I hope you’ve enjoyed these glimpses of the heroine and hero of Marrying a Monster as much as I have. Please check out the full book (for only $0.99) at e-bookstores all across the internet. Not ready for that kind of commitment? Check out the free sample chapter available now on Instafreebie!
Category: Marrying A Monster
Meet Vipin
Let me introduce you to Vipin, the hero of Marrying A Monster. He’s a quiet, athletic man with a strong, hawklike face and brown eyes that glow gold when the sunlight catches them. Rina first meets him on her bus trip into the foothills of the Blue Smoke Mountains. He’s helpful and polite, almost the perfect gentleman, but Rina wonders what he’s really up to.
He claims to be an anthropologist researching regional folklore, but the fact that he can run like a marathoner and fight like a martial artist seems a bit suspicious to Rina. Vipin is no were-creature, but the last woman he loved rejected him due to his strange powers and sinister pedigree. Will he open his heart to Rina, before it’s too late?
Meet Rina
Let me introduce you to Rina, the heroine of Marrying A Monster. She has one of those super-efficient metabolisms we all envy, and the kind of long, wavy hair I personally envy, even though I know how much work that can be. Her first weapon of choice is her pepper spray, though she doesn’t like to use it in places where it would hit innocent bystanders.
At the beginning of the story, Rina’s clothing shop is losing money, and her chief financial backers (her parents) can’t help her out unless she does them a favor…which will involve her traveling back to their hometown of Thundermouth, near the top of Mount Snarl in the Blue Smoke Mountains.
Along the way, she visits such prime vacation spots as Goatsfart and Stayout, meets a hunky but secretive folklore expert by the name of Vipin, and bickers with her archnemesis and least favorite customer, Amita. But there is a monster stalking her up the mountain, and it will take more than snark and pepper spray to take it down….
Check Out Sweet Free Books!
Sweet Free Books runs a mailing list that covers free and discounted books, and today they are including Marrying A Monster! When I booked my novel for this promotion, I was impressed with the smoothness and efficiency of their website. This is all the more impressive when you consider the very modest fees they charge for book promotions. Many, many brownie points to the owner!
Click here to see a partial selection of the free and discounted books available out there.
New book recommendation service launching: Bobdog Books
A gentleman named Sean Hinn is launching a new book recommendation service called Bobdog Books, where both readers and authors can submit their favorite books to his site, along with their links on Amazon. The more nominations per book, the greater the visibility. When he starts to monetize the site, through Amazon Associates links, he plans to give half the proceeds to St. Jude Children’s Hospital. Since it was a worthy cause, I went ahead and submitted Marrying A Monster to his site, and may try to submit some of my favorite books later on.
Sample Chapter Giveaway for Marrying A Monster
An abridged version of a chapter from Marrying A Monster is now available on Instafreebie! Feel free to go check it out.
And the Jaglion Press Mailing List is born!
You should start seeing a popup subscription form on this website with the following message:
“Interested in exciting news, discounts and freebies from Jaglion Press? How about news and free or discounted books by other authors? If you are, please subscribe to the Jaglion Press newsletter!”
I have volunteered to participate in a Halloween-themed promotion involving forty-plus authors, all with $0.99 books. I will probably make that the subject of my first or second newsletter, so stay tuned for some interesting offers!
Marrying a Monster is now live!
An exciting moment for me here: the book I first wrote back in 2013 and spent several months preparing for submission, is now available for purchase at a mere $0.99 on Amazon, Nook, iBooks, Kobo, All Romance Ebooks and Inktera. I submitted it to several ebook vendors through Draft2Digital, so hopefully it will go live at Scribd, etc. in the next few days.
Ebook Cover Reveal for Marrying A Monster!
One of my hobbies while I was working on Marrying A Monster was trying to make my own cover art. This produced a bunch of dubious results and two or three that were decent but not appropriate to my genre.
Then I went looking through premades. There are a lot of very talented designers who make premades available at reasonable prices, but a couple of things made my search more difficult.
One, my books are not steamy. The thing to remember about the “bare torso” style of cover art is that the author (and/or publisher) is usually being very honest in advertising the contents of the book. It attracts people who like that kind of content, and tells people who don’t like it to keep on moving. If I gave Marrying A Monster that kind of cover, it would be false advertising, which is a good way to annoy your potential buyers.
Two, the setting is a fictional country called Jaiya, “in a world not quite like ours.” Jaiya has elements of several cultures, including a religion very loosely inspired by Christianity, but the climate, ethnic groups, and parts of the country’s history are inspired by India, Pakistan, and the other countries in that area.
There are several places where I describe people as having gold or bronze or tea-colored skin…which meant that any piece of cover art with blonde or red-haired, fair-skinned people was automatically a no-go. I also describe the characters as mostly wearing modern clothes and talking on cell phones, so the handful of “Exotic India” covers I ran across didn’t seem to fit either.
I eventually decided that since people in that part of the real world several different ethnicities, it was okay to look at artwork where the characters could maybe pass for Mediterranean or Middle Eastern, or where the stock photos involved had been manipulated so thoroughly that trying to judge the character’s ethnicity seemed pointless.
Then I fell in love with a particular premade at Rocking Book Covers and contacted Adrijus, the designer who runs the site. He was happy to make the font changes I asked for, and just submitted the final version to me today.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I am very pleased to present to you, the cover art for Marrying A Monster!
Title and blurb Reveal: Paranormal Romance Book 1
It is a world not quite like ours, where the insect-like Gnosha live alongside humans, cars, and cell phones; and stranger things lurk in the shadows. Rina is a city girl now, but she can’t bring herself to say no when asked to come back home for an old local custom: a symbolic marriage between her town’s young women and the Mountain King, a legendary guardian spirit. As Rina travels home with a handsome but mysterious folklorist, she learns that the Mountain King is real, and a monstrous menace….
Ladies and Gentlemen, I am very pleased to introduce to you the first book in my paranormal romance series: Marrying A Monster.
It’s around 50,000 words long, more sweet than sensual on the romance side, more eerie than gritty on the paranormal side. It takes place in another world, in a country called Jaiya. Jaiya is a place of seeming contradictions: with modern technology anyone of us would recognize, ancient traditions that speak of guardian spirits and Old Ones, and humans who may just have a trace of the Old Ones’ powers.
Rina embodies those contradictions in her own way. She considers herself a thoroughly modern woman who runs a clothing shop in Rivertown, Jaiya’s capital, but she goes home to take part in what is to her a meaningless ritual, so that her parents won’t feel embarrassed in front of their neighbors.
The dashing anthropologist Vipin carries his own contradictions within him. His good looks and gentleness draw Rina to him, but he may yet prove more dangerous than the Mountain King himself…
Jaglion Press 