Archive for strange angel

Strange Angel Experiment Data 2

July 3, 2012 books, brainmeats, strange angel No comments

All right! We’re back with the second round of Strange Angel Data! You may remember the first round of data (You can find that here.) but to recap quickly:

On Weds June 6th, 2012 I put my book STRANGE ANGEL up on my site as a pay-what-you-want, DRM-free, eBook download (still offered over here). I did this for a few reasons:

  • I truly believe that DRM is the devil. It does more harm than good, every single time. People who want to steal your shit will crack it, anyway. All you do is inconvenience your actual users. Why would you want to do that to them?
  • I enjoy poking at new models for getting my work out there.
  • I wanted to generate data on this model, given my set of circumstances, because I like to know things.
  • I was, above it all, curious.

And I learned many things, shared them with you and since then have learned even more, that I want to share.

The first round of data was generated by spreading the word, fairly softly, via my own social media network. Roughly one in ten people who visited the front page of the book offer donated money. So I wondered what would happen if I moved to a bigger pool.

To recap a few more facts:
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Strange Angel experiment data 1

June 14, 2012 books, brainmeats, strange angel 5 comments

On Weds June 6th, 2012 I put my book STRANGE ANGEL up on my site as a pay-what-you-want, DRM-free, eBook download (still offered over here). I did this for a few reasons:

  • I truly believe that DRM is the devil. It does more harm than good, every single time. People who want to steal your shit will crack it, anyway. All you do is inconvenience your actual users. Why would you want to do that to them?
  • I enjoy poking at new models for getting my work out there.
  • I wanted to generate data on this model, given my set of circumstances, because I like to know things.
  • I was, above it all, curious.

So, what did I learn? Lots of things. But first a few facts:
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Pay what you like.

June 6, 2012 books, strange angel No comments

So I’ve done a thing. you can now get a digital, DRM-free, copy of my book STRANGE ANGEL for free or pay-what-you-want. Just click here and you’re good to go!

This is an experiment to see if sales go up, down or don’t change by offering people the ability to pay what they want, and to offer a DRM free product. Spread the word and let’s see what happens.

BUY BOOKS NOW – GET BOOKS CHEAP.

March 9, 2011 books, imaginary friend, stays crunchy in milk, strange angel 2 comments

Those of you waiting to read some of my books in electronic formats have no excuses now. Seriously. As of right now you can read:

Strange Angel

Stays Crunchy in Milk

and

I Slept With Your Imaginary Friend

in the following formats: HTML, Javascript, Epub, PDF, RTF, LRF (for Sony readers), Palm Doc, Plain text, MOBI (for Kindle).

They’re also dirt cheap. The first two are $5 each and Imaginary Friend is only $4. Even better though – until the 12th of March you can use the code RAE25 at checkout on Smashwords and get 25% off your order. Which means that the first two are only $3.75 each and Imaginary Friend is only $3. Come on, you won’t find a better off than that!

Every format you could want, including Kindle (though with no DRM! You just have to mail it to your Kindle account or drop it on the device) at prices so low they almost count as stealing (of course they are all also available in print formats as well just not at prices quite that low). So give them a try, won’t you? And better yet – tell a friend.

And, if you missed it: Click here to go get books.

Wanna read Strange Angel for FREE?

March 9, 2010 books, strange angel 12 comments

Hey guys, the offer is closed. Sorry! But you can, of course, still buy the book at Amazon.

So it is read an e-book week or something. And so for today only, until Midnight EST, I make the following offer:

Anyone who emails me [adampknave @ gmail(dot)com] between now and midnight and asks for it, will get the PDF of the entire Strange Angel book. For frees, yo.

What is Strange Angel, you ask?

Susie Sparrow’s life has turned upside down. She’s merged with Ferapont, who says he is an angel, and has dedicated her life to ridding the world of demon possessed people. Unfortunately she is also in High School. Trying to schedule fights around school, hanging out with friends and dinner with the parents might be too much for one girl with large flaming wings to handle. But don’t tell her that. This volume collects all three volumes of the hit novella series as well as the original short story that started it all. As an added bonus it also contains a never before seen end story, exclusive to this volume!

