I've moved!

I've moved!

Thanks for stopping by, but it appears you are using a (very) old address for my blog. I've moved to a Wordpress site and you'll need to update your bookmarks for Books on the Knob

I've moved!

Custom Search

Friday, December 11, 2009

Free Book - DEAD(ish)

DEAD(ish), by Naomi Kramer, is available for free from Smashwords and in the B&N store for the nook. The version at Smashwords is DRM free (and Kindle compatible), but you'll want to download any versions you want and make a backup, as it can't be added to your library when it is that price. The version at B&N is also DRM free (although only in EPUB format), but will stay in your library after purchase. This one isn't in the Kindle store (at least not yet), although that is supposed to be an option for those in the Smashwords Premium Catalog (as this one is).

Regardless of where you buy it, it's a short read (~10K words), so you should be able to breeze right thru it.

Book Description
Linda’s had a bad day. First her boyfriend killed her. Then she woke up, still on this boring plane of existence, and with an odd obsession about her missing body. Mike won’t tell her what he did with her body, and she can’t find the stupid thing herself. There’s only one thing she can do - torment the bastard until he coughs up the information.

Click HERE for the B&N version.

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Free Book - The Undead Situation

The Undead Situation ($0.99 Kindle), by Eloise J. Knapp, can be read for free on her website.

Book Description
When people started dying and coming back to life, it wasn’t difficult to start throwing terms like “apocalypse,” and “end of the world,” around. When authorities noticed said walking corpses’ affinity for eating the flesh of the living…well, it was easy to define them as “zombies.”

Self-proclaimed sociopath Cyrus V. Sinclair isn’t surprised by the dead rising and roaming the Earth. In fact, he doesn’t mind the idea of staying in his Seattle apartment until the end of days—that is, until meeting up with other survivors’ cramps his style and forces him to reevaluate his outlook on life.


Click HERE to read it free.

Another Extended Sample Preview, But Not Free

Book publishers have been trying to figure out how to get samples out to readers, so they can get hooked and buy the full book, for quite some time. In bricks and mortar bookstores, you would occasionally see short (25-50 page) samples from upcoming books and the occasional sampler volume, with a chapter from several books. Extended short stories were bound alone or with others, and novellas published as teasers for a series. These often were at discounted prices (at least compared to paper prices), often just covering printing costs. When the web came into being, these were supplemented by the same material on author websites (and now by locked free reads/sneak peaks on publisher sites) and by ebook versions of the same material being "sold" in bookstores, often at the same prices.

Along came the Kindle, which promised free samples to all, consisting of the first 10% of the book. Some publishers started giving away the first book in a series (which is a very effective tact, it seems, from the authors who have commented on it during the last year or two), while others either negated the value of the sample by including multiple copies of the cover page in the book file (I counted four in one book sample) or including an insanely long author preface (one sample never even went past that section, which had continued for hundreds of locations after the cover, copyright, table of contents, review quotes, etc).

A last group started giving away only the same type of extended samples they had previously been charging for (and which they continued to charge for in some stores), usually business books whose sample versions included at least the intro and first chapter. These free samples were also effective - they boosted the author into Kindle bestseller lists, which in turn (due to linking of the titles) led to sales of the full book. Inevitably, publishers have started doing the same with fiction titles, most famously (or infamously, due to the bait-and-switch description and book title) Witch and Wizard by James Patterson (which remains on the Kindle bestseller lists, despite the average one-star rating -- the reviews were so bad that the publisher unlinked the sample from the main book, so that it's reviews would not be seen when it is released late this month; Grace Notes used a similar deceptive ad on the Big Deals on Kindle page, which has since been rewritten -- it first claimed you would receive the full year's book for free, but you only get December's Notes -- but at least the title always made it clear it was a single month preview).

As I suspected, it wasn't long before publishers started charging for these samples in the Kindle store, as they are used to doing for other stores. One such sample is Between Here and Here ($0.99), by Amy Bloom, which consists of a single short story from the upcoming volume Where the Love of God Hangs Out ($9.99).

