Trout Nation Posts

Howdy dear readers! Today through Saturday, you can get The Boss free from Amazon! Some of you are new here, so let me explain what The Boss is. It’s an erotic romance with a kinky Dom billionaire and a twenty-something sub, written specifically to counter all the abusive, non-con stuff in 50 Shades of Grey. I’ve heard it described as The Devil Wears Prada meets The Secretary. I think that’s apt.

Anyway, it’s free today through Sept. 7th, so tell the 50 Shades fan or anti-fan in your life. Or yourself (And yes, still planning on offering The Boss for free again after the KDP Select promotion ends in November, for those curious/anxious). Buy link is after the blurb:

Sophie Scaife almost ran away once, trading her ticket to college for a ticket to Tokyo. But a delayed flight and a hot one-night stand with a stranger changed her mind, putting her firmly on track to a coveted position at a New York fashion magazine.

When the irresistible stranger from that one incredible night turns out to be her new boss – billionaire and publishing magnate Neil Elwood – Sophie can’t resist the chance to rekindle the spark between them… and the opportunity to explore her submissive side with the most Dominant man she’s ever known.

Neil is the only man who has ever understood Sophie’s need to submit in the bedroom, and the only man who has ever satisfied those desires. When their scorching, no-strings-attached sexual relationship becomes something more, Sophie must choose between her career and heart… or risk losing them both.

Get it for free from Amazon.com

Two evil blondes who will probably try to steal your boyfriend have been cast as Christian “hanging in that way” Grey and Anastasia “European names are dumb” Steele in the Fifty Shades movie. Christian will played by Charlie Hunnam, better known from Sons of Anarchy and Queer as Folk, and Ana will be played by some ugly bitch who will never love Christian Grey as much as you do. NEVER!

Dakota Johnson is actually Melanie Griffith’s daughter, so I have to hope, pray, and cross my fingers that we’re a step closer to seeing Melanie as Mrs. Elena Bitch Troll Robinson.

I wish both of these crazy kids nothing but the best as they mangle their careers irreparably by stepping up as the only B-squad actors who would touch the roles with a ten foot pole. Whatever gambling debts or student loans they’re trying to pay off by joining this shit show are sure to be resolved.

Now that the roles are cast, what scene are you most looking forward to, dear reader? I’m torn between the tampon scene, or the one they have to write in to make it seem like Ana has any agency or gives consent.

Hello Dear Readers! It’s been a while!

Here’s something I have to absolutely share with you: Beneath The Hat is posting audiobook versions of my 50 Shades of Grey recaps. This is a thing, and it is happening. Kate Davidson reads them, and she is so amazing and funny. Please, check them out, because she’s done a fantastic job.

Okay. Recrap time.

Hey everyone! I’m hard at work on the next 50 Shades recap, but I’m taking a break to answer a question I’ve gotten from a lot of people: where the hell is The Boss now? Why can’t I get it for free anymore? I hope this all makes sense and I hope it helps other people who are trying to navigate self-publishing on Amazon and other retailers.

When I decided to publish The Girlfriend on Amazon and Smashwords, I charged $3.99 USD for it, and I had no intention of enrolling it in “Kindle Select,” a program on Amazon that allows authors to offer free versions of their book, either as a limited promotion or as part of a lending library program. But I wanted The Boss to be available on all the same platforms. I thought it would be simple. I would just upload The Boss to Smashwords and Amazon and set the price as free. No problem. I uploaded it to Smashwords, and within four days it had been downloaded over 1500 times.

Amazon was not so easy. I had heard that if you got your book into the premium catalogue at Smashwords– and The Boss was in the premium catalogue– all third party retailers would offer it for free. Including Amazon. But that’s not the case, as Smashwords won’t ship to Amazon unless you’ve specifically asked them to, after you’ve made over $2,000.00 USD in sales on that book at Amazon. Which is hard to do with a free book.

You can’t list your books as “free” at Amazon, but I’d received a few tips on how to force a book to become free there, through price matching. One of the methods was to get your book into the premium catalogue at Smashwords, and when it was offered for free at other retailers, it would automatically become free at Amazon. Despite enlisting friends to report the book as free to the price matching people at Amazon, the book remained $2.99 USD.

Hmm.

So, I consulted another self-pubber, who explained that if the book hadn’t been offered for free on Amazon before, I had as much of a chance as a sparrow fart in a wind tunnel at getting it listed for free forever. How do I get my book listed for free on Amazon? I had to either traverse the hills of Av’Enlee, slay the two-headed ogre, Frax, steal his enchanted pendant, take it to the wizard in Fa’al, and with his assistance, perform the ritual of the Seven Stars.

