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”Category: Marketing
Summer Book Sale Is Here!
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!
Blurbing With Claude AI: Slaying a Tyrant
(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”Happy Valentine’s Day…And A Book Sale!
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!
State of the Author, Start of 2025
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”Sequel to Wolf’s Trail Is Done!
A hair over 56K words, so a bit longer than Wolf’s Trail itself. What’s next? Well, I’m going to take a break from this universe for a week or so, try to work on getting my older stuff into Kindle Unlimited, and other “administrative” writing related work, and then try to get back to work on the novel in maybe second week of November, – cleanup, breaking into chapters, submission to the people who early-read and edit for me. I hope to have it out by the end of the year, but no guarantees.
Let’s throw in a somewhat triumphant sounding Bollywood video while we’re at it:
Goodbye, Wide Books
For most of my time self-publishing, I have tried to make my books available on a wide variety of platforms, sometimes after a period where a newly published book was exclusive to Kindle. However, Apple has decided that self-published authors must register as traders under the EU’s Digital Services Act, which places additional responsibilities on the authors, which may potentially include exposing their legal name and address to the public, and which in turn may enable cyberbullying of authors. Amazon has made no official statement, but the chatter among veteran writers on the Kindle Direct Publishing forums suggests that self-publishing writers might be more correctly viewed as “consignors” rather than traders. The other e-book platforms have also made no official statement.
As a precautionary measure, I have delisted all my books on non-Amazon platforms, and will soon delete my mailing list. As an unfortunate side effect, Slaying a Tyrant and Marrying a Monster will no longer be “permafree” at some point in the near future, but I hope to enroll my formerly wide-release books in Kindle Unlimited, which will at least reduce the expense of reading my books for KU subscribers. If you are interested in what Jaglion Press has to offer, including the upcoming sequel to Wolf’s Trail, please follow me on WordPress or on Amazon. Thank you!
Happy Summer! Have a Free Novel!
Free Novel!
The name’s Chloe Fortebat, and I am in trouble. I left my father’s ranch on the plains to come to the Old World: a place of airships, steampower, and monsters nobody talks about. Now I’m dodging giant werewolves with fangs the size of my knife, and the hunters crazy enough to go after them. The most dangerous of these doesn’t look the part: a quiet, sharp-dressed medical man with a tired face….
My name is Dr. Maxim os Storm, and I hunt the beasts that haunt the night. The leader of this pack of werewolves has set his mark on Miss Fortebat, but this brave lady would rather fight him than let him make her his tool. As far as I am concerned, that makes her my ally. My only chance of curing her lies with an ancient machine, hidden by my people in the caves beneath Wolf Island. We must keep that artifact out of the werewolf’s grasp at all costs, for he would put it to a terrible use….
Continue reading “Happy Summer! Have a Free Novel!”Wolf’s Trail is Free Until Friday!
The name’s Chloe Fortebat, and I am in trouble. I left my father’s ranch on the plains to come to the Old World: a place of airships, steampower, and monsters nobody talks about. Now I’m dodging giant werewolves with fangs the size of my knife, and the hunters crazy enough to go after them. The most dangerous of these doesn’t look the part: a quiet, sharp-dressed medical man with a tired face….
My name is Dr. Maxim os Storm, and I hunt the beasts that haunt the night. The leader of this pack of werewolves has set his mark on Miss Fortebat, but this brave lady would rather fight him than let him make her his tool. As far as I am concerned, that makes her my ally. My only chance of curing her lies with an ancient machine, hidden by my people in the caves beneath Wolf Island. We must keep that artifact out of the werewolf’s grasp at all costs, for he would put it to a terrible use….
Wolf’s Trail, the first book in Hunter Healer King, my gothic gaslamp fantasy series, is free for all readers until Friday, March 22, 2024!
You may know me from my clean romantic fantasy novels in the Jaiya series and the Ancestors of Jaiya series, or my space operas, the Star Master duology. Wolf’s Trail still combines adventure, mysticism, romance and fun characters, while avoiding harsh language and the more graphic forms of violence and sexuality. This new series is written for fans of steampunk, gaslamp fantasy, lost civilizations, and monster hunters like Van Helsing (the more action hero version of the character, as portrayed by Peter Cushing and Hugh Jackman).
Where Did that Come From? The Blurb for Wolf’s Trail
I previously discussed (towards the bottom of this post) how I used Google Bard as a tool in working on the blurb for this book. Bard generated 2543 words by my count, of which 16 were usable in a blurb of 172 words.
Here’s what I used as a starting point and fed to Bard. It’s the blurb I wrote when I was serializing the book on Vella:
To claim her inheritance, Chloe must leave her ranch for the Old World, where she mingles with monster hunters. The most dangerous of these doesn’t look the part: a quiet, sharp-dressed medical man. Dr. Maxim os Storm’s mission is to destroy those monsters which feed on human pain. He is drawn to Chloe, but she is being slowly transformed into the type of creatures he hunts. He does not know if he can cure her in time, or what she will do when she learns his secrets…
Note that this is in 3rd person, but the book itself is in first. Here’s the final blurb, with Bard’s contributions bolded:
The name’s Chloe Fortebat, and I am in trouble. I left my father’s ranch on the plains to come to the Old World: a place of airships, steampower, and monsters nobody talks about. Now I’m dodging giant werewolves with fangs the size of my knife, and the hunters crazy enough to go after them. The most dangerous of these doesn’t look the part: a quiet, sharp-dressed medical man with a tired face….
My name is Dr. Maxim os Storm, and I hunt the beasts that haunt the night. The leader of this pack of werewolves has set his mark on Miss Fortebat, but this brave lady would rather fight him than let him make her his tool. As far as I am concerned, that makes her my ally. My only chance of curing her lies with an ancient machine, hidden by my people in the caves beneath Wolf Island. We must keep that artifact out of the werewolf’s grasp at all costs, for he would put it to a terrible use….
Below the break, I have the Bard-generated content in full, with the bits I used bolded. First come the “long” versions of Chloe’s and Maxim’s POVs which came to around 1858 words and yielded nothing useful. 1-3 are Chloe’s; 4-6 are Maxim’s. Then come the “short” versions, which are where the useful bits (bolded again) come from. 7-9 are Chloe’s POV, 10-12 are Maxim’s. Bard was useful mostly because I’m a little uncomfortable writing blurbs; I can’t imagine this being an efficient way of writing blurbs for someone who was actually good at them.
Continue reading “Where Did that Come From? The Blurb for Wolf’s Trail”
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