#book swag

[inkcurlsandknives]

Look at my mini Saints of Storm and Sorrow Match "Books" these will be swag giveaways at my Houston Events coming up this week and next July 18th 6pm at the FANHS Author fair and July 22nd 6:30pm at Brazos books!

Head to gabriellabuba.com/#events for all the details I hope to see you there!

May your fury be a beacon!

[torpublishinggroup]

The Atlas Complex—the conclusion to Olivie Blake's twisty and intrigue-laden dark academia fantasy comes out early next year, and we're giving away these cool enamel pins to everyone who preorders a copy!

Just upload a copy of your receipt here to enter, and then you'll have a few months and change to prepare yourself for this book to blow your mind.

POWER IS TAKEN

[tjalexandernyc]

Want to get a FREE signed bookplate and character card?

I'm going to be giving them away in next month's newsletter! You can sign up here.

Totally free, no need to do anything except tell me where to mail 'em. August newsletter will have all the details. AND I'll send internationally for all those worldly girlies (gender neutral). While supplies last, of course.

I love this art card so much (by @hattedhedgehog). I really made it my entire personality for the last six months.

Just a lil thank you to everyone who bought/borrowed CHEF'S CHOICE. Or who plans to. Or I guess is just interested in a signed sticker? That's fine too. 💜

[noahhawthorneauthor]

Presenting Quentin and Elochian chibis! They are so bashful and cute and totally THEM. Thank you @gagakumadraws for another fantastic commission, I love them with all my heart.

Stickers have been ordered, they're currently available in the shop so if you want first dibs you better run. I opened the shipping on them to international. All Matsdotter and Adrastus preorder boxes will have one of each included.

Speaking of, if you are an international reader and really -really- want a preorder box, let me know. I closed shipping on books a little while back, its just so expensive and I wasnt charging the full shipping amount, which wasn't a great business decision. I am going to be adding the bookplates tonight, so there are always those as well.

Less than a month before their book comes out !!!

[felfiramoondesigns]

Buy one get one 25% off on Grishaverse Second Army Kaleidoscope pins!! (P.S THE SH0P IS BACK 0PEN YAY!)

To celebrate SHADOW & BONE SEASON TWO on March 16th, get a limited time deal on FMD Grishaverse Second Army Kaleidoscope pins! Add 2 pins to your cart & the 2nd pin will be 25% off*

None of these pins will be restocked, get them before they are gone forever!

*Grishaverse Second Army Kaleidoscope pins only. Automatically applied when added to cart. Discount applies to cheapest of the 2 pins. Offer ends March 17th @ 11:59PM GMT

[jonmcbrine-author]

So, you self-published a book and marketing is difficult. Sales are low, and some days there are no orders at all. This is to be expected as a brand new author promoting a novel in an already overcrowded market. Since no one has heard of you or your characters, why not add merchandise on top of everything?

This is pretty much me in my pursuit of selling my debut full-length YA sci-fi book Unsecret Identity: Eric Icarus - Book One. Appearing out of the blue as a new writer can be surprising to readers or simply overlooked. After all, there are thousands of over authors pushing their stories, too. As an indie-creator, accepting this ambitious endeavor includes expecting long months of not much taking off. The book hasn’t set the world on fire - okay, this was a known possibility. It’s part of the journey; a prerequisite of non-traditional publishing. The process of developing a novel from the ground up is grueling and often goes unnoticed and lacking rewards. Not much of an indie writer’s life is glamorous. In fact, a self-published creator is more often than not toiling away in silence and working alone. If one book entails such a daunting workload, why add more?

For me, expanding my goals to include anything other than the actual writing itself, editing, cover art and any other illustrations (not to mention keeping up with the moving target that is social media), is well… crazy? Stacking up the items on my personal list is delusional? Whatever it may be, it is unequivocally enjoyable. That simple answer to adding more things for myself to do is I simply want to.

There is some marketing strategy at play so it isn’t purely a vanity project. As a graphic designer, I am gravitated toward the art aspect of fiction anyway. The overall creative aspect of making a novel come to life is such a pleasurable activity that the inherent headache that comes along with it is worth it. Loving the process is key because the destination or final achievement is a goalpost that tends to perpetually slide.

