Tag Archives: Free

DIE 6 is no longer free…but you can still buy it for $0.99!

So I gave away 54 copies of DIE 6, a book that hasn’t really sold much, no matter how proud I am of the stories in it. One of my favorites, titled “Blood Ties,” was a fun and fast write. I dreamed the premise. I remember the dream vaguely now, just that it was about someone asking a ghost about where some buried loot was or something like that. When I woke up, I made a mental note of the idea, and later started writing it.

The story is that this psychic is in trouble with a loan shark and stumbles across a magazine article that talks about a bank robbery from the 1920’s. After a little investigation, he finds that the suspect (who was never jailed for it) is dead, killed in a hit and run accident (an unusual event back when cars were new, I’d guess, but pedestrians definitely got killed in accidents back then). So he starts to research it, and visits the guy’s grave, where he meets a beautiful young lady who turns out to be the robber’s great-granddaughter. From there, it was pure fun. I tried to write my main character with more than a little snark in his attitude, but with a good heart. My loan shark bad guy is a caricature, for sure. But he was fun to write as well.

I also included one about the Tooth Fairy being caught by an adolescent who is late losing his baby teeth. That one’s short (about 2500 words) but it was fun to imagine the world of the Dentata (the tooth fairy race). I read something like it on Reddit not too long ago, but I thought mine was still better!

Three of them were written for a contest back in the Delphi days. Ancient history, perhaps. Two of them were sort of SF, one with transferring one’s being to the computer, and the other with time travel. The computer-y one was very dated and took a lot of rewriting, almost to the point where it was a new story. The time travel one worked for the most part as it was. So did the horror story, THE GHOST TRAIN, set in Addison Falls, our shared setting back in the Horror Discussion Group (Custom Forum #235) days of Delphi. Of course, all of these were edited for style, grammar, and length (most became longer).

Anyway, I always felt that DIE 6 deserved at least a few readers. Now it has at least 54 potential new readers, presuming that most of them read something they downloaded for free.

Thanks if you downloaded it, and please, sign up for the mailing list.

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Short Story: THE BAD COP

I wrote this story for a contest back in September of 1996, and found it in my archives a few days ago. I did a very minimal amount of rewriting but didn’t change too much. I’d write it differently today, probably, but I don’t think it’s terrible for flash fiction from my earliest days of attempting to write. If you’d like to read it, click the link at the bottom of the post:

THE BAD COP

“If you open your mouth again, I’ll have to shut it for you.” The man in the police uniform spoke in a low voice, intending to intimidate Joe, and the rest of us were too cowed by the badge to interfere. We all watched silently as Joe backed down.

It wasn’t every day that a cop showed up at a party and started hitting on our female friends. No one knew what to make of it. So we had ignored him, for the most part. After all, cops are the good guys. We’d just partied on, like he wasn’t there, or like his presence was a normal thing.

But that was before he’d started hitting on Joe’s girlfriend…

If you’d like to read the rest of this story, please click here: THE BAD COP

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Short Story: GRANDPA

This is the first short story in my collection 14 DARK WINDOWS. You can get it in its entirety if you download the free sample for Kindle, but I thought that maybe some people who don’t do Amazon or have a Kindle might want to read it. I wrote it a long time ago as a contest entry where the first sentence and six additional words were given and you constructed a story around them. Enjoy!

GRANDPA

“All the King’s Horses, and all the King’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again!” Grandpa finished the rhyme and closed the book. “Well, Billy, what else would you like to do?”

Billy loved his grandfather. Grandpa always had time for a story, a game, or to simply talk. “I’ll do whatever you want to do, Grandpa.”

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You can read the rest of this story by clicking this link or by going to “Stories” on the menu above and choosing “Grandpa.”

You can buy 14 DARK WINDOWS at Amazon by clicking this link: 14 DARK WINDOWS

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Giveaway results

It isn’t the first time I’ve given JACK’O’LANTERN (and other stories) away. But it’s a Halloween story, and I think it’s pretty good. The title story was published on a magazine/blog site called “Friendly Fiction” a few years back, and the site’s editor had a go at it, suggesting changes. I made several at that time, and ignored a few that I disagreed with. The result was a fairly tight story. I connected it with two other Holiday stories, THE MOMENT (about a junior high student who finally finds the courage to ask his crush to dance at the school Halloween mixer, through the anonymity of a costume) and SARAH’S PUPPY (where a little girl hears the barking of a puppy that she’s hoping she’ll get for Christmas and meets a bearded stranger by the tree in her living room), because all of them feature younger children and holidays, even though only the title story is horror.

So, for Halloween, I decided to give it away again. What the heck? I thought. Maybe someone will like the stories enough to buy the collection that it’s also a part of, 14 DARK WINDOWS. (No one did.) But I also put in sample chapters of both of my $0.99 novellas, THE INN and THE CAVE. My hope is that someone will read the three short stories, read the sample chapters and be interested enough to check out the novellas. Maybe realize that they’re bargain basement priced at $0.99, and will buy one or both.

