Each Friday the Smashwords store reports the bestselling indie fiction titles based on the previous week’s sales. If an author has more than one title eligible for the list, only the highest performing title will be included. This ensures high-performing titles receive the accolades they deserve, while providing up-and-coming authors the visibility they have earned. Don’t miss Monday’s Top 10 Hot Preorders List, where Smashwords will provide a list of the most highly anticipated ebook preorders.

by CJ Holmes We have to talk about dragons. ONYX STORM is book three in Rebecca Yarros‘s Empyrean series, and it’s releasing on 21st January. This book is one of the biggest romantasy releases scheduled for 2025 – and I can guarantee there will be a social media takeover, and more than a few bookshops will be holding all night long publishing events. Not sure what this series is? You’ve probably heard of book one, FOURTH WING. It’s been a huge publishing phenomenon in romantasy and this book has caught the imagination of a whole new generation of readers. Is it perfect? No. But no book is and if this has inspired a whole load of people to pick up books and become readers, then I’m all for it! THE EMPYREAN SERIES has also brought dragons out of hibernation, and there’s been a surge of readers wanting books about these amazing fantasy creatures. In the world of fantasy romance, they come in three broad flavors: evil villains who need to be defeated, magical beasts with fantastic riders they’re somehow connected to, and dragon shifters. What’s a dragon shifter, I hear some of you ask… It’s a creature that shifts between…

Nestled in a little scooped out valley in the Appalachian Mountains and surrounded by the National Forest like a giant maw waiting to snap closed and swallow us whole, Caball Hollow, West Virginia is a hard town to get to and, with the switchback that washes out every time it rains, an even harder town to leave. We have one stoplight and two restaurants. The Pub and Grub, is primarily a bar, complete with sticky floors and a menu that tastes mostly like old fryer grease. And I’m not just saying that because the other restaurant is my family’s diner. The Harvest Moon serves breakfast and lunch six days a week, from fried green tomatoes and grits, to cathead biscuits and red-eye gravy. Each recipe was perfected by the generations of James women who came before and faithfully recorded in our family books of mountain wisdom, alongside the best places to find paw paws and what to plant by the phases of the moon. And these days, my younger sister, Linden, has taken to supplementing our menu with a selection of baked goods that make use of her special talents, like lavender shortbread to ease conversation and chess cake for…

Book: THE CAPITAL OF DREAMS Character Name: The Goose How would you describe your family or your childhood? My family hardly paid any attention at all. I could have been any goose to crack out of the egg. I knew I was different. But my family alas, did not know I was different. It was muddy. I do remember that. So much mud. So much squawking. What was your greatest talent? I consider myself to be a public intellectual. I think public speaking is something I am gifted at. I believe I could only truly feel myself when I am in front of a crowd of a thousand people. Significant other? I belong to a human child. That was my ambition. I did not want anything to do with other geese. I was laughed at on the farm. They said you are not a dog, you cannot acquire a child. But I knew I would. So I found a lost one on the side of the road. A very posh erudite child from the city. I wanted a well-to-do child, who would have a similar vocabulary to me. Biggest challenge in relationships? Accepting that your partner is going to make…

By Lauren J. A. Bear When I set out to write about mothers in literature, I knew it would be complicated. Because motherhood is complicated. The moms I know – myself included – certainly do our best, but we are all working within the parameters of our current existence and under the veil of our past experiences. I always say, I might be correcting the mistakes of the mothers before me, but I’m making entirely new ones in the process. Defining a “good” mother in fiction or reality is, thus, a subjective task. There’s Marmee March, of course, morally steadfast and true, and Mrs. Rabbit of Beatrix Potter lore, always aproned and full of sage advice. But one of the hallmarks of good literature is authenticity. Nobody is an angel of the home all the time. On the flip side, there are quintessentially bad mothers: Mrs. Wormwood from MATLDA, vain and self-centered, or sociopathic Cathy Trask from EAST OF EDEN. While some may find the antics of Jane Austen’s Mrs. Bennett entertaining, I’m no fan. Her meddlesome desperation never felt like it had her daughters’ best interests at heart. There must be a middle ground. Moms who are devoted to…