I’ve recently posted of my upcoming merch store, which I don’t have any preset notions of garnering excitement. Mainly these social media posts serve to inform anyone who happens to look that I intend to do a thing. Not quite the most buzzworthy news, but it is something that I’d feel strange about ignoring entirely. The merch store itself will essentially be links to online shops - in fact, I have a “shop” that is currently active on Teepublic but as of now, no book-specific items are listed. Not only will apparel based on the story be available, such as T-shirts, but I love the option of designing mugs, tote bags, decals, art prints, decor, device accessories, etc. Also, I’m very excited to eventually be able to sell bundles of signed paperback copies including bookmarks and stickers.

So, why would I produce merch for a novel that not very many people are aware of? The same reason readers will like the book - because it is fun. The adventurous spirit of taking on this challenge as an underdog encapsulates the core concept of Eric Icarus.

Stay in the loop for more details by following Jonfiction Blog on Substack and be sure to check out jonmcbrine.com for more info about this and all my books.

Unsecret Identity: Eric Icarus - Book One is available now from the Amazon as a paperback and as an ebook.

https://a.co/2XAtxvH

New blog every Monday. Newsletter first Monday of each month.

[quirkycatsfatstacks]

Illumicrate: I Tried a New (to Me) Book Subscription Box

Okay, I’m no stranger to Illunicrate. I’ve bought dozens of items second-hand through sites like Mercari. I even joined the panic to buy their Locked Tomb Book Set (which was worth it, btw). But until recently, I’d never actually been subscribed to them. Naturally, I decided to change that (the fact that they ship from the US now helped me make this decision). I knew going into this subscription…

[lizardho]

I came out to my dad as bisexual at 14 and I was PANICKED because I had a crush on a guy in my Boy Scout troop and thought I was Going To Hell Forever and he was so kind and understanding of my distress, but he had NO idea what bisexuality was. He just said “yeah but you like girls too? This is normal. Everyone is like this.” And I love my dad and trust him with my life to this day and the idea that the concept of bisexuality had not occurred to him had not occurred to me so I put it off.

By 16 though I had a crush on like THREE boys. Three entire boys in my Boy Scout troop. I felt like my sin was slowly advancing, until like an untreated cancer it had become metastatic. I remember bawling my L’il limp-wristed sissy eyes out in his big rumbly truck on the way home from a scout meeting and him telling me that it was OK, that he still loved me if I was gay, but that he knew I wasn’t gay because I still had crushes on women and that meant I was straight. I didn’t quite know how to explain that those felt *~*different*~* and that I felt like I was losing a fight to evil inside me but I again felt comforted by his reassurances and his genuine fatherly love.

At 18 I was like “hey I’m realizing all my friends are going on missions. I don’t wanna do that. Idk how to say that and I don’t have a ‘good enough’ reason to not wanna go.” So I just put it off. Again, my parents were extremely supportive of the information I gave them (I blamed it on perpetually forgetting to start the paperwork.) and one day my mom texted me that she had done the paperwork for me! And that all I needed was to get a physical! So I did that (it was awkward af tbh, my hernia check was done by a trainee doctor and she spent like 3 minutes fishing around my inguinal canals before her attending rescued me) and was sent to Mexico City where I learned that in addition to dipshit himbos with strong hands and scruffy guys with artistic hearts I was REALLY into chubby Latin men with strong personalities who bullied me a little when I lived in Mexico.

I remember my first companion got annoyed with me during an argument and said we were just gonna wrestle and whoever won the wrestling match won the argument (I stg I am dead serious this happened.) I was like…SWEATING when he tore off his tie and threw his white button-down shirt onto the ground (I won btw, don’t ask me how).

I remember one of my companions with this really intense, almost manic energy telling me that he was gonna make sure I was safe in a new area I didn’t know very well. He cooked breakfast for me and we’d go shopping together on P-Days and in the mornings before breakfast he’d jog around and do pull-ups with his shirt off and I’d do anything but look at him because my face would break out in a sweat so intense he’d think I was crying and come over to see if I was OK and somehow make it worse. He let me play D&D with myself in the evenings even though it was against mission rules because he knew how lonely and stressed I was.

