Magician First Class: Pre-Orders Open!

It has been an exciting week at the Healey Chalet!

First, if you missed out on the Kickstarter or you're new around here (hi, new people!) the Magician First Class e-book is now available for general pre-order! It's launching Feb 3, and in my usual manner I have not done nearly enough marketing, oops.

Pre-ordering e-books (next to reviews) is about the most helpful thing you can do as a reader, and every indie author appreciates the heck out of it.

The e-book will be going straight into Kindle Unlimited, so if you're an Unlimited reader, free up a spot in your library. The paperback and hardcovers will also be available via Amazon, but they can't be preordered. I will give you a heads-up on the day.

Second, readers started sending me photos of their copies of Magician First Class as their Kickstarter copies arrived in their homes, an excellent activity I heartily encourage.

I'm so thrilled with how these high-gloss covers came out.

Then my author copies arrived, along with the cute-as-heck mass market paperbacks of Bespoke and Bespelled and Savory and Supernatural:

I'm going to be taking all of these, plus the Olympus Inc books to Ages of Pages (Hamilton, May 2) and I'm looking forward to seeing some of you there.

Finally, in addition to dropping the four book Trojan Women collection on Patreon for $5 and up Patrons, I also unearthed and published the short story "Red River, River Red" for the first time, for my Bonus Content Patrons:

A frozen water surface, cracked, with text reading: "Red River River Red" and "Kate Healey"
Sometimes a lady can drown you a little bit, for a treat.

Like all the Patron Bonus Content material, I'm putting these covers together myself, and I actually... kind of like this one?? I don't rate my graphic design skills very highly, but the thing about being a one-woman show is that I either have to hire people to do things, or do them myself. My generally published work gets professional covers, paid at professional rates, but most of the bonus stuff is just me and my Canva subscription. This is one of the things I really miss about traditional publishing.

However! It turns out that if you do something a lot, even if you don't like it and aren't particularly good at it, you cannot help but improve. Today I replaced the old BookFunnel "cover" for "Taylor Made", my short story prequel to the Movie Magic universe. I won't claim it's good, but I prefer the new version, with its theatrical curtains and simpler colour scheme.

1: 2023 version. 2: 2026 version. I've been doing this for three years!

It always feels like the best kind of magic, the moment where I notice that just continually doing something results in more ease and better outcomes1.

Until, of course, I hit the next plateau. But hey, when it comes to graphic deign--there's still a lot of up to go.

I hope you're all enjoying the climb!

Love, Karen/Kate.

That Healey Girl is the newsletter of Karen (or Kate) Healey, a romance and speculative fiction author who lives in Ōtautahi, New Zealand and shakes plots loose by wandering along the river. Please feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone you think might enjoy it.

1 Except, of course, for scrubbing the shower. I am as good at that as I am ever going to get, it's as clean as it's ever going to get, and I am never going to enjoy it even a little bit.