What a week…

ryderocox — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 00:12:12 +0000

12/14/2022

AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH~!

Ok, now that that’s out of the way, hello! Happy Wednesday! Welcome back to my blog! It’s been a week for me, and not the good kind, but I’m still fighting that good fight and writing that good smut, so that’s a plus, right? And as always, being able to share my journey with you all, including my successes and failures, is a huge help for me, so thanks again for being here!

This week’s updates include a rant, new promos, a bit about my plans for the future, and another more in-depth ‘about me,’ section on what’s been making things so hard lately. As always, my mailing list subscribers got this update before I posted it anywhere else, so if you want to be in that exclusive club, be sure to sign up here!

And leave me a comment to let me know if you have any questions, suggestions, or just wanna talk about my cat-children or tell me to get well soon. They love you already, I promise, and I’d love to company while I’m fighting off this flare!

Do me a favor and Look at all these steamy MM Romance books <3

Wait wait! Stop! Please don’t scroll past! Believe me, I’m as tired of sharing this link as you are of hearing about it, but this is the best way I know of to boost my ratings on BookFunnel and allow myself into bigger and better promos so that I don’t have to harp on these so much And if I get enough of a following, I can quit my day job, write more smut more often, and get my smexy books out even faster!

For those of you who are new, I’ve been trying to grow my following. One of the best ways to grow is to get more folks to join my mailing list, and in order to do that, I purchased a BookFunnel subscription and joined some badass promos!

Click here to check out the sexy gay books here!

I get ‘karma points’ for every time someone clicks my referral link to these promos, even if you don’t buy anything or click on any of the books linked there. Higher karma grants me access to more, bigger, and better promotions, so I’d really appreciate it if you could please click the link below even if they don’t sound like your thing.

However, the one for December is all MM sexy books, so I think you’ll find at least something good there. I know I did! And many are free on Kindle Unlimited as well, so you might not even have to pay for them!

Click here to check out the sexy gay books here!

And if you really want to help me out, check out…

If you already clicked the links in the last section, HUGE thanks! But this is something different! This is a feature-swap, which I’ll be doing with other authors a few times of a month. They’ll be sharing my book in their weekly list and I’ll share one of theirs with you. Just like the promo above, Bookfunnel tracks how many clicks I send to this url and gives me a ‘score’ that other promoters can see and decide whether or not they want to work with me based on that, so please click it and check it out for me <3

Click here to get A Devilish Saturnalia, a Hellbond Novella by Alexa Piper

I couldn’t pass this one up just based on the cover. Those WINGS I might have to pick up this series based on just the cover art alone!

I say series because this book is NOT a standalone. The events in A Devilish Saturnalia take place right after The Devil’s Saturnalia, making it book 7 (I think?) in the series.

Click here to get A Devilish Saturnalia, a Hellbond Novella by Alexa Piper

Here’s a quick synopsis:

Lionel and Lucifer are spending the holidays in Scotland. They are set to enjoy a quiet Midwinter, and Lionel is looking forward to spending this time with his found family, although having a family is still new for him.

Lucifer’s goals for this holiday season are simple: convince his necromancer to willingly stay in bed with Lucifer, but of course, that is just a fantasy. Lucifer knows it’s not what his necromancer needs, and the cruel side of love is that even the Devil has to put his lover first.

Snowed in, will these two and those who love them find something to do to pass the longest night of the year? In this sweet and cozy read, you will find out.

Click here to get A Devilish Saturnalia, a Hellbond Novella by Alexa Pipe

Ok, ok, promos over for the week. Thanks again for those who have been engaging with the links here, on social media, or on my site! As always, I’m totally open to other, less-invaisve (for you) ways to promote instead, so lmk if you’ve got any!

Now for that rant…..

Time for more frustrating life lessons with Ryder… This week, I learned that Amazon sucks. Ok, no, I knew that, we probably all know that to one degree or another, but this week they annoyed me in a specific new way that I hadn’t experienced before.

Basically, Amazon’s terms of service for what can and can’t be sold there are vague and arbitrarily enforced. They do this for legal reasons that I won’t bore you with (feel free to hit me up if you want the extended version of this rant LOL) so it’s not likely to change. But I managed to run afoul of them this past week.

What did I do? What heinous crime did I commit!? Nothing. I changed the price of Discovery, lowering it to $0.99 since it’s so short, which switched me from a high commission to a low commission through Amazon (you have to sell your stuff for more if you want Amazon to give you a higher commission). This somehow meant that the book had to go through review again and was flagged as breaking TOS.They wouldn’t tell me how, and I went through 3 different reps before I was able to get it back up, so if you wanted to read Discovery this week and couldn’t find it, that’s why. It’s all fixed now, but damn was it an extra frustration that I didn’t need…

However…

This means that, since Discovery is back up, I’m still planning to release the next installment in the Inheritance series next! I’m taking a little time off for the holidays, so it won’t be until early 2023, but the first draft is done and it’s just editing and formatting from here on out! And cover design, of course. Still looking for a good cover artist if anyone knows one!