I remember one of my companions was a big chubby man with a loud voice and a great sense of humor. He was kind and direct when addressing conflicts with me, and always bragged about how he knew the secrets of women’s minds and it felt like he really did since it almost always boiled down to “Treat Them Like People and Love Them a Lot. Don’t Stop Being A Person For Them. Also Eat Them Out Sloppy Style.” Our P-Day activities sometimes felt like dates, and it seemed like he was more attentive to my emotional state than I was since he was always the first to suggest we slow down our Divinely Mandated, God-Ordained, Super Sacred Work and Wonder to get a snack or check out a Pawn Shop (I love Pawn Shops).

I remember another companion who asked me to bully him every time he did something against his goal of losing weight. It was like he gave me Carte Blanche to take out my crush on him by being a nuisance and I LOVED that. I remember having a breakdown one day after we’d spent the afternoon frantically cleaning our disgusting-barely-habitable mission house to make it look less vile that it was (not our fault imo?) and I started bawling and he pulled me into a hug and he smelled good and he told me he knew it wasn’t just the house and that I was mad at him for being a Huge Dickhead for about a week (true) and that he would work on it. (He’s also a huge chaser but that’s a separate thing.)

I remember one of my companions waking up early (and our schedule is already built for sleep deprivation) to make me a “birthday cake” from knock-off Nutella and bread. He used matches for candles and woke me up, lit the ‘candles,’ pulled them out, then smashed it in my face and took a bunch of pictures while I was still madrugada and disoriented as fuck. He had the same sense of humor as one of my HS crushes and I could push his buttons pretty easily which was so fun.

I came home from my mission and started back at BYU where I became actively and aggressively suicidal. I had a stalker the year I moved up there and my dad’s solution to that was to get me a gun. I know he wouldn’t have bought me a gun if he could have read my mind, but I had a loaded pistol under my bed during a trifecta faith/sexuality/gender crisis and that was not helpful. I remember that the day I decided to kill myself I figured I’d call the BYU CAPS and see if I could get into therapy because it felt like what I was “supposed to do” so I could check my suicide boxes. My therapist was the guy who’d helped me pick a major the year before and was this drop-dead gorgeous Hawaiian man who cried when I told him how I’d been feeling.

A few weeks into therapy I met another stunning man with soft eyes and a scruffy illegal-at-BYU beard he kept pushing his luck with. He was funny, kind, patient, married, and wouldn’t give me the time of day if he knew I was crushing on him. We were in my history of psych class, which was inarguably the worst psych class I have ever had, and we studied together for every assignment and test and I realized that my feelings for him and for all the men I’d already mentioned were in direct conflict with my faith and relationship with God. My already agonizing spiritual conflict became even more wretched and as a result of this plus some other tightly-packed experiences with Mormonisms bullshit, I left the church.

After leaving the church I decided to move back to AZ and transfer to ASU. My mom helped me get a dog since I think it had started to dawn on my family that my mental health was barely getting me through the day, and she knew that we both loved dogs. Madi made my last year at BYU livable while I got my shit together and transferred. In that last year, I went on a date with quite possibly the only semi-openly-out trans person on BYU campus. It was not a great date imo, I was not doing well, but the person I spoke with was fun and fascinating and talked to me about Gender Dysphoria and it really cemented my need to go. To leave and never come back to that fucking school.

I started at ASU a month after my last semester at BYU and within a very short time frame it felt like I was coming back together, like a puzzle magically putting itself together in an environment that wasn’t slowly draining that puzzle’s will to live.

