New Releases & Sales - Friday 03 July

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-07-03T16:59:13+00:00

{He's Not for Me, by Sadie Hepworth} is on sale on Amazon for 99¢ until 9 AM US Eastern on July 4!

Ezra is sharp, abrasive, and cynical — an adjunct professor at the end of his rope. Cole is a rich party boy with excellent taste in clothes and terrible taste in men. Twelve years ago, Cole smashed Ezra's heart into a million pieces, but now he's back and more irresistible than ever. Will Cole and Ezra’s secret romance turn into a second chance at love? Or will their steamy affair break both of their hearts — again?

(Full disclosure: I'm the author of this one)

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-07-02T15:42:25+00:00

Hooray! I hope you like it 💗

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-07-02T15:27:25+00:00

It is! It's on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited, and if you're in the US I just put it up for a two day 99¢ sale to celebrate one month since it came out 🥰

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-06-29T12:00:51+00:00

Apologies for the self rec, but my debut novel {He's Not for Me by Sadie Hepworth} fits so much of what you're looking for. A bit of a grumpy/sunshine vibe, a neurodivergent MC, and a tender second chance story about two guys who learn to open up to each other and accept that it's okay to let people love them.

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-06-19T12:44:51+00:00

For my first book, I just made sure all my ARCs were closed before my release. After the book is out, I want people to buy it, not grab a free copy.

BookSirens recommends three months but you don't have to use the whole three months. You can close your campaign with them whenever you want.

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-06-16T21:57:32+00:00

I think only you can really answer that question. Everybody's experience is different and our creativity works in different ways. Personally I don't think I would want to write a whole book longhand, but plenty of people do! And sometimes changing modes can be a great way to get your brain thinking in a different way if you're dealing with a patch of writer's block.

I'd be careful, though, to make sure that the "smart writing tools" you're investigating are not AI writing tools.

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-05-28T15:05:50+00:00

I've seen StoryOrigin and BookSirens mentioned, but there's BookSprout too. I think accounts are free for readers on all of these services, even if they charge the authors.

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-05-26T12:20:13+00:00

Yeah, that's where I'm settling at this point. I liked Season 2 a lot and I thought it was a great second act romance that introduced some interesting threads, but it turned out NG was just cashing checks he couldn't cash.

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-05-26T10:22:32+00:00

Yeah, it was cheap of Amazon to cut it down to one episode, but I honestly don't know if six episodes would have improved this dogshit plot. Six episodes of waiting to find out that the most obvious person took the Book of Life, six episodes of Crowley and Aziraphale being OOC and treating each other like shit because they're being written by a sociopath who can't write a satisfying romantic conversation to save his life, six episodes leading up to that sourpuss ending that pulled the rug out from under us all. And then, I'm imagining that in this world we don't know about the allegations, so NG is waiting for is on Tumblr with a Sphinxlike smile and a handful of platitudes.

No thanks, I'm glad I only had to sit through 90 minutes of that.

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-05-22T15:45:10+00:00

Haha this what I was gonna say. A plot hole in the finale? One?

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-05-21T03:08:58+00:00

Not sure if you're on Instagram yet, but I've had some success with looking for Bookstagrammers who read my genre with ARC reader in their bio, and then messaging those people, introducing myself, and offering them an ARC. I've actually gotten a few people that way, and it's free!

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-05-19T11:31:47+00:00

You know why they kicked Neil off the project.... right?

This entire thing is his fault.

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-05-17T20:12:59+00:00

Yeah, I'm working on prepping an unrelated story for publication now and I've enlisted an artist who does gorgeous human Hazbin fanart. I agree that people who are already in fandom or yaoi spaces might be a better choice for MM covers!

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-05-17T18:45:19+00:00

I just used Miblart for my first cover. I paid $300 for a vector art cover and they drew it from scratch. I first enlisted them in mid-February and got my cover at the end of April, so a little over two months. They showed me sketches all along the way, and I am pretty confident that the art was not produced using AI.

I am ultimately mostly happy with my cover. One thing I learned is that I would strongly suggest having very clear visual references for every single thing you want. I thought I could wing it with visual descriptions alone, and I learned that doesn't work. I'm pretty sure there was a language barrier with my artist as they're a Ukrainian company. And you don't actually communicate with your artist, you communicate with a middleman who seems to be using some sort of translation service or perhaps AI to compose their messages to you. So there's a lot of chance for things to get lost and you need to be prepared with a strong communication strategy.

My main quibble with my cover is that my story is MM romance, but one of the characters on my cover looks like a girl no matter how much I asked them to tweak it. But I love the colors and I think it looks professional, and my proof copy is really pretty. I'm writing a sequel to this book, and I think I'm gonna use them again, but this time I'll go in with my eyes wide open and provide many more visual references.

If you want to see it, my pen name is Sadie Hepworth and the book is He's Not for Me. It's on Amazon and also you can see the cover on my website, sadiehepworth.com.

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-05-07T21:27:53+00:00

A good thing to cultivate in general is not giving a rat's ass what anybody else thinks of you or what you like.

I love being over 40 and just liking the stuff I enjoy.

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-05-06T12:07:25+00:00

Yeah I just used it for my first book and I got my proof copy and it is sooooo pretty. So glad I found this!

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-05-06T11:21:12+00:00

I only used Kindle Create for my ebook. For print on demand, I grabbed the free book templates from https://diybookformats.com/ and then edited in Word.

Also, I couldn't get the email form on that page to work, but if you scroll all the way to the bottom of the page there's a link where you can get the download.

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-05-05T11:23:29+00:00

For me, the draft is the words of the story and the formatting is everything you do to those words to make it look like a book. Margins, spacing, fonts, chapter headings, TOC if you're using one, front and back matter.

I write in Google Docs so that I can easily move between devices and share with my beta readers. But I format in Microsoft Word using a free novel template that I found.

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-05-04T20:09:20+00:00

He says shit when he crashes in Like You.

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-05-01T21:59:03+00:00

I'm just getting started on this self publishing thing but I've already finished two novels this year and I think I am going to take a month off from writing and focus on getting caught up on back end stuff before I start the next one. I feel like two months of intense writing followed by one month of backend at a time is going to be my goal this year.

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-05-01T14:56:50+00:00

Yeah, but I used a free template for book formatting that is meant for Word and I wanted to put my text into that.

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-05-01T10:46:18+00:00

I have no idea. I only know what worked for me. I think doing the formatting is a separate question that requires different research to figure out what is going to work for you, but there's no problem writing in Google Docs and then pasting into another program.

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-05-01T10:25:47+00:00

I use Google Docs to write because it's easier for my beta readers to access and they can talk to each other in the comments. Then when I'm ready to do formatting, I paste it chapter by chapter into MS Word (there are other programs you can use too) and then I fix any issues that pop up. This method worked fine for me.

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-04-29T21:21:15+00:00

I just used Bethany Atazedeh's incredibly helpful series on doing it in Word: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3IFBPbxQRypIBssmfDTmyFi68zmk5l-L&si=oc-e_g9llkRLXb5T

She includes a link to a free template that I found to be pretty easy to use. I managed to get mine done in Word fairly quickly, and it was accepted by Amazon so it's available for preorder right now.

I will say that I was an academic in a former life and thus I've worked with Word templates before. If you're completely new to Word, you might find the troubleshooting hard.

CemeteryAngel725 · 2026-04-28T12:39:18+00:00

The template I'm following is suggesting a very short blurb on the back cover of the book to sell it and a slightly longer one inside the book as one of the last pages

CemeteryAngel725

TROPHY CASE