Or, I could enroll it in KDP Select.

The rules of the KDP Select program are pretty straightforward. You allow your book to be published exclusively on Amazon for a period of ninety days. During this time, anyone who is an Amazon Prime member can read the book for free. Also during this time, you can schedule a five day free download promotion. After the ninety days are up, you’re free to opt out of the program and offer the book on different platforms for however much you want.

At first, I was like, “Okay, I’ll take down the Smashwords copies, and leave my blog up.” And then I saw in the TOS that you can’t offer the content on your blog. So, for right now, the blog version of The Boss is set to private. It will be come public again when the KDP Select promotion is over. It will also be available again through Smashwords and other retailers, like B&N and iTunes.

I’m not happy that it has to be done this way. I’ve had a lot of people give me other solutions (“just list your book with x retailer and Amazon will match the price!”), but the overwhelming advice I’ve received has been to just buckle down and accept the KDP terms, because it’s the simplest, surest way of achieving results.

So, for eight-five days, The Boss will only be available to Amazon Prime members and people who want to pay $2.99 USD for it. At some point, it will become free on Amazon, and hopefully after the ninety days are up, it will be free again all over– including the blog, which will once again be public.

Thanks for your patience, guys! And thanks for those of you who offered help with this!

Hey y’all! I am so excited to tell you something, and I’ve wanted to tell you ever since I got the job, but I couldn’t.

I, like Sophie Scaife, am now writing about beauty stuff. Life imitates art, and all that, so if you see any kinky billionaires around, send them my way. But seriously, I’m so pleased to be writing a monthly feature called “Jenny Tries” for Collective310.

What is “Jenny Tries” about? I find random DIY beauty tips and recipes on the internet, try them out, and report on the results. This month, it’s a blackhead removing mask.

The hope is that readers will come up with their own suggestions as to what I should try next. Expect to see photos of my face slathered in gross concoctions. I suppose you should also expect to see photos of the resultant breakouts caused by sticking mayonnaise on your face or whatever.

Anyway, that’s my news! I’m super excited, the first feature was a ton of fun, and I look forward to the next!

Up next for this here blog, expect a 50 Shades recap by the end of the week!

Gird your loins, dear reader. Last night, at the VMAs, a young, blonde white pop star did something raunchy.

If you haven’t seen it, or for some reason you can’t get enough of “Can’t Stop,” you can watch Miley Cyrus’s performance, which people “Can’t Stop” talking about (see what I did there?) at MTV.com.

Let us never forget where we were the night we saw Miley Cyrus inexplicably air guitar to a drum solo.

So, what I saw on the screen was a young white female pop star appropriating elements of black culture badly in order to break out of a painstakingly Disney-crafted image she’s never going to fully escape. But apparently, the media saw something entirely different.

NBC saw a raunchy sex explosion that threatened to tear apart marriages and make innocent fifteen-year-olds cry.

HuffPo saw a husband and father sexually violated. (Never mind, of course, that the husband and father in question wrote a song about getting a woman high so she would lower her inhibitions to have sex with him, and dedicated not one, but two videos to nude/scantily clad models spelling out the size of his penis with mylar balloons).

People magazine doesn’t know what twerking is.

CBS news doesn’t know what a lap dance is.

And Fox News goes for the good old fashioned women-in-competition angle. But let’s keep in mind, Fox News is also running a story about Ricky Skaggs on their entertainment front page. Really, really think about that. It’s a miracle they even know what the VMAs are.

I took to twitter in the dead of night to air my grievances. It went like this (the tweets are chronologically reordered for non-twitterholics):

Then tweep @Its_Britney made my birthday, Christmas, and Festivus by sharing this. It truly must be seen to be believed.

It’s wrong to criticize Miley for acting sexually suggestive at an event that thrives off the hyper-sexuality of pop music. If you want to focus on the fact that Miley continues to appropriate black culture, use people of color as accessories, and doesn’t actually know how to twerk, then be my guest, those are legitimate gripes. I mean, Katy fucking Perry showed up with a grill last night. This is a thing. This is happening. But don’t tell me that it was somehow wrong of Miley Cyrus to get up on stage and grind with a guy who wrote an entire song about wanting to turn a “good girl” bad with his magical cock.  Because I’m not buying that double standard for a second.

I went camping last night. Not far from home or anything, which is why I’m home again while the rest of the family enjoys the rest of their camping experience. I learned that fibromyalgia and a leaky air mattress are not good bedfellows.

