Coming Soon... Succubus Summoning 101: The Novel

Out Friday 3rd Feb

“Is this where you tell me, ‘Yer a wizard’,” Phil said.

The man laughed. “No, not a wizard,” he said. “A warlock.”

“What’s the difference?” Phil manhandled a big bin liner full of crap into the skip.

“One’s make-believe while the other is very much real.”

So are daemons…

Phil Rowling, a normal eighteen-year-old, discovers this when he is plucked from a dead-end life of fast-food service and enrolled into Wargsnouts College for Warlocks. At the college students are taught how to summon and control daemons from hell.

Everyone at Wargsnouts knows what a succubus is, and why warlocks summon them. It’s a dirty joke shared in sniggers amongst the students. Succubi are female sex daemons, famed for their mastery of the arts of pleasure. Eager to experience this pleasure first-hand, Phil and his friend, Jake Pulman, take the Daemonica Malefique from the library and use it to summon a pair of succubi for a night of sexy fun. After all, succubi are sex daemons, used only for sex, how dangerous can it be…

Phil finds out exactly how dangerous when the ritual goes wrong and he is taken prisoner by a harem of hot succubi. Trapped in a perverse corner of hell, can he escape before the erotic wiles of the succubi claim his life and soul…?

Yes, I finally got around to collecting my Succubus Summoning 101 series together into a novel. If you ever wanted the complete story in a nicely formatted ebook, or even an actual paper-print book, you'll get your chance in a week's time.

So what's new? As you may have noticed already from the little excerpt in the blurb above, I've included some extra pages to give more of Phil's background--how he came to be recruited, who he met on enrolment, and so on. Nothing major, I don't want to dilute all those sinful succubus sex scenes after all, but enough to add more flesh to the world. I also spent some time cleaning up the chapters, fixing some iffy grammar, correcting typos; basically all the boring editing stuff required to bring the novel to as close to a professional standard as I could manage.

One thing I haven't cleaned up is the sex. Some authors tone their work down before putting it up on sites like amazon. In true John Carpenter style, I cut nothing. No need to worry there. Verdé and company are just as sexually uninhibited (depraved?) as before.

In case you're wondering, I'm not going to pull the existing chapters from Literotica and the other places I posted them. While I intend publishing the follow-up, Succubus Summoning 201, as an ebook first, I will continue to serialise the chapters on Literotica. All I ask is if you read the series and enjoy it, please support my writing by buying the ebook.

If you haven't read it yet, whoo boy are you in for a treat!

Next Friday...

What a dull, grey, joyless world some people want us to live in...

Apparently this poster:



was so offensive it needed to be banned.

Sigh.

Some aspects of feminism need to be slung back into the dark pit of the seventies. They do more harm than good nowadays. How is this any different to the half-naked beefcakes that adorn the covers of romance novels? Should we ban those too, in the interests of equality? Let's keep going until everyone is in shapeless boilersuits and no tantalising flesh can be seen at all. What a rotten world that would be.

The most offensive thing here is they're trying to bring back Hair Metal. For that crime alone they should be locked in a cage with live panthers, preferably ones that haven't been fed for a week.

And have rabies.

Just to make sure...

I've had better Januarys...

It's been an odd month.

Ideally I'd have been promoting Succubus Summoning 101 coming out as a book (my first actual novel!) about now. Unfortunately, what I assumed to be the simple process of converting a finished word doc into the many different ebook formats turned out to be anything but. The awesome Selena Kitt of eXcessica publishing had given all us eXcessica peeps a straightforward step-by-step guide on what needed to be done, which was great until I found out one of the pieces of software behaved very oddly on my M$ Vista laptop (I know, I know, the computer came with it and I was too lazy to change it). What went in as a lovely, nicely-formatted novel ended up looking like bloody gibbets run through an industrial saw when it was spat out the other end.

I'm really not helping myself with character names like Cέrμləa and Mamǝḵā Bēyˁṯān.

Or an insistence on using this as a chapter heading:


But hey, a first novel is like your first wedding--you want everything to be shiny and perfect. So I bashed my head against the monitor in an attempt to get it right, working with software seemingly designed for alien thought processes.

Then I came down with gastric flu and got knocked on my back for a few days, because why not, it's January 2012. Ugh.

Not the best month, as I said.

At least the worst is over. I'm not sure when exactly Succubus Summoning 101 is coming out. It's pencilled in for Feb 3rd. Watch this space.

Now, hopefully, I can get back to doing some damn writing.

English Patch for first part of Monster Girl Quest, Chapter 2

Hello, hello. I nearly missed this while I was distracted with all the plagiarism drama.

Someone's been busy...

Once again Luka finds himself in a sticky spot with the ladies...

Hat's off to RogueTranslator. He's already got the first third of Monster Girl Quest: Chapter 2 translated, right up to the lovely Undine above. You can get the patch here. You'll still need a copy of the original game, which can be purchased from here.

Follow-up on Robin Scott, Plagiarist

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Another Plagiarist Scumbag: Robin Scott

Oh well, I suppose it was inevitable it would happen. Someone has been swiping the free stories I put up on places like Literotica and StoriesOnline and trying to sell them as their own on amazon.com.

