If you're like me, and you subscribe to several romance author newsletters and/or follow pretty much any account in the bookish community on social media...this is old news for you:

The increasingly infamous ROMANCEBOOKWORMS Stuff Your eReader promo event is back-- and this time, it's running for three days!

This promotion has been taking place a few times a year for a long time. Thanks to social media (looking at you, TikTok,) it has exploded in visibility recently and-- we're all rather proud of ourselves for this-- June's event actually managed to break Amazon's website.

OK...so we're not all actually proud of ourselves, several people keep insisting that's not a good thing. But I'm in the camp of morally gray types that take a certain devious pride in generating enough traffic to overwhelm a website as robust as Amazon's. I mean...that takes a lot of traffic. So my internal super-villain can't help but rub her hands and cackle with glee.

The graphics all link to the same page, FYI.

The thing about this promo is, promoting it is a massive grassroots effort on the part of the authors participating in it. That includes these promotional images that go out in newsletter and on social media-- there are a ton of amazing authors who put these images together and then share them for others to use-- so lazy folks like me don't have to bust open their photo editing apps and create our own. (I mean really, I couldn't even be bothered to combine these into one image, how could I be expected to create my own?)

These are my top faves this time and even with three days to promote, I won't be able to use all the images I liked. So-- I'm putting them ALL in my newsletter just to show you because they are pretty.

AND! For technically challenged geezers like me-- did you know that there's a super handy "search page" feature on your desktop/laptop computer?

Once you get to the page that has the links to your preferred storefront and then go to the page featuring the romance subgenre you want to search through, you can hit CTRL+F on your PC keyboard or COMMAND+F on your Mac and a little search window comes up and you can use that to plug in an author's name or a keyword like "instalove" or "mountain man" and it'll show you any results that match.

I WAS TODAY YEARS OLD when I learned this! LOL! (OK, technically, I was last week years old when I found this out.)

Knowing that one weird trick makes combing through 2400+ free books much easier. Just sayin.

You probably already knew about that though.

It's Ash and Hyacinth's story from my own books that's running for free in the promo this time-- so if you're looking for a chance to own a copy for free, it will be free until Sept 23.

Also of note: EVERY book in the promo is NEW to the promo! The rule this time was that we couldn't use books that had been featured in this promo in the past-- so NONE of the books being offered this week were in the June promo that was so huge!

Don't miss out because you're thinking it'll just be the same books again!

A Rare Personal Reading Rec:

Several years ago now, I attended a writer's conference where I happened to make friends with another author-- a heroic feat on my part, I'm painfully socially awkward, all the credit goes to her.

We've been managing to get together about once or twice a year since then for weekend writing retreats, as we're both incurable night-owls and we discovered that we lived reasonably close to one another (in the same state, at least.)

So the last time we hung out, she was bouncing ideas off me, sharing her plans for a new series she was thinking of writing.

I tried to be helpful and supportive but, TBH, the whole premise sounded like a whole lot of "meh" to reader me.

Well, she wrote the first book and let me know about it.

I stared at its Amazon product page many a time, unsure just how supportive a friend and fellow author I really was.

You see, she does not write short books. It says it's 384 pages. I get antsy over 100. But I nabbed a copy and read it between writing a couple of the Moonshine Ridge books earlier this summer.

I'm hooked. I promptly emailed her to let her know that I was abusing my personal contact privileges to demand the next in series immediately. (Spoiler alert-- we're friends, but we're not that good of friends. I do not get "read the next book before it's finished" privileges. LOL!)

So, with all that backstory out of the way, I recommend:

If you are even a little tolerant of or into reverse harem/why choose romance:

This is book one of a series and it is a slow burn romance with a very slow build up.

If you dig fantasy/paranormal romance:

Total fantasy world with lots of magic and fantastical creatures.

If you dig academy romance:

It takes place in an academy. LOL! I am SO NOT INTO academy romances!

I can't really say how Darkstone Academy compares.

There is excellent world building and character development. There are bad bad guys and murders and mystery and conspiracies abounding. There's a young heroine coming of age, discovering herself and becoming a badass along the way...and also, it is a reverse harem romance, so there are four (I think four) sexy, gorgeous, alpha dudes with vastly differing personalities, strengths and weaknesses who-- naturally-- can't stand to live without her. (swoon.)

I also happen to be a sucker for ACOTAR style titling.

Seriously, that title style will get me every time.

Dark paranormal fantasy romance?

Brooding romantic suspense thriller?

True crime murder mystery?

Tonight's dinner menu?

I will read your ten year old's book reports if you title it: A Sheaf of Ink and Suffering*

*Jots down title to add to my list of "titles that need to find stories"

A Kiss of Salt and Sea is also currently FREE as part of the Romancebookworms promo, so the only thing you have to lose is a few kilobytes of space on your ereader, a few hours of your life to a good book, and then you can sit and impatiently wait for the next book with me. (It's also available in Kindle Unlimited.)

This is a long email and I have rambled enough already.

I have not even left the cabin this week. BFF and her hubster both tested positive for Covid after spending the weekend with me here at their Tahoe home. They have done me the favor of retreating to their second home and leaving me and my immune system to our own defenses.

So far, so good. Wish me luck, I guess.

~Rocklyn