Perspectives on Shapeshifters

by Cori Posted on July 20, 2018

Just last week my itty bitty micro-press put out the third volume of our Triskaidekaphilia (love of the number 13) anthology series. This series is meant to explore the darker sides of romance. Each volume is released on Friday the 13th and I’m hoping there will eventually be 13 of them 🙂

Transformed, edited by Charlie Watson, is filled with romantic shapeshifter stories. I thought Charlie put together a really strong anthology, and I’m proud to share it with the world. I’m also happy to share this guest post from her with you. I think it offers some interesting insight into the production of this collection 🙂

Perspectives on Shapeshifters

Charlie Watson

Hello Everyone! My name is Charlie Watson and I’m the editor of Transformed. As this release marks my first foray into the wide world of publishing outside of an academic setting, I am obviously going through the grab bag of emotion—I’m terrified, of course, due to the usual fear of sharing any work publically; guilty, oddly enough, that I haven’t been doing enough social media promotion; and most importantly, I feel extremely privileged to have had the opportunity to work with such an amazing group of authors. I’m also unendingly grateful for the chance to work with the minds behind Pen and Kink publishing. I really had no idea what I was getting myself into when I agreed to edit Transformed, which probably isn’t the best thing to admit, but hey! Here we are on the other side, and I have a neat new perspective on things.

I was involved in the production of an anthology while at university which dealt primarily with student creative writing—no prompts or themes, the students were allowed to submit anything. I felt that the absence of a theme would create a unique space where the author’s voice had an opportunity to shine individually instead of being lost in parameters. When I started working on Transformed, I have to admit that I was a bit hesitant about working within the confines of a theme, as I was concerned about losing what I thought of as the uniqueness and individuality of my last experience. I cannot stress this enough, but I absolutely could not have been more wrong.

I don’t know about you, but I find that every time that cocky little voice pipes up in my head and says, “pfffft, girl, I know exactly how this is going to go—relax, I’ve totally got this… I promise…” I inevitably end up having to pick myself up off the floor and try to discover where my preconceived notions led me astray.

Transformed has shown me, among other things, how boundless creativity is. Obviously I have a flair for the dramatic, but it really is quite astonishing to me how each author involved in Transformed managed to interpret our prompt so differently. We asked our authors to write a romantic short story that explored shapeshifter culture. Maybe the problem is that I’m just not creative enough. Maybe I expected everyone to hear the word “shapeshifter” and default to werewolves, and vampires, and Jekylls (oh my!) just like I tend to.

Instead, when it came time for the submission deadline, I found that I had a startling array of creative and vibrant characters to choose from. I received stories featuring shapeshifting cobras (which, being Canadian, aren’t really even on my animal radar, let alone my shapeshifter one), selkies, hawks, and dragons, etc. Instead of the lack of individuality I was so foolishly worried about, I got an incredible array of characters, history, mythology, and conflict. I got a set of stories from authors who come from all over the world and have perspectives regarding shapeshifters that I could never have even dreamed of.

Again, I know I’m being overdramatic here, but I think it’s really cool that I got to work with something far better than individual stories with no cohesive theme—I had the opportunity to work with stories that shared a kind of synergy. A synergy that showcases each voice much more dramatically than an anthology with no cohesion would. I think Transformed is worth reading for a great number of reasons, but I think, at least for me, one of its biggest charms is the opportunity it affords us to see how vastly different people interpret what it is to be a shapeshifter.

Buy It Now:

Amazon (US) (CA) (UK)

Or go here now to read more

 

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Unforgettable Page-Turners

by Cori Posted on June 20, 2018

Every once in a while I join in on these group promotions at Book Funnel. The idea is that a bunch of authors get together and give away a book. By promoting the giveaway to our readers we expose them to the work of other people that they might also enjoy. It’s kind of win/win/win, really 🙂

This month I’m in the Unforgettable Page-Turners giveaway. My offering, Love Bytes, is erotic in nature but most of the rest of these books are not. I’ve downloaded a couple myself. While I haven’t had a chance to read them yet their descriptions promise fast pace and high tension, which I’m kind of a fan of 😉

If you’d like to add some free books to your summer reading, check it out:

Unforgettable Page-Turners

<3

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Happy Birthday Rough Edges!

by Cori Posted on June 15, 2018

 

Rough Edges turns two this week.

