Now is your best chance to find my entire ebook collection for a steal at Smashwords as part of their End of Year Sale through the end of 2024!
Including… ♡ Oak King Holly King, a Victorian fae romantasy between a fae warrior and a mortal clerk. ♡ Fiorenzo, a fantasy-of-manners romance featuring swordplay, hurt/comfort, and a happily-ever-after. ♡ Mr Warren’s Profession, a Victorian cross-class romance featuring hurt/comfort and a happily-ever-after. ♡ Hold Fast, a Victorian romance between a whaling harpooner who inherits a baronetcy and the estate agent tasked with turning him from sailor to gentleman. ♡ The Haunting of Heatherhurst Hall, a Victorian gothic romance rife with horror and heartache, wherein an American heiress makes an ill-advised marriage to bring herself closer the woman who’s stolen her heart.
WHERE Tatnuck Bookseller Westborough Shopping Center 18 Lyman Street Westborough, MA
Tatnuck is a charming independent bookshop with enormous selection, wonderful accessibility (wide aisles, single floor, and automatic doors), and an expansive parking lot – just as easy to get to as it is to get lost in.
The Oak King Holly King audiobook is on wicked sale, thanks to Chirp!
The sale runs from November 28th (today!) to December 26th (aka Boxing Day – a date of some significance to Mr. Grigsby, as readers of Tales from Blackthorn Briar know well).
If you or a friend have been waiting for the perfect opportunity to snag the Oak King Holly King audiobook, this is your chance – grab it today!
Oak King Holly King(a queer romantasy wherein a fearsome fae warrior falls head-over-heels for a Victorian clerk) and Tales from Blackthorn Briar (an anthology of sequels to Oak King Holly King) are both on sale for just 99 cents!
Perfect for readers who enjoy…
fae folklore
Victorian shenanigans
big buff guys who just wanna be soft
sharp little guys who are tired of being kicked around
lush fantasy worlds, liminal spaces, cozy cottagecore vibes, and queer community.
We’ve already crushed our first stretch goal. Can we meet our second and fund the sequel audiobook Throw His Heart Over?
Your support – either by backing the campaign directly or by sharing it with friends or through social media – could be the final push we need to make it happen.
Rewards include… • ebook deals – grab the complete Sebastian Nothwell back catalogue for just $10! • signed and annotated paperbacks of Mr Warren’s Profession, Throw His Heart Over, and Oak King Holly King – more details on annotated books here! • the Oak King Holly King audiobook at a steal – narrated by the one and only Gary Furlong! • and, of course, the Mr Warren’s Profession audiobook itself!
Mr Warren’s Profession is a gay Victorian cross-class romance featuring hurt/comfort and a happily-ever-after – and the audiobook could be yours if you check out the Kickstarter today!
The campaign ends September 30th. As of this writing we’re already 70% to our goal. Your support – either by backing the campaign directly or by sharing it with friends or through social media – could be the final push we need to make it happen.
Rewards include… • ebook deals – grab the complete Sebastian Nothwell back catalogue for just $10! • signed and annotated paperbacks of Mr Warren’s Profession AND Oak King Holly King– more details on annotated books here! • the Oak King Holly King audiobook at a steal – narrated by the one and only Gary Furlong! • and, of course, the Mr Warren’s Profession audiobook itself – which won’t exist without this Kickstarter!
Mr Warren’s Profession is a gay Victorian cross-class romance featuring hurt/comfort and a happily-ever-after – and the audiobook could be yours if you check out the Kickstarter today!
We’re already over halfway to our goal. Your support – either by backing the campaign directly or by sharing it with friends or through social media – could be the final push we need to make it happen.
Rewards include… • ebook deals – grab the complete Sebastian Nothwell back catalogue for just $10! • signed and annotated paperbacks – more details on annotated books here! • the Oak King Holly King audiobook at a steal – narrated by the one and only Gary Furlong! • and, of course, the Mr Warren’s Profession audiobook itself – which won’t exist without this Kickstarter!
