Tasha's (aka Beren) Journal

I have just visited 79 Facebook groups to see which ones are worth posting my book to on launch day (21st Feb) and this morning I was doing the same with Twitter.

Yesterday I submitted the book to at least 80 book sites, who may or may not list it, and I have another 13 or so to submit to actually on launch day.

Book launching is a pain in the bottom - not to mention that I have to write blog posts for here, my blog and the Wittegen blog at some point too. Writing the book was the easy part, I tell you, easy! :)

Thank you for listening to me whine.

If you are here for Writerly Wednesday, today's post is a guest interview with the lovely Dorothy Massey and may be found here.

So Sophie and I are currently looking for people who would be willing to be pre-release reviewers for Wittegen Press. Before you click on to another page, this involves FREE books :).

We are seeking individuals who would be willing to read and give honest reviews of advanced copies (ARCs) of our books prior to general release. If you would be interested please:

1. Fill in this Google Form : http://goo.gl/forms/1bJ7cgU0Jp
2. If you are accepted we will then add you to the Wittegen Press Reviewers mailing list.

Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year to One and All

I wish you all the joy, blessing and peace of the season. As my dear Papa would say, may the joy of the shepherds and angels, the love of the holy family and the peace of the Christ child be with you this Christmas time. I very much hope you are happy and well however you keep the season (even if it is just to stare at the rest of us as if we're bonkers :)).

To my friends who I know are struggling with bad things, all my love. This time of happiness for others must be incredibly hard. I wish you survival and the hope that the coming New Year will bring you everything you deserve and life will be better.

I am just off to make Last Minute Christmas Chutney ready for Boxing Day lunch, then I have to make a galette from Mary Berry's recipe for those of us who don't like Christmas pud and after that I will be on to the veggies to make sure they are all prepared for tomorrow's feast. If that's not enough, it's also my dear daddy's birthday, so we will be going round there for dinner this evening.

I've been roped into singing in the choir for Midnight as well, which I am so looking forward to. I love singing carols and descants. They're down a few members this year because of various things so they asked if anyone would mind standing in. Can't wait :). Then on Christmas morning Daddy is taking the 10:30 service, yay! It doesn't feel like Christmas until Daddy has taken a service (CofE vicars never really retire, they just take services for other vicars now that they don't have their own parish ;)).

So I promised FREE eBooks didn't I :). Here is the public service announcement ;)

~*~

FREE eBooks from Wittegen Press

Those of you already subscribed to our mailing list will remember us asking you to vote on your favourite genres and now the two books based on the top two genres are ready for you to enjoy :).

Genre: Paranormal




Assassin's Blood
by Natasha Duncan-Drake

Meet Kira Roltof, or rather Jasmin Welby at the moment because she’s undercover. Kira’s an assassin with a sense of humour that’s almost as dangerous as she is. When hunting down her targets it helps that she's a vampire/werewolf hybrid and has been at the killing game for over seventy years. Practice makes perfect and all that jazz.

Of course her combined species status could just as easily get her killed as help her out. If either the vampires or the werewolves figure out she’s both, she’ll never be safe again.

Her latest target is a Mafia big shot. Nothing she can’t handle easily, except she runs into a little snag of the vampire persuasion at the end of the job.

Assassin’s Blood is a short story full of paranormal intrigue and action with a little bit of romance to round it off.

Genre: Contemporary Fantasy




Curse of a Banshee - (The Darwell [Magical] Cleaning Services #1)
by Sophie Duncan

B, a djinn/banshee low fae, runs Darwell Cleaning Services, a business that specializes in tidying up magical crime scenes. She's managed her company with her friend and business partner, Jean, for over one hundred years without any complaints, or problems. She keeps her head down and offers a job to those whom higher fae look down on for their lack of personal magic.

B and her team are expecting an ordinary night of clean-up when they arrive at the aftermath of a spell battle in the middle of an English woodland. However, when a terrified djinn boy appears in the middle of their job, B finds the mix of her djinn and banshee instincts, which she normally keeps under strict control, beginning to rise. The boy is not alone, he is being chased by criminals intent on selling him to become a genie, the same gang who took B's father a century earlier.

B must struggle with her own unsettled powers and fight the slavers for the boy's freedom, risking her own life and those of her friends in the process.

Curse of a Banshee is fast-paced fantasy taking a fresh look at ancient powers in a contemporary British setting.

~

Existing subscribers to our mailing list will have received our Christmas Newsletter containing the links to the books, for anyone else, you can get the books as well. We'll send you the links in the confirmation email when you sign up to the Wittegen Press mailing list here.

Keep the bunny safe! Vote for The Avebury Legacy over at Cover wars or the vicious kitty will attack!