Happy New Year everyone! I’m multi-genre author Debra Parmley, and I write while living the RV lifestyle full-time with my husband. I’m excited to bring you “Tales from the Trailer” a new feature on Fresh Fiction where each month I’ll be sharing stories of our travels and the RV lifestyle from an author’s point of view. For 23 years we had lived in Bartlett, TN just outside Memphis and we had talked about getting an RV and traveling more when he retired from his pressure washing business. Then Covid changed things in the US, and I said, “What are we waiting for? Everything is shut down anyway. If we must stay home, why not do that in a home on wheels? We can just move the home and go see national parks and our beautiful country. Let’s sell the house, buy an RV and go.” So, we did. By October 2020 we had bought the RV, a 2010 Tiffin Allegro diesel bus, parked it at our house, and started moving things into it while I worked on downsizing everything in our house.  When we put our house on the market, it sold 6 days after we listed it with two…

1–What is the title of your latest release? THE MAP OF BONES 2–What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book? A fast-paced adventure thriller, two pioneering women – separated by nearly two hundreds – go in search of the women in their own family, a quest that takes them from Europe to building a new life in South Africa. Quickly, they discover the past is far from dead and buried and they cannot escape the long-hidden secrets within their own family.  It’s an adventure detective novel, a quest novel celebrating incredible heroines, a novel about the power of words and how they connect generations. 3–How did you decide where your book was going to take place? I was in the Huguenot graveyard in Franschhoek South Africa back in 2012, when I had a sudden vision of a young woman in 19th century dress rubbing the lichen from a headstone to discover who was buried there.  I had to write The Map of Bones to find out who she was and what secrets were buried in the red earth of Africa.  It was quite a ride writing the book! 4–Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life? Absolutely!  She’s…

1–What is the title of your latest release? THE BANISHED BRIDE 2–What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book? It’s the first book in my “Intrepid Heroines” series—and Aurora Sprague needs every bit of grit and determination she can muster! Forced to become a child bride to a complete stranger in order to pay off a gambling debt of her wastrel father, she is banished to a remote estate while her husband—who has also been forced into the marriage by his own father—rides off from the wedding to return to his military assignments abroad. As the years pass—without a word from her legal husband—Aurora and her loyal former governess starts their own thriving business advising women on how to outwit the wiles of scheming men. When one of her clients is in danger of violence from a drunken spouse, Aurora insists on helping the woman escape to a relative in Scotland. But on the journey home, she finds a knife-wielding stranger in her carriage—and is quickly drawn into a cat-and-mouse intrigue involving the roguishly handsome British agent, who is chasing a French spy. It turns out they work well together trying to unravel lies and secrets . . . but…

1–What is the title of your latest release? THE LIFE CYCLE OF THE COMMON OCTOPUS 2–What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book? Eighteen-year-old Penelope Winters moves to Edinburgh for university to unearth a piece of her divorced parents’ history that she knows they’ve been keeping from her. She contacts an estranged friend of her father’s, a novelist called Lord Lennox, who invites her to spend the weekend at his centuries-old estate on Scotland’s east coast. As she pulls at the thread of her family’s secret, she unravels more than she bargained for. 3–How did you decide where your book was going to take place? The setting came first. I was writing scenes set in Edinburgh before I knew I was writing a novel. 4–Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life? Yes. I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with Pen over the past five years. I sometimes get annoyed with her, for the same reasons her friend Alice does, but like Alice I care deeply about her and especially appreciate her spikey, darkly funny side, which she hides from most people. 5–What are three words that describe your protagonist? Perceptive, determined, careful. 6–What’s something you…

1–What is the title of your latest release? REMEMBER WHEN. Book 4 of the Ravenswood series 2–What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book? Clarissa Ware, Dowager Countess of Stratton, mother of the Ravenswood clan, finally gets her own happy ending with the man she has secretly loved since childhood, despite his somewhat lower social standing. 3–How did you decide where your book was going to take place? The mansion and park of Ravenswood in Hampshire already existed from the previous three books in the series. Although the stories sometimes stray to other places, like London, I like to center them mostly around Ravenswood itself since it is central to the series and readers will be familiar with it. This story takes place almost entirely there, with a few scenes set at Clarissa’s childhood home ten miles away. 4–Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life? Probably not. I am a 21st century author, living a quiet existence in a modest home in rural Saskatchewan, Canada. She is a Regency-era British aristocrat. She lives in the realm of my imagination, which seems very real indeed when I am in the process of writing but is not reality in…