
Book Quotes: Dragon’s Teeth

Monster hunters, spaceships and comedy of manners by indie author Mel Dunay

It’s time for the latest Book Sale hosted by Hans G. Schantz, where indie authors from across genres join together to offer great stories at great prices.
I’m glad to be participating once again. This event has always been a great opportunity for readers and writers to connect through their shared love of good books, without all the noise.
My contribution this quarter is Undead Flight, the second book in my Hunter Hunter Trilogy. It’s a gaslamp fantasy where our horse-loving heroine faces vampires and zombies ON AN AIRSHIP, while sorting out her feelings for a certain sharp-dressed monster hunter. It continues on from the first book in the trilogy in terms of the setting and the leads’ dynamic, but stands on its own as a story.
You can find it, and many others, at the sale here.
As always, I’m thankful for everyone who stops by, whether to browse, buy, or spread the word. Every bit of attention helps keep indie pub going.
Happy reading!
2026 promises some big changes in my life. I will be helping some family members moving into a smaller place. Also, I will dealing with some new and different writing challenges. I have three WIPs, all in different genres/settings, plus a different approach to marketing my work. Fingers crossed!
To me, AI is a flawed but interesting tool, brought to us by the same flawed (and often corrupt) people who brought us the rest of the modern conveniences we live with. Other people have other opinions about it, and out of respect for them, I try to be transparent about my use of AI.
I do not use AI for first draft writing or for high-level concept and character background work. I have found ai chatbots (mostly Claude.ai) helpful for tasks like:
Continue reading “Due Disclosure: Me and AI and Marketing” →It’s been roughly three months since the last State of the Author, so here’s where I’m at:
Continue reading “State of the Author, 4Q2025” →This was a collaboration with Claude.ai, but a bit different from my usual. I had a chat going covering several aspects of the final stretch of the book: dictation cleanup, brainstorming and revision thoughts (basically me feeding it my revisions and seeing if it caught anything obviously wrong like typos, awkward sentences or me losing track of the characters’ movements). The reference docs included a summary of our previous chat, covering the “darkest hour” stretch of the book. Claude’s cheerleading had been very helpful through both these stretches of story, which were difficult to write. I fed the blurbs from the past two books into this chat (which had gotten long enough in terms of total tokens to where Anthropic was throttling it every few messages for a couple of hours). Claude naturally focused way too much on the spoilery third act it knew best, so I had to summarize the earlier stages of the story for it. It then gave me a rough draft I could use, and we went through several rounds of me tweaking it, asking the AI for feedback from a book marketing POV, and me tweaking it some more. The final (for now) version is below the cut, with human text in bold. The taglines for each character are carryovers from earlier blurbs, and have been italicized.
Continue reading “Hunter Healer King 3 blurb” →Hans G. Schantz has put together one of his massive book sales, and has graciously agreed to include my novel Wolf’s Trail in the sale. Hans’s book sales always cover a wide range of genres and possibilities, so take a look! Happy Summer Reading!
(Disclaimer: some of my past “blurbing with LLMs” posts have been very TL;DR because I included a lot of unnecessary fluff that the LLMs churned up and that I didn’t use. This prompt below helps cut down on the fat, so, although this is several paragraphs long, it is much shorter than those previous posts.)
First off, I prompted Claude in this manner: You are a book marketing expert trying to help a fantasy writer. Please help her improve her blurbs. The first novel in her fantasy series is Slaying a Tyrant by Mel Dunay, which may be part of your training data, if so, please feel free to refer to your training data. The problem is that the Empire mentioned in the blurb is mostly a background issue throughout the series [then I spelled out what role the Empire plays throughout the series, and fed Claude the existing blurb for Slaying a Tyrant].
Continue reading “Blurbing With Claude AI: Slaying a Tyrant” →Hans G. Schantz has graciously included Undead Flight in his quarterly book sale, covering over 200 books! Undead Flight, the second book in the Hunter Healer King series, is just 99 cents USD, like many of the books in the sale. The rest of the books in the sale are free. With so many books from so many different authors, I’m sure there’s something for everyone in there, so please be sure and check it out!

My plans for the New Year are always kind of vague, because “Mann tracht un Gott lacht” (Man plans, and God laughs).
Continue reading “State of the Author, Start of 2025” →