News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #161…
Summer reading. Whether on the beach, at a mountain campsite or cabin, or at home on the porch, summer is the time to catch up on your reading. With so many good books and good authors to choose from, what are you waiting for?
The Great Spring Thaw Sale is almost over. Summer has started, after all, although sometimes it doesn’t look like it. For your summer reading, check out the ebooks still on sale at my Smashword’s author page. Have a great summer!
Love-hate relationship with the NY Times. Here’s a recent title from one of their articles (you can guess the date): “22.5 Degree Planetary Lean on the Longest Day of the Year Drives a Debate.” The debate: with all the planets recently discovered, whether a tilt is necessary for life to begin (a common sci-fi theme). The nitpick: The Earth tilts all the time, not just “on the longest day”!
Rules for comments. Some readers of this blog might wonder why their comment hasn’t appeared. There’s a simple reason: they didn’t follow the rules. I love to receive comments on my blog posts, but I have rules—see them on my “Join the Conversation” webpage. If you can follow these reasonable rules, you’re welcome to comment on posts. Otherwise, don’t bother.
Freebies. I only give away ebooks in exchange for an honest review—that goes for all my ebooks, because they all need more reviews. I give away print books for promo purposes (that includes copies to a few public libraries). Otherwise, I don’t give away books, and I find authors and publicists’ logic for doing so specious. If you need a “free fix,” offer to write a review. Or you can read free short stories from A. B. Carolan and me on my blog, and other free short fiction (short story collections and novellas)—see the list on my “Free Stuff & Contests” webpage and follow the download directions.
Big Five attack? Many of us read indie books and traditionally published books from small presses (I’m a mongrel—I publish with both). The Big Five publishing conglomerates now have a new tactic: new books have premium prices, with ebooks almost costing as much as print. But they also sell old books in ebook format by established authors at low prices to compete with the afore-mentioned segment of the market.
I guess the idea is to kill that segment. And wonderful Amazon is killing that segment’s reviews and inflating the numbers for books they publish as well. (You didn’t know Amazon is a publisher now? We should add Amazon to the Big Five because they’re a big publisher.) Sour grapes? No, just an observation about questionable business tactics that hurt all readers.
Speaking of reviews…. Yes, I still read some Big Five books…when someone gives them to me, or from our public library (otherwise, they’re generally far too expensive). I recently reviewed Isaacson’s Leonardo Da Vinci on Bookpleasures and Comey’s A Higher Loyalty on my blog. Other reviews can be found on Bookpleasures or on my blog under the categories “Book Reviews” or “Mini-Reviews of Books.”
Did you miss The Secret Lab? A. B. Carolan’s second edition of this sci-fi mystery for young adults features four tweens in the future living on the International Space Station who try to discover the origins of a mathematical mutant cat. Available in ebook format on Amazon and Smashwords and all their affiliated ebook retailers (iBooks, B&N, Kobo, etc) and in a print version on Amazon. And don’t miss the next A. B. Carolan YA sci-fi mystery, The Secret of the Urns—coming real soon! A.B.’s books make great summer reading gifts for young adults and adults who are young-at-heart alike. (Give books to yourself. No one will know.)
Coming attractions! Besides A. B. Carolan’s The Secret of the Urns (soon to be published, maybe before you read this newsletter!), my new ebook will be Goin’ the Extra Mile, #3 in the “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries.”
In 2019, Black Opal Books will publish my post-apocalyptic novel The Last Humans. My bio is already on the Black Opal Books website. Check out their catalog. There’s a lot of good summer reading there too. I’ve already read two books from their catalog, and I’ll be reading Saralyn Richard’s Murder in the One Percent next–look’s interesting!
The following are the blurbs for all three of these new novels:
The Secret of the Urns. Set in the same sci-fi universe as A. B. Carolan’s The Secret Lab, this new young-adult sci-fi mystery explores a Jupiter-sized planet’s satellite Hard Fist in a faraway solar system where human scientists are studying local flora and fauna but behaving badly until a teen who wants to study the satellite’s ETs comes along. She shows that cooperation is better than xenophobia. In the process, she discovers that the ETs’ beliefs go far beyond ancestor worship.
Goin’ the Extra Mile. Ex-USN Master-at-Arms Mary Jo Melendez is in trouble again. Now China is interested in her MECH friends (“Mechanically Enhanced Cybernetic Humans”). She and her new family are kidnapped and used as bait to make the MECHs come out of hiding, but they have their own ideas about that. Like the other two mystery/thrillers in this trilogy, this one is non-stop action right from the beginning. Near-future sci-fi thrills await the reader. Who said reading isn’t aerobic exercise?
The Last Humans. The apocalypse kills billions—numbers so large that most survivors’ minds snap shut. Foes of the U.S. have attacked with a bioengineered contagion that spreads around the world. One of only a few survivors, Penny Castro, ex-USN diver and L.A. County Sheriff’s deputy, reacts differently. She fights back and creates a life for herself where death is the common denominator. On a forensic dive, she is interrupted. When she surfaces, she finds all her colleagues dead, so she has to battle starvation, thirst, and gangs of feral humans until she ends up in a USAF refugee camp. A post-apocalyptic thriller for our times, Penny’s adventures will entertain and shock you into asking, “Could this really happen?”
In libris libertas!