“Strange Angel is fun, scary, gory, action packed, and surprisingly touching… This book is highly recommended for any fans of Buffy or just good, fun, dramatic horror and fantasy.” — D.J. Kirkbride, author of SOULLESS

“Knave’s intense vision is packed with occult thrills. His brutal meditations on the struggle between good and evil create a fast-paced narrative bristling with gothic horror appeal. This dark action series is bound to be popular with fans of the recent surge in horror film.” –John Edward Lawson, author of LAST BURN IN HELL

“And even though I have repeated this time and time again, Knave is one of my favorite writers. His style is intimate and provocative, quietly humorous and always intelligent. He has this amazing ability to make you question everything you believe in, while passing you a beer and telling you a dirty joke. And never was it showcased more then in this series. That’s right, people, Knave has fucking arrived!” -Kelly “Bloodymary” Perry, Horror-Web.com

“If you’ve been missing some Buffy, but want to read something with a unique twist, the Strange Angel series of novellas by Adam P. Knave is a great joyride.” – Adrienne Jones, author of BRINE

So once again it is simple. Email me [adampknave @ gmail(dot)com] and ask for the book and get a shiny PDF in the mail. I’d offer it in other formats if I had it in other formats, but, uhm, I don’t. So this is what I can. Still! Free book! Today only!

Hey guys, the offer is closed. Sorry! But you can, of course, still buy the book at Amazon.

Red Lodge

October 3, 2009 awesome!, books, crazy little thing, stays crunchy in milk, strange angel 4 comments

So there’s this bookstore in Red Lodge, Montana. It’s name is, aptly enough, Red Lodge Books. Lemme tell ya about them. See this guy I met, he liked Things Wrong With Me, worked there. And we talked. He’s a pretty cool guy, so that’s good. Always nice to find new cool people to talk to. Well this guy mentioned he worked for a bookstore.

Well I’m a whore so I pointed him at my books. You know how it is. He offered to show them to his boss and maybe they could carry them or something. So I, quite happily, mailed them a book or two all nice and signed and hoped that even if they didn’t carry them they would like them. Running a bookstore is not easy. There’re less and less people buying books all the time. Thin margins and the like. So not wanting to carry more books makes an amount of sense to me. I certainly wouldn’t have taken it personally.

Turns out they liked the books. Further turned out they wanted to stock them. So yes, if you go to Red Lodge, stop by the bookstore and buy a book. Mine, someone else’s, I don’t care. But supporting local, non-chain bookstores is an awesome thing to do. And the place looks pretty spiffy.

Anyway, Halloween is coming in a few weeks and like most stores Red Lodge Books has a Halloween display. Lemme show it to you:

See that? Front and center? Yah, that’s my horror short story collection. I only ever wrote horror in short story form and don’t do it now but I did and I’m proud of the stores in that volume. And these cats dig it. They dig what I did enough to put some unknown fucker front and center, surrounded by things like World War Z. And I can’t appreciate that enough. So thanks, guys.

And the rest of you, quite seriously, support a non-chain bookstore if you can. And if you’re anywhere near Red Lodge go in, buy a book and tell them that they’re awesome.

The Prancing Pony.

May 11, 2009 administrative, books, NY Life, strange angel No comments

Spent the weekend in Ohio. Nice place, really. Come for the food, stay for the crippling depression.

————–

Got an awesome review of Strange Angel (which you can order here in StoryisStory.com:

I wound up reading Adam Knave’s Strange Angel twice: this is a complex, ambitious book. It’s a rare book that I read twice in a row: I needed that, for this, to get my head all the way around it.

Awesome! You can read the rest right over here. (Thanks again for the review CB Potts. The review is also on Amazon, please if you do read the book review it there, it helps.)

————–

Grabbed a Red Bull on my way to work today. Except I grabbed a 16oz. Now normally I drink a normal sized 8oz Red Bull. Sometimes if really out of it I might grab a 12. I didn’t mean to grab this thing. It’s huge. I’m sitting here like a gawking hobbit going “It comes in pints?

————–

Also, if you want to have a banner to link to the book with I give you one! Designed by Unrepentant:

McFly day!

May 6, 2009 books, strange angel No comments

Adrienne Jones came up with a concept a while back: McFly Day. That’s the day when you get your new book. See, remember Back to the Future? When George McFly got a big box of his new book and opened them? That was the best day a writer gets. It’s McFly day! I always want that day.

The other day, thanks to Strange Angel (click and order it now, amazon has it on sale for like $10.20!) I got me a McFly day!

So that’s always exciting. Box of books. Hooray! Also congratz to Marianne who had her own McFly day for her book, Lessons from the Fat-o-sphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce with Your Body which is a MUCH longer title.

So hooray for McFly day! The mostest wonderfulest day of the year, and it can happen more than once!

STRANGE ANGEL now for sale!

May 4, 2009 books, strange angel No comments

It’s that time! Yes folks, despite odd printer delay, Strange Angel is for sale! You can click the image about or click here or whatever to get your copy.

