Mai Keyes's Blog

- and Taking Flight

2016 was the worst year of my life! I'll definitely never touch wine from that era!

I'll need a real blog too express the over-abundance of SOD. (For those not following our Twitter feed, SOD is Series Of Disasters.)

Family rupturing, deteriorating house, cancer and MORE. So much, that I've decided to make a book of it someday. That will be our only non-fiction work.

I stopped writing to care for my partner, and she hasn't finished the romance books we expected to release last year. Thus her Gryphon persona hasn't been revealed.

Things have improved (slightly) the last two months.

We launched Little Red Hide.
I hope our new fairytale by the Orator will be a success. We need something to go right.

No one who downloaded Gryphon Scribes books for our Smashwords Cyber Monday sale added them to their bookshelf. You know who you are.
[feathers bristle]
It hurts, but there's nothing to do.

This isn't helping publicity or our money issues, so we're going to focus on Twitter and Cafepress until January.

I'd like to start a real blog page, but don't have the time since I'm trying to get another book out soon.

Maybe things will turn next year.

#losinghope

Well, I read hundreds of books in my lifetime, many as a child. I like to read many genres, including nonfiction subjects.

I can't list all my books on this website. To me, that's private information. It used to be illegal for libraries to reveal what you checked-out. I suppose those days are gone.

I agree that, as an author, it's useful for potential fans to know what types of books I write. So, I am listing books that have inspired me or are similar to my stories and styles.

I love lots of non-fiction, but don't write it, so won't list much here.

My free time is very limited, now. I won't review books that have more than ten reviews unless I have something important to say.

If your book is short, and has few reviews, contact us on Twitter. One of the Gryphons will review in exchange for a review. You scratch our wings, we scratch yours.
Sorry, no time for novels.

I searched for my first book in Apple iBooks, downloaded the sample and it is not my carefully crafted free sample on Smashwords. Believing this must be an error, I emailed Smashwords.

"After uploading our newest doc file, I found the sample to be too small for flash-fiction. It just showed the first two paragraphs of story. I immediately increased the sample to 38% which was perfect. I fixed it within one hour, but Apple's sample is still too short. Is this because their samples only go to 25%, or did they not receive the update?
If they don't allow samples above 25%, I need to inform readers to come here for the longer epup sample."

This is Smashwords' reply. "All retailers will create samples of their own,
and the size of which is at their discretion, regardless of the size or
existence of a sample at Smashwords."

Can you believe it? That means other retailers can size samples of MY books too short or too long, ruining reader appetites. I was so angry, I nearly pulled my book from iBooks shelves!

However, I decided to just point readers to Smashwords.com to get the proper book samples. You don't need to sign up for free downloads, and you can still buy from your preferred store.
I assure you our samples are long enough to get into the stories. Best of all, you can choose to open them right in your browser!

http://www.smashwords.com/profile/vie...