Nick Bryan

Buy My Work

Hobson & Choi Blog Tour – WEEK ONE

by

The first week of the Hobson & Choi Blog Tour has more or less happened! The good word of H&C spreads far and wide across half a dozen sites, with many more still to come!

In case you haven’t had time to keep track of the latest tweets and so on, I thought I’d come back with a quick summary of what’s happened in the last week. Not to mention, I wrote a few fun posts for this tour myself, and since subscribers to this website are meant to like that sort of thing, I figured it was worth calling attention to them.

Me Me Me

First up in the posts-by-me section, then, we had a good-length interview with fellow indie author and JukePop graduate Virginia McClain. Some good introductory questions about the series, plus a few more in-depth moments about process, serials and whether I would be willing to eat a guinea pig. Virginia’s own post-Jukepop action-fantasy novel Blade’s Edge just came out too, which I thoroughly recommend. More details on Goodreads, including a longer review by me.

I also had a guest post on Music, Books & Tea about how to use the internet in fiction without killing the drama, which might be of use to other writers and funny to everyone else. It’s kinda a jokey post, but I means my jokes.

Last in the all-me section, I also wrote a fairly comprehensive piece of My Influences for YA Yeah Yeah. If you ever want to know what turned me into the writer I am today, or just want some recommendations, I stand by all of those. Although some might be aimed at a quite young demographic.

The Thoughts Of Others

Even more excitingly, some other folk were kind enough to read the H&C books and offer up some thoughts for the blog tour. Writer/craft blogger and long-time friend of both me and whole H&C project Claire Rousseau wrote a review of both books on her site.

If you prefer lists (like they do on the internet, I hear), Faye of A Daydreamer’s Thoughts produced a list of ten reasons why you should read the Hobson & Choi series, and they’re all worth taking heed of, I feel. But I would say that.

Lastly for now, we have another review of both books by Chelley of Tales of Yesterday! Not only are there kind words said about the books, Chelley may also win for tour dedication with her H&C-styled site banner created for her tour date, which I’m reproducing below for posterity.

Excellent. If anyone in the second week of the tour wants to repaint their house in the style of the Hobson & Choi covers, that might be the only way to beat that.

Prizes Prizes Prizes!

I will just mention that if you want a free copy of the first H&C book, I have recently sent five copies to the Books On The Underground scheme, which leaves copies of books around the London Underground – it seemed apt considering our cover. So if you follow me on Twitter, I’ll try and post whenever I hear the location of a copy.

Hobson & Choi Blog Tour!

by

Tomorrow, the second H&C book is released! To mark this occasion, and promote the series as a whole, Hobson & Choi is Going On Tour!Well, on Blog Tour, organised by the excellent Faye Rogers – you can see even more tour details on her site.

Basically, a range of bookish and book-related blogs (see list to right) will be featuring Hobson & Choi in some capacity, one every day for two weeks. This will include a couple of interviews with me, some guest posts where I talk about H&C-related issues, reviews of the books by the bloggers themselves, a competition, possibly a couple of surprises too.

Once we’re a few days into the tour, I might do a post here to point out the specifics, and I’ll probably retweet the tour posts on my Twitter when they happen. I’ll also keep updating the links below with the H&C-specific post on each blog when available. For now, if you just want to see the sites we will later feature upon, click away!

And don’t forget to buy both the new book and the newly cheap first one too, obviously.

Blog Tour Route – Collect ’em all!
Monday 19th January
Rain On A Summer’s Afternoon – Interview with author (i.e. me). – Tuesday 20th January
Claire Rousseau – Review of both books. – Wednesday 21st January
Music, Books and Tea – Guest post by me about using the internet in fiction without killing drama. – Thursday 22nd January
Ya Yeah Yeah – My Influences: I list stuff that inspired/drove me towards Hobson & Choi – Friday 23rd January
A Daydreamer’s Thoughts – 10 Reasons To Read Hobson & Choi (not by me!) – Saturday 24th January
Tales of Yesterday – Review of both Hobson & Choi books. – Sunday 25th January
K-Books – Short author interview. – Monday 26th January
Nimbus Space – Review of H&C v2. – Tuesday 27th January
The Online Novel – Detailed guest post on H&C publication strategy. – Wednesday 28th January
Nyx Book Reviews – Fun guest post on the concept of “YA Crossover” and whether H&C is that. – Thursday 29th January
Winged Reviews – My Top Ten Book Series – Friday 30th January
Kirstyes – Character interviews! Hobson and Choi speak! – Saturday 31st January
The Book Moo – Impressively, Mel of The Book Moo has done video reviews of The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf and also Rush Jobs. Amazing stuff.Sunday 1st February
Bookish Outsider – Review of both books! – Monday 2nd February
Pewter Wolf

