March 2012 Recap

March 2012:

March wasn't terribly exciting. I was doing some heavy editing and didn't have time for much else. I did some more fuming over PayPal, but they ended up giving in (sort of). I started a newsletter, even though I didn't really start using it until later, gushed about my upcoming release, Absolutely Eric (which was the one I was editing), and did a bunch of giveaways. 

February 2012 Recap

February 2012:

I started the month setting up reading goals...which crashed an burned spectacularly! What can I say? I was busy with edits.

I was also busy expanding on my m/m-only blog hop idea. Originally, it was only supposed to be a giveaway of m/m books only (since I'd taken part in many blog hops where I'd had to wade through m/f books to find the few m/m books to sign up for). However, once I read about the International Day Against Homophobia, the goals changed, and my friend K-Lee Klein came up with the name Hop Against Homophobia. N.J. Nielsen was also a part in the organizing. The goals were now "to help create awareness against homophobia and to stand together as an m/m genre (authors, publishers, reviewers AND readers) to try to help the world see gay fiction as first class literature, not second class." We felt it was important to stand together as a community of m/m because RWA had grossly discriminated against m/m by excluding same-sex stories from a contest of theirs.

February 17th was a release day! Some readers didn't seem as keen on Grade-A-Sex Deal as they were on Hot Hands, mainly because of the subject (teacher-student relationship) and the darker theme of the story. However, there were a number of "I didn't think I'd like this story because of the subject, but...".

Paypal started censoring books and I felt they were sniffing around way too close to m/m, which only reinforced my determination to make Hop Against Homophobia a success. I didn't want m/m books to be pushed under a dirty carpet as some form of indecency! These were great books that had to be seen. So now, the HAH team didn't want to make a splash anymore, we wanted to make a tsunami.

January 2012 Recap

I was going to post this in January, but it's February now! I'm officially one years old as an author. January 3rd was the official day of my one year - January 4th if we're talking about non-free fiction. In the monthly rundown, I'll be going over what happened in 2012 and linking to a few interesting posts from 2012.

January 2012:

I decided to gamble on a new publisher, No Boundaries Press, so they share my anniversary of one year. They kicked off by publishing a few free stories, including my In His Pocket, on January 3rd. In His Pocket has held the nr. 1 spot on the most downloaded titles on NBP since that day. 

The first ever non-free story published by NBP was Hot Hands, on January 4th. It has also been on their top 10 bestseller list since then and also became an ARe bestseller.

My first novel was released on January 13th through MLR Press, A Life Without You. It was well received, getting twelve 4+ reviews from book blogger sites (four of which were 5 stars), and became an ARe bestseller.

I spent rest of the month in revisions for my upcoming works, making beginner's mistake in marketing, and getting my m/m-only blog hop brainchild started. What an exciting month!