Star Turtle Publishing

04/05/2024

Okay team, an update:

Cassie has just about finished a new book and it’s now available for pre-order. It’s going to be called “Love vs The Scarecrow!” and is another installment of our Frightful Loves series. Like the others, it’ll be an entirely self-contained romance in the spirit of 1990s teen horror books. You will not need to have read any of the others to understand it. It will be released on September 1st.

Why are we opening up pre-orders for a book so early? Amazon decided to run a promotion on "Love vs The Ooze Monster!", the first book in the Frightful Loves series. They’re setting the price this month, not us, in exchange for them promoting it better. So, until June 1st, it seems like "Love vs The Ooze Monster!" is going to be $1.99. So, if you’ve been holding off on it, now might be a good time to pick it up while it’s on an Amazon deal.

And apologies if you’ve written us lately and we haven’t replied. We’ve been swamped with our mother’s medical issues again (this time she’s broken her hip and needed glaucoma surgery). It’s basically been one thing after another this year, and we haven’t had the time necessary to answer everyone. We’re going to try to make time to get it done going forward.

Thanks!

05/02/2024

The paperback edition of "Happily Ever Witch" is now for sale. Again: the price of the print edition of the book is not our doing, it's the high cost of Amazon's printing service. We actually make less on the print books than the ebook editions, despite that high price.

I'm going to be sending out the newsletter tomorrow morning, probably. Just finishing up the editing on Cassie's deleted chapters.

Hope everyone had a great weekend! :)

02/02/2024

Okay, team: Cassie's new book, "Happily Ever Witch," is now available on Amazon. Right now it's only in ebook, but I should have the paperbacks ready to go in a day or two. And I'll be sending out the next newsletter which will include the first few chapters of an alternate and unpublished version of the book with an entirely different hero. If you'd like to check it out, drop us a line at [email protected] and I'll add you to our newsletter list.

Happily Ever Witch (A Kinda Fairytale Book 6)

31/01/2024

Today is the final day to pre-order the next book in Cassandra’s Kinda Fairytale series, "Happily Ever Witch." It is Esmerelda and Trevelyan’s story, showcasing their adventures together in Wonderland.

Happily Ever Witch (A Kinda Fairytale Book 6)

31/12/2023

A HUGE thank you to our readers for making 2023 the most successful year in the history of Star Turtle Publishing! Truly, it means so much to us that you’ve supported us like this. Hopefully 2024 will be even better for all of us! Happy New Year!

27/11/2023

Cassandra Gannon's new book, "Happily Ever Witch," is now available for pre-order on Kindle. It is the next book in her Kinda Fairytale series and will be released on February 1st.

The book features Esmeralda and Trevelyan having a romantic adventure in Wonderland.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CP2G19G2

23/11/2023

Wishing the happiest and safest of Thanksgivings to our readers, from the Consortium of Chaos and Star Turtle Publishing. :)

(Why did I name the department store in those books “Drews”? I honestly have no idea. I’ve never known anyone by that name and I don’t think it’s a reference to anything. Typically all of the minor names I choose in books mean something, but if it has any deeper meaning, I’ve long ago forgotten what. But that’s what its name is, so I’m not changing it. I do still question why it’s “Drews” and not “Drew’s” though. Seems like an odd choice.)

10/11/2023

This is only the second book we’ve ever hit #1 with, in any category (Amazon does not have a Horror Romance category, for whatever reason. Feel free to complain to them about that. :) ). So, that’s pretty cool. From a company perspective, this is the only time a book of mine has outsold a book of Cassie’s when on equal footing. It’s not a contest, obviously, but I’m totally winning (anyone pointing out that my victory is probably mostly due to the fact that my book is twice the length of hers and KDP pays us by the page, will be immediately blocked. ;) )

Other than that, I’ve just been doing some housekeeping of our Amazon descriptions and such. Adding graphics, fixing blurbs, etc. Still some work to do, but they look a lot better now. And I fixed Goodreads so that it (usually) displays the new covers. So, a TON of backstage kind of work done this week.

