Hatsept Heat, V.C.O.E. Book 3 is available early in print. It was supposed to come out on May 19th, but I don’t mind that you can get it now ;D Order at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Samhain Publishing and other booksellers.
In addition to print, this book is also available for Kindle and other eBook readers.
Blurbage: Kenoe: A sexy lethal weapon. Shinju: Ditto—with more dangerous curves.
Kenoe Hatsept is in a quandary. The handsome elite Seeker spent years training for a single burning goal: Revenge. Now that the object of his attention has been brought to justice, what’s next? Japan, the one place that has always called to him, sounds like the perfect place to relax, search his soul and plan out the rest of his life.
Instead he finds his head, and his hands, full of a woman who’s sharper than she appears on the surface…in more ways than one. And she’s hip deep in trouble.
Shinju Maruyama just wants to keep her profile low and go about her business. But the long-toothed people just don’t want to let her keep her family secrets. It’ll take all her skill with her brain and her blades to change their minds. There’s something strange and irresistible about Kenoe, and it scares the hell out of her. But she just can’t seem to shake him.
For Kenoe, endangering his life to help her bring the bad guys to heel is easy. Revealing his true nature to her risks far more—his heart.
The folks in the news industry are taking this latest Amazon debacle seriously. I called their web diva to let her know that the ‘gay/lesbian’ stint as reported by the Associated Press that speaks of those books having their sales rank pulled doesn’t cover the half of it.
They ended up doing an interview on the spot about how far reaching Amazon’s decision goes. Also, on Twitter a fellow author confirmed with her editor that a Amazon rep said that it is NOT a glitch, as its currently being reported.
Check out the article and what I have to say courtesy of KOMO News in Seatle: KOMO NEWS LINK
This just seems to be a bad idea on a long list of bad ideas. What are they thinking?
Amazon has pulled the sales rank of books with adult themes. This includes books by yours truly, as well as lifestyle books for gay and lesbians (some are historical accounts and not novels at all). My book, Doing it the Hard Way from Pocket and all of my Ellora’s Cave books are now stripped of their sales rank and may not appear in searches. Oh joy. As if making sales wasn’t already hard enough.
This from Smart Bitches Trashy Books: “Authors such as Jaci Burton, Maya Banks, Larissa Ione and Stephanie Tyler have reported that since being stripped of their sales rankings, their titles are no longer found in searches on Amazon.com. MetaWriter is also compiling a list of titles that have been stripped of their sales rank.
When pressed for a reason, Amazon.com’s customer service department told YA author Mark Probst:
In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.”
And of course, Twitter is exploding with the news as small press and NY Presses are affected by this.
Wanna help get the point across? Link to http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/amazonrank using the words Amazon Rank.
I know many of you have seen this video before but I just love it. What brought this about? I was in Indianapolis for work at a customer site. As I walked through the cafeteria a woman I didn’t know caught me by the sleeve and asked, “Girl, are those sisterlocks?”
She was a beautiful woman…but her hair was thinning and breaking especially around the edges. She had a receding hairline where her hair should have been.
Been there, done that.
I spent a whole lot of years trying to get my hair to do something that it was never meant to do – be straight. I would go devotedly to the beauty shop, sit for hours (they double and triple booked in case somebody cancelled… but nobody ever did) for them to get to me so they could put a glop of grease on my scalp to try to protect it from burning when they put the lye relaxer in my hair.
Then I would sit with tears in my eyes for about fifteen or twenty minutes while they tried to get to the two thousand six hundred and forty nine women in the shop. I would get a rinse with some really good smelling shampoo followed by a setting solution that stung so bad the tears came back with a vengeance.
Next, my hair was rolled, slicked down or styled into whatever doo I was after, and I was off to sit under the dryer for an hour and a half so my hair could dry to a crackling, stiff-but-bone-straight consistency. After all that my hair was surprisingly soft, smelled great and was straight as I-don’t-know-what. And I did that every six to eight weeks for years.
Why? Because when I was growing up, curly, kinky or nappy hair was SO not in. Women of color were taught to straighten their hair. No doubt my hair was easier to manage when it was straight, but there was one little problem: My self-esteem became wrapped up in my hair. So what do you think happened to my self-esteem when my super-long gorgeous hair, after so many years of being practically burned out by perm solution, began breaking and thinning to the point where I had to wear hair pieces on my ponytails to even HAVE a ponytail? Hummph!
It seems to be a normal thing in society these days to be convinced that what you were born with is nowhere near good enough to be acceptable. If you have thin lips they tell you to go get ‘em plumped. If you’re a big girl, you’re told to get skinny. If you’re skinny, you’re told to get some hips. If you’re dark, you’re told you should be lighter. If you have straight hair, you’re told you need some curls. If you have curls, you’re told it should be straight. I mean, DAYUM!
I’d been toying with the idea of going natural for a long time but had no idea how to go about it. Then I met a fabulous author named Kimberly Kaye Terry. She’s a natural hair-wearing sistah who pointed me to some really good resources to research the path I wanted to go. It was encouraging hearing her story on what made her go natural. And it was something I wanted so much.
Me chillin’ in my office
So finally I found an answer to the kind of doo I wanted to wear. I have been sporting locs (no, not dreadlocs ’cause there ain’t nothing dreadful about my hair) for two years now and I couldn’t be happier. My hair is thick, long, strong and beautiful.
Check out this music video about how we women, all of us women, are more than what appears on the outside. I absolutely LOVE IT! If you can’t see the embedded video, visit this link.
Terry from Romance in the Backseat (ritbs.blogspot.com) captured me singing! Oh my GAWD! She said she was gonna put that video blog up but I didn’t believe it. ROFL!!!
This is so very cool! I embedded the video here, but if you can’t see it you can visit this link.
