Monthly Archives: January 2015

Free Promotion is here!

Started today, January 29th.  For five days only, ending February 2nd (Monday).

Two of my titles are free for Kindle on Amazon via KDP promotion.

Here are the links:

The Gateway Coverand

Jackolantern Cover

Please download them, read them, if you like them, consider leaving a review.  There are SIX (!!!) short stories contained in the two titles.  See the previous post for a description, or check out the Amazon book page for that same description.  They’re more or less flash fiction pieces.  The longest clocks in at something around 1800 words, if I recall correctly.

Thanks for grabbing them!

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Another KDP Select promo coming up…

I’m running a promotion on two of my titles, THE GATEWAY (with AMERICA’S PASTIME and HOT SPOT) and JACK’O’LANTERN (with THE MOMENT and SARAH’S PUPPY).  They will be free starting on Thursday January 29 for five days.  The promo ends on Monday, February 2.

The Gateway CoverAn imaginative boy discovers that the gateway for all evil has been opened, and his neighbor has been possessed! The fate of the whole world, or at least his neighborhood, is in his hands now. He must act to destroy the Gateway.

A 1500 word short tale of horror.

(Also found in the collection 14 Dark Windows.)

Contains two bonus stories:
America’s Pastime – a 1300 word short horror story, &
Hot Spot – a 700 word short horror story (dedicated to Dale Vincent Schwitalla)

Jackolantern CoverAs four young wanna-be Halloween vandals terrorize the far side of their neighborhood by smashing pumpkins, they encounter a jack’o’lantern that is by far the biggest and ugliest pumpkin they’ve seen this night. But this pumpkin is more than it appears.

A mild horror short story of about 1300 words.

*Also contains TWO bonus stories (NEITHER IS HORROR):
THE MOMENT (about 1500 words) and                                                                                                    SARAH’S PUPPY (about 1000 words)
And a short author’s note.

(These titles can also be found in the collection 14 Dark Windows.)

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Please feel free to download them, starting Thursday January 29.  Thank you!

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Update on Book Pricing

I just thought a quick post updating the book pricing might be interesting.  A couple posts back, I wrote that Amazon’s ebook price for DARK CITY by F. Paul Wilson was $8.54, more than my arbitrary max for a fiction ebook for myself.

So I waited.  I received a ten-dollar gift card from Barnes and Noble for Christmas, and yesterday I went into their store to browse a bit.  There was DARK CITY, retail price $8.99.  With my 10% member’s discount, it was already down to $8.09, less than the ebook price.  Okay, you might say that I already paid for that $0.90 discount with the $25.00 membership fee, and you’d be correct.  But then I also had a 20% coupon that came via email that day.  When I was not a member of B&N’s program, I rarely received coupons, and almost never received 20% coupons, except maybe at Christmas.   Plus, the $25.00 is a “sunk cost” whether I buy the book from Amazon as an ebook or from Barnes and Noble as a trade paperback.

With my 10% and the additional 20%, the cost of the book dropped to $6.47 (plus an 8.75% sales tax).  (I also bought remaindered editions of Evanovich’s 19th Stephanie Plum, a Joe Pickett novel from C.J. Box, a Robert Crais novel and a Jeffrey Deaver novel, each at 10% off their already low price, three at $5.98 and one at $6.98, so I got an additional $2.50 off besides the $0.90 on the Wilson title.  A total of $5.02 off with the coupon.)

Now watch:  I’ll go to Amazon next week and DARK CITY will be $3.99.

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UPDATE:  I went to the Amazon page to see what the price was today.  Instead of it being $8.54, it had gone up to $8.99, the exact same cost as the MMPB.  All I can do is shrug…

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Mount TBR

The to-be-read pile:  It’s something that every avid reader I know has.  There are all sorts of landscapes to be found on the slopes of this mountain for avid readers.  My own contains plenty of mystery, science fiction, horror and thrillers, but also contains books on sports, on music, on wine, on history…I don’t even know what’s in it anymore.  Only the parts I can see, which are heavy on Deaver, Connelly, Child, King, Grafton and Evanovich.   I don’t have a clue how many books are in the pile anymore.  The only thing I know for sure is that it got a whole lot bigger when I got my Kindle Fire, and while I’m pretty sure most of the content is genre fiction, I haven’t a clue how many unread books there are on that device either.

Before I got married in ’98, I lived a bachelor’s life.  I had a small house with three small bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen, and one bedroom was my “music studio” with my keyboards and guitars and an old Tascam Portastudio that recorded four tracks on a cassette.  Another was my library and writing room, where my bookshelves contained my nicer hardcovers and double rows of paperback books.  Then there was my bedroom.  I wish I had a picture of the mess that it was.  For a booklover, the mess was sort of beautiful.  There were books everywhere.  Stacks lined the far walls of the room to a height of about half the distance between the windows and the floor.  At least three feet of books (the windows were small and set high), with the columns of the paperbacks lining the walls.  I don’t know how many there were.  I know that I never got to most of them, and I still have most of them, boxed, in my basement (though a few made the trip to the attic at my office).

Now my TBR stacks are confined to shelves in the basement, in my bedroom, and in our home office.  I don’t know the count, but I’d guess thirty in the bedroom, thirty in the office, and another million or so in the basement.  Oh, and then there are the ones next to my bed, in the drawers of my nightstand where they are out of sight if not out of mind.  And three or four sitting on top of the nightstand, still IN sight, and still IN mind.  Oh, and I forgot the stack that’s here at my dental office.  Probably less than twenty here.

The Kindle has made it easy for me to pile books on Mount TBR, because the guilt about the sheer number of books is easier to deal with.  Also the cost is significantly less.  There are only a couple of authors I buy when they release a new book (King and Coben, though F. Paul Wilson’s Repairman Jack series was on that list until it was finished).  The rest either get bought off the bargain bins, or when I have a coupon to supplement my 10% B&N discount.  I still have quite the physical Mount TBR, but the virtual mountain is growing by leaps and bounds.

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