Two!

Wow. I don’t even… it does not feel like it’s been two years. It’s been a hell of a journey from there to here, it should feel like much longer than two years, but it feels like the blink of an eye.

Without Rough Edges there would be no Pen and Kink Publishing.

There might be no Cori Vidae.

So happy second birthday to the steamy anthology that has made so many things happen… and remains P&K’s bestselling title. Here’s to many, many more years of bringing sexy cowboys to appreciative readers 😉

<3

Nothing is sexier than someone who knows what they want and has the confidence go after it. This anthology is crammed full of hot romances featuring those kinds of rough-around-the-edges alpha personalities–stories about the kind of men and women who ride horses during the day and their partners at night, who speak few words but mean every one of them, and who would never break their own personal code of honor.

Get It Online Now!

Amazon (US) (CA) (UK)

Kobo

 

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It’s awkward, but can we talk about pricing for just a moment?

by Cori Posted on June 11, 2018

This will just take a moment and then we can go back to talking about things that aren’t nearly as awkward as money… which is a pretty funny thing to say, actually, when you consider that I usually write about love and sex which can be plenty freaking awkward, amirite?

But money is like the most awkwardest thing. Except maaaaybe politics?

So I’ll try to make this short and story-like so it’s not too boring.

See that image? It’s a photo I took of my daily planner for last week. It shows part of my to-do list for June 5th–the release date for The Longest Night.

I colour code my planner, so that is in different colours because I wrote each of those lines on two different days.

The day I decided June 5th was going to be the release day I wrote it in my planner in green. Weeks later when I figured out how I was going to price the story I made a note to raise the price on release day from the $0.99 pre-order price to $2.99. Then, and here’s the important part, I added, “Yes. Do it.”

Because Past Me knew Future Me was going to look at that note and go, “Uh-uh. Nope. No one will pay $2.99 for the story…”

Which is exactly what happened. I opened up my planner June 4th, looked at the note and thought, “If I raise the price to $2.99 no one will buy it, and then all the work I put into it will be for nothing.”

But then I looked at the extra note Past Me left me, “Yes. Do it.” and I thought “You’re right, Past Me. If I don’t value my work, no one else is going to do it for me.”

What I do is a work of heart, as they say, but a girl’s gotta eat too.

Readers have been conditioned to expect ebooks to be really inexpensive but the thing is, for every book I sell for $0.99 on Amazon I earn $0.35.

At $0.35 a book, it makes it very difficult to break even, let alone make a profit.

For example, editing and the cover for The Longest Night cost me a combined total of about $250 (which is pretty freaking cheap, all things considered).

At $0.35 a book I’d need to sell over 700 copies to break even and I don’t have a big enough audience to do that in anything resembling a timely manner.

There are things I can do to grow my audience–advertising, promotions like BookBub and the like–but those usually require discounting the price of the book… which is tough to do when the book is already $0.99.

So from here on out I’m going to try listening to Past Me.

Now and for the foreseeable future. I will discount my pre-orders as low as I can manage (usually $0.99) and then at release I’ll increase the price to maximize my margins and the opportunities I have to promote the book and increase sales.

I think I’m going to base future prices largely on word count so the scale will look something like this:

  • 10k words or less: Free – $0.99
  • 10k – 25k words: $2.99
  • 25k+ words: $4.99

I think that’s a fair way to price things that means you get the maximum value for your dollar and I get to feel valued and maybe make enough money to be able to afford to produce the next book.

I know some people sincerely can’t afford more than $0.99 a book so I will commit to keeping my pre-order prices very low to fit those budgets, and will continue to offer opportunities for people to read my books for free in exchange for a review or, sometimes, just as a way of saying thank you for your support.

