Its all happening this week! I received Lose a Princess, Lose Your Head back from my super-talented editor, and I think it reads really well now. I've done a final proofread, and so the second novel in the Merchant Blades series will soon be ready for release. Just need to format it for the e-book, refine the cover blurb and it'll be ready to go.

The Alchemist's Box has been doing well so far. The Kindle Unlimited 'pages read' count has been stradily increaseing, despite having done little promotional activity yet. We've even had our first '1000 pages read in a day' day! Its been read around the world, with sales in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, and of course in Greece, and its great to know there's people out there who I don't know who are picking it up and reading it (without having been bullied into it!) I'm also really pleased that from the stats it looks like once people start reading it, they can't put it down, and get through it in a couple of days.The intention when I wrote the book was that it would be a page-turner that would make you miss your stop on the bus! 

This weekend we're running our first promotional event, a GIVEAWAY SATURDAY, where the book will be available to download for FREE from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. Hoping we get a good number of downloads, that will hopefully translate into some more good reviews on Amazon. I'll blog more about that on Saturday, but if you want a copy, or you know anyone who might want to get their hands on a free copy, Saturday's the day!

I am very excited today, and not just because it’s Christmas Eve, always a good reason to be excited. The reason that I'm so excited today is that I’m happy and proud to announce that my first novel, The Alchemist’s Box, is available for download in Kindle format.
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For the UK, click here.

For the US and the rest of the world, click here 
 
It’s taken a while from the moment the original idea popped in my mind to the day the final finished form of the novel was ready. It had to be written down, re written, edited, re-edited and then edited once more by a professional editor. This sentence makes it sound that everything happened very fast, but it did take some doing. It was all worth it, as I think it turned the book into the best it could be. I think the revamp of the website (still a work in progress) is also an improvement, and I’m very excited about the map of this world, and the sketches of the leading characters, Regina Fitzwaters and Maximillian Jaeger.

The book is a fast paced, swashbuckling fantasy adventure set in a world similar to Napoleonic/Regency era Europe. Captain Regina Fitzwaters, a mercenary in the Merchant Blades and former cavalry captain is offered an opportunity to have her gambling debts forgiven by the bosses of Border Town. All she needs to do is bring back a box they purchased from the Alchemist in the city of Pella. The catch? She has to pair up with Kapitan Maximillian Jaeger, a former enemy, who fought on the opposite side of the war.

Throw in snow threatening to block the only pass, highwaymen, a persistent pack of wolves on their tails, the niece and nephew of the Duke in the opulent court of Pella taking a particular interest in Regina and Jaeger. What could possibly go wrong?

Need something to help you unwind for Christmas? Someone to keep you company on the long journey to and from home? A great gift for someone who likes a good book? The Alchemist’s Box is here for you.
If you enjoy The Alchemist’s Box, as I hope you do, “Lose a Princess, Lose Your Head”, the Merchant Blades second adventure will be out very soon.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Love and Festive Kisses to everyone,
​
Alex

Looking for a fun read over Christmas? I'm excited to announce the e-book version of The Alchemist's Box is now available for pre-order on amazon.co.uk and amazon.com, and will be delivered direct to your e-reader or PC on release day, 21st Dec. Reserve your copy now! 

The Alchemist's Box

​Five years ago she would have run him though with her saber without a thought. Now she must trust Kapitan Maximillian Jaeger, enemy in the recent bitter war, with her life. Mercenary Captain Regina Fitzwaters embarks on one simple job to save her reputation: to retrieve the mysterious Alchemist’s Box from the court of the neighboring Duchy of Pella. 

But in Pella, a curse of a thousand years has resurfaced. Where are all the court dignitaries? What does the Alchemist’s box contain that is worth killing, or dying, for?

Can Regina and Jaeger put the war behind them and work together to save everyone in the Duchy before it’s too late?

Here's a short video trailer of my fantasy adventure novel, The Alchemist's Box. Paperback now available from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com. The e-book will be released next week!

It’s been a busy few months since the last post, but we have some exciting news to report. The paperback version of The Alchemist’s Box, the first book in the Merchant Blades series, is now live on amazon.com here and on amazon.co.uk here. It’s been a long process, getting it professionally edited, and going through it repeatedly to make it as polished as possible for the final publishable form. We also have review copies of the e-book available, which we are starting to send out in advance of launching the e-book. If you are interested in obtaining a free review copy (kindle mobi format, or e-pub format for other e-readers/apps) please let us know by e-mailing contact@alexavrio.com, and if you know anyone else who has an interest in reading fantasy novels and might like a review copy, please share this with them – in fact, we’d love it if you share this with everyone you know! We’d also like to share with you a map of the Merchant Blades world, so you can see where all the action takes place. There's a larger version of the map, and more background information on the Merchant Blades series in this section of the website.

We’re starting the editing process on this one now, which will take a good few months. Oh, and book 3 has been started! The working title for this one is “The Hidden Dragon,” and we’ll get to see a bit more of Regina in this one, and meet her family, including her amazing great aunt Lady Felicity.
Finally, I thought I’d share with you another artist’s impression of our leading lady, Regina Fitzwaters. I thik this captures her really well, and shows her in her Merchant Blades coat with her saber. We’re working on getting a similar one of Jaeger, but he’s proving a little bit more troublesome – as he always is!