08/11/2023

Big news! Cassie has finally finished “Happily Ever Witch,” the next book in her Kinda Fairytale series! Yes, Esmerelda’s book is done, which is amazing! I’ve answered sooo many emails and messages about that book over the years. In any case, she included a free preview chapter of it at the end of “Love vs The Beast!,” so, if you want to read the first chapter, it’s available there right now. It features Trevelyan and Marrok in prison together. The full book will probably go up for presale later this month, with a release date of early next year. It stars Ez and Trevelyan in Wonderland.

And I included a chapter I deleted from Love vs The Beast! in our latest newsletter. It’s the original first chapter of the book, which I decided was unnecessary. But it’s fully finished and offered for free with the newsletter, if anyone wants to take a look. Cassie’s been offering a lot of deleted and alternate material from her books lately too. If you’d like to be added to the newsletter, simply drop us a line at [email protected] or send us a message here with your email, and we’ll add you.

06/11/2023

Elizabeth Gannon's new book, "Love vs The Beast!" is now available on Amazon. It is the second book in the Frightful Loves series, which is a horror romance imprint inspired by the "Goosebumps" and "Fear Street" paperbacks of the 1990s. Each book is self-contained but takes place within the same fictional world. Cassie's "Love vs The Ooze Monster!" is set in the 1920s and this is set in 1780, but both take place in Nevermore County.

Our adventure this time finds a Revolutionary War couple hunting a murderous wolf-cryptid.

Welcome to Nevermore County: where falling in love can be terrifying. :)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CM293TQG

30/10/2023

Love vs The Beast! is the first book either of us has written which is largely based on a true story (The Beast of Gévaudan). I mean, the romance is added and the setting is changed, but our horror monster itself is almost 100% taken from actual historical events. It’s probably the only time I’ve ever written something fictional and the least believable parts of it actually happened.

This is an 18th century illustration of it.

29/10/2023

Elizabeth Gannon's new book: "Love vs The Beast!" is now available for preorder on Amazon. It is the next book in our Frightful Loves series, but is a stand-alone story which can be read on its own.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CM293TQG

03/10/2023

I think this is the first time we’ve ever hit #1 in a category before. Granted, it’s not one of the most popular categories, but we’ll take it anyway. :)

02/10/2023

Cassandra Gannon's new book, "Love vs the Ooze Monster!" is now available as an ebook and on KU!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CJV4WN11

26/09/2023

Cassandra Gannon's new book, "Love vs The Ooze Monster!" is now available for preorder on Amazon!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CJV4WN11

18/09/2023

Coming from Cassandra Gannon on October 1st: "Love vs The Ooze Monster!"

Nevermore County, 1922: Slaughter at a speakeasy! A mysterious creature has killed all the revelers at an illegal bar. It left nothing behind but bottles of tainted moonshine and a trail of orange slime.

For a bootlegger like Mabel Harrison, this situation could be a professional catastrophe. Now, she’s got to team up with the most prominent gangster around to discover who made the poisoned liquor. Unfortunately, Boyd Cassiday is also her too-handsome, too-charming ex-boss. Mabel is still furious that the big idiot fired her. Somehow they need to work together, though, because an ooze monster is hunting the streets of their small town. …And it might just have its sights set on Mabel.

Welcome to Nevermore County, where falling in love can be terrifying!

15/09/2023

Wise words, Cassie. Wise words. ;) We are going to have more news about her new book early next week.

(I told her I was going to make her critique of a book she was reading into an inspirational meme. She didn't believe me.)

11/09/2023

Star Turtle Publishing is proud to present a new imprint from Cassandra and Elizabeth Gannon: Frightful Loves!

Remember those teen horror books from the ‘90s (Goosebumps™, Fear Street™, etc)? With the colorful covers and high-concept trope-y horror plots? Where everyday people are thrown into scary but fun situations? This imprint is heavily inspired by those. Only now with romance. And steamy s*x scenes.

