Free Ebook - In Over Her Head (PDF)

In Over Her Head ($24.95 Paperback) is Elsie Russell's first novel and it is an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award semi-finalist, but the author hasn't been able to find a publisher (not surprising, with publishers cutting back all over and the apparent fascination with pseudo-celebrities they have been signing these days). So, the author has decided to self-publish using Lulu.com and Amazon (so far, not using Kindle - so be sure to leave her a note asking for a Kindle edition and click on the I’d like to read this book on Kindle link on the Amazon page). She is also giving away a free PDF copy of the book on her web site (which also has links to paintings she has done).

Book Description
The debut of Penny Bell's's musical composition, featuring the use of mysterious extremely low frequency waves takes a tragic turn when several concert-goers die in their seats during the performance. The once-bright horizons of Penny's career collapse, and she retreats to a dank Soho basement apartment lit only by the glow of computer monitors and electronic displays. There, using herself as a guinea pig, she sets out to unlock the secrets of her beautiful and deadly symphonies. A series of strange coincidences intrude upon her solitary quest. Her neighbor, the erotic performance artist Ula Nova's, disappears after her studio is broken into. And then Ula's charming and damaged young choreographer appears, and sweeps Penny off to Europe to search for the diva, plunging Penny into a seedy and unfamiliar world of jet set artists and international intrigue where the threads of every encounter always seem to lead back to those ELF waves and their pint-sized progenitor.

Download your free copy HERE.

Shimmer by John Passarella

For some reason, this article didn't get posted (it was stuck on "scheduled", even though it's been a week after the posting date). I'm posting it now, but I just checked John's web site and it's down for the moment. Hopefully, it will be back up soon.

John Passarella is another Hollywood writer, best "known" for his Buffy the Vampire and Angel books (even if most don't know who the writer is on a TV series), who has started publishing in the Kindle store. What those fans may not realize is that he is also a Stoker Award winning novelist (Wither, currently out of print, but coming to Kindle in July, along with Wither's Rain). He recently started releasing a free serialized version of his latest novel, Shimmer, a techno-thriller, on his web site and the complete novel has just been released in the Kindle store ($4.99) and in other formats from his author store, for those that don't want to wait for the ending. He's already started removing the free downloads from his web site (he says they will disappear at the rate of about 9 chapters a week), but has a special offer where you can get the first 9 chapters emailed to you HERE ("if you email me at author[at]passarella[dot]com and mention [kindleboards.com], I will be happy to mail you the expired first 9 chapters for another week"), then you can download the rest of the first 48 chapters on his website HERE. Subscribe to his site or check back every week to get the lastest chapter (I suspect the final chapters will only be available free for a week or two). Of course, if that's too much trouble and you don't want to read the book all broken up into parts, you can be reading the Kindle version in about a minute.

Book Description
Logan Walker has a gift: he senses supernatural trouble before it happens. But when his special talent predicts hell on earth, he knows his gift has become a nightmare for him and his unusual family. Possessing various paranormal abilities, the Walkers have, through generations spanning thousands of years, protected the human race from supernatural predators. These creatures enter our world through dimensional rifts and must be defeated or returned to their world before wreaking havoc in our own. But the Walkers have suffered a long war of attrition and their numbers have dwindled. They are at their weakest when our world faces its greatest threat. And time is running out.

Ayn Rand on Kindle

Looks like these were all bootlegs. All but one have been pulled from the Amazon store and I suspect it will be gone soon.

Ayn Rand's Anthem is in the public domain and there are numerous editions of it in the Kindle store and available at most free book sites. What's been missing was the other novels that are classics (and required reading for high school and college English students). That has apparently been remedied and there are now five additional Ayn Rand titles in the Kindle Store. Be sure to download samples and check the formats (I've only looked at a couple, but have heard there are some problems with them). So far, they appear to be Mobi (AZW) with no DRM.

Atlas Shrugged ($1.99)
The Fountainhead ($5.99)
Night of January 16th ($1.99)
Virtue Of Selfishness ($1.99)
For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand ($1.99)

Monthly Kindle Book Budget: May

Quite a few free reads last month (some of which I would not have purchased, otherwise, although now and then one of the free reads is one I have on my Wish List). Several books have gone up in price since I purchased them and I've started noticing that some of the books purchased this year have disappeared from the Kindle store entirely (Summer's Path by Scott Blum and all of Boyd Morrison's books, for example).

May

The Night Gardener	George Pelecanos		$1.99
Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith #1: Precipice	JOHN JACKSON MILLER		$0.00
The Colorado Sequence	Stacey Cochran		$0.80
Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms	Chuck Austen		$1.59
The Red Cross of Gold IX:. The Queen of the Abyss	Brendan Carroll		$1.59
The Red Cross of Gold VIII: The Silver Caduceus	Brendan Carroll		$1.59
The Red Cross of GoldVII:. The Wisdom of Solomon	Brendan Carroll		$1.59
The Red Cross of Gold VI:. the Dragonslayer	Brendan Carroll		$1.59
The Red Cross of Gold V:. the Quinta Essentia	Brendan Carroll		$1.59
The Red Cross of Gold IV:. The Hesperian Dragon	Brendan Carroll		$1.59
The Red Cross of Gold III:. The Head of the Crow	Brendan Carroll		$1.59
The Red Cross of Gold II:. The King of Terrors	Brendan Carroll		$1.59
The Red Cross of Gold I:. The Knight of Death	Brendan Carroll		$1.59
The Grove	John Rector		$0.99
CLAWS	Stacey Cochran		$1.59
25 Language Phrasebook	MobileReference		$0.01
Irreconcilable Differences	James R. Strickland		$0.99
Looking Glass	James R. Strickland		$0.99
Migration of the Kamishi (The Feral World)	Gaddy Bergmann		$0.99
In Her Name: Empire	Michael R. Hicks		$1.59
Felonious Jazz	Bryan Gilmer		$1.99
Dragon Ring	Lettie Prell		$0.99
A Lifetime of Vengeance	P. J. Grondin		$0.99
The Network Imperative: Community or Contagion?	Yoram (Jerry) Wind, Paul R. Kleindorfer		$0.00
Master Of The Game	Sidney Sheldon		$0.99
Call Me (Joker's Wild Series)	Lena Matthews		$0.00
Living With Your Kids Is Murder	Mike Befeler		$3.99
The Merchant of Death	D.J. MacHale		$0.00
The Huntress	Shiloh Walker		$0.00
Crossroads: Navigating Your Calling and Career	Colin Creel		$0.00
Kiss of Midnight	Lara Adrian		$0.00
Once Bitten, Twice Shy	Jennifer Rardin		$0.00
Weapons of Choice (Axis of Time, Book 1)	John Birmingham		$0.00
Elric: The Stealer of Souls	Michael Moorcock		$0.00

For the month, that's 34 books, $34.79 in total, for $1.02 per book. Definitely within the monthly budget (but the TBR stack is getting quite high). Here's the break-down by month, for the year-to-date:

Month	No. Books	Total Cost	Per Book
January	59	$83.47	$1.41
February	43	$29.97	$0.70
March	32	$33.44	$1.05
April	22	$13.11	$0.60
May	34	$34.79	$1.02
Totals	190	$194.78	$1.03

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