Mr Warren’s Profession is a gay Victorian cross-class romance featuring hurt/comfort and a happily-ever-after – and the audiobook could be yours if you check out the Kickstarter today!
Every Kickstarter has a goal. An amount of funding is achieved, and the project is created. Simple, elegant, beautiful. It worked for the Oak King Holly King audiobook, and I’m very hopeful it will do the same for Mr Warren’s Profession.
A stretch goal is an extra bonus goal that kicks in after the original funding goal is reached. When a stretch goal is reached, it allows us to create even more things than the original Kickstarter!
For the Mr Warren’s Profession audiobook Kickstarter, we have two stretch goals. Both are centered around the sequel novella Throw His Heart Over, an equestrian continuation of Aubrey and Lindsey’s romance.
If the campaign reaches $6k, we’ll have the funds to reformat Throw His Heart over (complete with cover redesign) to print through IngramSpark, which will unlock signed and annotated copies as backer rewards.
If the campaign reaches $7.5k, we’ll have enough to record the Throw His Heart Over audiobook in tandem with the Mr Warren’s Profession audiobook, and unlock the sequel audiobook as a backer reward.
But why?
Throw His Heart Over – redesign
At present, Throw His Heart Over is printed through Amazon with a cover designed by yours truly.
This means it is not available to libraries or brick-and-mortar bookshops. They stock from a different printer, IngramSpark. This is the printer I use for almost all my other books to maximize accessibility and quality.
Amazon creates paperbacks by crunching the ebook into print format, with mixed results. IngramSpark, on the other hand, not only offers wider availability of the resulting book but also requires a file especially formatted for print. This results in a more thoughtfully-presented and more consistently high-quality paperback. Honestly it will be a relief to know that Throw His Heart Over will now match Mr Warren’s Profession inside and out.
In short, reformatting will result in library availability, indie bookshop availability, and an increased print quality.
The cover painting for Throw His Heart Over will remain the same. What will change is the style of the title and other text on the outside of the book.
This may not sound like a very big change. However, please consider the following examples.
Left: The Haunting of Heatherhurst Hall, cover typography by me. Right: The Haunting of Heatherhurst Hall, cover typography by an actual graphic designer.Left: Hold Fast, cover typography by me. Right: Hold Fast, cover typography by an actual graphic designer.
Left: Throw His Heart Over, cover typography by me. Right: Throw His Heart Over, cover typography by an actual graphic designer???
Kelley York of Sleepy Fox Studio is the graphic designer behind all my other book covers. Her skills allow the cover artist’s paintings to shine to full effect—including the wonderful work Jan Falk of Thistlearts Studio did for the Mr Warren’s Profession cover painting.
With the redesign, Throw His Heart Over will look just as gorgeous as all other books, including Mr Warren’s Profession. Plus with the redesign Books one and two of Aubrey & Lindsey will (finally!) match each other and look nice on a shelf side-by-side. All the more important when ensuring that the signed and annotated editions are looking their best, suitable for collectors and pride-of-place in personal libraries.
So there’s our first stretch goal—the Throw His Heart Over paperback redesign, which will unlock signed and annotated paperbacks as additional backer rewards.
Our second stretch goal is…
Throw His Heart Over – audiobook
Simply put, this will allow Gary to record Mr Warren’s Profession and its sequel Throw His Heart Over back-to-back in one fell swoop. Very convenient for him, and very fortunate for us, because it gives us two audiobooks for one Kickstarter.
None of this will be possible without the power of stretch goals.
There’s a new episode of Right Here Write Queer waiting for you in your favorite podcast app!
Tess Carletta (she/her) interviews Sebastian Nothwell (he/him) about his gay romance novel Mr Warren’s Profession, including historical research, Victorian engineering, and the strange and stubborn road to indie publishing.
Tess Carletta (she/her) is the author of Kit & Basie, a queer cozy magical-realism romance. You can connect with her at her website: tesscarletta.com
Sebastian Nothwell (he/him) is the author of Mr Warren’s Profession, a queer historical romance currently crowdfunding its audiobook. You can check out the campaign on Kickstarter.
Sebastian Nothwell 