As it turns out, I did sell one copy of THE INN during the giveaway. Whether it was because of the short story giveaway, who knows?

All in all, I gave away something like 33 copies of the collection, which is back up to $0.99 today. Would I buy it myself for $0.99? No. I’d spend that same $0.99 and buy the collection mentioned above. I clearly state as the first line in the story trio’s description that it is part of that collection and that the collection also costs only $0.99.

The pattern was something like this: Thursday, 8 free copies were downloaded, with virtually no promotion besides mentioning it on Facebook. And I think the downloads occurred before I even made the Facebook post. On Friday, 6 free copies. Saturday, only 1 copy was downloaded. I posted pictures later on Friday of my own pumpkin carvings on my Scott Dyson page, with another link to the giveaway title. On Sunday the number went back up to 5 free downloads.

Then on Monday, I thought to mention it on Goodreads, in a group I lurk within called Horror Afficionados. As a direct result of that mention, 13 more copies were downloaded. More to the point, they were downloaded by people who like horror, if I can safely assume that those who read the post in the promotion topic on the bulletin board. I can only hope that they get around to reading them and like the sample chapters enough to try my novellas.

So the promotion is done for now.

I’ve been thinking about a topic for a post soon about how I personally rank the elements of a novel when I’m reading it. Still thinking about how to organize it.

Till then, have a great day.

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JACK’O’LANTERN (and THE MOMENT and SARAH’S PUPPY) free on 10/29!

In honor of Halloween, I’ve made my short story trio containing JACK’O’LANTERN, THE MOMENT and SARAH’S PUPPY free for five days, starting Thursday, 10/29/15, till Monday, 11/2/15. It’s been free before, but this time it contains sample chapters from my novellas THE INN and THE CAVE.

All three stories are also found in the collection 14 DARK WINDOWS, which is priced at only $0.99 and will continue to be priced there for the foreseeable future.

Grab it while it’s free! If you like it, grab something else as well! Thanks for reading!

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ODD MAN OUT Promotion

It was a spur-of-the-moment decision – I decided to give away ODD MAN OUT, a short story pair that featured the title tale (about 1600 words) and a second short story called THE HOUSE AT THE BEND IN THE ROAD (about 1800 words).

Of all my works, I like this cover the best. It looks professionally done, because it was. I have a good friend, Rich Siegle, who did the cover for me (gratis), and he does book covers for small publisher Poison Pen Press in Scottsdale, Arizona. I paired these two stories because, well, they seemed to go together. Originally I had paired SOLE OCCUPANT and ODD MAN OUT because I liked them about the best of all my short stories, but I ended up using this pairing because it kept the word counts between the two ebooks about the same.

ODD MAN OUT is also found in the collection 14 DARK WINDOWS. The short story pair costs $0.99 on Amazon, because that is the lowest price Amazon will let you set for something. I lowered the collection to $0.99 also, because I hoped to move some titles.

I decided to give this short story away because I thought if someone liked enough, they might be inspired to buy the collection which contains both of these and twelve other stories (including the aforementioned SOLE OCCUPANT).

I also started to expand this short story into a longer work. Hoping that I can get 20 or 30 thousand words out of it. It struck me as I read it that there was a lot more story to tell. So we’ll see what comes out of that project. I haven’t been putting much time into writing on this story recently; there’s been a LOT going on with my family, but I think things might start to wind down now.

The other reason I haven’t been writing it is because I spent some time finishing up the collaboration between my son Kevin and me. It’s part of a series, and we completed Book 1 and got a fair start on Book 2. Book 1 is about 77000 words, so it’s a full length novel. Believe it or not, it started life as Harry Potter/SwordArt Online crossover fan fiction written by my son. I saw some potential in it and decided to write it with a more original slant.

So, maybe I will get some things written before summer runs out of time. We’ll see.

Oh, yeah. The point of this post was that I did a giveaway with ODD MAN OUT. The giveaway ran three days (Friday, Saturday, Sunday). I only announced it on Facebook. I gave away 35 copies of the short story in that time frame. (Well, 36, but one was downloaded by me for free in an attempt to boost the number by one.)

I guess that’s 35 people who never heard of me before, because I doubt I had anyone from my Facebook announcement get it. Okay, perhaps there were four or five downloads because of that announcement. I can’t say for sure. We’ll see if anyone grabs the collection in the next week or so. Even one or two downloads would be great!

So, did it do what I hoped? No…it made it to #10 on a “Ghosts and Haunted Houses” list on Amazon, but it certainly didn’t amount to much in the sense of sheer downloads. But it’s just one of those things.

Have a great week.

