Comments Off on LUSTLOCKED is live! Also, a quick and dirty primer on my novella series!

Sniff.

Do you smell that?

I love the smell of pulp and LCD screens in the morning.

It smells like…book release day.

Here we go again, folks. Today my new book LUSTLOCKED is live! It’s the second book in my new supernatural comedy action romance drama urban fantasy series, Sin du Jour, from Tor.com Publishing. It’s more fun than ants in the pants, an eight-ball of cocaine, and watching every Jim Varney Ernest movie in chronological order. And it’s available to read right now.

But don’t take my word for it! LUSTLOCKED has already garnered the series’ first starred review from Publishers Weekly and folks are laughing and loving the shit out of it. Here are obligatory pull quotes to prove that thesis!

• “Magic and humor combine with delicious results in this unusual, wildly fun novella.” – Publishers Weekly
• “Another hilarious entry into the Sin du Jour world, with some of the funniest dialogue I’ve ever read.” – Books, Bones, & Buffy
• “I’m not fucking around when I say [Matt Wallace] is a comic genius.” – Chuck Wendig, author of Zer0es and Star Wars: Aftermath
• “Every new revelation about the mythology Matt Wallace is creating for this series is a new delight…” – SF Bluestocking
• “Matt Wallace is an absolute genius of the absurd.” – FangirlNation

You know the drill already, Sin-Eaters. Go forth, consume, and spread the Sin du Jour gospel. I want to see reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, I want to see tweets and blogs, I want to see you running through the streets naked waving copies of the book in ecstasy praising its teachings and learned wisdom and making the six-o’clock news.

Click here to buy LUSTLOCKED on Amazon in paperback, for Kindle, or from Audible.

Click here to buy LUSTLOCKED on Barnes & Noble in paperback or for Nook.

You might think to yourself, like Biff at the end of Back to the Future (movie references make people feel comfortable and evoke a sense of buying nostalgia), “There’s something very familiar about all this.”

That’s because it was just three months ago I was telling you to go out and buy, read, rate, review, and share the first Sin du Jour book, ENVY OF ANGELS.

Which brings me to the second thing I want to rundown real quick, mostly for you new people. There’s a lot of great SFF books out today. Folks like Robert J. Bennett, Charlie Jane Anders, and Kevin Hearne all have new novels dropping that are worth your time.

My book is a bit different from the rest, and I’m going to explain why.

ENVY OF ANGELS and LUSTLOCKED are both novellas. They’re books, just like the any other book, whether you buy the paperback or the ebook or the audiobook (we’ve got all your tastes covered). They’re just shorter, tighter reads, meant to be enjoyed in the amount of time you’d binge-watch several episodes of a streaming series on Netflix or Amazon in a single evening or afternoon. They’re also meant to be enjoyed in the same way. Sin du Jour, and the way I write novella series in general, is episodic. Each book has a standalone plot, in this case centered around a single event the company is catering, but it carries over a lot of the stories and character arcs from the last book. It’s like an old-fashioned serial. There are cliffhangers, there are monsters of the week, and there’s a fast-paced world you check in with every few months to get the next part of the Big Story.

With my Sin du Jour series, instead of writing three epic tomes over five or ten years and keeping you waiting (which is its own kind of experience, and I’m not heralding one over the other), you’re going to get a 40k-word book every few months, and you’re going to get twice or three times as many books. I have seven planned in the initial arc of this series, and it will close the current story out in a satisfying way, I promise.

Finally, while the majority of the other books being released day are filling shelves in chain brick-and-mortar bookstores, Tor.com Publishing is distributing its novellas digitally right now. Which means you have to order it. Now, you can absolutely go to your local bookshop and order it through them and they’ll be happy to do it and have the business, but you’re not going to see LUSTLOCKED on a shelf outside of rare occasions where those kinds of local indie shops have taken the time to stock it, or in a library or something. Most of the time this book is going to be ordered on-line via Amazon or Barnes & Noble (probably Amazon. Reality is what it is).

Why is that important? Well, for the life of the series, it’s important because nobody is going to find the books browsing shelves or walking past window displays. They’re either going to hear about it from me, or more likely and much, much more vitally, from you. Word-of-mouth is literally everything for this series and me, and thankfully with these here internets that can be more than it or I will ever need, providing you go out there and make noise about these books. Blog about them, tweet about them, Facebook about them, Snapchat about them, Instagram them, write reviews and leave ratings on Amazon and Goodreads, email your friends, and tell you co-workers.

That is vitally, vitally important.

So, a couple few things here. 1) You’re really going to want to read the books in order and begin with ENVY OF ANGELS. 2) Once you get hooked, and you will, you won’t have to wait a million years to read the next part, and there will be a lot of next parts coming. The third Sin du Jour book, PRIDE’S SPELL, is scheduled for June. 3) When you’re hooked on it, if you want to keep enjoying those coming-soon next parts, you need to tell people about the series, bang a drum, make noise, buy the books as gifts for your friends, and generally spread the message so other people get hooked. Or y’know, no more books.

And that’s how my Tor.com Publishing novella series works, y’all.

I hope you dig LUSTLOCKED, and also enjoy the bonus Sin du Jour short story, “Small Wars,” included in the book.

I’ll see you in June for PRIDE’S SPELL.