Touchstone - the Jenny Edition

By request of Jenny, a 796 page block of rambling teen adventure.  [It started out over 900 pages, but since Lulu only does hardcovers up to 800 pages I had to reduce the font and prune the margins.]

I'm only going to add it to Lulu for the moment - purchasing the extended distribution package would mean raising the price and it's already hefty enough.  [$3 of the price goes to me - the rest to Lulu.]

[You won't have trouble spotting this one in the mail, Jennies - it's liable to be bigger than your mailbox.]

351,000 Words

The compiled The Touchstone Trilogy is now live on Amazon (US) and will filter through to the other Amazons.  [Will be doing the Smashwords version tomorrow.]

It will be interesting to see if it picks up sales - the cover gives off such a different vibe to the covers of the individual books (which are far more accurate to the tone of the story), and I've no doubt it's more marketable toward its target audience, but the price point ($8.99) is certainly less 'impulse buy'.  I might use it for Goodreads ads.

Caszandra has been going well for its first couple of days - over 200 sales between the US and UK stores (and one in France ;).

Caszandra Release

A while ago I mentioned in a post that I'd noticed search terms leading to this blog about the Caszandra release date.  Since then:

Very funny, mystery UK person!  You'll be happy to know the answer is TODAY!

Available now from Smashwords, Amazon US and Amazon UK.  Other vendor sites (and the TPB version) take longer to process through.

Congrats to the ebook competition winners (ChrisL, JulieH, Jyak, DianaW, smarywcerb2, Gonzalo & Carin): the book should be in your inbox.

Today I have:

- Decided to never, ever set a fixed release date again.
- Uploaded the WRONG version of the cover to Amazon (can't fix this till tomorrow).
- Cried all through editing the final entry.  Probably from relief at being at the end.
- Discovered a new typo every time I went to finalise the ebook.
- Stressed constantly about whether this bit or that bit or the other bit is boring.
- Read my favourite bits over and over with a big grin on my face.

It's been a big boost for me to have readers looking forward to one of my books, so I'd like to add a big THANKS for all your comments and reviews.  I hope you all have fun with it!

"Caszandra" Ebook Competition - Plus Important Note for Nook Readers

For this release, instead of a Smashwords coupon, I'll be running a competition to give away an ebook copy of Caszandra, plus your choice of any of my other books.  There'll be seven winners, and the ebooks will be emailed out before I even load the copies up on Smashwords and Amazon.

To enter, simply email giveaway@andreakhost.com.  [Competition closed now.]  Your email should include:

- Which Setari squad would you most like to join/hang out with and why?
- The email address you want me to send the ebook to.
- Your preferred ebook format (Kindle's mobi/Epub (Nook)/PDF).

Winners will be chosen by random number generator and the competition closes when the book is done! [The 24th, most likely.]

Feel free to include your squad selection in comments on this post as well.

Important Note to Nook (ie. non-Amazon) Readers

Stores such as Barnes & Noble do not allow non-US authors to upload books.  To place the book on B&N, I upload it to Smashwords and Smashwords vets it (can take days/weeks) and then distributes it (can take days/weeks).  Which means that Caszandra will show up on B&N _eventually_ but I have no way of knowing when.  You can still purchase the book at release from www.smashwords.com - Smashwords will have the book in both Nook and Kindle format.

If there's some reason you cannot use Smashwords, but you can't bear to wait for distribution vagaries, email me on release day and I'll see if I can work something out.

Touchstone Wordclouds

And on an only very mildly spoiler-ific note, here are the Wordclouds for each book of the Trilogy.

Stray

Lab Rat One

Caszandra

Wordclouds are an excellent way to spot your writing tics.  I use quite a few weasel words, such as 'like' and 'sort of' and I add 'really' to almost everything and then go back and edit most of them out.  'Just' is also very common.

Interesting to see the progression of importance of certain people through Cass' year away from home.