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My second free promotion results…

So my promotion ended yesterday. It ended with a slight uptick on the downloaded copies of my two short story trios but it still was unimpressive. Thank you to everyone who DID download the stories. Hope you find something you like. Even more, I hope you’ll maybe try something else I’ve written. DIE 6 has some pretty good stories in it….I think…

So how did it compare to my first giveaway, where I promoted my titles SOLE OCCUPANT and DEAD OR ALIVE? Well, that time I gave away 144 copies of the two titles. The first of them did better. I don’t think it’s surprising. The cover for SOLE OCCUPANT was done by a professional, while the cover for DEAD OR ALIVE was done by…well, by me.

This time I gave away 71 copies in total. Forty nine copies of JACK’O’LANTERN and 32 copies of THE GATEWAY were given away (by zombies…no, not really…by me). Half the number of copies, though almost as many copies of JACK’O’LANTERN were given away as of DEAD OR ALIVE. Anyway, why so few this time? I have a few theories.

First, I did not have the opportunity to tag my giveaway with another giveaway. In that case it was QUANTUM ZOO, with the giveaway promoted by all twelve authors (to some degree) and D.J. Gelner shared my status update, where I plugged both my own stories’ free status as well as that of QUANTUM ZOO. This time, no shares from any authors. (One offered but didn’t follow through, far as I could tell.) I did have two friends share it with their own friends, and there is not much overlap between our groups of friends. Anyway, when D.J. shared it on FB, my post views approached 300. This time my post views were around 150 (maybe a bit more). Half the page views, half the downloads. Plus, people who were downloading QZ might have theoretically searched out works by the other authors in the collection and found a couple of mine on promotion, and grabbed them that way. I’ll never know.

Second, these two covers are probably my worst covers. I did them myself, and they were the first and second covers I ever did. I’ll probably try to redo them sometime when I have the time. But I don’t want to spend any actual money on them. At $0.99 per download (which means $0.35 to me) it just does not make sense to spend the money on them.

It’s a shame, really. I’ve had really good feedback on some of the stories. Annetta Ribken once said of JACK’O’LANTERN (seen in a less edited form on the Friendly Fiction forum on Journalscape) that she could totally see it in a YA Halloween themed collection. J. Michael Major listed AMERICA’S PASTIME (part of THE GATEWAY trio) as one of his favorites of the 14 DARK WINDOWS collection. THE MOMENT also received good comments when I posted it on a blog a few years back. And SARAH’S PUPPY won a contest on The Book and Candle Pub several years ago. I think they’re decent stories.

Here’s Annetta’s quote (about JACK’O’LANTERN):

I can so see this in a YA Halloween anthology.
Cute and interesting premise. nicely done!

Author Eric Mayer (of the John the Lord Chamberlain mysteries) said this about THE MOMENT:

I enjoyed the story. From what I recall of eighth grade it seems true to life. Although I only wish I could’ve been bright enough to ever come up with a ruse like that. I’m surprised you could concoct this from six words not of your own choosing. Out of curiosity, do you recall what the words were?

I couldn’t, by the way. I remembered “pirate” and “tommy gun” and “black cat” once I read it and looked for them.

And J. Michael Major’s Amazon review of 14 DARK WINDOWS:

It’s always fun to discover a new, talented author, and Scott Dyson is my latest find. The fourteen creepy tales here range from wistful and romantic (“The Moment” and “Ghost of Love”) to the horrific (“Hot Spot” and “The House at the Bend in the Road”). My personal favorites are “The Only Solution” and “America’s Pastime,” but all are wonderfully written and there is something here for everyone — just don’t read these hair-raising stories when you are alone at night! I look forward to reading more by Dyson. Buy a copy today and tell your friends about this exciting new author!

So there you have it. The results of the giveaway.

I had been debating whether to put ODD MAN OUT on promotion next month. It’s my best cover, and I like both stories. But I don’t know if it’s worth it. Maybe I’ll just schedule it for a two day giveaway or something like that.

Better get something new written and published. And soon.

Take care! Thanks if you downloaded them. Heck, thanks if you’re reading my blog!

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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:

and

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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Successful giveaway?

Just a quick post to update the KDP Select promotion for two of my titles.

I’ve given away 114 ebooks in 3 1/2 days (today being the 1/2). It’s scheduled to run through tomorrow. (12/14/14)

Here’s the links: SOLE OCCUPANT

DEAD OR ALIVE

It will be interesting to see if getting these two stories in the hands of readers results in any reviews of the stories or better still, any increase in sales from them. Crossing my fingers…

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Two titles free for download from Amazon!

My short stories SOLE OCCUPANT and DEAD OR ALIVE are both available for download for free as of today, December 10th, through Sunday, December 14th.

SOLE OCCUPANT is a 14 page, two story combination that features the short story SOLE OCCUPANT (about 2400 words) and THE ONLY SOLUTION (about 700 words). It’s short, to be certain, but it’s also free!

DEAD OR ALIVE is a 32 page short story and is the first story of THE STRIKER FILES, a combo-volume featuring all three stories of the series plus a bonus story (priced at $2.99 at Amazon). DEAD OR ALIVE is free today through Sunday.

QUANTUM ZOO remains free as well, until Friday!

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