• click here to go to the Cover Wars page
• check the radio button next to The Avebury Legacy
• click vote
• repeat daily until Sunday (if you would be so kind)

When you're a vampire hunter infected with vampirism your life expectancy is short. Nate's a hunter and Lexie's a witch and they have less than six months before Lexie's magic can no longer delay the symptoms and keep them at least partially human.

Firstly, in hopes of rounding up a few reviews I'm offering anyone who reviews The Avebury Legacy in a fair and honest manner a copy of The Beginning (Vampires: The New Age, Prequel #1) absolutely free.

There is a Google form on The Avebury Legacy's book listing to make it easy for people to point me at their review and give me an email addie to send the free book to. If you already left one and would like a copy of The Beginning, please pop over and fill in the form and I'll send you one asap.

I've also written a couple of blog posts to go with the book:
Nate Laven - An Introduction
This is an intro to Nate, my main protagonist and is posted at my Tasha's Thinkings blog.

Phone Home (Vampires: The New Age, Flash Fiction)
And there is also some flash fiction set between ch1 and ch2 of the book, but which doesn't require prior knowledge to read. This is posted over at the Wittegen Press blog.

Thanks for reading.

So I finished the cover for Assassin's Blood. I've been working on it for a while, but finally finished it yesterday after finishing the story it goes with.

In case you missed the last post about this one, it's a short story that will be free to the subscribers of the Wittegen Press Newsletter. My brief was Paranormal and Soph is doing one that is Contemporary Fantasy. Once Soph is finished with hers we will be releasing them together.

Assassin's Blood by Natasha Duncan-Drake

Kira is my protagonist and she is a vampire/werewolf hybrid and an assassin with a rather twisted sense of humour. In this short story she's after a Mafia big shot, but runs into a snag of the vampire persuasion.

Soph and I did a couple of panels at TLWLexicon this last weekend focused on Selfpublishing, and we put together several pages of resources and information. I thought I'd put together a post with links to them all so they are easy to find if you have missed them:

On the Wittegen Press Website:

• Indie and Self Publishing Tips & Tricks - lots of info and links to other useful sites as well
• Social Media for Authors - info on lots of the social media
• How to Link to Your eBook - on some of the big sites it's hard to find your book or figure out how to link to it, this post details Amazon, Nook UK and Apple

On My Tasha's Thinking's blog:

• Where to Publish eBooks - a non-exhaustive list of places to publish eBooks, if you have suggestions to add, please comment, thanks
• How to Format an eBook - how I format eBooks for publication step by step
• Blogger/Designer Resource Links - useful resources like image sites etc

I knew I was forgetting something - so much to do, no time to do it.

During the 24 days up to Christmas, Wittegen Press is doing

An Advent Giveaway



Each day we are giving away an eBook via Rafflecopter entry on our blogs and every day there is also a letter on the post which will eventually make up a Christmas message. Keep this message, because between Christmas and New Year you'll be able to use it to win all the books in one bundle.

I distribute my books via Smashwords and I thought several of them must have been simply refused by Nook UK because they didn't show up when I searched for my name. It turns out they are there, they just don't show up in searches.

It mostly seems to be my adult titles, but there are a couple of others that are simply not there. I have no idea why, but the only way I found them was by translating the B&N url into the Nook UK format. We link to Nook UK from Wittegen Press when we can so that Nook users can easily find our books. For my reference and for anyone else having the same trouble I thought I'd document how to do it.

Here is a B&N url for my latest book Cat's Confidence (it's on both sites which is what made it easy to use).:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/cats-confidence-natasha-duncan-drake/1116968975?ean=2940045280310

here is the Nook UK URL:
http://uk.nook.com/ebooks/cats-confidence-by-natasha-duncan-drake/2940045280310

So to translate one to the other you have to do the following three things:

• Replace www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ from the B&N URL with uk.nook.com/ebooks/
• Add a by- before the author's name
• remove the first number and ?ean= (e.g 1116968975?ean=) from the last part of the URL

That then gives you the correct URL on Nook UK for your ebook that is on Barnes and Noble. It doesn't seem to work with big name books because they have different ref numbers, but they'll show up in searches anyway.

Last year I was lucky enough to take part in Den of Eek, run by the lovely people at Den of Geek. This was a live evening with twelve authors (3 of us from a competition Den of Geek ran, the others established writers) reading aloud their works of horror written specifically for the event in aid of the Geeks vs Cancer appeal.

All of those stories have now been put into an eBook, which is also being sold for Geeks vs Cancer appeal.


The Den of Eek! ebook is now available to buy
The link above goes to Den of Geek's post all about the book with links where to buy it. This is a great cause and all the stories were fabulous so it's a great book too :).

Authors:
Clayton Littlewood
Leila Johnston
CJ Lines
Sarah Pinborough
Natasha Duncan-Drake (me :))
James Moran
Mary Hamilton
Joff Brown
Neil Jones
James Brogden
Johannes Roberts
Kevin McNally