Nick Bryan

The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf

The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf – FREE AT LAST (on digital)

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The first Hobson & Choi book, The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf, has been around since early 2013 in various forms: on Jukepop Serials, podcasted, in the self-published book and recently in serialised form on Wattpad.

Well, as the H&C Empire begins gearing up for its third installment (and I’ve already written the first draft of Case Four), I’d like everyone to at least give my grim-yet-fun urban crime book series a shot so I can have some chance of buying that heavily armoured central London fortress.

For that exact reason, the very first H&C case is now free on all major ebook platforms that I could upload and set it as free on.

So if you’ve been meaning to try the series but held back by money, it now costs nothing. How long this price will last, I don’t know – I am a man, not a publishing machine – but at least the rest of 2015, I think.

I considered announcing this on Tuesday with the cover reveal, but because I didn’t get it set up in time wanted to maximise the impact of the strategic announcement on the internet content media #landscape, here’s the freebie news a few days later.

If you’ve already read the first H&C story arc in one format or another, consider grabbing the freebie anyway for Book-One-only bonus short story The Left Hand Is Always Right, which I enjoyed writing muchly.

Anyway, that’s enough text considering all I’m announcing is The Free Thing Is Free. Go now to the dedicated page to begin yoinking from your ebook retailer of choice. And if you enjoy it, you can move quickly on to Case Two and (soon) Three, feeling good about your real contribution towards my fortress.

ADMINARAMA – H&C on Wattpad! Competition answer! BOOK THREE LOOMS!

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Sundry bits and bobs on the blog today – might try for a full-length post in a few days, but for now, sundry newsbursts from Nick-land…

The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf on WHAT pad?

If you want to read The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf, the first book in my darkly-comic crime Hobson & Choi series, without shelling out cash, I’m currently serialising it on Wattpad, the popular story-sharing site. Plus you can read H&C old-school, serialised with cliffhangers, a format I still have a huge amount of affection for.

Chapters are going up every other day (next one tomorrow) and there’s only fifteen of them, so it should be all there fairly soon.

Check it out and if you have a Wattpad account and feel like throwing in a vote or comment, go for it.

Phantom of the Space Opera – Competition ongoing!

Remember my competition from last week? The one where you had to guess which chapter I wrote in the team-written book from Nine Worlds? Well, no winners yet, so because I feel like it, rather than tell you the answer, I’m going to just leave it hanging.

Once one human being (not one of the ones who has told me they got the answer in a way other than reading it) emails the correct answer to nick@nickbryan.com, I’ll send them a copy of The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf, signed or unsigned as per their will. Maybe some other gift as well, I’ve got a few spare comics and stuff hanging around.

Once that happens, I’ll post the right answer here. Check the original blog post for the full details of what that’s all about.

Trapped In The Bargain Basement soon to be released!

Last and definitely not least, the third Hobson & Choi book Trapped In The Bargain Basement is finally more or less ready to be released into the community! It’s taken some work – specifically, a set of rewrites so massive that I’ve had to remove the original webseries version from the internet because it embarrasses me.

But we have a final text, nearly a final cover, it’s all very close. I’m not going to say anything specific like a date yet, but Trapped should be with you by this time next month, let’s put it that way. So even sooner than that, there might be a cover reveal. Gosh.

However, if you have a blog and would like a review copy so you can post something near the release date, do email me or something and I can probably get it to you reasonably soon. If you definitely have a blog/other outlet for reviews and desperately want to cover the whole series, I may even be able to supply all three.

How To Be Number One! (In the Dark Comedy category on Amazon US!)

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News that social media followers probably already know! For around a day, dawn to dusk on Thursday 12th March 2015, my self-published crime epic The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf was the most popularest, bestest book in the Dark Comedy category on Amazon US. If you don’t believe me, here’s a screenshot.

BEHOLD THE ORANGE STRIPE OF VALID LITERATURE

Now, much as I’d love to pretend this was an entirely natural spurt of love for me, I did require some advertising to achieve this. For anyone who wants a tiny wee glimpse into the inner workings of the self-publishing DIY promotion world, harnessing the resources available to reach the very top of a fairly uncompetitive Amazon category, this is your moment.

Quite cool, as the bulk of my existing readers are in the United Kingdom, so sales across the Atlantic had been quite modest until now. This is an important step in breaking America. If Doctor Who and Sherlock can do it, then so can Hobson & Choi!

As you can see, I also placed in some more challenging crime-related categories

Also, I was in the mid-80s of the overall humour (or “humor”) category on the site, which I was quite pleased with.

Anyway – long story short, I advertised the book with Fussy Librarian on Tuesday 10th (costing $7) and Ereader News Today on Wednesday 11th (costing $35), and by the morning of Thursday 12th, I was atop my category, so mission accomplished.

If you’re wondering how many book sales this requires, it’s about 85. So for my total $42 investment, that’s about two books per dollar. Not bad, although due to the first book in the series being a cheap hook-them-in deal, I didn’t quite make my initial investment back.

I found the people to advertise with by lurking for a while in the Writer’s Cafe section of KBoards. Although actually posting isn’t mandatory, a lot of people do share their experience, particularly of different promoters. There’s even a spreadsheet here if you just want a big list.

Obviously, the long-term dream is for the book to either sell itself or make a huge profit on advertising. More short-term, it’d be pretty sweet if some of the 85 people who bought the first book just now leave a review and/or pick up the second one.

So yup, this is the ultimate plan. Promote first book, hope it fires through to later books. Ereader News Today is one of the biggest and most reliable promotions, it seems, so future efforts may not be quite as huge.So, in case anyone was interested, that was my achievement this week. We’re still at #12 in Dark Comedy as of this writing, so that’s nice. If you want to help me achieve pleasure via numbers, feel free to buy the Hobson & Choi darkly comic crime books, but no pressure. I blog for love.

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

Interview with me about The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf!

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My lovely book cover!

I have not written a blog post today, but it’s okay, because Julianne Benford has interviewed me for her blog, so I can just link to that!

It’s a fun interview, I talk a bit about my inspirations and process, throw in a few jokes. Give it a look and report back.

And yes, the interviewer is also my girlfriend so there is a nepotism element in there. But don’t worry, it’s definitely addressed in the post.

Should reading that inspire you to pick up a copy of the book, here’s the page with the links. And if it reminds you you’ve read the book and still need to write a review on Amazon/Goodreads/your blog/somewhere else, that’s cool too.

Oh, and I 100% finalised my design brief for Book Two last night, so that’s looming in the distance, ready to bubble over at any moment. But for now, let’s focus on The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf. Read interview, buy, enjoy.

The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf – NOW IN PRINT

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So, after a few weeks of slow roll-out, the final step of publication is here: my first book The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf is now in print! Next time, I may try and do it all at once for maximum impact, but this time, here it is a week later.

Basically: it’s a darkly comic London crime novel, the first in the Hobson & Choi series. More details about the book, along with enthusiastic review quotes and such, on our very own official Hobson & Choi homepage.

But long story short, the print edition is available from Amazon here, or the Big Green Bookshop if you happen to be in London (and I’ve remembered to give them some stock).