For a very long time indeed, the price of Cold Iron remained at a mere 99 cents, just shy of a full United States dollar. I put my only published work ‘on sale’, and never rescinded that status. I got caught up in other events, life and love and loss and learning, and that price remained a measly 99 cents, and the book itself went without promotion.
Until now.
I wish I had some sort of fancy new edition to tempt you with. Maybe some crib notes or a better sample chapter from the sequel, Bloody Streets. But, no. The song remains the same. So, why should you lay down not one but FOUR hard-earned American bucks to read just under 200 pages of what one reviewer calls “supernatural hardboiled fiction”?
Well, those three words alone might have sold it to some of you, so by all means…
Anyway, things have changed since Cold Iron was first published. Handheld devices are, somehow, even more ubiquitous than they were just three years ago, and the Kindle app is free on any device you care to name. Except, maybe, GameBoy Color or the NeoGeo or something. Point is, you can read it even if you don’t own an actual Kindle. But that’s just the mechanics of it. What’s the essence of it, the thing that I feel should pull you into the tale?
Let’s start by saying that, despite a “20 minutes in the future” setting and all sorts of supernatural trappings, this story (like all good stories) is about people. The main people here are our two protagonists, Morgan and Seth. Morgan is a female homicide detective working in Philaelphia. Seth is a man of Egyptian lineage who finds himself alive and awake 35 years after his apparent murder while he himself was working as a detective.
I’m going to pause in the pitch and say that this is a novel of hardboiled urban fantasy, not an urban fantasy romance. Okay? Okay. Let’s move on.
So you have Seth trying to figure out why he didn’t stay dead. As he does, bodies turn up in his wake, which means Morgan has to investigate. And then there’s the things Morgan usually deals with on a night-by-night basis. I make it a habit not to say up-front what those things are, as it’s an unknown to Seth at the start, but considering I wrote Cold Iron in the midst of a huge torrent of Twilight‘s bullshit, you can probably take a wild guess and be relatively correct.
That’s my pitch for Cold Iron: it’s short, punchy, diverse, fast-paced, and it never assumes you, the reader, are an idiot.
Why did I bring its price up and start singing its praises again?
Well, I’m a writer. And I want to get paid for writing.
I have a sequel, Bloody Streets, in need of some cover art and design. I have the perfect photographer in mind, and I’ll be tapping the same designer who did Cold Iron, so I know what my budget needs to be. And there is no way I am making that much spare cash as a barista.
I do have some Magic cards and role-playing game books to sell, but those are temporary measures, and I want to build something more sustainable, something with growth potential. I also want to do some brand-building, which hopefully will escalate between the novellas, Innercom Chatter, and Coven, later this year.
I’m curious to see what will happen. Is a little written entertainment, especially in a genre like this one, worth the price of a latte to you? Find out. And feel free to leave a review behind, too. No matter what it says.
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