Showing posts with label ebooks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ebooks. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

Changes with M.E. Hydra books

I should have posted this earlier, but it's been a busy month yadda yadda.

A few weeks ago I received an email that eXcessica would be closing its doors and unpublishing all its books at the end of November.  First up, there's nothing controversial about this.  Excessica was started as a sort of writer's collective right before Amazon's Kindle blew the doors off self-publishing.  This was back when alternative book sites required "publishers" to have at least three authors in their stable and Selena Kitt wanted to both start her own career as an author and recognised there was a lot of untapped talent on Literotica that could be brought along for the ride.  I feel honoured and grateful to be one of those writers and have nothing but praise for Selena and her hardworking crew for having me along.

All good things must come to an end, and in an era where it's trivially easy for a writer to upload their work to Amazon and other places, there is no longer the need for writer's-collectives-cum-publishers.  It's time for us to make our own way, and I fully understand the decision.

What does it mean for M.E. Hydra books on Amazon and elsewhere?

As far as I know, the ones put out through eXcessica will be unpublished at the end of the month, so if you want to grab the old versions, you might want to do it pretty sharpish.  The books affected are Succubus Summoning 101 and 201, and the A Succubus for collections (6 of them).  The Sandwiched by novellas were fully self-published by me and won't be affected (I really should get back to finishing that series off!)

The books won't be gone for good.  As soon as I've sorted out the logistics of rights transfers and the rest, I'll be reuploading them under my own author account.  For Succubus Summoning 101 and 201, that will probably be right away as I'm happy with the current covers for those.  They'll just need some tweaks to the copyright page and the removal of the old logo and should be good to go.

As for the A Succubus for collections, I might use this as an opportunity to tweak these and rebrand the series as a whole.

As part of the rebranding I definitely want to redo the covers and number them as a series.

The other thing I might do is rejig the contents and running orders.  Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed links between characters and events, and realised these are all taking place in a shared universe.

This was not always the case.  Early on, I wrote them as standalone short stories, which means there are some that don't quite fit within that shared universe - the superhero parodies, that one science fiction story, some of the "Succubus vs." stories.

While I haven't put any books out for a while, I have continued to write stories.  Some have been Patreon-exclusives, others have been posted on Literotica.  I probably have enough for a new collection and some left over.  I'm thinking of replacing some of the older stories in the older collections, and then rebranding the collections as part of a much larger ongoing story in the same universe.

What do people think about that?

Go with the rebrand, or preserve the collections with their original line-ups?

Either way, expect the Succubus Summoning series to be reuploaded fairly quickly, and I'll likely follow with the new A Succubus for editions over the first half of 2022.  Maybe, if everything falls into place, a brand new 7th collection to follow the updated editions.

As for covers, I'm still checking on whether it's allowed, but the WOMBO dream app has thrown up a few pictures I wouldn't feel too bad about sticking on a book cover.


A Succubus for Halloween?


A Succubus for Freedom?


A Succubus for Remembrance?

What do you think?

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

My Donation Button(s)

It's been a fairly quiet month sales-wise.  I suppose I should keep my publisher (okay, writing collective of fellow awesome smut writers) happy and remind people I also write books when not blogging about dubious Japanese hentai games.

I'm lousy at the whole monetization side of things because I'm a stupid big softie and find asking for stuff awkward.  That's why I consider myself a hobbyist writer rather than a pro writer.  It would be nice to be able to go full time because then I'd have an extra 8 hours a day to dream up more bizarre and sexy weird stories.  Maybe one day.  I can dream (of sultry succubi).

Other blogs have adverts and donate buttons.  I hate web adverts because they're usually annoying at best and toxic virus delivery mechanisms at worse.  If you ever see adverts for anything other than my own books here it means I've either been replaced with a soulless automaton, or desperately need to pony up cash for a new kidney.

I thought about adding a donation button then remembered I already have something better:

http://www.amazon.com/Succubus-Summoning-101-M-E-Hydra-ebook/dp/B0074N661I/ref=sr_1_6?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1405488868&sr=1-6
http://www.amazon.com/Succubus-Christmas-Other-Devilish-Delights-ebook/dp/B00486UEHG/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1405488901&sr=1-2
http://www.amazon.com/Succubus-Valentines-Other-Perilous-Pleasures-ebook/dp/B004NEW16A/ref=sr_1_3?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1405488901&sr=1-3
http://www.amazon.com/Succubus-Halloween-Other-Terrifying-Temptresses-ebook/dp/B005Y1AR8K/ref=sr_1_5?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1405488901&sr=1-5
http://www.amazon.com/Succubus-Freedom-other-tales-ebook/dp/B008RZH56C/ref=sr_1_4?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1405488901&sr=1-4
http://www.amazon.com/Succubus-Remembrance-other-tales-Fatales-ebook/dp/B00GUXWGX0/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1405488901&sr=1-1

If you like the sexy fiction/game reviews/other stuff I post here and elsewhere on the internet, and are feeling generous enough to ship a few $ my way to incentivize me to keep on writing sexy (and occasionally (okay, okay frequently) horrific) succubus/monster girl stories, click on one of the covers above and buy one of my books.  It's better than a donate button as you'll get additional stories/chapters that aren't found anywhere else.

If you hate Amazon and refuse to give them money under any circumstances, my books can also be found on Smashwords, or even directly from my publisher, eXcessica.

If you already have all of these books, thanks a lot for the support and I hope you enjoyed them.  You're ahead in my eyes and it's up to me to pull my finger out and write more books to tempt you with.

If you'd like to, but don't have the funds, don't sweat it.  That's how it is sometimes.  I'll keep posting new erotic fiction to places like Literotica for as long as circumstances allow (although $$$ is the best way of making sure adverse circumstances stay the fuck away).

That's enough shameless begging.  Time to get back to writing.  Book #7 (should be Succubus Summoning 201) isn't going to write itself.

Sunday, August 08, 2010

Bad Nanny Apple

This sucks. They censored the erotica from their bestsellers list. It’s Apple’s toy and they can do what they like with it, but I think this kind of control freakery will only end up biting them in the ass. Amazon didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory when all the gay books ‘vanished’ or when the big grab fairy came and took back George Orwell’s ‘1984’ from people’s ebook readers, but at least they had the decency to mumble something about a ‘glitch’ in the first place and a rights fuck up in the other.

Apple, nope. They swept them away and tried to tell us reality was something else, which is never going to work as somebody is going to spot it, and then everybody else will know about it and pretty soon everyone will be looking at their bestsellers list and singing: “We know you’re lying...”

It’s silly. They could have handled it sensibly in any number of ways. Don’t sell the smut in the first place (although that’s bound to result in endless hilarity when someone gets over-zealous and blacklists “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” or “Lolita”). Filter your bestsellers list by price to remove the cheap little novellas. Filter your bestsellers list by genre (Both fine as long as the filtering is stated).

Or suck it up and show a sense of humour in the “Gosh, who’d have thought adults would buy ‘adult’ titles” vein.

Instead they tried to pretend the world is basically flat.

I don’t hate Apple. They make a lot of cool stuff and I love my iPod to bits. But they also have a habit of building nice walled gardens and putting machinegun nests on the walls. And then wondering why the masses deserted them in droves for a competitor’s knock off that doesn’t come with a built-in nanny.

Nice to see erotica ebooks doing well against the big boys anyway.

Here’s hoping to hit the #1 spot in the invisible ‘real’ bestsellers list sometime soon ;).