We both read a TON of those books as kids and I’ve always had such a soft spot for them. I told Cassie my idea to combine their plots with romance, and she was like, “Yes.” And so here we are. :)

Our goal is that Frightful Loves will be a romance novel series, but instead of dealing with your billionaire boyfriend’s ex and associated baby drama, you’re dealing with hostile alien invasions, masked machete-wielding psychos, and a water park tormented by an ancient Lovecraftian Old One. “Can love survive a demonic mutant wolf-beast that’s eating everyone in your Revolutionary War-era village?” That kind of thing.

These are romance novels with a fun horror overlay, they will not be horror books with a few love scenes randomly tossed in. Like our other books, they will not be “dark” or “serious,” and ultimately these books will be about the couples and their relationships, even if the obstacles to that relationship are a bit more life and death than typical. In tone, I think they’ll end up being “Love in the Time of Zombies” or the scarier sections of “Formerly the Next Big Thing.” They are shorter, punchier romances which take inspiration from 1990s teen horror paperbacks and horror films. We do not intend to re-write Saw, or any other stories where the horror and gore would overwhelm the romance, we simply want to add some horror spice to the traditional romance novel. The mass-market romance paperback and the horror paperback started off as the same genre in 1959 with the reemergence of the Gothic Romance, before splitting apart and going their separate ways. We felt like it was time to reunite them again.

Each full-length book is a complete and standalone story, and the series can be read in any order. They will all take place within the same “world” though and might refer to past events in other books, even if none of the same characters show up. They are all set in a fictional place called “Nevermore County,” which is a very dangerous and very overlooked little spot on the map, and frankly, it’s a mystery why anyone would voluntarily live there. (Like, okay, sure, there are ooze monsters there that dissolve innocent victims in acidic goo, but the men in town are really hot, so I suppose it evens out in the end.)

Cassie and I will both be writing books in the series, and they’ll cover all kinds of crazy, creepy plots, and feature a variety of interesting couples experiencing love in various time periods throughout the history of Nevermore County. For example, sometimes it’ll be a couple in the Prohibition era and sometimes it’ll be a couple in the 1980s. We’re going to have some fun.

We will be releasing the first book in the series shortly and have a second almost ready to go as well.

So, prepare thyselves, gentle readers... for Frightful Loves!
Falling in Love Can be Terrifying.

03/07/2023

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C9ZV8SC8

Okay, team: Cassie's new book "Betrothed to a Dinosaur" is now available! This is the spin-off book from her story in the "Sexual Tyrannosaurus" anthology, featuring secondary characters from that. But you could probably read this on its own, if you wanted. It's pretty self-contained, just referencing events from that. The novella is 40K words long and is M/F. Enjoy!

Betrothed to a Dinosaur

07/05/2023

Random: here’s a rough draft of the original alternate cover for "Sexual Tyrannosaurus" I did years back now, when we first began the project. That’s a pic of a model wearing lingerie which I’ve Photoshopped into a cavegirl outfit, Mount Fuji, and a Jurassic Park toy. :) I wanted it to look like a vintage and beat-up “sleaze” pulp book, since my story was going for an over-the-top kind of fun Pulp feel; serious in tone but still fun for readers. Cassie felt like it didn’t look like a romance novel though, and didn’t like that the Nox on the cover was fully a dinosaur, rather than being a dinosaur-man, like in the actual book. She said it was reading a little too parody for her, like it was subverting the expectations of a romance novel, rather than being an actual romance novel that simply has a silly set-up, and she wanted me to do it again. So, I did, and we ended up with the other one which looks much better. This silly draft took me a few dozen hours though, so I’ll post it anyway, just for fun. :)

06/05/2023

Okay Team, Sexual Tyrannosaurus (which has a full-length book from both Cassie and me) is now available on both KU and in paperback. As always, the paperback price is not our choice. The book is 700 pages, and printing costs are huge. We each make a little over $1 on the paperback, the rest goes to Amazon. We just offer it because some readers like having physical copies.

