I was going to write something profound-ish, or at least interesting, but I have a migraine and can’t think about anything other than the funny jagged colors dancing in front of my eyes. So instead, I’m sharing this picture of all of the books I’ve self-published, as Karenna Colcroft and under other names, since May 2021. Lex Valentine did the covers for Salad on the Side, Alpha Receptor, and Messages from Shiva vol. 1; I did the others.
2023 has been over for just past a week now. Last week, I talked a little about what I have planned for 2024. Now I want to take some time to celebrate what I did in 2023.
I released two Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat novels. Even though the original plan was to release three, that didn’t work out, but I did release two. And I’m proud of myself for that.
I changed my release schedule when life stuff got in the way of what I’d originally planned. This is definitely cause for celebration, because in the past, if I’ve said I was going to do something, I’ve felt like I had no choice about doing it. Even when it wasn’t possible to actually follow through. In 2023, the book I’d slated for a March release took longer to revise and rewrite than I’d anticipated, especially since I wound up almost doubling the length of what had originally been a novella. Expanding the story took time, and I was trying to do it while in the thick of dealing with the fallout from my mother’s passing and my father’s health issues, among other things. Instead of forcing myself to stick to the release schedule I’d set and risking putting out a shoddy product, I chose to delay the March release by a couple of weeks, which then resulted in delaying the May release (which would have been Try the Tofu, Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 4) to July, the September release to October, and not planning to have a November release at all. I felt a little guilty about that, and also dealt with some “people will forget I exist if I don’t release books often enough” fears, but ultimately it turned out to be the right choice, both for my books and for my mental health. And I did end up having a late November release with my Christmas short “Snow on Christmas Eve.”
I wrote two novels. Fill the Empty Spaces was started in December 2022, but I wrote the bulk of it in early 2023. I also wrote Take Some Tahini (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 6)… and then rewrote the first few chapters of it. I also wrote a few short stories and started a new novel, Ebb and Flow at the end of November. (Ebb and Flow is a spin-off from Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat, and will probably be released in fall 2024.)
In addition to the two Real Werewolves novels, I released two other novels and a short story (or short novella, depending on how you look at it).
I dealt with family issues, health issues, and life issues, including one that knocked me for a severe loop at the beginning of December 2023. I’m still dealing with that one, but I’m doing much better than I was at first.
Like I mentioned last week, I have plans for 2024, and hopefully this time next year, I’ll be celebrating a lot more!
It’s a new year. Which is a little mind-boggling. December went by way too quickly.
It’s now 2024, and I’m still kind of wrapping my head around that. Usually I spend December, and sometimes start as early as October, planning the upcoming year. My goals, my hopes, my “if there were no objects in the way” dreams. It’s a month or more of daydreaming, brainstorming, Tarot and oracle cards, and various other means of sorting out what I want to do, what I’m capable of doing, and what I would really love to do if I could figure out how. I didn’t do that this year. At the beginning of December, something hit my life (and the lives of a number of others in my social circle, as well as my family) very hard, so I didn’t have the bandwidth to do much more than process, grieve, and figure out how to reconstruct my day-to-day life.
However. I do have some plans for 2024. It might be worth noting here that I don’t do “New Years resolutions.” For me, personally, resolutions are the “I should do this” things that usually get put aside because either I can’t figure out *how* to do them or because I only decided to do them because I thought I “should.” I don’t deal with shoulds anymore. As one of my past therapists was fond of saying, I stopped shoulding all over myself. I make goals and plans, not resolutions.
For 2024, tentatively, I’m planning:
1.To release Tempeh for Two (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 5) on January 11. This book is already up for Kindle preorder! I’ll also be releasing Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 6, titled Take Some Tahini, in July. Take Some Tahini is the first brand-new Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat novel since 2014; the previous five, including Tempeh for Two, were originally published between 2011 and 2014. (All the rereleases have been revised, updated, and re-edited, and some have been expanded with new content.)