I’m not Robin Scott. I suspect Robin Scott isn’t Robin Scott. Succubus fans, if you’re tempted by “her” Halloween offerings, don’t bother. You’ve already read them.

Halloween Daily Short Story #1: Hollows Eve Succubus is A Succubus for Halloween.
Halloween Daily Short Story #2: Fuck the Flowers? is Don’t Fuck the Flowers.
Halloween Daily Short Story #3: Nÿte Nÿte Is Halloween Nÿte.
Halloween Daily Short Story #4: Red Light Halloween is Venus of the Red Lights.
Halloween Daily Short Story #6: A Succubus on Guard Duty is Guard Duty.
Halloween Daily Short Story #7: The Dance is Wrapdance.

If you also write and post stories on places like Literotica you might want to check her back catalogue to make sure your work hasn't been stolen.

I suppose I should treat it as a compliment that my stories are popular enough on places like Literotica for the unscrupulous to try and make a fast buck out of them. Still, it’s a horrible feeling to see a title, check the preview and realise someone has stolen your hard work. It’s like returning home to find you’ve been burgled. It’s not the value of the items taken, but the feeling of being soiled.

The value is negligible in this case anyway. Judging by the amazon rankings I haven’t lost much in the way of stolen sales. The nuisance comes from having to waste time chasing them off. "Guard Duty" and "Don’t Fuck The Flowers" are scheduled to appear in my next collection as part of a growing narrative. I don’t want to risk that, or future Succubus Summoning books, getting torpedoed by fans confused over original ownership or by the scam-artist getting cute on the legal side of things. I like posting work up for people to read for free and want to continue to do so, but this kind of bullshit is enough to make me wonder if that’s a wise strategy.

I’ll be contacting amazon to see if I can get the offending work taken down.

This is Robin Scott’s twitter link from her amazon site: @Erotica_scott. Feel free to register your displeasure and go all PennyArcade on her ass. These scumbags are a pox on readers and writers alike.

Numbers from a Newbie Writer's First Year

Here's the latest post I put up on the Self-Publishing Revolution blog detailing how my first year as a self-published(ish) writer has gone. Thanks to everyone who supported me through buying my books and I hope you enjoyed them! More to come next year!

I had a nice early Christmas present when my third quarter royalties came through. I was expecting this to be fairly light, but it also included some October sales, which was when my third collection of short stories, A Succubus for Halloween, came out. The amount this quarter was $600, a nice little sum right before Christmas.

That takes my total profits, after taking out initial setup costs, author copies and seller’s/publisher’s cuts, to $1,300 for my first (kind of) year as a writer. Obviously this is nowhere near the same ballpark as self-publishing titans Amanda Hocking and Joe Konrath, but this is all money in the black, with the only outlay being my free time spent in an activity I enjoy doing anyway.

I put out three collections of short stories, with A Succubus for Christmas coming out October 2010, A Succubus for Valentine’s Day coming out February 2011 and A Succubus for Halloween arriving October 2011. Christmas and Valentine’s Day were originally priced at $5.99 and this was dropped to $3.99 about halfway in the year after eXcessica head honcho Selena Kitt did some experimenting on pricing. Christmas and Valentine’s Day sold just under 200 copies and Halloween just over 100, making 500 books (print + ebook) in total for the whole year. It’s a modest amount, but not bad considering collections of short stories rarely sell well and my subject matter is about as far from the mainstream as you can get! :)

More promising is the growth. Christmas and Valentine’s Day sold nearly 200 each over the whole year. Halloween came out at the end of the third week in October and my royalties run up until the end of October, which meant it managed those hundred-and-so sales in the first week. Baby steps, I know, but they’re going in the right direction.

Unsurprisingly, the lion’s share of these sales was through Amazon, but they are not the only game in town. I can understand why some might think Amazon’s current dominance is a cause for concern, but I suspect if Amazon really started to abuse that dominance to the detriment of writers and readers, they’d quickly find themselves outstripped by one of their competitors in the way Nintendo was usurped by Sony in the console wars of the ‘90’s. For the moment they’re fantastic and a budding writer would be foolish not to take advantage of what they have to offer.

Writers shouldn’t restrict themselves to only Amazon. Having their own webpage for direct sales can be very useful once they’ve built up a following. By promoting eXcessica’s coming soon link for A Succubus for Halloween heavily on my personal blog in the month leading up to its release I was able to generate 40 sales, nearly half of the total for that book, directly through eXcessica’s own store (which also took Halloween to the top of their bestsellers list, yay! Now if only I can match Selena’s sales out in the rest of the big bad world. :)).

For people looking to self-publish as a route to fame and riches, these numbers aren’t very exciting. If I was trying to make a living as a full-time professional writer, 500 sales and a return of $1,300 for the year would be horrifying. Thankfully I’m not, so I can feel chuffed about the numbers instead of worrying about what I’m going to live on next year.

Next year I plan to put out my first novel and a fourth collection of short stories. I don’t know where the path is going to take me, but it’s going to be fun to find out!

All the best for 2012!