I sent out the newest edition of our newsletter yesterday, which includes a free 17,000 word story concept that Cassie wrote and never finished or published. It served as the basis for her characters in Sexual Tyrannosaurus, so she thought she would put it in the newsletter so that everyone could get a glimpse behind the curtain, as it were. If you’d like to be added to the newsletter, just drop us a line at [email protected] and we’ll add you.

Cassie’s next book will be a novella sequel spin-off to, Sexual Tyrannosaurus called “Betrothed to a Dinosaur,” and it will be published shortly. We’ll have more information on it in the coming weeks.

Thanks!

Sexual Tyrannosaurus

05/05/2023

And it's off to Amazon and should be available later today or early tomorrow. :) Paperbacks will take longer as I'm still editing, it's very long.

Presenting "Sexual Tyrannosaurus"!

Barbarism and passion inflame the pagan pleasure empire of the Dinosaurs! Discover a savage, primeval world whose only law is lust! Cassandra and Elizabeth Gannon bring you two never before published views of a world where dinosaurs hunt for passion in a prehistoric land of blood and romance, where desire roars hot and loud as a volcano!

Lust & Fury! by Elizabeth Gannon: The Dinosaur God-King claims an innocent cavegirl as his sacrifice but soon has other plans for her delicate human body.

Taming the Tyrant Lizard by Cassandra Gannon: An Amazon queen goes undercover at the Dinosaur Royal Court in order to save the world. But can a tyrannical T-Rex and his delinquent son save her in the process?

26/04/2023

I finished my half of our joint project an hour ago, and Cassie's has been completed for some time. I need to read it over and make edits, but it should be released within the next week or two, assuming I don't discover anything major which will take additional time to fix. There will be TWO full-length stories, one from each of us (one is 108K and one is somewhere around 70K). In the meanwhile, here's a teaser. :)

09/04/2023

Happy Easter, Team! Quick update:

We should have an announcement on our joint project coming out very soon. I'm running behind on it because the "u" key on my keyboard broke (I had to copy and paste the letter to finish this post) and although Cassie loaned me her laptop, it's difficult to get used to. But hopefully I can either finish the book or get a new keyboard within the next week or two. I'm only a few chapters away.

In any case, Cassie informs me that she is now 98,000 words into Esmeralda's book. She's really been working on it and hopes to have it done sometime this year. Which wold be good, as the #1 question I have to answer from readers is "When is Ez's book coming out?" (Runner up being: "When is a new Elemental book coming out?" and before anyone asks that, the answer is still "Cassie is 25K words into it and says she's making progress now. She hopes to be done it soon." ;) She's also 2 chapters away from finishing off a short novel which is part of a new series I'm planning and she wanted in on too. We will probably hold that back and release hers at the same time as a couple of mine in the same series, although they are only loosely connected. I'm trying to have mine done by Fall.

So, we are planning the joint book within the next... month, maybe? Sooner if possible. Then Cassie's spin-off novella of that, which is already completed and waiting. Then our joint series of books later in the year, which are almost done (my two are like 50% done, and hers is like 80%), and then Ez's book sometime thereafter. I have some other books in the series which are about 20% done and Cassie has another that's 15K words in, but I doubt they will be out this year. Ditto the Elemental book, I don't expect that to be completed given the amount of other things she's writing right now and simply how busy we are with life in general.

I think that's about it.

(Please excuse u or 7 related typos)

- Lizzy

01/04/2023

(Lizzy writes:) We just wanted to say thank you to our readers and the romance community for making "Seducing the Sheriff of Nottingham" such a tremendous success. In the last 6 weeks, it has made more than we made all of last year on all of our books combined. And March was the 2nd best month we've ever had, behind only September 2017 (which was due to Ilona Andrews giving us an excellent review for Kingpin of Camelot, so shoutout to her again for that.)