2. To figure out the timing of the rest of my release schedule. For 2023, my original plan was to release books in January, March, May, July, September, and November. But my March release, Chance Met, got held up because of personal life stuff as well as issues with expanding it, so instead of releasing the second week of the month as intended, it came out toward the end of March. Because of that, I didn’t want to have a May release, because it wouldn’t have given me enough time to promote both books. So I skipped May, made the September release an October release instead, and then wound up doing a Christmas story in November after deciding not to release anything that month. Yeah, it was all as confusing as it sounds. For 2024, I’m currently planning releases in January, April, July, and October, with another Christmas story at the end of November/beginning of December, but that might change.
3. To make all of my books available “wide,” meaning through multiple retailers. This means they will no longer be available through Kindle Unlimited, which requires that books be sold exclusively on Amazon. I apologize to my readers who prefer KU because of finances or other reasons. There are multiple factors behind my decision, including a reduction in the amount Amazon pays authors for Kindle Unlimited reads and hearing from readers who would like to buy my books but won’t or can’t by from Amazon. After considering and talking with other authors, I decided it would be worth trying having my books available through other retailers in addition to Amazon, including Kobo and Barnes & Noble. I’ll be starting this change in February with Fill the Empty Spaces, followed by Chance Met in March. Tempeh for Two, along with the rest of the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat series, will be available through Kindle Unlimited until April, at which time the entire series will be released through other retailers. I’m still fine-tuning how I’ll approach new releases; my options are either release them through all retailers from the beginning, or make them Amazon exclusive–and available through Kindle Unlimited–for the first 90 days after release, then put them with other retailers. Stay tuned for announcements on that as I make decisions and see how releasing my books wide affects my sales and readership. Yes, I write books because I love writing books… but I also do it to help pay my bills, and sometimes that means needing to make decisions that benefit the bank account.
4. To start a subscription. A number of my fellow authors have Patreon or Ream accounts through which they offer readers bonuses and perks for a monthly subscription fee (which in some cases is as low as $1 a month!) I actually have a Patreon but haven’t done much with it because creating things for it and promoting it felt like a little too much. I’ve been following those other authors, though, and learning more about how to make it all work without breaking my brain, so I hope to either brush up my Patreon for a relaunch or set up a Ream subscription (Ream is like Patreon but exclusively for writers) by my birthday, June 30. If you read this and have thoughts about what you’d like to see offered through a subscription like this, please leave a comment!
5. To release the follow-up to Chance Met, titled A Fighting Chance. This book will probably conclude Trey and Jeremiah’s story, as it brings their romance to a logical happy-for-now ending as well as tying up plot threads introduced in Chance Met. I don’t really see anywhere for their story to go after this one. This is the only “I’m not completely sure yet” plan on this list; I haven’t decided whether I’ll actually release this one. If I do, it will be out in March or May.
6. To rerelease my novella Hooch and Howls. Originally published in 2012, this is a historical MMM novella featuring a crotchety hermit werewolf and two young men sucked into the rumrunning trade in 1930 Nova Scotia. I’ve rewritten a portion of this novella to address a plot point I found…we’ll say distasteful, and I’m looking forward to reintroducing Malachi Powers, the hermit werewolf, and his love interests Roger and Jonathan to the world. And speaking of Malachi…
7. To release a new novel, currently titled Ebb and Flow. This novel follows from Take Some Tahini, but is not part of the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat series. (You can tell, because the title doesn’t reference a vegan food.) In Tahini, Tobias meets a young werewolf named Quinn Bouchard, who had a traumatic entry into the werewolf world that reminds Tobias of his own. After Quinn’s pack ejects him for reasons beyond Quinn’s control, Tobias takes him in as one of his guards and brings Quinn with him and Kyle to meet with the Anax of Canada. While in Nova Scotia for that meeting, they meet Malachi Powers (yes, the one from Hooch and Howls, which is why I plan to rerelease that novella), a friend of the Canadian Anax–and, as it turns out, Quinn’s mate, something which disturbs Malachi both because Quinn is mourning the loss of his partner and because of a major age gap; Malachi is somewhere around 150 years old, while Quinn is only 22. Though their story begins in Take Some Tahini, it’s fully formed in Ebb and Flow, which I’m currently in the process of writing and am very much enjoying. I hope to have this novel ready to release in September or October.
Other plans, particularly for book releases, are in flux right now. But the good thing about planning and writing and working for myself (and my readers) is that I have the ability to be flexible.