Anyway, before the cold, sandy ground beneath the deflated air mattress seeped its icy tendrils into the very marrow of my bones, I used my camping time wisely:

I suppose now is the time that I should be like, “Okay, clearly I miss writing about vampires.” But I’m still in denial about that, and I don’t have time to write about vampires right now, anyway. So, let’s just say I did this for research. If you’re out there, writing a book about vampires or vampire hunters, you need to know stuff about how to make wooden stakes. It’s pretty straight forward; I started with a chunk of log that had been split, and then split again so it had a triangular wedge shape. Then I patiently and very slowly whittled one end down to a point. It’s actually quite sharp and probably could penetrate somebody’s breast bone if you put a lot of force behind it. So, I’m not sure if this counts as a deadly weapon. I probably wouldn’t drive around with it.

Then, at my cousin Tony’s urging, I whittled out three long, shallow scoops to use as a grip. Total time: about an hour and fifteen minutes.

So, there you go. If you’re writing a vampire book, or you’re just wondering how long it takes the Scoobies to make all those damn stakes, it takes an hour and fifteen minutes per stake, and you need to sharpen your knife between stakes.

In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone will never learn the lesson that nothing good happens after 2AM. She will also recap every episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer with an eye to the following themes:

1. Sex is the real villain of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer universe.
2. Giles is totally in love with Buffy.
3. Joyce is a fucking terrible parent.
4. Willow’s magic is utterly useless (this one won’t be an issue until season 2, when she gets a chance to become a witch)
5. Xander is a textbook Nice Guy.
6. The show isn’t as feminist as people claim.
7. All the monsters look like wieners.
8. If ambivalence to possible danger were an Olympic sport, Team Sunnydale would take the gold.
9. Angel is a dick.
10. Harmony is the strongest female character on the show.
11. Team sports are portrayed in an extremely negative light.
12. Some of this shit is racist as fuck.
13. Science and technology are not to be trusted.
14. Mental illness is stigmatized.
15. Only Willow can use a computer.
16. Buffy’s strength is flexible at the plot’s convenience.

WARNING: Some people have mentioned they’re watching along with me, and that’s awesome, but I’ve seen the entire series already and I’ll probably mention things that happen in later seasons. So… you know, take that under consideration, if you’re a person who can’t enjoy something if you know future details about it.

Hey there everybody! I know you’re all probably tired of this blog being one big, extended commercial for The Girlfriend, but I wanted to update everybody on what’s going on with the release. Because I didn’t quite understand the process over at Amazon, the Kindle version of the The Girlfriend released two days early. I thought it was going to take forty-eight hours to publish to Amazon, it really only took twelve. And actually, it took less than twelve. It takes forty-eight hours to publish to Amazon in other countries, that was the part I misunderstood.

Unfortunately, that means everyone who pre-ordered or who will be ordering over at Smashwords are now getting the book after everyone else. I put a note into customer service at Smashwords and I’m waiting to hear back to see if I can get it released before Tuesday.

This was exactly the situation I was trying to avoid by not going through the Kindle Select program, so I’m very sorry to everyone who didn’t get the book early. I promise, I’ll have this figured out better for Raptors of The Great Plains. If I hear back from Smashwords before tomorrow, you’ll hear about it on twitter. In the meantime, if you were planning to buy The Girlfriend from Amazon, you can find it here.

As for other blog stuff! I’m so happy to be working on the next BtVS recap, and that will be up tomorrow!

 

Hell, Troutnation! You’re not having deja vu, this is the same post as yesterday! I just wanted to add stuff to it, and I didn’t want anyone to miss it.

You can now pre-order the digital version of The Girlfriend on Smashwords. Since I announced that on twitter last night, I’ve had a slew of questions about whether or not it will be available on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. It will definitely be available on Amazon, but I don’t have the option of a pre-order on Amazon. So, you’ll be able to buy it via your Kindle on August 20th. It will be offered on Barnes & Noble, Sony, iTunes, etc. through Smashwords, but I’m not sure what date those third-party retailers will have it available.

Oh, hey… did I mention that there are like SIXTY PAGES OF PREVIEW AVAILABLE AT THE SMASHWORDS LINK? The sample is downloadable. You get about three chapters. THREE CHAPTERS, Y’ALL.

If you were planning to order The Girlfriend as a paperback, now is the time! I opened orders for the paperback version a little early, so readers who wanted it could get it as close to the release of the ebook as possible. No, you probably wouldn’t be able to order this and get it before the 20th. I tested, to make sure. I mean, unless you wanted to pay like, eighty dollars worth of shipping, which would be insane, so don’t do that. Just send me the eighty bucks instead and go sit in a corner and think about your financial priorities.

So, if you’re itching to order your copy, you can do so here.