Posts tagged Amazon
MMP Third Birthday Discount Madness!
0We don’t like to make a big deal of these things, but yes. Yes, we’re three years old. If we could pinpoint the actual birthday of something as nebulous as a micro-press, than by Daoloth we would. But we can’t. We just know (addled as we are by weird smut and gonzo horror and, oh, cosmic rays, probably) that we had our start around this time of the year. Hence, our annual anthology release (this year it’s RESONATOR: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond — say, whaddaya waiting for? Click the link! Go get it!) and of course, a quaking raft of ridiculous discounts on ebooks through the Great Satan, Amazon! So, without further delay, here’s what you, the intrepid Migraineer, can get from us in our insane state of being, and when!
First up… Justine Geoffrey’s collected Blackstone Erotica series: PRIESTESS
Reduced from it’s regular 5.99 to 1.99 from Thursday the 12th to Friday the 13th
This is pure Cthulhu Mythos-inspired smut with shout-outs to Robert E Howard and other great Weird Fictioneers! This collection received glowing praise this year from Bobby Derie in his seminal examination of All Things Lusty and Lovecraftian, Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos. If for some bizarre reason you haven’t checked out Blackstone, here’s your best chance for a while. Click the cover or title to go straight to Amazon for purchase!
SOFT FROM ALL THE BLOOD
0.99 from Saturday the 14th to Sunday the 15th
The debut collection from Scott R Jones, editor of RESONATOR and author of When The Stars Are Right: Towards An Authentic R’lyehian Spirituality. Seven tales of surreal terror “… to engage you, upset you, unsettle you. Cage-rattling horror … crawls under your skin, and lays eggs.” Who doesn’t like eggs laid under the skin by a good book!? No, seriously. Who doesn’t enjoy that. Click the cover or title to go straight to Amazon for purchase!
FREE POETRY SPECIALS!
skawt chonzz’s R’LYEH SUTRA and the thoroughly trippy ANTHROPOCALYPSE NOW! by West Coast weirdo wunderkinder, 2 Dope Boys in a Cadillac
FREE from Monday the 16th to Tuesday the 17th. So much could be said here, but these ebooks are FREE so we’ll let them speak for themselves! Click on the covers or titles to go straight to Amazon for purchase!
Justine Geoffrey’s gonzo sci-fi sextravaganza
ORGY IN THE VALLEY OF THE LUST LARVAE
Reduced from it’s regular 3.99 to 0.99
from Wednesday the 18th to Thursday the 19th
“Low-brow, squelching fun. You don’t grab a book like this on literary merit, you dive headfirst into unapologetic escapism. It is unrepentant camp without resorting to self-satire (which shows admirable restraint). There’s a lot informing this – Lovecraftian subtext and J-Pop tentacle hentai, even French New Wave surrealism a la Moebius and the Métal Hurlant crowd, Laloux’s La Planète sauvage – Like Ray Bradbury Theater rerun gone horribly, horribly wrong. It is a fever-dream of adolescent-imprinting and sexual development during the era of underground VHS cult. Deviant, imaginative, grotesque and what-the-hell-else-were-you-expecting-exactly-with-this-title. The name promises, the text delivers.” Click the cover or title to go straight to Amazon for purchase!
WHEN THE STARS ARE RIGHT: Towards An Authentic R’lyehian Spirituality
1.99 from Friday the 20th to Saturday the 21st.
What can be said about our most controversial title of 2014? Leeman Kessler of Ask Lovecraft called it a crime scene. Laird Barron stated that author Scott R Jones gives Thomas Ligotti a run for his money in the Cosmic Horror Philosophy arms race. And S. T. Joshi hisself was seen to squirm uncomfortably when the book was mentioned during a convention panel he was sitting on. Yes, it’s that good. Are you #KeepingItRlyeh? A #Cthulhusattva without even knowing it?! Only one way to find out! Click the cover or title to go straight to Amazon for purchase!
And we’ll bring our discount bacchanal to a fitting close with last years popular anthology… CONQUEROR WOMB: Lusty Tales of Shub-Niggurath!
1.99 from Sunday the 22nd to Sunday the 23rd.
This is the Adults Only Lovecraftian Erotica Anthology you deserve! 18 pulpy tales of fertility and fear, hot sex and chilling sacrifice! Stories that squelch, tales that both titillate and terrify, from some of the best writers working in Lovecraftian horror and mind-bending erotica today: Wilum H. Pugmire, Molly Tanzer, Don Webb, Christine Morgan, Kenton Hall, Brian M. Sammons, Jacqueline Sweet, Copper Sloane Levy, Annabeth Leong, and Christopher Slatsky, along with fresh new voices. It’s SPRING, goddamnit! Time for all you Dark Young to get it on in the Grove with Shubby! Click the cover or title to go straight to Amazon for purchase!