I hope your 2024 is off to a wonderful start! If you have plans you’d like to share, leave a comment!
In two days, I’ll be putting Tempeh for Two up for preorder! The book will officially release on January 11 in Kindle and print formats; the preorder will be Kindle only since Amazon doesn’t allow for preorders of paperbacks. This book will be available through Kindle Unlimited until April, at which time I’ll be pulling all of the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat books out of KU so I can release them through vendors in addition to Amazon.
I’m looking forward to having this book out there. This will complete the rereleasing of the original 5-book Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat series. In July 2024, the series will continue with the first brand-new book to be released since 2014, Take Some Tahini. And there’s a spin-off or two coming as well. These werewolves get pushy about having their stories told!
I’ve shared the Tempeh for Two cover before, but here it is again because I like it (and because I’m typing this over Christmas weekend and so I’m keeping it short so I can go on with holiday prep).
I posted several weeks ago about why my books are currently only available through Amazon. However, that will be changing in 2024.
Amazon has a subscription service called Kindle Unlimited, which allows people to pay a monthly cost and access a large number of Kindle books that they can read; those books are removed from their device after a certain amount of time, if I’ve understood correctly. This enables people who can’t necessarily afford to buy every single book they want to read, to be able to read the books they want. For a book to be included in Kindle Unlimited, it must be exclusive to Amazon, meaning that the *digital* version of the book cannot be available anywhere else, including as a giveaway (again, as I understand it, though I might be wrong about that). The print version can be available through other sales or giveaway channels, because Kindle Unlimited only deals with e-books.
When I started self-publishing my books in spring 2022, I chose to go Amazon exclusive because I wanted my books to be available through Kindle Unlimited. I knew authors who were making the bulk of their income through “page reads” in KU, and as someone who myself can’t afford to buy all the books I want, I thought it would be good to make them available to my readers who might not be able to buy my books.
However, Amazon keeps changing the rules for how they pay authors for Kindle Unlimited page reads. They’ve also made the decision to allow AI-generated books, which not only will flood the market (further reducing the amount that authors receive) but also is problematic because of how artificial intelligence is trained. Generative AI, the programs people use to “create” art, books, etc., is trained through use of existing art and books–for which the human creators of those things are NOT asked for permission and receive no compensation. One of my young adult novels has been essentially stolen to train AI to “create,” and I only knew about it because someone spotted it on a list and informed me. (I’m not going to get into all the problems with AI. Nor am I going to respond to people who say “But some of us need AI!” AI does have its place.. but that place should not be stealing the work of human creators in order to enable machines to “create” things. You can Google if you want more info about this, or check out authors like Lori Gallagher Witt who are talking more extensively about it.)
Because of those issues, I’ve made the decision that beginning in 2024, I will be pulling my books out of Kindle Unlimited as their terms expire (KU books are signed up for 90 days at a time, which automatically renews unless we opt out). I will also be releasing some short stories and shorter novellas in addition to the novels I’m planning to release in 2024, and that will start in a couple of weeks with a Christmas short story, “Christmas Eve Snow,” which will be released wide. (This story is also an alternate gift to those who subscribe to my newsletter; details are on the https://karennacolcroft.com/get-your-free-story/ page.)
Due to when the expiration dates fall, some of the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat books will still be in Kindle Unlimited when I release Tempeh for Two in January. Because of that, I will be releasing Tempeh for Two as an Amazon exclusive (and available in Kindle Unlimited) for the first 90 days of its existence; it will be available wide in April, and between February and April the rest of the books in that series will also be going wide. Beginning with my April 2024 release, which currently is slated to be the sequel to Chance Met, all books will be released wide; none will be available through Kindle Unlimited at any point. (As with everything I determine about my writing, this decision is subject to change, so stay tuned for updates.)
I still believe Kindle Unlimited is a great service for readers. But it’s no longer such a great thing for authors.
A psychopomp is a being (sometimes human, sometimes not) who guides spirits into or through the afterlife. Psychopomps appear in various world mythologies as well as in popular culture; for example, Stephen King’s The Dark Half references psychopomps represented by a flock of sparrows.
