object to a book didn't involve a romance novel. (At Francis Marion University one of my profs made me take me take James Joyce's "Ulysses" outside her classroom and made me promise never again to bring the novel back into her presence.  It turns out the professor wrote her doctoral thesis on the book and never wanted to see it again.)

And women worrying about telling their hubby they are reading a romance or being afraid to show him the cover?  Oh, please.  Who are these women?  Did they poll refugees from the 1950s?  If a woman is that concerned with her hubby's opinion of her reading material, then her marriage has far, far deeper problems than romance novels. 

Besides, in my household Mr. Quack designs the romance novel covers.  All of the earlier book covers were pretty non-offensive and gender neutral, but they were striking covers with very graphic images.  They're killer covers but they don't necessarily sell sex and lust.  We both adore the covers, but the one I'm writing now, The Duke of Eden (it's up as a serial on Amazon BTW), has a much more graphic cover.   Currently in Casa de Quack hubby and I have been talking about him doing some new covers for the earlier books that are more graphic.  Yes, we're talking about adding pebbling nipples and rippling abs. 

Why?  Because we've learned that sex still sells.  And Quacking Alone Romances is very much a joint enterprise.   What's good for the brand is good for our bank account.  And what's good for the brand is what sells.  Some of the very best-selling e-reading material is erotica of the kind that can make me blush - and that ain't an easy thing.  We've learned that the graphic covers grab the eye and we'll never get readers to press the buy button if we don't get their attention first.

...continue reading "Pebbling Nipples, Rippling Abs & Ringing Registers"

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Each year Britain's Literary Review honors a mainstream author with "The Bad Sex In Fiction Award."   The award goes to writers whose descriptions of sexual antics and activity inspire "eye-rolling and disgust." 

This year, Rowan Somerville won the award for descriptions in his book, "The Shape of Her."  Passages like the following secured him the honor:

Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.

As if that wasn't good enough to secure the best of the bad prize, elsewhere in the book Somerville describes a nipple as "the nose of the loveliest nocturnal animal, sniffing in the night."

Some other big literary names were on the list of nominees, including Jonathan Franzen for his book Freedom which included the following passage:

One afternoon, as Connie described it, her excited clitoris grew to be eight inches long, a protruding pencil of tenderness with which she gently parted the lips of his penis and drove herself down to the base of its shaft.  Another day, at her urging, Joey described to her the sleek warm neatness of her turds as they slid from her anus and fell into his open mouth, where, since these were only words, they tasted like excellent, dark chocolate.

Another nominee was Adam Ross for descriptions in his book, Mr. Peanut.  Including a passage where a husband describes his love for his wife's "giganticness" and said if he made love to her from behind he felt like "an X-rated Gulliver among the Brobdingnags."  Ross writes,

She was not his wife but a giant she-creature, an overlarge sex pet:  his to screw, groom and maintain.

In accepting the award, Somerville was gracious and stated that he felt it was fitting because, "There is nothing more English than bad sex."

...continue reading "Bad Sex 2010: Dead Bugs, Pencils & Giant She Creatures"

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 Great news for our readers eagerly awaiting the next chapters of Mary Anne's The Duke of Eden serialized historical romance novel - it's here!

We also have a button for it on our Complete List of Books page, but you may have to scroll down to the bottom of the lengthy book synopsis there... your patience is appreciated!

And once again, we show you the glorious, magnificent pecs of the Adonis adorning my wife's e-book, because you ladies just can't get enough of that guy. Or that guy's chest. Or whatevs. Just look at 'em and buy the damn chapters already. You female chauvinist sows. LOL!