If you haven’t read Discovery yet, now is the time! The next installment (title pending lol) will be a direct continuation of the story with Jun, Theo, and Troy, so you’ll want to catch up for sure!

Why is Ryder broken?

As promised, more getting to know the author – me! Mainly, why am I so broken? Basically, I have an immune system disorder where my body flags certain things like skin, joints, etc, as ‘bad’ and attacks them. So I’m 35 with arthritis and occasionally need a cane to walk around…yaaaaay. I’m on a medicine that helps, but it ‘helps’ by squashing my immune system, which means I’m much more likely to get sick, and much more likely for whatever illness I get to be more severe.

It also only helps most of the time. Right now, I’m having a ‘flare,’ which basically means that the medicine isn’t strong enough to keep my batshit immune system from wreaking havoc on my body. I’m in pain and it’s hard to move around. Luckily, I have my partner who does the hard stuff, like lift the heavy milk jugs and open jars, which I basically can’t do right now.

On top of that, I am also ADHD, which is always a fun challenge. I take medicine for it, but it’s still a lot to deal with. I also suffer from treatment-resistant depression, which always seems to get worse in the winter. That’s not all, but those are the big ones which affect my productivity and quality of life most.

I’m not sharing all this for sympathy or anything – I honestly do pretty well most of the time! But I did want to be honest about my life and my struggles so that if there does come a time where something may need to be postponed or something, you understand why.

Latest Books

Practice Makes Perfect

Get it now FREE on Bookfunnel!

Sparks fly when best friends Mateo and Morgan decide to work together to get good at dating. They’re two good-looking college guys, they just need a little practice.

Too bad they have no one to practice with but each other.

Hey, at least Morgan looks cute in a skirt, right?

Getting dumped sucks, and nobody knows the truth of that statement more than Mateo and Morgan. They’ve been best friends for a couple years, but neither of them can keep a girlfriend for more than a couple months! Mateo hasn’t even kissed a girl, let alone get past first base with one. So of course he turns to his bestie, Morgan, for help. And, after all, practice makes perfect, right..?

Killer Love

Harris McGuire and Dalton Gardener are both assassins utilized by the mafia. Dalton is one of the highest professionals on the totem pole, known for his precision and planning, who works for the top crime family in the area. Harris, on the other hand, is a brutal yet efficient freelancer who various mafia outfits have been known to contract. The two assassins’ paths cross on occasion and they enjoy a friendly rivalry, with Dalton teasing Harris for not ‘settling down’ to work with a single mafia family and Harris thinking that Dalton is the more stuck up and limited of the two due to the mafia’s rules which he must follow to a T.
But one day, unbeknownst to each other, they both receive peculiar assignments – to kill the other assassin. Dalton’s comes from his mafia boss, whereas Harris’ is from a strange anonymous (but wealthy) client. The two men chase each other around the city attempting to complete their jobs, each using his own skill set to the best of his ability.
But when Harris corners Dalton in his home, it’s not fighting that he has on his mind…

Discovery (Inheritance 1)

When Theo’s Uncle Harold dies suddenly in a car accident and leaves everything he owns to his nephew, Theo is more than a bit surprised. But he and his boyfriend, Jun, need a place to stay, and the mansion is more than spacious enough for the two of them. But when Theo starts hearing odd noises coming from the study after a few days, he starts to think that the place is haunted.

The truth is much worse.

In a small hidden room, Theo finds a naked man behind bars…

Tainted Belief

Bad: An asexual Catholic priest falls for the choir director at his church.
Worse: That choir director just happens to be an incubus in disguise.
For as long as he’s been an adult, Father Nikolas has been a priest. He went from high school to seminary school and then found a flock to lead in a small suburb of London. He’s never needed or wanted anything else, really. But when he finds his eyes lingering on the choir director long after everyone else has left, Niko begins to question everything.
Leviathan was cast out from Heaven and he chose to become an incubus, pursuing the pleasures of mankind instead of their torment. He sees Father Nikolas as just another meal, someone to play with, seduce, nourish himself with, and leave. But all that changes when he finds himself growing feelings for the priest.
Representation: trans main character (FtM), asexual main character, male homosexual main characters, POC main character

More coming soon!

That’s it for this week, but I’m still working on those ideas for how to make these newsletters more fun and engaging with things like giveaways and more ways to get involved in my life and my journey as an author. I’d like to grow my list to around 4 times what it is now before we do any of that, but if you’ve got something you’d like to see me do here, even share something you’ve made with everyone, let me know by dropping a comment below or sending me a message and I’ll do my best to make it happen!

new book announcements – Ryder O. Cox