Free April Romantic Suspense!

Who knew that as the days grow longer and Spring fills the landscape with flowers, we’d all be indoors?

April 2020 is a wonderful time to expand our horizons virtually. Boom-Books is offering Charisse Howard’s Dark Horseman: Mystery, Adventure, and Romance in Regency Virginia FREE as part of Smashwords’ “Authors Give Back” sale from now until April 20. If you’ve ever loved horses, wept for a heart-breaking loss, or wished you could to time-travel back to Antebellum Virginia, you’ll love this fast-paced full-length story of a strong-minded young woman who must stake her future happiness on an impossible choice. Order Dark Horseman FREE until April 20!

 

FREE for Valentine’s Weekend

Looking for a hot Valentine’s romance?

Click here for your FREE e-copy of Lady Annabelle’s Abduction, #1 in Charisse Howard’s Regency Rakes & Rebels series.

Boom-Books is partnering with The Fussy Librarian and Kindle Direct Publishing to offer this spicy but charming adventure FREE until Sunday, February 16, 2020.

COOL NEW LOOK FOR A STEAMY BAYOU ROMANCE

Lady Barbara & the Buccaneer, #2 in Charisse Howard’s Regency Rakes & Rebels series, has a new cover! Read this colorful Regency story of a pirates’ Mardi Gras on Kindle. Or try the audiobook on Audible, with fast-paced narration by British-American actress Stevie Zimmerman.

       And don’t miss Lady Caroline, the Corsair’s Captive, Regency Rakes & Rebels #3, a suspenseful tale of war between England and France on the high seas: ebook and audiobook (FREE with Audible Escape!)

 

 

Updates on Our Authors

Happy New Year!

What can we look forward to in 2020? Clear vision, everyone claims jokingly. Wouldn’t that be a welcome shift! Meanwhile, zooming in on the book world:

Regency romance author Charisse Howard assures us she’s still thinking hard about her next novel and writing whenever she can. Time, however, is on the side of her other career (classified), which has commanded her full attention ever since she published Regency Rakes & Rebels #3, the heart-wrenching Lady Caroline, The Corsair’s Captive. Good luck on both fronts, Charisse!

Multimedia biographer and mystery author CJ Verburg spent much of 2019 writing and publishing short stories. Congratulations, CJ, on “Birdbrain,” which appears in Fault Lines: Stories by Northern California Crime Writers, and “Peccata Mundy,” in Seascape: Best New England Crime Stories (2019). “Disarmed: an Edgar Rowdey Cape Cod Story” is available free on most ebook platforms ($.99 on Kindle). Next up: CJ’s first story for Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, “Scandal at the Savoy: The Missing Monocle,” due out in early 2020.

For 2020, CJ is putting final touches on her novella Scalped, or The Toastrack Enigma. That’s projected to be #1 in her D. Awdrey-Gore series of mysteries inspired by titles and covers created by her longtime friend and collaborator, the late artist/author Edward Gorey in The Awdrey-Gore Legacy. Next in line: Skewered, or The Pincushion Affair. These six sequels to CJ’s novels Croaked and Zapped (as well as her story “Disarmed”) are meant to debut in parallel with her nonfiction theater biography Edward Gorey’s Art of the Theater. More news on that as it comes in.

Also in the pipeline is #3 in CJ’s Cory Goodwin mystery series, the Barcelona novella Gaudi Knight.

Best wishes from all of us at Boom-Books to all of you authors and readers out there. Remember, whenever you need a fresh look at the world, or a few hours’ escape from it, nothing can match the ease, comfort, and imaginative power of a good book!

Book Notes from All Over

From Digital Book World: A summary of a Jan. 2017 agents’ panel at DBW’s recent New York conference confirms several points made by a Dec. 2016 indie authors’ panel at San Francisco’s Mechanics’ Institute Library:

  1. We don’t call them “literary” agents anymore. That went out with the 20th century. The 21st century is about business > literature.
  2. The role of agents has changed along with the publishing industry. Agencies are merging, reorganizing, seeking new strategies, and generally battling (like and with their authors) for discoverability, the sine qua non of success.
  3. While debate continues as to what (if any) value an agent can add to an author’s career, plenty of authors still desperately want one. “The issue for agents is finding the authors who have potential for big careers. One agent offered an interesting analogy. If you go out to sing karaoke, she said, you may hear a lot of beautiful voices. But it’s not enough to have a beautiful voice. Agents are looking for big, professional voices who can sing at the Met.”

From Boom-Books romance author Charisse Howard: The publishing python chokes another indie. From the now-defunct website of ARe in Safety Harbor, Florida:

It is with a great sadness that we announce the closing of All Romance eBooks, LLC. For the first year since opening in 2006, we will be posting a loss. Despite efforts to maintain and grow our market share, sales and profits have declined. The financial forecast for 2017 isn’t hopeful. We’ve accepted that there is not a viable path forward.

All Romance has always been a labor of love. Over the years we’ve developed wonderful relationships with the vendors we’ve worked with, the publishers whose content it’s been our pleasure to sell, the authors who supported us, and the customers who it’s been our honor to serve. On midnight, December 31 [2016] our sites will go dark.

From Boom-Books mystery, biography, & international literature author CJ Verburg: 

I’ve been trolled!

A Goodreads member who disagreed with me about one of the company’s policies searched my books that are listed on Goodreads, including two out-of-print textbooks, and gave each one the lowest possible rating (one star) as payback.

Although it’s also Goodreads policy that reviewers aren’t supposed to torpedo any book’s ranking and reputation over a perceived grievance — especially a book they haven’t read — the company takes no responsibility for enforcing this. My complaint to Goodreads drew the response that they had “reached out” to the troll, but it’s up to her if she wants to make any changes.

This is another reason to spend the 30 seconds it takes to rate and/or review books you love. An author’s viability depends heavily on what readers post on Amazon, Goodreads, et al. A book is much, much easier to kill than it is to write!