Winners & Red Rope Updates

Good day to you, Champions! Today is another newsy, update filled day.

First of all, congratulations to the five winners of my Mother’s Day raffle:  Cindy K, Catherine K, Becky G, Johanna D, and Gia! All five winners have been emailed, and will receive their prizes as soon as they get back to me let me know which K. M. Shea e-book they would like. Thank you to everyone who entered—I hope you all had a happy Mother’s Day!

I do have more news to share on Red Rope of Fate. With the help of some of my fabulous Champions, it has come to my attention that anyone who has read Red Rope of Fate through Kindle Unlimited and then purchased the new edition of Red Rope of Fate, is still going to get stuck with the old version. Your Kindle and Amazon account have something of a memory, so even if you deleted the book off of your account and repurchased it you’d still end up with the old edition. To get the new version, you want to talk to Amazon customer service.

How can you know if you have the old edition or the new version? Easy! The first words of the new edition are… “Elves and Humans could not communicate. Tari had known this since she was young.” If you don’t have that, you’ve got the old version.

To contact customer service, go to any Amazon page and scroll to the bottom. Under the “Let Us Help You” at the very bottom there is a “Help” tab. Once on the new help page, scroll down to the “Browse Help Topics” and at the bottom of the topics list you’ll see “Need More Help?” click on that and it will bring up a sub-menu. One of the sub-menu options is “Contact Us” which will take you to a new page. It asks what you want help with (Digital services) and what the exact problem is, then asks your preferred contact method–the website says a phone call is best, but most Champions have said instant messaging works great as well. (Email, not so much.)

Then tell them you have a book in your account that you want updated because there is a new edition available.

This will work for those of you who have not gotten the updates available button, although by now everyone should have it. (Another helpful Champion who spoke to customer service said Amazon mentioned it might take a day or two for the updates available box to pop up on your account, but as it has been over a week if you haven’t gotten it now you probably need to contact customer service.)

Thus far, everyone seems pretty happy with the changes to the book– which obviously makes me a happy, happy author. Swan Lake is going through some final edits with editor #2. Hopefully next week or the week after I’ll be able to send it back to editor #1 for the last proofread, and then it should be available for preorder in early June!

That is it for today! Thank you for reading, Champions, I hope you have a wonderful weekend.

Mother’s Day Raffle

Happy Mother’s Day, champions! Originally I had planned to release a post about the roles of enchanters and enchantresses in the Timeless Fairy Tale series today, however, there ended up being a few new, more pressing, updates I need to share.

To begin with, Red Rope of Fate has gone through a massive edit/rewrite. I’ve uploaded the new version, so it is available to purchase, but for those of you who have already bought it, I talked to an Amazon support techie, who made update available in your user account. He said, “We’ve sent an e-mail to customers who own the book to notify them of the update. These customers can download the update through their “Manage Your Content and Devices” page.” So keep an eye out for the email, or check out your “manage your content and devices” page.

The Red Rope of Fate rewrite includes several new scenes told from Arion’s point of view, and I trimmed down a lot of lengthy explanations. Hopefully, you will enjoy the changes!

Up next, is the KM Shea starter pack! In order to encourage newsletter sign-up, I will now be giving away a “starter pack” to anyone who signs up for the newsletter. The starter pack includes a two page King Arthurs short story, a four page Red Rope of Fate prequel story, and a short fairytale-esque story. (The fairytale story has no ties to the timeless fairy tales world, it is a completely original story.)

If you sign up for the newsletter, a link to the starter pack will be included in your welcome email. The link will take you to a site where you can download the.mobi file for your Kindle, or view the PDF file. I am aware that many of you have already signed up for the newsletter, so in May’s newsletter– which will be going out shortly–I will include a link to the starter pack so everyone gets a chance to download it.

