Alex Avrio's Blog

Hello everyone.

It’s been a while since I’ve updated the blog. It stood here all alone gathering dust, like a great ancient city slowly being covered by the mighty jungle. So it’s time to grab those garden pruners and try and rediscover the mysteries and wonders that lay hidden in the depths of that jungle.
 
Fans, friends and certain family members have been wondering where I’ve disappeared to and what happened to the fabled third book of the Merchant Blades.

Did Alex Avrio disappear in the jungle lured by the Mother of Serpent’s song, find the forbidden ancient lost city of legend and met her dubious fate?

Did she get strong-armed into delivering a package to the next city down the border, the only catch having to work with an unsavoury character? Because what could possibly go wrong?

Did she get chased by bandits and worse over frozen landscapes, become imprisoned in a treacherous court, sail across the sea and cross sun scorched desserts to find unimaginable treasures and nightmares?
 
Did she get agree as a favour to a friend to escort a person from here to there because what could possibly go wrong (you’d think she’d learned by now?) and get involved in political intrigues, get ambushed, sail treacherous seas, meet poisonous Dukes, deadly pirates, and play for the highest stake yet, her own head?

Or maybe she went to her most dangerous adventure yet, discovering treachery and discontent in the heart of her own country, trying to unmask lethal assassins and facing her most difficult task yet, going back home?
 
​Well the truth is that we did embark on our, as a family, greatest adventure. It involved trying to recruit a new, tiny member of our team.
 It was a long, difficult effort with a few disappointments along the way, but eventually it was all worth it because a little new team member was added to our family. As any of you who have babies know, they are notorious sleep thieves and time bandits, so all of 2018 passed in the blink in of an eye, mostly trying to keep our new treasure alive and well, and not keel over from sleeplessness. As she is getting a little bit older now, I will try my best to finish the third book of the Merchant Blades, The Hidden Dragon. It’s on a good track, about three quarters are finished. So dear friends, I do ask for your patience until the book is finished, and I hope that the result is worth the wait. 

Knowing how tough it is for independent authors to gain readers, as a new feature to this blog, I'm going to highlight good indie e-books when I come across them. For my first recommendation I have The Temptation of Dragons, a fun urban fantasy that I found through Goodreads.com.

In The Temptation of Dragons by Chrys Cymri a widowed Anglican priest from Northamptonshire discovers a parallel world where dragons, unicorns, and gryphons are bishops, priests and policemen. A dragon is found dead under suspicious circumstances. Our heroine is appointed to police any incursions through the thin spaces between the worlds, and encourage anyone who comes through from the other side, either deliberately or by accident, to return.


The World, Characters and Style: I absolutely loved the world and the characters of this book! The writing style was reminiscent of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, with a similar level and type of humour throughout. The dialogue between characters is sharp, particularly the bickering, and the relationship between characters (human, dragon, and gryphon) develop well throughout the book.

The Plot: At its heart this is a murder-mystery, albeit with the victim being a dragon. Ultimately, I felt there maybe weren't quite enough twists and turns and the endgame was possibly all wrapped up a little too neatly and conveniently, but its still well worth a read. 

Editing: This was very smoothly written and edited with no typos. This book felt very professionally finished and polished.

I will by trying the next book in the series, as the worlds (both of them) are places I'd love to revisit. Recommended if you like slightly quirky, fun reads with magical creatures rubbing shoulders with the real world. At the time of writing this post, the e-book can currently by found on Amazon.co.uk for just £1.99 or $2.57 on Amazon.com (Please bear in mind that authors do change prices regularly though).

Great news! InD'Tale magazine has reviewed The Alchemist's Box, and awarded it FIVE STARS and a CROWNED HEART,  an award that only goes to the top books in each issue.
​
If you enjoy reading indie-published books haven't come across InD'Tale magazine, you should give it a look as I have discovered some interesting reads in its pages.

First, I'd like to remind you that there's still time to enter the free giveaway competition on the Dab of Darkness site. 

I've also been interviewed again, this time by Matt Cowper for his blog, and you can read it by following this link. This was a really fun interview to do, as Matt's questions really got into the background of the Merchant Blades characters and world. If you'd like to learn a bit more about my thinking when constructing the characters and the world, this interview is worth a read. Its also worth checking out both of these sites if you're looking for some recommendations of books to download onto your e-reader.

And don't forget, if you haven't signed up to my mailing list yet, if you do you will receive and EXCLUSIVE FREE MERCHANT BLADES SHORT STORY. Sign up here.

Finally, here's the latest 3D view of the new cover for Lose A Princess, Lose Your Head.

I'm delighted that my interview for Susan's Dab of Darkness blog published today. She had some great, imaginative questions. Susan's also running a giveaway for FIVE FREE EBOOK COPIES of The Alchemist's Box . For a chance to win visit her blog. 

I've recently been interviewed by Mercedes Fox for her regular Meet the Author feature. She posed some really interesting questions that led me on to a range of topics including some background insights into the Merchant Blades series, my writing process, and my thoughts on self-publishing. If you'd like to read the interview in full, please click on this link.