Martian Migraine Press: the Best Kind of Headache … for Three Years Running!
Here’s to Three More Years. And Three after that. 333… that’s the Number of Choronzon, right? Sure, why not. That’s reasonable…
Too Hot! Too Weird! Too Shubby for Amazon!
0Well, yesterday the tutting grandmothers and maiden aunts that work out their sexual frustrations stoking the boilers on the Censorship Engines of Amazon.com saw fit to relegate our new title, Conqueror Womb: Lusty Tales of Shub-Niggurath, to the unsearchable dustbin that is their ‘mature content’ tag. What did this mean? It meant that until an hour or so ago, you could still find Conqueror Womb, if you knew where to look (ie. the Kindle store, specifically), and it also meant you wouldn’t find it, if you searched for, say, Lovecraft or Shub-Niggurath in the general search terms for Amazon.com itself.
Is this kind of thing a big deal? I mean, don’t most readers come to MMP titles because of something MMP authors say or do or post? Who goes searching for the term “conqueror womb”, anyway? Precious few, I’m sure, and I’m not sure I’d want to know anyone who would. (I’m sure you’re lovely people, but … you understand.)
So, why’d the grannies hit us, and hit us so fast? Conqueror Womb was released on the 10th. Of February. That’s right, a mere three days ago. We were alerted to the fact of our change of status by one of the collections authors, the sharp-as-a-goddamn-tack Jacqueline Sweet. Alarmed that they had moved so quickly, and just before Valentine’s Day, which was, you know, the whole reason for releasing this book this week, Scott immediately got on their case with this letter…
According to their spokes-granny, the cover (by friend-of-the-show and genius Glaswegian illustrator Garry Mac) was deemed to be “mature content”. Ladies and gentlebeasts, the original cover…
Beauty. That’s EIGHT breasts, at least. And, like Scott said, monstrous. And not all that sexual, even. In fact, Garry Mac’s Shubby here is feeding her Dark Young. Amazon, what do you have against breastfeeding mothers? she asks in something nearby to complete seriousness. Well, whatever problems they have with that particular miracle of nature, the upshot is they asked us to change this. Remember, too, that we had to confront them on this issue: if we hadn’t noticed their action, they wouldn’t have mentioned it to us at all. If you’ve never seen one of their your cover is too smutty emails, they look like this.
Well, gosh, Cecilia, thanks for being so up front and honest and understanding about Amazon’s behind-the-scenes manipulation of our product!
So, yeah, we changed the cover. And if you think it was easy for us to move the text elements north to cover up our beautiful, regal Shub-Niggurath, then let me tell you honey, IT WASN’T. (Sorry, Garry! We’re sooo sorry!) Here’s the revised cover…
Not exactly a hatchet job, but we are saddened, still.
Now, here’s the thing: Amazon asks you to choose two categories for a title, and we, in an effort to be honest about the content of Conqueror Womb, chose Horror (obviously!) and Erotica (also obviously)… certainly CW is far more horror than erotica. Even we don’t think it appeals to prurient interests enough for anyone to reasonably get their rocks off, although you’re welcome to try. Scott felt, and I concurred, that we had been penalized for our transparency. And so the Martian Migraine response was a little testy, naturally…At this point, we pretty much threw up our hands. Wiser heads than ours nodded sagely and advised us that once a title had been flagged as mature, it was effectively done, kaput, as good as disappeared. Certainly, this has been my own experience with the first two Blackstone books (Red Monolith Frenzy and Green Fever Dream both got hit about eight months back, and sales of those has dropped noticeably — but hey, there’s the links, go, now, and buy a copy of each, just to rub it in their noses, please) and so we resigned ourselves to obscurity.
Then, this happened…
We fought Amazon.
We fought a rear-guard battle, granted, and we gave up some territory (those lovely mutant mammaries!), but we fought Amazon…
AND WE WON! We won. It can be done.
But, just to spite ’em, remember this, Migraineers: buy DIRECT from MMP and you’ll get the uncensored glory of the original cover AND exclusive website bonus content! Delivery may not be as swift as Amazon’s Whispernet (generally under 12 hours to your inbox) but you get our chummy personalities and sweet extra swag with the transaction, and our gratitude for supporting independent presses. It’s Valentine’s Day! Show your sweetie some weird love and pick up a copy of Conqueror Womb: Lusty Tales of Shub-Niggurath for a little light pillow reading!
Justine out.