Hobson & Choi – Case Two cover reveal! Case One price drop!

by

Now that the whole Christmas/New Year block is fading into distant memory, time to get on with the serious business of getting Rush Jobs launched out into the world – the second Hobson & Choi book in which a new age of gentrified crime starts to pile up around our heroes. The book comes out on Monday 19th January, which is a mere two weeks away! Yipe!

So, probably time I showed you the cover, created once more by the good folk at Design For Writers. I’ll throw in the blurb again for good measure.

“Sometimes #crime feels like the Matrix. Or the #patriarchy or #porn. It’s everywhere, even in people you trusted, and there’s so MUCH of it.”
Angelina Choi returns for her second and final week of work experience at John Hobson’s detective agency, ready for anything after their first successful murder solve.
After all that online buzz, they’re in phenomenal demand. Can Hobson & Choi solve a kidnapping, play chicken with corporate crime, beat back gentrification, save a dog from drug dealers and head off violent backlash from their last case?
Or will grim revelations about Hobson’s past leave them floundering in the chaos?
Rush Jobs collects the second major storyline in the Hobson & Choi saga, #1 on Jukepop Serials and #2 in Dark Comedy on Amazon, adding brand new chapters and scenes to the case.
Also included: bonus story Infernal Accounting, exclusive to this book. An unfortunate accountant is terrified of his first day working for Rush Recruitment – but they’re only a temp agency, right? How bad can it be?

Launch Details

This time, thanks to better planning on my part, we should have the print and e-editions on sale on launch day. The same outlets as last time – Amazon for print, most popular e-shops for the digital edition. I’ll also hopefully get copies in the Big Green Bookshop again, though that may take a tad longer.

As well as shoving the book on sale and tweeting about it, there’s also a Hobson & Choi Blog Tour going on around the launch, starting on the 19th Jan and running for two weeks, spreading the word around the internet. So that’ll be exciting.

If you want to register your interest in Rush Jobs, it is already up on Goodreads. If you want to be considered for a review copy, drop me an email. And if you’ve not read the first one yet, well…

The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf goes cheap!

Wolves do not go “cheep”, I know that.Anyway. To mark the upcoming release of book two, I’ve slashed the price of book one to give everyone a chance to catch up. It should be around a pound (or local equivalent, taking into account VAT, etc etc) on most e-vendors, so if you haven’t read it, now seems a decent time.

If you already read the webserial and just want to check out the new extended back-up story in the book edition, this might help.

The print edition, I’m afraid, will not be going cheaper, as it’s already down as far as I can really go. Sorry, paper-fans.

Anyway, check it out, and then prepare yourself for the Rush Jobs experience, as we deepen the universe

Hobson & Choi Blog Tour – Book Two Blurb + Launch Plans

by

It appears the launch of Rush Jobs, the second Hobson & Choi book, needs preparation. You can see an exclusive 100% real not-fake not-a-joke preview of the Case Two cover just to the right of these words. Enjoy!

But yeah, if you’re someone who dislikes making Christmas plans in mid-November, best duck and cover, because we’re about to talk late January 2015.

After The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf‘s relatively soft launch, we at H&C HQ are going bigger this time. Yes, it’s a blog tour. This means that if you, the reader, run a blog about books (or something else you can easily relate back to H&C), you can host a post around the time of the Rush Jobs launch. This could be your own review of the book or a piece I’ve written or some combination of the two. We can work something out.

However, if you wish to be involved at all, you should register your interest by filling in the form here, which does include checkboxes to determine what kind of post you might want to feature.

