Nick Bryan

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Hobson & Choi Case Two – “Rush Jobs” – out now!

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Today, my friends, the second H&C book goes forth into the world, where it hopes to be received with open arms and warm love. After meeting in the first book, John Hobson and Angelina Choi further explore the world they’ve found themselves in, and find it to be a strange, grim place.

So, here is a picture of the cover – for more details on the actual plot, go to the Hobson & Choi homepage, where you can also find links to buy a copy of Case One – The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf – for a newly super-cheap price.

For the new book, you can add it on Goodreads here if you so wish, and if you feel like leaving a review and/or rating there, on Amazon or on your own blog/social media, that would be pretty sweet of you. Continued growth plays a big part in helping me continue to get these out there.

Speaking of heading on out there, we’re also doing the Hobson & Choi Blog Tour to coincide with the book launch – check out the details here if you want to follow along. If you follow me on Twitter, I’m sure the blog posts will also be retweeted there as they happen.

You can buy Rush Jobs in both print and digital from various venues. I’ll also be dropping off a few copies soon at the Big Green Bookshop, if you’re a fan of buying things in person.

Hobson & Choi Blog Tour!

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Tomorrow, the second H&C book is released! To mark this occasion, and promote the series as a whole, Hobson & Choi is Going On Tour!Well, on Blog Tour, organised by the excellent Faye Rogers – you can see even more tour details on her site.

Basically, a range of bookish and book-related blogs (see list to right) will be featuring Hobson & Choi in some capacity, one every day for two weeks. This will include a couple of interviews with me, some guest posts where I talk about H&C-related issues, reviews of the books by the bloggers themselves, a competition, possibly a couple of surprises too.

Once we’re a few days into the tour, I might do a post here to point out the specifics, and I’ll probably retweet the tour posts on my Twitter when they happen. I’ll also keep updating the links below with the H&C-specific post on each blog when available. For now, if you just want to see the sites we will later feature upon, click away!

And don’t forget to buy both the new book and the newly cheap first one too, obviously.

Blog Tour Route – Collect ’em all!
Monday 19th January
Rain On A Summer’s Afternoon – Interview with author (i.e. me). – Tuesday 20th January
Claire Rousseau – Review of both books. – Wednesday 21st January
Music, Books and Tea – Guest post by me about using the internet in fiction without killing drama. – Thursday 22nd January
Ya Yeah Yeah – My Influences: I list stuff that inspired/drove me towards Hobson & Choi – Friday 23rd January
A Daydreamer’s Thoughts – 10 Reasons To Read Hobson & Choi (not by me!) – Saturday 24th January
Tales of Yesterday – Review of both Hobson & Choi books. – Sunday 25th January
K-Books – Short author interview. – Monday 26th January
Nimbus Space – Review of H&C v2. – Tuesday 27th January
The Online Novel – Detailed guest post on H&C publication strategy. – Wednesday 28th January
Nyx Book Reviews – Fun guest post on the concept of “YA Crossover” and whether H&C is that. – Thursday 29th January
Winged Reviews – My Top Ten Book Series – Friday 30th January
Kirstyes – Character interviews! Hobson and Choi speak! – Saturday 31st January
The Book Moo – Impressively, Mel of The Book Moo has done video reviews of The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf and also Rush Jobs. Amazing stuff.Sunday 1st February
Bookish Outsider – Review of both books! – Monday 2nd February
Pewter Wolf

Hobson & Choi – Case Two cover reveal! Case One price drop!

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Now that the whole Christmas/New Year block is fading into distant memory, time to get on with the serious business of getting Rush Jobs launched out into the world – the second Hobson & Choi book in which a new age of gentrified crime starts to pile up around our heroes. The book comes out on Monday 19th January, which is a mere two weeks away! Yipe!

So, probably time I showed you the cover, created once more by the good folk at Design For Writers. I’ll throw in the blurb again for good measure.

“Sometimes #crime feels like the Matrix. Or the #patriarchy or #porn. It’s everywhere, even in people you trusted, and there’s so MUCH of it.”
Angelina Choi returns for her second and final week of work experience at John Hobson’s detective agency, ready for anything after their first successful murder solve.
After all that online buzz, they’re in phenomenal demand. Can Hobson & Choi solve a kidnapping, play chicken with corporate crime, beat back gentrification, save a dog from drug dealers and head off violent backlash from their last case?
Or will grim revelations about Hobson’s past leave them floundering in the chaos?
Rush Jobs collects the second major storyline in the Hobson & Choi saga, #1 on Jukepop Serials and #2 in Dark Comedy on Amazon, adding brand new chapters and scenes to the case.
Also included: bonus story Infernal Accounting, exclusive to this book. An unfortunate accountant is terrified of his first day working for Rush Recruitment – but they’re only a temp agency, right? How bad can it be?

Launch Details

This time, thanks to better planning on my part, we should have the print and e-editions on sale on launch day. The same outlets as last time – Amazon for print, most popular e-shops for the digital edition. I’ll also hopefully get copies in the Big Green Bookshop again, though that may take a tad longer.

As well as shoving the book on sale and tweeting about it, there’s also a Hobson & Choi Blog Tour going on around the launch, starting on the 19th Jan and running for two weeks, spreading the word around the internet. So that’ll be exciting.

If you want to register your interest in Rush Jobs, it is already up on Goodreads. If you want to be considered for a review copy, drop me an email. And if you’ve not read the first one yet, well…

The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf goes cheap!

Wolves do not go “cheep”, I know that.Anyway. To mark the upcoming release of book two, I’ve slashed the price of book one to give everyone a chance to catch up. It should be around a pound (or local equivalent, taking into account VAT, etc etc) on most e-vendors, so if you haven’t read it, now seems a decent time.

