Monday, June 30, 2014

Happy Release Day for Sultana: The Bride Price

It's finally here! Sultana: The Bride Price went live on Amazon and Scribd today; I expect Barnes & Noble and Kobo later. Apple will take the longest, as it always does. Huge thanks to everyone who put the novel on this list on its first day of availability at Amazon:#87 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Biographical. During the first two weeks of publication, I'll offer the title at 99 cents. Save $3 before the price updates to $3.99. Why am I launching at 99 cents? To generate reader interest, to get some visibility online where it's becoming increasingly difficult to do so without shelling out hundreds of dollars with sites that will lists books, and because the series is not part of KDP Select, which lifts some titles out of obscurity.


Here's the description:


Sultana: The Bride Price (A Novel of Moorish Spain) [Kindle Edition] 


Book #4 of the Sultana series.

In fourteenth-century Moorish Spain, a marriage of convenience for the sake of peace leads to disaster in the medieval kingdom of Granada. The young queen Jazirah, caught up in a dynastic struggle between warring brothers, fights for her survival. Wed to a husband who looks at her with more suspicion than lust in his eyes, she must escape reminders of a brutal past in a quest to find forgiveness, hope, and love. 

Her husband Muhammad faces greater peril than union with a wife he cannot trust. Surrounded by enemies within his family who seek the throne and undermined by ministers who would alter the course of his country’s future, he intends to rule the land of his ancestors alone. How can he endure against his most bitter opponents, not least among them, the woman whom he has chosen for a bride?

Snippet: 

“Why do you speak of me as if I am not here?” Jazirah demanded. Despite the collective gasps from everyone in attendance, she continued, “We may address each other as equals for we are both the grandchildren of a Sultan of Gharnatah.”

Her father admonished, “Jazirah, you are not the equal of a man, least of all the Sultan! You will apologize and beg his forgiveness. Now!”

Muhammad raised a hand. While Ismail fell silent and glared at Jazirah, she returned his narrowed stare with intense regard.

The Sultan said, “Let her keep false words behind her teeth. I would not believe them. What else could I expect, but this behavior from the daughter of a traitor to his people and my father?”

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Update on the Sultana series

The official release date of Sultana: The Bride Price is Monday, June 30. At long last and after a little consternation and probably too much nit-picking, I'm finally able to offer the title as an ebook. The paperback will be ready one month later.

One of the changes made in Sultana: The Bride Price was the exclusion of the historical events from my Author's Note. For readers who are really interested, those details will be posted on The Sultana Series page of my website by June 30. The link will be embedded in all digital versions. While many readers have told me how much they appreciated the details of the past, the historical notes for The Bride Price added nearly twenty pages to the manuscript. In addition to the histories of the main characters, I've included information on the prominent ministers who served Muhammad V, as well as some of his descendants. Unfortunately for the Moors, the reign of Muhammad V was the last glorious heyday of the Nasrid dynasty before family squabbles began the downward spiral. The Nasrids proved too adept at destroying themselves from within, long before the intentions of the Catholic Monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand came to fruition. That doesn't mean I plan to end this series on a somber note, but if there's been one consistent theme of each book, it has been that the bonds between family are very important and when those bonds begin to fray, disaster often follows. 

In other series' news, I'm looking into Arabic, German, and Spanish translations of each novel, and I've finished the outline and character list of Sultana: The Pomegranate Tree, which I'll start writing in 11 days. Wow, 11 days. The next novel makes a huge leap of eight decades from the time of Muhammad V to the tail end of the fractured reign of his grandson, Muhammad IX. Not that interesting stuff didn't happen in that 80 year  span - the problem is that too much happened! More importantly, no truly strong queen of the caliber of Fatima, Butayna or Maryam has come down through history for me to write about her in those times. Four books down, two more to go! Once the series is done in 2015, all six books will be bundled as an ebook only. Lastly, I'm working out a snafu with Amazon whereby Sultana has not been available as a paperback sold directly from their website since September 2013. Resolving this hasn't been fun, but I'm nothing if not persistent.

Time flies when you're having fun, or writing novels.

It's been a tremendous twelve months. A new job and health issues have impacted my writing time, but I'm still at it, trying to wrap...