Rumors ruin reputations. For a maid, they can be maddening.
The sharp-tongued Professor Campbell, your employer, is dead. Insinuations about your “nightly duties” make finding a new position impossible. Just as you exhaust the last of your options, an unexpected offer of employment comes from a man you’ve never met: Sicarius Estrova – shipping magnate, eligible bachelor, and an old friend of the professor.
His household, Gravelorne Manor, is far from the picture-perfect image it projects. The staff are rowdy, the mansion is bizarrely furnished, and your beguiling master seems to delight in playing calculating mind games. Too old for the nonsense, you meet his perverse teasing with biting wit and pernicious poise. However, when his endless taunts turn into a sudden proposal, you cannot help but feel something is amiss.
Seduced by his amorous attentions and the promise of financial security, you enter into a marriage where the only certainty is Sicarius’s obsessive desire to mold you into his world. As your husband flip-flops between hopeless romantic and shameless devil, you begin to wonder what wicked schemes hide behind that charming smile.
Reader Character Description: She/her pronouns, female anatomy, approx age late twenties to mid-forties.
Purchase your paperback or ebook copy at:
Barnes and Noble
Amazon US/CA/UK/DE/AU/BR/JP
Target
Bookdepository.com
Booktopia AU
Imusic.co EU
Hugendubel.de EU
Google Play
Also available by special order at Indie Booksellers:
Carmicheal's Bookstore (Kentucky, USA)
Sundog Independent Books (Florida, USA)
Prince Books (Vermont, USA)
Waterstreet Bookstore (New Hampshire, USA)
Annie Bloom Books (Oregon, USA)
Penguin Bookshop (Pennsylvania, USA)
Fireside Books (Alaska, USA)
Better Read Than Dead (New South Wales, AU)
Paperback Size: 178mm x 108 mm/4.25″x7″, Weight 257g/9oz
Paperback Price: 14.99 USD
Ebook Price: 4.99 USD (available at these retailers)
For those with limited finances: Talk to your local librarian to request the book! Print copies are available for order through the Ingram catalogue and digital library access is available through Overdrive/Hoopla upon your request!
They're forcing us to make our retailer discount 40% instead of the 30% most of us use because Ingram already takes a steep cut from our earnings.
This means if I don't increase the retail price, I'll be earning less than a dollar per book again.
It is also mandatory, and if we don't comply by October 30th, 2023, they're threatening to remove our work from circulation. Work that we've paid in excess of $75 for them to distribute per title.
This is a scant few months after their social media 'we love indie authors' push which was going on at the same time as when they put customer service behind a paywall 🙃
I'm done. Fuck this. Fuck that. I'm out.
Paperbacks might be Amazon only for a bit while I work up the funds to get my paperbacks reformatted for draft2digital but fuck this. I am not giving Ingram Spark any more money.
Just to clarify, because I'm already getting asks:
Yes, the way Ingram Spark works, the author is expected to foot the bill on retailer discounts, not the printer.
When I say retailer discount, I do not mean the fee Ingram Spark takes for printing.
I mean the discount we are expected to give retailers, like Barnes and Noble, to try and make buying our work into their store more appealing.
The discount used to be 30-40%. Ingram is now making it 40% minimum or else.
On top of that, they are still taking their printing fees. Which, the last time I checked, accounted for most of the cost.
So for every $17.99 book of mine that someone buys, I earn about... $1.90. It varies depending on the exchange rate. The rest goes to Ingram or the retailers.
I make more money on my $4.99 ebooks than I do on my $17.99 paperbacks. Make it make sense.
Anyway, yeah. Hi. I'm angry. I also can't seem to remove my books from Ingram, still. They want me to contact customer support to do that, which, haha, as previously mentioned, they put behind a paywall.
I feel like I'm losing my mind, but since posting this a few days ago, I've had several retailer workers who follow me (hi) and work for bookstores let me know that they're not seeing the 30% retailer discount on their end.
What they see when they try to order the book from Ingram is a 5% discount, and that's why they can't afford to have my work on the shelf.
Hunger Pangs has been set to a 30-35% global retailer discount since the paperbacks launched in 2020. There is zero reason for it to be showing as 5%
It could be an error. Goodness knows, Ingram has been fucking up a lot of late (sending people's books out months before their release date and then telling authors there's nothing they can do about it until they start yelling about it on TikTok/Instagram and suddenly it's a fixable problem but only if you've got a platform to go viral).
A larger part of me can't help but be suspicious that it's something else, but fuckit. The final nail was already in their coffin, as far as I'm concerned. This is just giving me the spite to dig it up and hammer more nails in to make sure no one else gives them any money.
I'm sure as fuck not paying $25 every 30 minutes to talk to them on the phone to try and figure out why they're not displaying my data correctly to retailers because they've basically stopped answering their customer service email. Not when I'm getting ready to pull my work from them and relaunch with draft2digital.
Anyway. Disregard any advice I've ever given to use Ingram.
NGL, I'm kinda getting sick of many of these historical romance novels having the same female lead. "Suzanne was virginal, tiny, whispy and walked with grace but also spunky and somehow modern so the duke loved her."
Nah bro. I want "Bernadette was an absolute unit. With broad shoulders, deep wrinkles, six children and no time for nonsense, she once punched a handsy drunkard so hard his grandmother felt the blow in heaven."
A lot of the time when I reblog jewellery on here, it’s art nouveau jewellery, because I really like art nouveau. In general, and in jewellery in particular. And most of that is the aesthetic. I like the natural forms, I like the twisty curly bits, I like the use of materials, I like how a lot of art nouveau jewellery is using metals and stones and other materials to create a specific form, an insect or a plant or a goddess or even sometimes nature scenes. I like …
I feel like a lot of the time with jewellery, it feels like ‘I’m going to use this object to show off the size and value of my pretty rock’. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Some of those rocks are indeed gorgeous. But art nouveau feels more ‘I’m going to use these pretty rocks, and several other things, to create the impact of this object’? I just love the use of materials, glass and enamel and colour, as well as precious stones and metals, to create a form or a scene.
Like, you get a diamond ring, it’s a diamond ring. But you get something like a dragonfly brooch (Louis Acoc):
Or a lilypad hair comb (Rene Lalique):
Or a wisteria branch (Georges Fouquet):
And it’s a whole creation. A little wearable piece of art.
And I don’t want to sound too dismissive. I know the craftmanship and skill and artistry that goes into any kind of jewellery making. That diamond ring took skill I will never have. I just.
I like the emphasis on form more than material that you get with art nouveau. Like normally you hear ‘glass jewellery’, ‘enamel jewellery’, and it’s cheap, it’s frowned upon, but in art nouveau it’s what that glass or enamel was used to make that’s the important part:
(Rene Lalique)
(Eugene Feuillatre)
Anyway. In summary, I really, really, really like art nouveau jewellery?
I think it’s time for us to all collectively return to the library. Get a card, go to a club meeting, volunteer on an off day, rent some equipment. You don’t even have to read a book. But since the digital world is rapidly becoming a subscription-only hellscape requiring a criminal amount of private personal information to use even CASUALLY, the library has become our last safe haven to just exist with information present and not have our labour or information exploited for money.