While people tend to think that a psychopomp is purely a fictional or mythological thing, there are those of us in real life who consider ourselves psychopomps.
Yeah, I said “us.”
I was about five years old the first time I “saw” a spirit. I put that in quotation marks because it wasn’t so much something I saw with my physical eyes as it was a mental image that my brain sort of projected into reality. My great-grandmother had passed away, and I saw her as my parents were discussing or preparing for the funeral. It’s been 48 years, so I don’t remember the exact context, but I do remember seeing my great-grandmother. I didn’t know why I was seeing her or why my parents got upset when I mentioned it, but I did learn pretty fast that seeing dead people wasn’t something I was supposed to talk about.
Since then, nearly every time someone with a connection to me has passed away (and even sometimes with people who have no connection to me), I’ve “seen” them in a similar way. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to identify whether they’re just appearing because they want to say goodbye or whether they need help finding where they’re supposed to go next. When they need help, I try to help them. It’s a process of visualization, mostly, in which I bring them to someplace that has meaning for them and help them find the light they’re supposed to cross into. If you’ve seen the TV series Ghost Whisperer, it’s similar to that, except I don’t solve crimes. And I do have a choice; if a spirit comes to me and I’m not comfortable helping them, I say so and my guides help them find someone else to assist. Sometimes my guides run interference for me when they believe it would be detrimental for me to work with a certain spirit, as they did last year when my mother passed away.
I know all this sounds kind of weird and “out there,” and that’s fine. You don’t have to believe in anything you’d rather not believe in. But there are those who do this work intentionally, sometimes assisting spirits after they pass and sometimes assisting them in the passing.
As I was starting work on Fill the Empty Spaces, I was also rewatching Ghost Whisperer and thought, “It would be cool to have a romance character who’s a psychopomp. I don’t think I’ve seen that in any of the books I’ve read.” And then I thought, “I’m writing a book. And I have a character who could be a psychopomp; why not?” Thus was born Lochlan, the friend-with-potential who my main character Del meets when he starts volunteering at a cat cafe.
Like me, Lochlan had his first experience as a psychopomp at age five with his late great-grandmother. The way Lochlan guides spirits is similar to how it works for me as well; after all, “write what you know” is one of the most common pieces of advice for authors. But his experiences and the spirits he guides during the story or tells Del about are not at all similar to anything I’ve dealt with. For which I’m thankful; Lochlan gets put through the wringer.
Fill the Empty Spaces is available now in Kindle and paperback formats on Amazon. To thank the Kitty Cat Cafe and Adoption Lounge in Peabody, MA, for allowing me to use the names of some of their real-life cat residents and the picture of Charlie the Sweater Cat on the cover, I am donating a portion of my royalties to the cafe, so your purchase of the book (or should I say “purr-chase”… sorry, I blame the bad pun on not having had enough coffee this morning) will help feed, house, and provide medical care for multiple furry (and, currently, one not-furry) feline friends. If you want to help support the cafe or pay a visit, you can also check out their website.
A few weeks ago, I started a new job. Within the first week, I realized it was more than I would be able to handle owing to the amount of physical involvement. I had told the employment agency I was hired through that I can’t do a lot of standing and walking, and yet they put me in a preschool classroom. If you know anything at all about preschool-aged kids, you know that sitting is not a thing adults get to do often when preschoolers are around! So after a week and a half of trying, I gave my notice and said I would stay until they found someone else, but that I wanted to be finished within two weeks.
It’s been a week and a half, and as of yesterday, they haven’t replaced me yet. I’ve been asked to work another full week. I agreed but told them very emphatically (and barely suppressing a couple of swear words) that I will do ONE AND ONLY ONE more week, and after that I don’t care if they’ve replaced me or not, my health is more important.
I love the kids I’m working with, and I get along well with ALL of the adults I’m working with. (Which is VERY rare for me; I struggle with social skills and social cues, and usually when I’ve had jobs in the past, I’ve been the odd one out and people either barely tolerated me or full-on bullied me. Yes, including jobs in public schools.) But I have physical and mental health conditions that mean this job simply isn’t a viable thing for me, and I’ve had to acknowledge that. Meanwhile, over the past week, at least four kids have come down sick, including one who was at school with an active fever. So I’m feeling kind of blah and seriously overtired and not really in the mood for writing the blog post I’d planned.