The exception to this pricing scale may be in regard to Erotica Under Glass since that already has a different price model… but I won’t be open to under glass prompts again for a while yet (too many other things on the go) so we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Speaking of books? I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t mention that The Longest Night came out last week and if you haven’t got a copy of it already, now is a great time to do that LoL

Available now

Amazon (US) (CA) (UK)

Kobo

Barnes & Noble

 

/awkward

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The Longest Night Excerpt

by Cori Posted on June 8, 2018

I’m not going to lie. I was sitting here thinking to myself, “I need an excuse to go on social media and talk about The Longest Night…” and then I thought, “Oh, I haven’t done an excerpt post yet!”

So here I am. With an excerpt to post in the hopes that it will intrigue you enough to pick up a copy of the story.

I’m just that devious.

🙂

Excerpt from The Longest Night

“Cairn, I want to see you,” she said, finally undoing the last of his coat’s buttons and pushing it off his shoulders.

“You can see me, Mary,” he said, laughing and shrugging out of the jacket. His arms got caught a moment in the sleeves but he leaned up and pulled them out, throwing the coat off into the center of the floor.

“No, the real you. Not this glamour.”

Now that he was healing his powers were recovering—it took a long time to fully recover from spending over three hundred years in Limbo. Only a few months ago maintaining his glamour would have required constant attention, but now the effort was so miniscule it didn’t even register anymore and he often forgot it was up.

He let the spell drop and watched as Mary’s lips curved up into a smile. Oh, how he adored her smile. It made his chest squeeze and his cock grow hard at the same time.

***

“Oh, there you are,” Mary breathed. Cairn, the real Cairn, not the illusion he wore while they were in public. When she’d first summoned him he’d looked nearly human—too sexy to be human, perhaps, but nearly human. In the months since then, though, his horns had grown back.

She’d felt them, the broken edges where they’d been cut from his head, the first time they’d been together, but now they were intact and beautiful things. They were black. No, more than black. Not only did they not reflect light, they seemed to consume it. To suck it in from all around. They were like shadows given form, or vacuums made solid.

Harder than bone, they seemed more like iron. Twisted, beautiful iron. The horns themselves were spiraled, like the incubus version of a unicorn horn she’d seen in a book when she was a kid. Unlike that horn, though, they didn’t stick straight up, but had a slight curve to them. Cairn said once they were fully grown they would curve like a ram’s, but there was nothing about them that reminded her of a mammal. They were all demon—from their otherworldly colour, to the weird cold they seemed to emanate, and the way they changed his profile into something abyssal—and they drove her wild with desire.

She felt him, hard between her legs, even through his trousers and her skirt. It made butterflies flitter in her belly and she unbuttoned his shirt, slowly, kissing every patch of skin as it was revealed to her and then pushing it off his shoulders.

She ran her fingers down his throat, pausing where she could see his pulse beating at its base, then lifted her fingers to press her lips against that spot. She sucked and nibbled, drawing a gasp and then a groan from him. Suddenly, he pulled away and knelt above her.

She smiled and then tossed her head back. It launched her toque off somewhere behind her, and her hair tumbled free and spread in red-gold waves she could see from the corner of her eye. More importantly, it bared her throat to Cairn.

He had fangs.

She couldn’t usually see them but when he kissed her she could feel them.

He leaned forward and kissed, nipped and sucked at her throat—giving her what she so obviously wanted. His fangs pressed against the soft skin of her neck. He could tear her throat out in a heartbeat if he wanted, and that thought sent a thrill right through her. He was dark and dangerous beyond imagining but he posed no threat to her. On the contrary, she had no doubt he would protect her from anything that tried to harm her. That feeling of absolute safety, coupled with the dark, forbidden deliciousness of being with a demon of all things, made her slick with want.

 

Dun dun dun!

Read the whole thing here:

Available now

Amazon (US) (CA) (UK)

Kobo

Barnes & Noble

“Oh dear God … this book is HOT. My husband actually read one of the sex scenes and said, “All men should read this so they know what to do.” Bahaha!! I just love Mary as a fiery heroine, and Cairn is to die for. Both characters are beautiful, complex, and overflowing with sensuality. It’s a short read, so if you’re looking for an erotic pick-me-up, this is the book for you.”

— Sara Dobie Bauer author, Bite Somebody

 

Though The Longest Night stands on its own, Circles Within Circles is the story of Mary and Cairn’s meeting. It’s the one that started the series:

Only $0.99

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