Susie Sparrow’s life has turned upside down. She’s merged with Ferapont, who says he is an angel, and has dedicated her life to ridding the world of demon possessed people. Unfortunately she is also in High School. Trying to schedule fights around school, hanging out with friends and dinner with the parents might be too much for one girl with large flaming wings to handle. But don’t tell her that. This volume collects all three volumes of the hit novella series as well as the original short story that started it all. As an added bonus it also contains a never before seen end story, exclusive to this volume!

“Strange Angel is fun, scary, gory, action packed, and surprisingly touching… This book is highly recommended for any fans of Buffy or just good, fun, dramatic horror and fantasy.” — D.J. Kirkbride, author of SOULLESS

“Knave’s intense vision is packed with occult thrills. His brutal meditations on the struggle between good and evil create a fast-paced narrative bristling with gothic horror appeal. This dark action series is bound to be popular with fans of the recent surge in horror film.” –John Edward Lawson, author of LAST BURN IN HELL

“And even though I have repeated this time and time again, Knave is one of my favorite writers. His style is intimate and provocative, quietly humorous and always intelligent. He has this amazing ability to make you question everything you believe in, while passing you a beer and telling you a dirty joke. And never was it showcased more then in this series. That’s right, people, Knave has fucking arrived!” -Kelly “Bloodymary” Perry, Horror-Web.com

“If you’ve been missing some Buffy, but want to read something with a unique twist, the Strange Angel series of novellas by Adam P. Knave is a great joyride.” – Adrienne Jones, author of BRINE

This brings, for me, a four year journey to an end. It’s a little odd. But I am also ridiculously proud. So go and grab a copy!

Also, mini-blog-tour is in effect. I know some of you had expressed interest in interviews or reviews or guest blogging. Speak up again if you haven’t heard from me or if you want to now, and we can get that ball rolling!

Strange Angel is available now!

Also! If you have any questions like “Why should I buy this” or “What makes it cool” or anything (that isn’t spoiler-y) ask them and I shall answer them here! And, you know, if you read the story when it was in novella series form and enjoyed it – do me a favor and review it on Amazon? Thanks!

Strange Angel – Thoughts, Part Three

April 24, 2009 books, strange angel, writing No comments

In part one I talked about how the how concept kicked off.

Part two saw me discuss the start of the novella series.

This will wrap everything up.

So yeah Book One was out and getting decent word and I was working on Book Two. Except something in it didn’t click for me. I couldn’t make the plot work quite right anymore and I had also written myself into a corner, to boot. It was a bad week or two there. I spent a lot of time on the phone to friends, bitching about how I just needed to solve these few little problems and everything would be all right.

Except the solution didn’t happen for a while. And then something else did. You see I found a solution to my plot issue, not the corner I wrote myself into. Fixing that plot problem though … well, I had an idea for how to end the series and it needed a pretty big plot left right near the end. I won’t spoil any story here for people who haven’t read the thing yet but it was a biggish left.

And it didn’t work where I had it. It would have, in fact, blown up the book and sunk it pretty badly. Right at the end. So I found a way to shift things around and move the left further up. Which had some ripples. Suddenly my plot for Book Two was half-gone and all my notes for Book Three became mostly unusable. I had to go back to the drawing board.

Now remember how these books came out every 6 months? Well there is a bunch of time there for production. The book had to be laid out, proofed and printed and … everything else. But that ate up a large part of the 6 month break. We were already close to the wire.

If I replotted everything I would lose a chunk of time I didn’t have. If I didn’t replot everything I would sink the entire series by being bad at my job. I replotted. I called Vince and warned him and got to work.

I then took a week off my day job and wrote all of Book Two in a single week. Well, except for the first little opening bits. The crushing deadline forced me to just stop thinking and get some work done. Insane, sure, but doable every now and then.

So anyway! The rest of the series came out, pretty much as planned, and we sat and judged it all a worthwhile experiment. Except it felt like a good idea to collect it and release the whole story at once. We decided to wait a while, then had to fit it into his schedule for publication and then deal with a delay or three.

Along the way I decided that beside getting the original short story back into place I would do something for the end. I wanted to give people a reason to consider rebuying this stuff. I thought of a few different stories I could do and tried a bunch of them on for size, but only one actually fit. So I worked it up and slid it into place.

It’s utterly different from the rest of the series, on purpose. Just as, to me, the series is utterly different from the short that it started as.

Still, I spent years working in, thinking about and dealing with Strange Angel and now with this new book out it is done. I’ll miss it, partly, and partly I’ll be glad it’s over. But either way it is a testament to trying new concepts in my storytelling, to having some fun and building characters that you may or may not like but you’ll enjoy.

And it’s almost out, as of this writing. Like – I hear a delay but also hear any day now. Maddening. As soon as it is out I will link it here and so on.

Anyway. I hope you enjoy it.

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