On the 4th of July, the year I started at ASU, I saw a transition timeline photo of a gorgeous happy beautiful happy radiant happy woman and her former Mormon missionary self and I realized the light that was on in her eyes was the light that was off in mine. I looked into transitioning for 3 days, sleeping about 10 hours total during that time. I started talking to other trans people on Reddit (one of whom is now my beautiful fiancée @cintailed) and after about a month of making preparations to be disowned and kicked out, something I was not sure would happen but was ready to go through to Turn On The Lights, I came out to my family and it was amazing. I started HRT a month after that. I secretly dated some dorky guys for about a year while I applied to grad schools. I got into a great grad school for me and my needs. I got FFS. I did my trainings and classes. Me and my fiancée moved in together after some LDR shenanigans. We’ve lived together now for 4 years of basically marital bliss. We have a cat named Grandmother Esmeralda Weatherwax who bites the hell out of my feet about three times a day. My bi-cycle continues to be part of my life but now it’s not as scary. Baby gays in my life have started to look to me for advice. Idk how this all happened so fast. When the years, months, weeks, days, and hours seems to crawl by so slowly now they are rushing past me so fast it’s almost bewildering. Whereas before I felt like I was living on borrowed time, past my ‘expiration date,’ now it feels like I can Fucking Breathe. I’m training myself to slow down now and it feels worth it to Live In The Moment.

Idk why I wrote this. Idk why these thoughts only seem to come up on Sundays when I’m supposed to be writing my dissertation. Idk why I’m crying rn or why I feel so happy. I’m gonna post this shit then get on with my dissertation I guess. Read more Terry Pratchett and give yourselves the time you need. Get a pet. Talk to someone. Re-examine the events that brought you here. Be gayer. Love y’all 💕

[televinita]

Giant box o' bookish swag on eBay right now that I absolutely do not need in my life; most of this is promo for books I wouldn't read if you paid me; AND YET. The sheer amount of bookmarks and pins and stickers and other things is so alluring that I'm going to collect all the pics for Gazing Purposes.

[jandkwriting]

Getting some extra freebies ready for our book signing next weekend! Did someone say temporary tattoos? No water needed. Become a Truthseeker today. Or, on June 3rd @galsguidelibrary from 12-2pm! https://fb.me/e/2Oby2xYef?mibextid=RQdjqZ

[inkcurlsandknives]

Did you know?? If you leave a PRH book carton in a thriving bookish environment sometimes your books will surprise you! Look at this fresh crop of baby books we found!

Ext week I'll be at Basket Books & Art with Vaishnavi Patel and you can take one of these little guys home!

Check out gabriellabuba.com/#events for all the details on my upcoming events

[peevishpants]

/ᐠ｡ꞈ｡ᐟ\: u like book? u want buy book? two dollar *falls asleep*

available as a print here!

[authorellenmint]

Your Personal Library—A Signed Bookplate

I’ve been wanting to have a way to get a signed bookplate to readers for a while, but I couldn’t think of anything that’d work. Then it hit me. Your own library card! I will sign the author part, then you can stick the fake library card to the back of the front book cover. Plus, you can add your name and date under Layla’s! If this sounds like something you must have, it’ll cost $2 for a…

[felfiramoondesigns]

ST0RE CLOSING FRIDAY 24TH FEBRUARY @ 6PM GMT for a couple weeks! >> SHOP FELFIRA MOON DESIGNS <<

I will be spending the weekend with my family and then heading into con prep for my first big con eeekkkk! I will be at ACME COMIC CON SPRING 4th/5th March!​​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​​ I am aiming to reopen on Sunday March 12th @ 4PM GMT. I'll let you all know if any of this information changes 😊️💜​​​​​​​​

I am super excited and nervous for my first big show! If you are going do drop by to say hi! I would love to meet you guys! I can't bring everything with me so if you are planning on buying anything specific from me, do let me know so I can make sure I have it! (I have around 80 pin designs/variants, I can't fit them all on my current set up lol 😂)​​​​​​​​

[jonmcbrine-author]

The book swag cometh! Bookmarks have been designed, edited, reviewed, and ordered. Watch this space for future giveaway info!

[quirkycatsfatstacks]

Book Talk: Recent Book Swag

I, like many members of the bookish community, have a bit of an addiction to pre-order swag. It’s so much fun to show favorite authors our love – and we get free stuff in addition to the books we ordered. What’s not to love? I’ve been telling myself for months that I would sit down and do a write-up about my favorite pre-order items. That hasn’t happened. It might happen someday, but for today,…