From the Random House website:
ABOUT THIS BOOK
A unique offer for fans of Amy Bloom, bestselling author of Away...sample just one piece from her stunning new collection of interconnected short stories. Available at this special price for a limited time only.

Love, in its many forms and complexities, weaves through New York Times bestselling author Amy Bloom’s astonishing and astute new work. Insightful, sensuous, and heartbreakingly funny, Where the God of Love Hangs Out illuminates the mysteries of love, family, and friendship.

In the haunting story Between Here and Here, a daughter reluctantly steps in to take care of the infirm father she hated for so many years. As a tribute to her late mother, and to show that she is a better person than her father, she gives everything she has to this terrible old man and revises history.

Between Here and Here and the eleven other stories that comprise Where the God of Love Hangs Out showcase stories of passion and disappointment, life and death, that beautifully capture deep human truths.
So, the full volume has eleven short stories, this non-free sample has one. If it's the first one in the book, you'd probably get most of it free with the normal Kindle sample. I've actually seem some short story collections whose samples contains the first two or three stories, in their entirety (the publisher has control over the sample size, when not using DTP). Even more deceptive is the "savings" calculated, which compares the print book's list price to the price of the sample -- at the least, it should only compare to one eleventh of the book price - so you are getting $2.72 worth of book for 99 cents, at the best (at worst, you are paying for what you'll get as a free sample of the full book, later).

Paid samples are a step backwards, but if people buy them and then the full book has higher than expected sales, they may become the way of the future. I hope not - it's an idea stuck in the same mindset of charging two to three (or ten) times the price for the ebook version of a book versus the paperbook (I was looking in the Barnes and Noble store for one author - paper books were $7.19, discounted from $7.99, while the ebook versions were $24.95).

I don't know about you, but I'll save my 99 cents (and buy an entire book whose free sample catches my fancy).

It's In His Kiss

It's In His Kiss, by Julia Quinn, is currently marked down to $1.59, the same price as The Epilogue II (which expands the characters lives after the end of the main book, something she has done for a number of other novels she has written; generally these are quite short, not even novella length, unlike the main novel, which is 384 pages in paperback).

Book Description

Meet Our Hero ...
Gareth St. Clair is in a bind. His father, who detests him, is determined to beggar the St. Clair estates and ruin his inheritance. Gareth's sole bequest is an old family diary, which may or may not contain the secrets of his past .. and the key to his future. The problem is -- it's written in Italian, of which Gareth speaks not a word.

Meet Our Heroine ...
All the ton agreed: there was no one quite like Hyacinth Bridgerton. She's fiendishly smart, devilishly outspoken, and according to Gareth, probably best in small doses. But there's something about her -- something charming and vexing -- that grabs him and won't quite let go ...

Meet Poor Mr. Mozart ...
Or don't. But rest assured, he's spinning in his grave when Gareth and Hyacinth cross paths at the annual -- and annually discordant -- Smythe-Smith musicale. To Hyacinth, Gareth's every word seems a dare, and she offers to translate his diary, even though her Italian is slightly less than perfect. But as they delve into the mysterious text, they discover that the answers they seek lie not in the diary, but in each other ... and that there is nothing as simple -- or as complicated -- as a single, perfect kiss.

eHarlequin Half Price Sale


eHarlequin's 12 Deals Of Christmas. Starts Dec 1!


For today only, eHarlequin has a half price sale on all ebooks - just add coupon code CUTINHALF when you go to checkout. I checked one of the books already on sale - there is no double dipping with this one; you get half off list, not half off the sale price. Remember, all of their books do have DRM, so no Kindle compatibility there. However, all formats work on the PC and they do support some other devices, such as Sony and the nook (I'd get EPUB, if your device supports it or for the PC and future compatibility).

Click HERE to check out their catalog.