​Happy Birthday to Merchant Blades: The Alchemist’s Box. I started writing it a year ago today! A year later a whole book is ready and the second book of the series is almost done. So Captain Regina Fitzwaters, Kapitan Jaeger and the rest of the gang have kept me company for a whole year now. I’ve lived with them through many scrapes and swashbuckling adventures, and you’ll soon get the chance to meet them too. Here’s to many more years of adventures and fun with the Merchant Blades gang.

OK, its been a while, so I should give you all an update on what we've been up to for the past few months. So things are progressing well, and we've spent time both writing the second book and revising the first book. The revisions take longer than we anticipated, but we've had good feedback from beta-readers we've recruited through Critters. Feedback was generally positive, with some good suggestions for tweaks. We've also identified a professional editor who has just received the manuscript, and will be working on ensuring its as good as it can be before we publish. In return we've also been critiquing a book for another author, which has also been a useful exercise for us. Still hoping to get the first draft of book 2 finished by the end of the year, so a busy couple of months to come!

We're about to try a different tack with promoting The Dreaming Demon. Previously this novella was up for sale on Smashwords as well as Amazon, which made it more widely available across multiple platforms, including Nook and Kobo. However, we found that almost all of our sales were coming through Amazon. We've now decided to give the Amazon Kindle Select route a try, which requires the book to be offered exclusively at Amazon, and taken down from other retailers. What you get in return is the availability of the book in the Kindle lending library, and it makes it far easier to run free promotions for a few days every few months.  So we've booked a slot for our free promotion days, which will take place this Weds and Thurs 15-16 July. We're hoping we'll get a lot more downloads when it's free, and that this will lead to greater visibility on Amazon when it goes back to full price, and may drive some sales after the event. We also hope it might flush out a few more reviews, which again will help with marketability, and maybe even gain a few fans who'll look out for future books. We'll also use this as a trial run to learn what works and what doesn't so that when we have a few more books finished and available, we'll have a better idea of how to use this approach effectively. If you're able to help with this promotional effort by sharing links to this blog, or to the Amazon page (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dreaming-Demon-Alex-Avrio-ebook/dp/B00L6GLD8U/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1436119692&sr=8-2&keywords=the+dreaming+demon) on or around the days of the promotion, that would be a great help.

For this attempt, we are only advertising using free ads on ebook promotion websites. Many of these sites offer paid options which guarantee the prominence of your promotional material, but there are so many that this would soon mount up, so we'll get a baseline from this trial, and then we can decide on a budget for advertising for future promotions and see how it affects downloads.

The sites we've advertised on in advance are listed below, for those of you who might be thinking of doing something similar. Submission to these 28 sites took around 2 hours of time filling in forms, although some of that time was sifting through other sites that didn't make it clear you needed to pay for the advertising slots until late in the process.

On the days of the sale we'll also be listing The Dreaming Demon on some book blogs, facebook pages and tweeting, so fingers crossed we'll get plenty of people reading it.

1. Freebooksy,  2. Its write now, 3. Kindlebook promos, 4. Ebooklister,  5. Booktourtips/orangeberry free me,  6. Indiebookoftheday, 7. Kindle book review,  8. Book goodies/ignite your book, 9. Ebookshabit,  10. OHFB one hundred free books,  11. Book preview club,  12. Author marketing club, 13. The Book Circle, 14. Ebook stamp, 15. Ebookstage, 16. The reading sofa, 17. Awesomegang, 18. Ereaderutopia, 19. Freebookdude, 20. Hotzippy (inc pixelscroll and bargain ebookhunter), 21. Armadillo ebooks, 22. Bookangel, 23. Bookdealhunter, 24. Freebooks, 25. Lovelybookpromotions, 26. Iloveebooks, 27. Frugal freebies, 28. Freebooksforme

It's been a few weeks since the last blog post,but I can report that things have been moving along at a great pace. We now have in our hands a complete first draft of "The Alchemist's Box," the first book in the Merchant Blades series! Alex completed it in April, at 90,000 words as planned. 

So what have we been doing since then? Well, I'm currently about a third through a proofreading run, and I've also been reading up on the editing process. So along with my proofreading I've been empowered to do a light edit to smooth off any rough edges. Alex will then go through for another revision, and then we'll have several things to sort out. At this point we'll try to get some beta-readers to have a look through the manuscript to give feedback, and we are also intending to send a synopsis and the first few chapters out to agents and publishers to see if it gets picked up by the traditional publishing route. 

By all accounts it tough to get a foothold in the traditional publishing world, and once we've sent submissions off its pretty much out of our control whether anyone takes the bait, so if we get no bites, we'll move on to getting a paid editor to give us some input, before taking the self-publishing route. 

The approach for self-publishing that is advocated on Lindsay Buroker's excellent blog is to release several members of a series of book within a month or two of each other to generate some momentum, and allow yourself to leverage promotions on the first book to draw in purchasers for books 2 and three. 

With this model in mind, Alex has embarked on writing book 2 in the series, and just today finished the first act at around 30,000 words, which is excellent progress. She was even writing by the pool on our recent holiday to the Yucatan in Mexico, to visit the home of the Dreaming Demon. Fortunately now we're back I hear no drums in the night! 

Keep your eyes peeled for some teasers for the Alchemist's Box coming soon to the blog!