Get ye applying. Your blogs won’t tour themselves (because I will be doing that).

In order to get everything in order for this blog tour, we’ve also put the new book on Goodreads, so if you want to announce your formal intention to read it, you can do that too.

Oh, and to make the Goodreads page look less skeletal, I’ve released the blurb for Rush Jobs, which goes like this:

“Sometimes #crime feels like the Matrix. Or the #patriarchy or #porn. It’s everywhere, even in people you trusted, and there’s so MUCH of it.”
Angelina Choi returns for her second and final week of work experience at John Hobson’s detective agency, ready for anything after their first successful murder solve.
After all that online buzz, they’re in phenomenal demand. Can Hobson & Choi solve a kidnapping, play chicken with corporate crime, beat back gentrification, save a dog from drug dealers and head off violent backlash from their last case?
Or will grim revelations about Hobson’s past leave them floundering in the chaos?
Rush Jobs collects the second major storyline in the Hobson & Choi saga, #1 on Jukepop Serials and #2 in Dark Comedy on Amazon, adding brand new chapters and scenes to the case.
Also included: bonus story Infernal Accounting, exclusive to this book. An unfortunate accountant is terrified of his first day working for Rush Recruitment – but they’re only a temp agency, right? How bad can it be?

So there we go. The countdown has officially begun. Apply now to be a tour stop! And yes, the real new cover, from the creators of the first one, will be unveiled at some point. Exciting times.

The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf – NOW IN PRINT

by

So, after a few weeks of slow roll-out, the final step of publication is here: my first book The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf is now in print! Next time, I may try and do it all at once for maximum impact, but this time, here it is a week later.

Basically: it’s a darkly comic London crime novel, the first in the Hobson & Choi series. More details about the book, along with enthusiastic review quotes and such, on our very own official Hobson & Choi homepage.

But long story short, the print edition is available from Amazon here, or the Big Green Bookshop if you happen to be in London (and I’ve remembered to give them some stock).

OUT NOW IN EBOOK: The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf – Hobson & Choi: Case One

by

The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf is out in ebook!

This is the first volume in the Hobson & Choi series, a crime saga with a heavy twist of dark comedy. It shows how my two mismatched detectives begin bickering, whilst also solving their first murder. This involves Twitter, a wolf and food – loads of food, in fact.

I’ll include the full blurb in the remainder of this post, but for those who have heard the H&C sales pitch a bunch of times, let’s cut to the all-important buy-buttons. Hope you enjoy the book, I’m very proud of it, and if you do go for it, consider reviewing it somewhere, be it Amazon, other book-buying sites, the book’s Goodreads page, your own blog, social media, or anywhere else which lets you have a book-opinion.

And remember, if you’ve read Case One on the H&C webserial already, there is an eight thousand word book-exclusive bonus story here to make it worth your while. Print book fans – that edition shouldn’t be too far away now. Proof is en route for my approval.

The Full Sales Pitch

“If we get 400 followers, John Hobson will solve that nasty wolf-murder case for free! Fight the thing himself if he has to! #HobsonVsWolf!”

Angelina Choi was only trying to drum up some Twitter followers and make a good impression on her first day interning at John Hobson’s one-man detective agency.

But the campaign went viral and now they have a murder to solve, no money coming in, and an unwilling Hobson faced with battling some enormous beast.

With both follower and body counts rising, can they crack the case without offending everyone or being eaten by a huge dog?

The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf is the first case starring Hobson & Choi, a bickering, mismatched detective duo for 21st century London. This book collects the debut storyline of the hit darkly comic crime web serial, extensively rewritten and improved for this definitive edition.

Also included: book-exclusive bonus story The Left Hand Is Always Right, grim tale from a dark corner of Hobson & Choi’s London – The Left Hand, budget pub of crime.

Even more details on the dedicated Hobson & Choi homepage! If you have any unanswered questions about anything Girl-Who-Tweeted-Wolf-related, email me and we’ll hopefully be able to come to some accord.

Thank you and goodbye for now. I’m off to enjoy the day. In case the buttons up top didn’t work for anyone, here are all those book-buy links in old-fashioned text form.