Amanda Hocking

Amanda's Blog

Turn on the Bright Lights
August 8th, 2010 by
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First, if you haven’t entered the giveaway to win all four of the My Blood Approves. books, you should. Enter: here

Now onto everything else I’ve been forgetting to mention. I did an interview over at Two Ends of the Pen, which is a fantastic site with lots of cool author interviews. I talk about publishing and Switched, the first book in my new paranormal romance trilogy. You can read it: here.

Indie urban fantasy author H. P. Mallory has started this fantabulous site – http://www.indieurbanfantasy.com/ – and she’s collaborating with a bunch of different authors to work on it (myself included.) It’s still in its infancy stage, but the idea is to make it easier for readers to find cheap, good indie urban fantasy and paranormal romance. So, if you’re into that sorta thing, you should check it out.

Also – you guys, Switched needs some lovin’. I’ll be straight with you here, cause I’m a pretty honest person: Switched is a better book than My Blood Approves. I mean I love them both, and I’m not supposed to pick favorites, but Switched is more original and Wendy is kinda kick ass. And Finn – he’s … well, you’ll see, when you read the book.

I changed my layout, too. I thought the old one seemed… less sleek. What do you think of the new one, folks?

I pre-ordered Interpol’s self-titled release today, and I suggest you do the same. (I’m a little in love with Paul Banks.) I won’t be going to see them at First Ave in Minneapolis the way I wanted to, but it’s cause I’ll be too busy hanging out with visiting friends. However, if you’re in the area, you should def check them out on August 14th. And I was once quoted in the SPiN magazine with Interpol on the cover.

Paul Banks (its hard to find a pic of him w/out a cigarette)

Oh, fun things that are factual: Interpol has a song called “Leif Erickson” and I know he’s a real person and all that, but it’s because of that song that the name “Leif” really started to grow on me. So the character Leif in the My Blood Approves is actually named after the Interpol song.

In conclusion: Enter the give away, check out the sites, read Switched, and pre-order Interpol. That sounds demanding, but I’m just trying to help. Free books, fun sites, great reads, and crazy awesome music.

My all-time favorite Interpol song – “NYC”

The best Interpol video – “Evil”

 

Giveaway!
August 7th, 2010 by
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With the Wisdom release approaching wicked fast, I realized I’ve got to get my giveaway underway!

So what will you be winning? 
All four books in the My Blood Approves series. Not only are all four books newly edited, newly revised, and all around newly awesome, but Wisdom  includes an exclusive first look at Letters to Elise: A Peter Townsend Novella due out December 2010. 

How do you enter, you may ask? Well, I’m glad you did. Here are the rules:

1. The giveaway runs from Saturday, August 7th until Friday, August 2oth at Midnight, with the winner announced on Saturday, August 21st. 

2. To enter: Simply comment on this blog, saying that you want to be entered in the give away and provide a way for me to contact you. (Email usually works).

3. Only one entry per person, BUT you can earn FIVE bonus entry if you tweet or Facebook the contest (and provide proof with a link.) 

4. Winners will be chosen by random.org.  

5. The winner will be contacted on Saturday, August 21st and has 72 hours to respond. 

The contest will have one grand prize winner, who gets all four paperbacks, but I’m also going to give three runner ups the entire series as a PDF’s (or word doc, if you prefer). 

I encourage you all to enter, and good luck! 🙂

Teaser Tuesday
August 3rd, 2010 by
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Teaser Tuesday is a meme hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading, but I’m doing things a little differently. Teasers are usually taken from the book you’re reading, but I’m taking them from the book I’m working on – i. e., Wisdom. 

Here is how it works:
– Grab your current read
– Open to a random page
– Share two or three “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
So with that in mind, here are two teasers from Wisdom:
“I knew that Peter and I couldn’t live together anymore, not if I wanted to make things work with Jack, but I didn’t like the feel of empty space. But it wasn’t just his absence that made the house seem empty.” 
And there you have it. 
 

frequenly asked questions (kinda)
August 2nd, 2010 by
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Okay, so people don’t frequently ask me any questions, except for release dates about books. But I have heard some questions about Wisdom, and I’m going to answer a few of them. 

When is the book coming out?
August 22nd, so only three more weeks!

What can we expect in Wisdom?
More action, but I don’t just mean fighting. Alice is on the move more. A lot of the story took place in the house the last few books, but I think hardly anything happens there this time. 
More answers. Hopefully, a lot of the questions you’ve had over the last few books will be explained. Stuff that’s been hinted at in the earlier books comes to fruition.
More bodies. People die in this book, and some of them are characters you know. 
And of course,  more Jack and Peter. 😉

Will this be the last book in the series?
When I conceptualized the story, I imagined it as five books, and I still think there’s room for a fifth book. However, I haven’t written it yet, and I plan on taking a break from this series for awhile to work on some other books. But I am planning to release a novella around Christmas called Letters to Elise. 
Who does Alice end up with?
Well, for that one, you’ll have to read the book to find out. 

If you have any other questions, feel free to ask them, and I’ll answer them the best I can.

random English fact
July 30th, 2010 by
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My books are being re-edited. I just uploaded a newly edited version of My Blood Approves, and its really good. The typos are gone!

But here’s something that’s been happening every time somebody edits my books: They point out missing quotes, when they’re not.

Here’s a quote from the third chapter of Wisdom:

“I don’t mean in a perverse way,” she said. “Everything I did, I was just looking to feel like someone cared about me, I think. And you were the first person that ever did. I could feel it. 
“So, thank you.” She laughed nervously.

The purple highlighted part is not in quotes. Most people think it should be, but it’s not supposed to be.

Here’s the rule (with a quote from Jane Austen to back me up):

In most cases, quotations that span multiple paragraphs should be set as block quotations, and thus do not require quotation marks. Quotation marks are used for multiple-paragraph quotations in some cases, especially in narratives. The convention in English is to give opening quotation marks to the first and each subsequent paragraph, using closing quotation marks only for the final paragraph of the quotation, as in the following example from Pride and Prejudice:

The letter was to this effect:

“My dear Lizzy,

“I wish you joy. If you love Mr. Darcy half as well as I do my dear Wickham, you must be very happy. It is a great comfort to have you so rich, and when you have nothing else to do, I hope you will think of us. I am sure Wickham would like a place at court very much, and I do not think we shall have quite money enough to live upon without some help. Any place would do, of about three or four hundred a year; but however, do not speak to Mr. Darcy about it, if you had rather not.

“Yours, etc.”


If the same person is talking in one paragraph, and they’re still talking in the next, the closing quote isn’t needed, because the quotation hasn’t ended yet.

I make a lot of typos and mistakes, which people have been kind enough to fix, but this one thing is not a mistake. The only reason I know about this is because of Ann Rice. Interview with the Vampire is just one long quotation.
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