On Thursday, I’ll be releasing Fill the Empty Spaces! It will be available for Kindle, including Kindle Unlimited, and in paperback. This is one of the books that I’m planning to bring “wide” (in other words, available through a variety of sources) in spring 2024, but for the next six months or so, it will be Amazon exclusive. The Kindle preorder is live now. I’ll share more about the book and the psychopomp involved in it in my next post. Right now, I think I need a nap…
Last week, I put Fill the Empty Spaces up for preorder! For the time being, Fill the Empty Spaces will be available only on Amazon, with both Kindle and paperback formats releasing on October 12. It will also be available through Kindle Unlimited as long as it’s an Amazon exclusive title. (In 2024, I will be working on making all of my books, including this one, available on a variety of platforms, which will mean not being able to participate in Kindle Unlimited.) The preorder is only for the Kindle version, since at the moment, Amazon doesn’t allow paperback preorders.
You can preorder your copy on Amazon now!
(I also posted this on Facebook over the weekend, so if you follow me there, you’ll have already read most of this. However, I did expand on what I’m currently planning as far as non-Amazon distribution of my books.)
I got an email the other day from a reader who wanted to know if there was a way to get my books without buying from Amazon.
I really appreciated them emailing me! I love hearing from readers, and this gives me a direction to go for the future.
However, as I told this reader, at the moment the answer is no. There is no other way to get my books other than buying from Amazon.
I know there are some readers who don’t want to buy from the giant conglomerate that’s trying to take over the universe, and I completely respect that choice. I also know there are some readers who will *only* go to Amazon; in some cases it’s because they can’t afford to buy all the books they want, so they have a Kindle Unlimited subscription that allows them to read as much as they like.
Books enrolled in the Kindle Unlimited program must be Amazon-exclusive; I’ve seen some authors who have gotten booted from KU because their books were pirated, and Amazon deemed that a violation of the exclusivity requirement.
As a side note: If you take an author’s book and toss it up on a “torrents” site or free download site or whatever, that is piracy. If you are committing book piracy, you are STEALING. Don’t be a dick; don’t steal authors’ work.
When I started self-publishing last year, I chose to put my books in Kindle Unlimited because I am one of those people who can’t afford to buy as many books as I would like, and I wanted my books to be available to people with a KU subscription. Also, we do get paid very minimal royalties based on pages read through Kindle Unlimited, and I hoped that would be a way to boost my earnings. And Amazon’s publishing platform is pretty easy for someone like me, who gets bogged down with technology and too many instructions, to use. Amazon also enables authors to at least try to protect their books against being pirated.
(The tendency for people to pirate books is another reason mine are not available through any other sources–including me giving them away; I used to give my books during release parties and such, but two got pirated before the release day even ended, so I said F it, if people are going to steal my shit, I’m going to stop giving them the opportunity.)
Things have changed in the past year and a half. Amazon has cut the amount authors earn for page reads through Kindle Unlimited, and more readers are refusing to spend their money with the universe-gobbling conglomerate. More authors I know are choosing to “go wide” with their books (i.e. have their books available through vendors other than or in addition to Amazon).
I am one of those authors. I am planning, beginning in 2024, to have my books available “wide.” But that’s going to take me some time.
I have to learn the other platforms. There are a few that allow authors to upload their books and distribute to multiple vendors; I will probably use one of those. I think I even have an account with one or two of them from when I self-published a couple of short stories a decade or so ago, so I just have to find the info again. But technology marches on, so I need to make sure I know what I’m doing with those platforms.
Which is another point: I have to find out what other platforms exist and which one(s) most authors in my genre (male/male romance) use and prefer. This involves some relatively easy research, but it’s still a thing I need to do.
I also have to go through my Amazon account and make sure my books *stop* being in Kindle Unlimited. When you enroll a book in KU, it’s a 90-day period that renews automatically unless you make sure it doesn’t. I have to make sure I uncheck the box (or whatever I need to do) so that the current books finish their enrollment and it *doesn’t* renew.
And I have to revamp my marketing strategy to accommodate marketing books that are available on sites other than/in addition to Amazon.
