Alex Gabriel

Writer. Reader. Romancer.


Leave a comment

Best Book Debut Winner!

You guys! “Love for the Cold-Blooded” is the 2nd Place Winner in the “Best Book Debut” category of the Goodreads M/M Romance Group Member’s Choice Awards!

Best Book Debut
1. Roan Parrish for In the Middle of Somewhere
2. Alex Gabriel for Love for the Cold-Blooded, or The Part-Time Evil Minion’s Guide to Accidentally Dating a Superhero
3. Avery Cockburn for Play On

I am incredibly happy and proud. Thank you so much to everyone who voted! I can’t tell you how much it means to get this kind of encouragement and affirmation from readers.

Congratulations to Roan Parrish, Avery Cockburn and all of the other amazing authors who won. If you’re a member of the goodreads group, check out the full list of winners here.

2nd place debut

 


Leave a comment

M/M Romance Member’s Choice Awards!

Love for the Cold-Blooded, Still Waters and First Contact have been nominated for eleven M/M Romance Member’s Choice Awards!

Thank you so much to everyone who nominated my books. I am beyond thrilled! While I don’t expect to win any of the awards, I feel that being nominated so many times is a wonderful compliment.

If you’re a Goodreads M/M Romance group member, you have until the 15th to vote. Here’s a list of my nominations with links to the polls. If you’d care to vote for any of my books, I’d appreciate it very much, needless to say!

First Contact
Best Contemporary/Mainstream

Still Waters
Best Love is an Open Road Story

Love for the Cold-Blooded, or The Part-Time Evil Minion’s Guide to Accidentally Dating a Superhero
Best Book Debut
Best Book of the Year
Best Fantasy
Best Humorous
Best Main Character (Patrick West)
Best Coming of Age
Best Story that Should have a Sequel
Best Virgins (unlike me, Pat would not be thrilled to know he is nominated in this category – rub it in, why don’t you *g*)
Best Family Drama

members choice badges overview


Leave a comment

New Cover for “Love for the Cold-Blooded”!

Several readers mentioned they found the original cover of “Love for the Cold-Blooded” bland – so I enlisted the talented, amazing and endlessly patient Joanna of Book Cover Master Class to design a new one. I am very happy with the result. Thank you again, Joanna!

Ccold-blooded 200lick on the image to check out the full glory of the dramatically posed hoagie – ahem, hero – with his imposingly billowing cape! The little mind control ray! The snakes! The jaguar! The cheeky minions peeking over the cape! And, of course, the heroically shirtless Silver Paladin, aka Nick!

(I’m only sad Nick isn’t slinging a Ghost Matter t-shirt over his shoulder. Alas! Clearly this was a day when he was forced to leave his lab.)

I hope this cover reflects the light-hearted, whimsical nature of the book, while also alluding to the superhero theme, flirting with its comic book origins, bringing out the affectionate parody / satirical homage element, and – not least – emphasizing that this is a book wherein readers can expect to find men without shirts.

The print cover is even lovelier, you guys. Just saying.

What do you think?

As an aside on the subject of cover models, let me just say: argh. Finding this one took a long and painful search (sifting through endless archives of half-naked men; I’m sure you can picture my suffering). He still doesn’t quite match my mental image of Nick, but he’s like the fictional movie version. In my mind, this is the underwear model who portrays the fictionalized character Golden Warrior in the films within the novel’s world.


Leave a comment

Falling in Love with the Cold-Blooded

Several people have asked where I got the idea for “Love for the Cold-Blooded, Or: The Part-Time Evil Minion’s Guide to Accidentally Dating a Superhero”. I’ll try to answer this as briefly as possible… which is still not very brief at all.

You rang?

A little over a year ago, a friend recounted several interesting anecdotes from an article about serving the extremely wealthy. There was a family who entirely forgot about one of the many estates they owned, for example, while the estate in question was kept in top shape by staff: a ghost mansion running smoothly along in constant readiness for a visit that never came.

mansion-425272_1920My friend also mentioned that most of the fiction she read got the details of extremely rich people’s lives wrong. Hmm, I thought. Yes, I’ve also read stories like that, and those details have always rung false to me. Fictional characters living in a billionaire’s mansion check what they have in the fridge and fix themselves a sandwich, making a mental note to go shopping because they’re almost out of ham; they call out for fast food; they forget to do the laundry; they discover they’ve run out of their favorite cereal, and squabble over who ate the last portion; they split chores like making breakfast and doing the dishes. All perfectly ordinary activities – all things that a very rich person living in a mansion would never ordinarily do.

What might a story that got it right be like…?

Continue reading


Leave a comment

Villain Cookies

Are supervillains attacking your city? So sorry for the inconvenience. Here, have a cookie.

villain cookies Yes, I made villain cookies – double chocolate, of course (Nick’s favorite). If you can identify all the villains, I will be extremely impressed!

If you want to make your own and don’t have any suitably villainous cookie cutters handy, here’s a template with the shapes I made. Bear in mind that I’m not an artist, though.

I also made diagonal cake a while back. It’s not very pretty, but that makes it all the more authentic – and it tasted great. 😉

This concludes my baking spree of baked goods featured in my books… for now. (Insert deranged evil-mastermind-type laughter here.)

 


4 Comments

Paper Love: “Love for the Cold-Blooded” paperback giveaway

Given my abiding love of the printed book, it won’t come as a surprise that I’m publishing my longer stories in both ebook and paperback form. Love for the Cold-Blooded is available already – and it looks great! (Sorry for the low-quality phone pic… it does look great, seriously.)

Cold-blooded paperback2
Even if nobody except me ever orders a paperback copy, it’s been well worth all of the work just so I can have one for myself.

In case anybody else would like to have a copy, though, I’m hosting a giveaway on goodreads. Why not sign up? With a bit of luck, you could win a free paperback copy of “Love for the Cold-Blooded”.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Love for the Cold-Blooded. Or by Alex Gabriel

Love for the Cold-Blooded. Or

by Alex Gabriel

Giveaway ends February 09, 2015.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win


Leave a comment

Going live!

All of my titles are now available on Amazon! Well, to be exact, they’ve been available since just before the holidays… I merely neglected to announce it due to a complete lack of sleep, followed by a seasonal break for cookies, Scrabble and too much good food.

I am ridiculously happy and excited, as well as somewhat nervous.

Next up: