Guest Blogger: Dawson Vosburg

I hope you will check out this post from guest blogger, Dawson Vosburg about his book, Double Life (The Adventures of Josiah Jones), and about using the Amazon Kindle, either as a reader or as an author. I've mentioned his book once before: he is a very young, new author and has just sold 300 copies of his book, almost all due to Kindle sales (over 100 this month, alone). You'd never guess that he is still too young to drive. Be sure to check out his book, especially if you have younger readers at home -- one of these days, you'll be saying that you were one of his earliest fans.

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Thanks for having me on the blog, Karen.

First I would like to introduce my book. The title is Double Life, and it's an exciting science-fiction young adult adventure that takes place in an imaginary secret government agency called the BLUE. It follows Josiah Jones on his mission to defeat the evil crime syndicate, the RED Agency. It's available in print and on the Kindle on Amazon.

Print: http://www.amazon.com/Double-Life-Dawson-Vosburg/dp/1435724283/

Kindle for 80 cents: http://www.amazon.com/Double-Adventures-Josiah-Jones-ebook/dp/B002BH4H3Q/

I think it's just absolutely wonderful to be an author. I think I have the best job in the world-I get to tell stories and people will HAND ME MONEY TO READ THEM. And that in itself is amazing...that people are willing to pay for something you crafted out of your imagination.

But the question for authors really is who will buy your book. Who will be the ones who will gladly hand over their hard-earned cash for your labor and toil for this book? That's the key to being a successful author-to find your audience and hook it.

How do you hook it? If you wrote your book for yourself (like you probably should, because that usually results in the best work) then you know who your audience is. It's you.

Think about it-where do you usually find out good reads? This should be your primary marketing tool or handle. If you find out about books from word-of-mouth, which you probably do, then you have to generate word of mouth. The problem most authors face is how to get the WOM started. Where do these big famous books get all the WOM that they do?

The answer is that the WOM was started with the author. They told people about it, those people read it and liked it, and they told more people. It spreads like a virus, thus it's called viral marketing.

So how to tell people? Here's a few options:

Twitter. This is why this site is popular for authors and publishers and marketers-because people follow you if you say you're an author. But really what it's for is to bring people to a more personal and less crowded place where they can hang out. That's called our second option, the blog.

The blog goes great with Twitter. Twitter can drive people to your blog, where they can feel more relaxed reading a conversational post. Post by post, you can draw them into your book and get them more and more interested in you and your book.

Realize that people won't usually buy your book at first pass. After several times, they will be familiar enough that when they see your book they will be genuinely interested. You must first draw them in, through your blog and your Twitter, before approaching for a sale.

And those are only generic things that work for almost every book-there are tons of options depending on your niche. Find your audience (you) and connect with your readers in thet way.

Good luck, happy reading, and happy writing!

Dawson
http://dawsonvosburg.blogspot.com
http://thepodjournal.wordpress.com

Free Audiobook - Christ Plays in Ten-Thousand Places

Christian Audio has a free audiobook each month. This month, the free selection is Christ Plays in Ten-Thousand Places by Eugene H. Peterson. This book is also available in the Kindle store ($9.99), or in Paperback ($12.24) or Hardcover ($16.50), as is a Study Guide ($4.80 Kindle, $6.00 Paperback).

Book Description

Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places reunites spirituality and theology in a cultural context where these two vital facets of Christian faith have been rent asunder. Lamenting the vacuous, often pagan nature of contemporary American spirituality, Eugene Peterson here firmly grounds spirituality once more in Trinitarian theology and offers a clear, practical statement of what it means to actually live out the Christian life. Writing in the conversational style that he is well known for, Peterson boldly sweeps out the misunderstandings that clutter conversations on spiritual theology and refurnishes the subject only with what is essential. As Peterson shows, spiritual theology, in order to be at once biblical and meaningful, must remain sensitive to ordinary life, present the Christian gospel, follow the narrative of Scripture, and be rooted in the “fear of the Lord” — in short, spiritual theology must be about God and not about us. The foundational book in a five-volume series on spiritual theology emerging from Peterson’s pen, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places provides the conceptual and directional help we all need to live the Christian gospel well and maturely in the conditions that prevail in the church and world today.

Get your free audio download HERE (be sure to use the coupon code shown, so you won't get charged). After you finishing checking out, you will be asked which format you prefer - select MP3 if you want to be able to play the book on your Kindle.

Seven Free Novels (PDF)

Lowry Pei has placed seven novels (plus 11 short stories and several short memoir stories) up on his web site as free downloads. Of the seven posted, Family Resemblances (Random House, 1986) has been previously published. All are in PDF form, so will need conversion for the Kindle1 and Kindle2. I tested the first one on the DX (just in; I'll have pictures up soon) and it's a bit small in portrait mode (there are large margins on the printer's proof), but plenty big in landscape mode after tilting the screen.

Family Resemblances
On the hottest days, my Aunt Augusta would drive around New Franklin with the windows rolled up, so that people would think the air conditioning still worked in the Buick she had inherited along with the house. The clear plastic cornucopias on either side of the rear window, which should have poured coolness on the back of our necks, were still quite noticeably there, but the remainder of the apparatus had succumbed to a mysterious illness some time ago. Occasionally, when she got to an out-of-the-way place, she’d hit the four buttons by her left hand and all the windows would slide down at once to let in relief, but she may have done this only when I was with her, to accommodate my weakness and youth; alone, for all I know, she never let down her resolve. She almost managed not to sweat, as if a regal bearing would keep her cool. Once when we were all visiting—my parents and I—my mother, red and hot, told her to her face it was absurd. Augusta, beautiful as she was, looked stony. I could see her in profile from where I sat in the back seat, and I was glad the Buick was big and I didn’t have to be any closer to her. Whose side to be on? There was a silence for half a block, and then she finally looked at my mother and said, “What they don’t know won’t hurt me.”

Download your copies HERE.

Kindle Book for a Dime!

What you can buy for one slim dime, these days? Not much, it seems (and if you thought: "I could make a phone call for that or buy a hamburger", you're dating yourself quite a bit). But an author has figured out how to list his Kindle book for a dime, using Amazon's DTP. Other authors who have tried have said that 99 cents has been the lowest value they could set (although if they set the price at $1, Amazon would discount it to 80 cents), so I'm not sure how he managed this or how long it will last. The only real problem with pricing this low is that some credit card companies (actually, the banks issuing the credit cards) refuse to process extremely small transactions and can even block a card for suspected fraud if they see too many of them. The best solution is to get Kindle Gift Certificates and apply them to your account. This keeps the credit card company happy, cleans up your credit card statement so there aren't tons of tiny charges (the more charges on a statement, the easier it is for a fraudulent one to be missed, when you are reconciling) and lets you manage whatever budget you've set for Kindle/Amazon purchases.

So, for one thin dime, pick up The Caliphate by Jack Stewart. If the book is as imaginative as the posted author bio (listed as a "Review" in the product description), then the book can't miss.

Author Bio
Jack Stewart is a treasure hunter, a mountaineer, and a gun for hire. When not writing his next adventure, this father of twelve spends his days on the beaches of Thailand trading an eight figure fortune and helping orphaned children. Jack is the only South African national ever to win both summer and winter Olympic medals. Jack holds the world record for the time to disassemble and reassemble a Kalashnikov. His MBA is from Harvard University and his Doctorate from Oxford. At night he sings Karaoke while sipping very dirty martinis.

Book Description
When Trent Lambert, a New York hedge fund manager, takes a run at the Indonesian Rupiah, he needs more than just money to make the currency decline. Amidst the glory of his billionaire status, he loses the support of his long time friend and investor. Then his son is kidnapped. The ransom: The destruction of the U.S. dollar and the ruin of the fragile American economy. Trent knows he can do it. But the FBI are now investigating him, and he must flee to Indonesia to save his son. On the world's busiest shipping lane, in its pirate-infested waters, Trent, a pirate, and a grade-school teacher, must confront the planet's most dangerous religious leader whose vision of a new superpower Trent is fulfilling with American-style capitalism.

Apocalyptic Fiction, Part One

One of the more popular categories of future fiction these days involves an catastrophic or apocalyptic event on Earth, generally resulting in a return to a more primitive technology level (and often a much reduced population) and, in many cases, a more primitive acting human race, as baser instincts take over in the struggle for survival. Many of these books are science fiction and/or fantasy, involving other species or a fantastical event that triggered the change and a few even venture into the horror genre (Zombie Apocalypse, anyone?). Books from major authors in the genre, such as S.M. Stirling, author of the excellent Change Saga, and E.E. Knight, author of the Vampire Earth series, are often priced well above the 9.99 level well after their release (I'll confess - I buy the books anyway, as I bought them in hardback before and even in the $15 range, I'm saving money with the ebook; now, if they would only get Valentine's Rising on Kindle, I could complete that series, as well). I'll probably pick up Worlds That Weren't ($5.59), as well, a short story anthology which is more in the alternative history genre, but features a novella by Stirling. Shikari in Galveston "is a rousing old-fashioned adventure. follows a hunting safari through a regressed American frontier that might have given even Daniel Boone pause."

Perhaps one of the earliest and best known works in this genre is The Last Man by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. There are numerous editions of this in the Kindle store, ranging from free to a $3.99 volume of collected works. This novel deals more with family relationships than the details of the plague, referring the reader to Daniel Defoe's fictionalized account of the Great Plague in London, A Journal of the Plague Year (free and up), and contains some racial references that reflect the ideas of the day.

Book Description
The Last Man is an early post-apocalyptic science fiction novel by Mary Shelley, which was first published in 1826. The book tells of a future world that has been ravaged by a plague. The Last Man was written in the period following her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley's death.

The author of the novel constructs a vision of the future painted on leaves by the Cumaean Sibyl, that foresee the first-person writings of a man living at the end of the 21st century, which proves to be the end of humanity.

The central character, Lionel Verney, son of a nobleman who gambled himself into poverty, prides himself on his ruggedness and manliness, but eventually is restored to the gentry and educates himself. Much of the novel deals with his relationships with family and friends of his class, and the terrible wars that go on around them, including one in which a woman friend of Verney's masquerades as a man in order to fight. A plague gradually kills off all people. Verney finds himself immune after being attacked by an infected "negro," and copes with a civilization that is gradually dying out around him.

Verney refuses to detail the gruesome nature of the plague, instead referring readers to specific passages of Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year to get an understanding of what he saw.

But there are also some bargains in this genre, some from new authors and some from authors more well known for the other works. One of these is from Lee Goldberg, a Hollywood writer better known for his Mr. Monk and Diagnosis Murder volumes, several of which are now available for the Kindle. In The Walk ($1.40), Goldberg departs from his usual TV series and instead presents the story of a TV screenwriter in the aftermath of a massive earthquake in Southern California. It's an apocalypse on a smaller scale than some, but nonetheless a lifechanging event for the millions affected, including Marty Slack.

Book Description
It's one minute after the Big One. Marty Slack, a TV network executive, crawls out from under his Mercedes, parked outside what once was a downtown Los Angeles warehouse, the location for a new TV show. Downtown LA is in ruins. The sky is thick with black smoke. His cell phone is dead. The freeways are rubble. The airport is demolished. Buildings lay across streets like fallen trees. It will be days before help can arrive.
Marty has been expecting this day all his life. He's prepared. In his car are a pair of sturdy walking shoes and a backpack of food, water, and supplies. He knows there is only one thing he can do ... that he must do: get home to his wife Beth, go back to their gated community on the far edge of the San Fernando Valley.

All he has to do is walk. But he will quickly learn that it's not that easy. His dangerous, unpredictable journey home will take him through the different worlds of what was once Los Angeles. Wildfires rage out of control. Flood waters burst through collapsed dams. Natural gas explosions consume neighborhoods. Sinkholes swallow entire buildings. After-shocks rip apart the ground. Looters rampage through the streets.

There's no power. No running water. No order.

Marty Slack thinks he's prepared. He's wrong. Nothing can prepare him for this ordeal, a quest for his family and for his soul, a journey that will test the limits of his endurance and his humanity, a trek from the man he was to the man he can be ... if he can survive The Walk.

John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids ($4.79) is a classic of the genre and has been adapted to the big screen several times.

Book Description
Huge plants called -triffids- have come to life, uprooting themselves and roaming the world, viciously attacking humans who have been blinded by a bizarre green deluge that appeared to be a meteor shower -- hell on earth is worse than anyone ever imagined in John Wyndham-s terrifying novel The Day of the Triffids. Whether it is called science fiction, speculative fiction or simply fantasy, Wyndham-s novel is an unforgettable vision of a post-apocalyptic world, where a handful of people have the means to prevail against an unending nightmare.

Mankind's Worst Fear ($0.99) by David L Erickson is another bargain title, more in the Science Fiction genre.

Book Description
On Mars, Air Force Colonel Kaider O’Brien leads scientists to a subterranean site containing an artifact of alien creation. On Earth, Professor George Schumer guides his experimental submarine through sudden, intense turbulence off the coast of Oregon. Through a twist of quantum physics, both men meet 300 years in the future on Earth, devastated by nuclear winter, to save mankind from extinction at the hands of an alien race fearful of the technological advancement of other worlds.

The Knowledge of Heaven and Earth: Book 1 ($4.00) by Mick Richfield is the start of a new series, planned to span five volumes. If he can live up to the promise of the reviews and maintain it thru all five, his books probably won't be bargain priced for long.

Book Description
Long after the Two Wars of the early twenty-first century, petty warlords on Earth rule what remains of the civilized world. They fight their endless battles with each other while, in the wilderness beyond their borders, the New Tribes grow stronger every year.

The warlords feed their armies with crops grown in agricultural slave labor camps, the largest of which is Jackson Camp in the Sovereign State of Michigan.

To be continued ...