I’m pleased to announce that the formatting and publishing of Cannon Fodder went smoothly, and it’s now available for purchase at most mainstream e-book sites. Check it out:
Smashwords
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
I also got a news spot written about me and the book.
As of the closing of the campaign on March 28, we’d raised $266, or 118% of the $225 goal. Thanks to all the backers, here’s the cover art that you have made possible:
Yeah! Again many thanks to Kelsey King, the illustrator who drew this. E-books of Cannon Fodder with this cover will be available at Smashwords and Amazon very soon. I’ll keep you guys posted.
Hey, guys? I have exciting news. My last ebook, The Confederacy of Heaven, was published in the fall of 2010. Now, after three and a half years, I’m finally ready to publish another ebook.
Kelsey’s concept of what the book will look like.
It’s called Cannon Fodder, and here’s a taste of how it goes:
The good guys always win – and Alec Nightshade isn’t going to take it anymore. Alec’s a fifteen-year-old member of the Norgolian Society of Evil Overlords, which means not having much of a life expectancy. When a hero hunts down and kills his aunt, the Viper, he sets off on the first evil scheme of his life to set things straight.
Starting an evil scheme proves to be harder than it looks. Alec catches a break when a friend tips him off about the Eggbeater of Doom, a device that can summon a kiloton-sized elder god with a grudge against those puny hairless apes. If Alec blabs about the Eggbeater, gets a hero to go after him, then kicks the hero’s ass, he can break the cycle of prophecy that dooms his side never to see the age of fifty. He doesn’t mean to hurt anybody else. But when another overlord steals the Eggbeater with the intent to actually level a city, Alec knows what he and his gang of minions will have to do: save the day. He will never get to live this down.
Like the sound of it? I’m running a Kickstarter campaign starting today to raise money for professional cover art. I’m working with Kelsey King, a local artist who’s illustrated my other ebooks. If you preorder a copy of Cannon Fodder through the Kickstarter, not only do you get to help support the cover art, but you’ll get the book at a discount.
Check out the Cannon Fodder Kickstarter campaign.
Want to know more about the project? Drop me a line. I’ll keep you guys posted about the campaign’s progress now through the end of March.
After today it’ll be 99 cents. Check it here.
This week, I’m promoting an e-short-story, “John of the Rhine,” that’s free on Amazon here.
Parts of this short story are based on real life. (Not the part about a piece of river mud coming alive.) But Mr. Kaufman’s research is based on a real experiment that was done by Thomas Young in the early 1800’s. At the time, scientists couldn’t agree whether light was a wave or a particle. In 1803, Young did an experiment where he forced light to split by passing it through a card with two pinholes in it, like so:
Image courtesy of Wikipedia
When the light came back together, the two beams either added to each other or destroyed each other, which is something that only waves do. Everybody believed that the matter was settled, that light was only a wave, for about a hundred years. Then a more sophisticated version of the experiment found that light behaves like a particle, too.
So is light a wave or a particle? Yes.
Hello, everyone! I wanted to let you know that I have some new writing out, and just for this week, it’s free.
“John of the Rhine” is a longish short story about a golem who works as an assistant to an alchemist. In his spare time, John teaches himself how to cook.
Here’s where you can get your free copy on Amazon.
Don’t have a Kindle device? There’s a couple of things you can do. You can download a free program from Amazon that will let you read the file on your mac or PC. Or, wait a couple of months. To do this promotion, I agreed to put “John of the Rhine” only on Amazon for 90 days. When the 90 days are up, I’ll put it on Smashwords as well, where it’ll be available in just about every file format imaginable.
Come and get it!
You can read the original blog post here: http://blog.smashwords.com/2012/08/new-smashwords-direct-enables-libraries.html
The upshot of this news is that Smashwords (a website that hosts and distributes self-published e-books) has just greatly expanded its ability to distribute its books with public libraries. As a Smashwords author, I think this is great news. Smashwords authors get to have their work in libraries, so one of the disadvantages of self-publishing (that you don’t get to be in libraries) is gone. Libraries get to vastly expand their lists of titles. And Smashwords, of course, gets to do more business 🙂 .
Check it out! One of my old writer friends got published! Staking Shadows is a paranormal romance in which Summer Sun McKellar is one of the few remaining humans after most people in the world have been transformed into soul-sucking … things. Summer’s taken it upon herself to re-kill as many of them as possible. But when one of the soul-suckers spares her, it gets complicated.
I read a couple draft chapters back in 2009, and if it’s still like the draft, this is not your plain ole vampire story. Way to go, Rebekah!
This is contingent on whether Podiobooks has problems with the formatting of my podcast audio files, but at the moment, the forecast is good.
For the rest of the summer, I’m going to be teasing you mercilessly with excerpts from the text and illustrations. I’m going to be telling everybody I know and their uncle about this book. I don’t think I marketed Grizelda effectively enough, and I want to do better the second time around.
I’ve decided I’m going to make The Confederacy of Heaven available for free. While it would be nice making a living from writing, it would also be a lot less fun. What I really love getting out of my e-noveling hobby is feedback. Please, feed back! Tell me what you thought of the book (and this blog, too). Tell me if you hated it. And then go tell all your friends about it.
Hi, guys.
You might know by now that I’m working on an e-book called The Confederacy of Heaven (I’ve probably talked about it to death on this blog). It takes place about two hundred years after an apocalypse that turns Earth into a giant desert. The heroine’s part of this nomadic band of people that makes textiles and things and trades them for water. Then she gets kicked out of her band. Uh-oh.
Anyway, I’m planning on distributing the thing on Podiobooks as a free podcast and on Smashwords in a variety of formats, including .pdf and the Kindle reader format. What I’d like to know is, how do you like to consume your e-books? Are you going to go for the podcast or the .pdf? Would you be interested in seeing a chapter a week posted on this blog, so you can get it as a serial?
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