I've decided to revamp the covers of the first two books. See what you think of the new ones....

Things are moving at quite a pace now, and the e-book of book 2 in the Merchant Blades series, Lose a Princess, Lose Your Head,  is now available to pre-order on Amazon. Click here for the pre-order page on amazon.com, and here for the page on amazon.co.uk.

It will be released NEXT WEEKEND on Saturday, 25th Feb, 2017, and if you pre-order today, it will be sent direct to your kindle device or app on the release day, so you can be among the first to read of Regina's and Jaeger's continuing adventures.

To celebrate the release of book 2, I'm running a promotion on book 1 in the series, The Alchemist's Box, from Friday 24th through to Saturday 26th Feb, so if you haven't already got a copy, this is your chance to get hold of one for free. 

If you haven't signed up for my newsletter yet, you should, as soon every subscriber will receive a free short story! You can sign up here.

So, what do Regina and Jaeger get up to in the second book? As you probably read in the teaser at the end of the first novel, while lying low in Eressia, they bump into one of Jaeger’s former officers in the Eressian Imperial Army, who invites them on a job, to escort a princess of Eressia across the country to meet her future husband. They sense that everything’s not as it seems, but Jaeger’s patriotism gets the better of him, and he accepts. Now she's bound to Jaeger by a curse, Regina has little choice but to come along. Of course, the job doesn’t go entirely to plan, and they are ambushed and the princess is kidnapped. They find themselves in a mad rush to try to retrieve her before the kidnappers cross the border into the Duchy of Korthi. Thus, the adventure begins. 

I want to say a BIG THANK-YOU to everyone who downloaded The Alchemist's Box for our first promotion on Saturday. Watching the downloads rack up was exciting, and from that one day there are now around 500 extra copies out there to be read. If you got one, I really hope you enjoy it.

As an independent author, gaining book reviews is SO important, so if, once you've read it, you can spare a moment to write a few lines of review on Amazon, it would be so helpful. I really need to build up reviews on Amazon.com (the US site) as well as on Amazon.co.uk, so if you downloaded it from the UK site, you can still post a review on Amazon.com by clicking here. 

From here on, I'll give some details on what we did for our giveaway, which may only be of interest to other independent authors, so if you're not interested in the details, I thank-you once more for your help in reading this, and hopefully downloading the book.

OK, so the Amazon free promotion was for a single day, Saturday 14th Jan, 2017. We submitted free ads to 18 book promotion websites, of which we found our book live on 6. The other twelve may have tweeted or posted details of our book promotion on Facebook, or may not have had room on the day for our book, so I will calss these 12 as unconfirmed. We also paid fairly small amounts for promotions on 3 sites, and posted details on 2 book promotion forums, and tweeted to 5 book promotion twitter accounts. 

This resulted in download of 470 copies over the day, with a significant number (approx 1 in 3) of those coming after 10 pm UK time, suggesting that a lot of folks in the US downloaded in their late afternoon/early evening. The following day we also had a small spike of paid sales, which easily covered the price of the ads we placed.

Our target from this first round of promotion is to increase the number of reviews on amazon.com. Before the promotion we had 5 reviews, and I'm optimistically hoping that if 1% of the downloads turn into a review, we might get another 4-5 reviews from this campaign. If this is the case, this will open up other promotional sites to us who have larger distribution lists, such as Book Barbarian, who claim to have an average of 1800 downloads from their site alone for promotional giveaways, but require a minimum of 10 reviews.

We will plan another promotion once we have the second book, Lose a Princess, Lose Your Head, published, as I'm hoping that will be ready in a couple of weeks now its back from the editor. I'm formatting it for e-book at the moment, and having a final proofread to try to ensure it is as error free as possible before it is published.   

Finally I will summarise the promitional websites we used:

Paid ads:
ebooksoda.com ($20)
newfreekindlebooks.com ($5)
snickslist.com ($1)

Free ads where our listing definitely went out:
pretty-hot.com
ebookasaurus.com
www.philipsmith.eu
ebooklister.net
contentmo.com
askdavid.com

Forums:
book-circle.com
kboards.com - book bazaar

Tweeted to:
@DigitalBkToday  
@kindleebooks   
@Kindlestuff  
@KindleFreeBook  
@FreeReadFeed  

Sites submitted to, where we were unable to confirm whether our promotion was live (if you heard of it from one of these, please let us know and we will adjust the post):
freebooksy.com
bookangel.co.uk
bookbongo.com
bookdealhunter.com
bookoftheday.org
bookwormworld.com
thedailybookworm.com
ebookshabit.com
ebookskill.com
theereadercafe.com
freebooks.com
frugal-freebies.com

The FREE GIVEAWAY of The Alchemist's Box is doing great. We're getting lots of downloads, and climbing the Amazon charts. Unfortunately, to get any higher we need to start deposing the likes of H.G.Wells, Victor Hugo, and Robert E. Howard: three of my heroes! Still, it looks good to see The Alchemist's Box in such exalted company!
If you haven't downloaded your copy, get it tonight before it goes back to full price!
Download from Amazon.com  or  Amazon.co.uk.