We were planning on making another announcement today, but life got in the way, so we'll probably be doing that in a week or two.

In any case, thanks again everyone! :)

04/03/2023

Okay Team: I have finished the paperbacks of all of our books now. So if you order any of them, you should get the version with the new cover.

And a shout-out to our readers for making “Seducing the Sheriff of Nottingham” one of the biggest releases we’ve ever had! Its sales numbers are through the roof and the positive ratings on Amazon have been rolling in. Seriously, in two weeks it’s sold as much as some of our other books sell in 18 months. It is our 4th best month ever, despite the fact it didn’t come out until the 15th. And it already has more reviews on Amazon than most of our other books combined, which is awesome! Reviews REALLY help us with the Amazon search algorithm. So, that’s pretty cool. Thanks everyone!

Also, randomly, in the last 10 days, Cassie has written 40,000 of another book, which she intends to be a short story set in the same universe as a project I’m working on. Which is… surprising. But cool. We’ve never shared a “world” before. It’s like having royalty over or something. All of my characters will need to be on their absolute best behavior. :)

24/02/2023

Okay Team, I’ve finished the new covers for Cassie’s Elemental Phases series. Kinda switching up art styles here compared to the others, going for a more realistic style. Cassie’s guidance was that she wanted something which looked like an old school painted romance novel cover from the 80s and 90s, and that they should showcase the element featured in the book. So, here we are. I think they turned out pretty well. I’m happier with some of them than others, but all in all, an improvement over the old ones.

I find these covers VERY difficult to do, given the series’ strange mix of genres. They carry swords but it’s a modern-day fantasy society, which has just lost 90% of its population, but is still a “happily ever after” kinda tone which isn’t at all grim-dark. And that’s tough to get right on a cover. It’s one of the reasons why Cross’ book has had… I want to say 4 different covers (?) over the years? It’s really hard for me to capture.

Anyway, they’re up. At the moment, they are eBook only, but I will get to work reformatting the paperbacks to feature the new covers. I should have them done in a few days.

Speaking of which, I just sent Amazon the file for the “Seducing the Sheriff of Nottingham” paperback, so it should be for sale tonight or tomorrow. Again, about the paperbacks, they are NOT a cash-grab by us. Because of the length of our books, the printing cost is *massive*. We make significantly less on paperbacks than we make on eBooks (I make like 80 cents a paperback on some of mine), but we offer them because people want them. Also, based on previous comments we’ve received, the text size is a little bigger in this edition. This increases the price, since it adds a lot of pages. Sorry about that, but it's the printer, not us.

19/02/2023

(Lizzy writes:) Okay Team: I've finished the new covers for "Love in the Time of Zombies" and "Ghost Walk." They are currently eBook only, but I should have the paperbacks done within the next couple of days. Next up will be the Elemental Phases.

And BIG shoutout to everyone who left a review for "Seducing the Sheriff of Nottingham" or our other books on Amazon! That really helps us a lot with the algorithm and moves us up in search results. And more importantly, it's just nice to know when people enjoy our books. :)

17/02/2023

Okay Team: I have uploaded some new content to our website. In this case, Cassie has added Nottingham to her guidebook of the Kinda Fairytale world. It's like a travel brochure with information about the kingdom. Additionally, if you follow some links, you can read a free sample chapter of her new book, "Seducing the Sheriff of Nottingham."

I should be going through and updating/adding more content to the various sections of the site in the coming weeks.

Oh, and I just sent out our newsletter, so if you didn't get it, drop us a line at [email protected] and I will make sure you're on the list. Again, we have a pretty cool article this time around, as Cassie is including the first 2 chapters of an unreleased/never-to-be-finished book for free!

Books in the Kinda Fairytale series are self-contained romances, but they are also connected to a larger world.  Many characters and kingdoms appear in multiple books.  To get a fuller pi…