If you already read the webserial and just want to check out the new extended back-up story in the book edition, this might help.

The print edition, I’m afraid, will not be going cheaper, as it’s already down as far as I can really go. Sorry, paper-fans.

Anyway, check it out, and then prepare yourself for the Rush Jobs experience, as we deepen the universe

OUT NOW IN EBOOK: The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf – Hobson & Choi: Case One

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The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf is out in ebook!

This is the first volume in the Hobson & Choi series, a crime saga with a heavy twist of dark comedy. It shows how my two mismatched detectives begin bickering, whilst also solving their first murder. This involves Twitter, a wolf and food – loads of food, in fact.

I’ll include the full blurb in the remainder of this post, but for those who have heard the H&C sales pitch a bunch of times, let’s cut to the all-important buy-buttons. Hope you enjoy the book, I’m very proud of it, and if you do go for it, consider reviewing it somewhere, be it Amazon, other book-buying sites, the book’s Goodreads page, your own blog, social media, or anywhere else which lets you have a book-opinion.

And remember, if you’ve read Case One on the H&C webserial already, there is an eight thousand word book-exclusive bonus story here to make it worth your while. Print book fans – that edition shouldn’t be too far away now. Proof is en route for my approval.

The Full Sales Pitch

“If we get 400 followers, John Hobson will solve that nasty wolf-murder case for free! Fight the thing himself if he has to! #HobsonVsWolf!”

Angelina Choi was only trying to drum up some Twitter followers and make a good impression on her first day interning at John Hobson’s one-man detective agency.

But the campaign went viral and now they have a murder to solve, no money coming in, and an unwilling Hobson faced with battling some enormous beast.

With both follower and body counts rising, can they crack the case without offending everyone or being eaten by a huge dog?

The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf is the first case starring Hobson & Choi, a bickering, mismatched detective duo for 21st century London. This book collects the debut storyline of the hit darkly comic crime web serial, extensively rewritten and improved for this definitive edition.

Also included: book-exclusive bonus story The Left Hand Is Always Right, grim tale from a dark corner of Hobson & Choi’s London – The Left Hand, budget pub of crime.

Even more details on the dedicated Hobson & Choi homepage! If you have any unanswered questions about anything Girl-Who-Tweeted-Wolf-related, email me and we’ll hopefully be able to come to some accord.

Thank you and goodbye for now. I’m off to enjoy the day. In case the buttons up top didn’t work for anyone, here are all those book-buy links in old-fashioned text form.

TWO new stories by me in Seventh Star Press anthologies!

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It’s been a while since I had any new fiction out there except for regular Hobson & Choi updates, but the wait is over. Pleasant genre-merchants Seventh Star Press have included my stories in two (yes, two) of their upcoming anthologies. They’ve done cover reveals at their own blog in the last few days, we’re definitely all public now, so let’s talk about it a bit.

First up, in the Hero’s Best Friend anthology, I have a story called The Violet Curse. The theme of the book is animal companions – all manner of hero-helping creatures from cute internet-ready cats to that armoured lion thingy on the cover. Find out more here.

My specific piece is about a loyal dog who wants nothing more than to help its owner – the resident fantasy hero – but discovers she might be a crucial part of his undoing instead, thanks to a pesky purple magic spell. Bummer, right?

And you can now buy Hero’s Best Friend in electronic format in the following places by clicking on their respective links:Amazon US – Amazon UK – Nook US

Elsewhere, in A Chimerical World: Tales Of The Unseelie Court, there are some evil fairies about. Note that this is a two-book set of anthologies, with the good section of the fey appearing in Tales Of The Seelie Court, but I am only in the Unseelie volume. This is because I am a terrible person. Full details of both books right over here.

My story is called The Fool And His Money and is thoroughly contemporary. You know how that economic crash happened recently, and everyone explained it as “Well, they thought there was all this money, but it didn’t really exist”? It turns out there’s a fairy-based explanation for that…

And you can now buy A Chimerical World: Tales of the Unseelie Court in electronic format in the following places by clicking on their respective links:Amazon US – Amazon UK – Nook US

Both books should be available for print ordering a week after that – rest assured I will be posting the links up when that happens. In the meantime, if you want a brief preview from the actual text of both stories, I intend to put out such a thing on the new mailing list soon, so definitely subscribe to that, either in the blog sidebar or by clicking on this link right here.

Woo! Publication again! Twice! Pretty excited by this, guys. Now, back to angsting over my editing/synopsis/choice of socks…

"Blood Will Stream" – New story available in actual book!

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Hi! I have news!

A medium-length story I wrote called Blood Will Stream is in a new anthology called Standing In The Kitchen At Parties, from indie publisher Deserted By Dignity. (Yes, both those names do work pretty well for me.)

The story itself is about one woman’s quest to kill her boyfriend and stream it live over the internet. And I work part-time in IT and use a lot of social networking sites, so it’s obviously going to be 100% technically accurate.

Anyway, this does mean you’ll need to spend some currency to get hold of it, but the story is 12,000 words long, so you’re getting a decent chunk of me for your money. (That’s twelve times as long as the stories I post here on Fridays.) The publisher has posted a brief preview of my part on their website.

You can buy the book from Amazon UK, Amazon US, probably other branches of Amazon too. For those of you who are not made of money and don’t care about having a real book, you can also get it in PDF format from Lulu for a much cheaper price.

(Although, for what it’s worth, I have the proper book and it’s a nice package. I’m rather pleased.)

Anyway, this is a big step for me, so I’m excited. If anyone buys the book and wants to let me know what you thought, there is a comment section below, or I also have an email address.