All of those things take time and mental bandwidth. I’m low on bandwidth much of the time; I have chronic health conditions that impact my ability to do the things. And some of my limited bandwidth is currently being occupied by a whole bunch of personal-life stuff that needs to be my priority right now.
I am going to be putting the time and bandwidth into making my books wide, but it’s going to be a little longer before I get there. In addition to the health and the other stuff I was already dealing with, I started a new job this past week that is VERY physically challenging for me and is wreaking havoc with the health. (I’m hoping it’s just a matter of needing another week or so to adjust; if not, I’m going to have to reconsider the job. But that’s a separate issue.)
So, for the time being, my books are Amazon-only. That includes Fill the Empty Spaces, which will be up for Kindle preorder on Sept. 28 and will release in Kindle and paperback formats on Oct. 12. I am sorry to those readers who won’t buy books from Amazon; I hope you’ll give me the grace and patience to stick around another few months until I am ready to go wide.
Currently, the plan is that Tempeh for Two (Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat 5) will be released in January 2024 as an Amazon exclusive for only the *first* 90-day enrollment period for Kindle Unlimited. Once that 90 days is up (mid-April), Tempeh and the other four RWDEM books will go wide. Stay tuned for info about which sites they’ll be available through. I have not yet decided whether the new books of the series, beginning with Take Some Tahini in July of 2024, will be enrolled in KU for the first 90 days or will just release wide right out of the gate, but I’ll keep readers informed when I decide.
For Chance Met and Fill the Empty Spaces, the current plan is to set those wide at the same time as the first five RWDEM books. I would *like* to make these two wide in mid-January 2024, after Fill the Empty Spaces completes its first 90-day enrollment period in Kindle Unlimited, but I’m not a hundred percent sure I’ll have everything in place by January, and I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep.
Beginning in March 2024, all future books that are *not* part of the Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat series, including books like Chance Met that have ties to the series but aren’t directly *in* the series, will be released wide from the beginning and will therefore not be available through Kindle Unlimited at all.
These plans, of course, are subject to change depending on what is happening in my non-writing life that takes up time and bandwidth, but currently this is what I intend to put into place.
Meanwhile, although I know some people prefer ebooks only and some of my readers are overseas, I do have paperbacks available. Amazon’s exclusivity requirement only applies to ebooks; paperbacks aren’t part of it. And all of my books are available in paperback because personally, I prefer having a hard-copy book that I can hold in my hands and flip the pages. So if you’d like paperback copies of any of my books and are willing to cover shipping costs as well as the cost of the book itself, feel free to message me!
Now that I’ve done the cover reveal for my newsletter subscribers, I’m sharing the Fill the Empty Spaces cover here as well. (And if you want to subscribe to my newsletter so you get future exclusive content, you can go to my free short story page to sign up for the newsletter and get the link to download an exclusive Real Werewolves Don’t Eat Meat short story.)
The cat in the image is Charlie the Sweater Cat, who was a resident of the cat cafe where I volunteer. Charlie was found as a stray, with fur so matted he had to be shaved. He also had multiple health conditions that kept his fur from growing back properly. When a little girl visiting the cafe swaddled Charlie in a blanket, the cafe staff and volunteers realized Charlie felt comforted, so one of the volunteers started knitting sweaters for him to wear so he would always be warm and feel safe.
In the story, Del volunteers at a cat cafe modeled on the real-life one, and Charlie (and other feline residents of the real cafe) became characters. Charlie, in the story, winds up adopted by Del and goes home with him.
Sadly, Charlie in real life was in too much pain from conditions that couldn’t be treated. He crossed the Rainbow Bridge on July 7 of this year. The cafe has a small memorial to him on top of one of the shelves (where the other cats can’t get to it), and the cafe’s owner gave me permission to use one of my photos of Charlie as part of the cover art for this book.
To find out more about the Kitty Cat Cafe and Adoption Lounge, located in Peabody, Massachusetts, visit their website, where you can learn how the cafe operates, schedule a visit, and/or make a donation to help them care for the current kitty residents.
Fill the Empty Spaces will be available for Kindle preorder on Sept. 28, and will be released for Kindle and in paperback on Oct. 12.