Finally, today marks the beginning of my Mother’s Day raffle. It’s free to enter, and out of the entrants five randomly selected winners will receive a K. M. Shea ebook of their choice. It opens today, and will close Thursday night, May 12. This raffle follows all the usual terms and conditions– I reserve the right to change the prize, shut down the raffle, etc– and you can only enter once.

As you might recall, there isn’t a rafflecopter widget for wordpress, so I have to use a link. So click here to go to the raffle!

Finally, I want to conclude with a shout out to all of you mothers! (And when I say mothers, I mean all of you wonderful ladies who have had an impact on the generations that come after you. Not all mothers have given birth, and that doesn’t make you any less amazing or inspiring to those who look up to you.) Being a mother is an incredible, tough, and simultaneously heartbreaking job, but I am so grateful for all of you! Enjoy your special day, and have a fabulous weekend! Thanks for reading, and I promise next week I’ll get that post out!

Results are in!

Every year–I say every year but this is only the second year I’ve done this, it will be an annual thing, though–I ask the Champions subscribed to my newsletter to vote for the story they would like to see me offer for free on Valentine’s day–February 14. This year’s winning book is…Rumpelstiltskin with 25 votes and 33% of the votes. So mark your calendars folks, Rumpelstiltskin will be free on Amazon on February 14, 2016! Happy Valentine’s day!

Also, the polls are closed and the results are in for the 2016 Hero poll! The favorite hero types are: Prankster Deviants (Friedrich of C&C and Asher and Aron of Life Reader) have a runaway win with 169 votes, Earnest and Sweet (Stil of Rumpelstiltskin and Azmaveth of Princess Ahira) take second place with 146 votes, and the Strong and Silent type (Arion of Red Rope and Severin of B&B) take third with 135 votes. In fourth are the sarcastic and opinionated heroes (Merlin of King Arthurs and Steffen of Puss in Boots) with 126 votes, Villains with Heart (Farrin of Snow Q.) stole fifth with 122 votes, Arrogant but loving (Aysel of the MBRC) took six with 71 votes, the Heroic type (Rune of Wild Swans, Will Scarlet of Robyn Hood) snagged seventh with 51 votes, and loyal flirts (Devin of MBRC and Lancelot of King Arthurs) come in last with 33 votes. I do suspect Devin’s place in rock bottom might be partially due to pairing him with Lancelot, but I didn’t have another example. (Sorry, Devin!)

Looking at the results, I have to say they are fairly consistent with 2015’s poll. In 2015 the strong and silents won with 121 votes, and they were followed closely by the prankster/deviants, the earnest and sweet type, and then the sarcastic and opinionated. There was a bit of an upset with the first three this year, but the vote counts are so close I think it is safe to say the top three winners for 2016 and 2015 seem to be the types you guys prefer. Which brings us to the next poll!

I asked you, Champions, what hero you most wanted to see in future stories, and used your comments from my blog and Facebook to compile the archetypes I offered. Winning by a hair is the Over-Looked Good Guy with 108 votes. The Arrogant/Caustic Genius gave him a close race with 107 votes, and the Trickster Anti-hero wasn’t far off with 98 votes. The Tragic Anti-hero came in fourth with 87 votes, the older brother/mentor type took fifth with 77 votes, and the Awkward and Nerdy guys took sixth with 65 votes. Mysterious placed seventh with 58 votes, the Childhood Friend came in eighth with 57 votes, and the Alpha male grabbed ninth with 52 votes. Last were Male-Damsel-In-Distress with 48 votes, Unapologetic Villain with 42 votes, and nice Jocks with 14 votes.

Thank you to everyone who voted! I consider your preferences as I try to mold and sculpt new characters, so you can bet that you’ll be seeing some of the poll options in future stories. That’s a lot of information for today so I’ll cut it off here, but to give you a quick work update I’m getting ready to start my next Fairy Tale, and Editor #2 is still ripping apart working on Snow Queen 2. Thank you for reading, Champions. Have a fabulous week!