Read and produced by Jane McLaughlin, published via ACX, and sporting an extremely awesome cover by Vanessa Matte (who also did the cover for the regular e-book version, as well), it runs about eighty minutes, and is available at Audible, at iTunes, and Amazon.com / Amazon UK / Amazon Germany. (And all the other regional Amazon sites, as well.)

Jane and I get various bonuses if you should happen to go and sign up for Audible just to buy Midnight’s Tale, but, really, anywhere you should happen to want to buy a copy is fine with me.

Happy New Year, may the goat revolution continue strong through 2013 and beyond, and may you never want for apples.

Some books are fun to write, and seem to just pour out of you, quickly. Writing them is painless. Not just painless—pleasurable.

There are also, as it happens, the other sort. The difficult problem children of books, the ones that don’t do what you want them to, that just generally misbehave in every possible way.

This was, as you might guess, one of the latter.

An Accidental Fastball to the Heart is a romance novel about two women who become friends—and then somewhat more than friends—during the final weeks of their final year of high school. It’s touching and heartwarming and sweet and inspirational, or so I very much hope. It’s a book about growing up and falling in love and coming to terms with who you are and your place in the world. Should have been quick and lighthearted and easy, right?

Aw, man. I started this book in October. October, 2011. I finished it in October of this year, 2012. Obviously, I didn’t spend the whole intervening time writing it, but I worked on it slowly and steadily. Along the way, there were… problems. It didn’t want to be the book I thought it was going to be. It wanted to be a coming-of-age story, not a romance. It wanted to be about the supporting character alone, and about gender identity. It wanted one of the supporting characters to be more prominent. It wanted another supporting character to be all psycho and jealous.

I wrote about ninety percent of that book. And then I gave up and started over.

The second time around, it mostly did what I wanted it to. I don’t know why. I was working with the same outline, but… this time, it was a love story. This time, it had a happy ending. And a cover illustration by Brian Kittrell, who stepped in to perform a quick miracle when my own less-than-artistic efforts were unanimously judged lacking. Very lacking.

Maybe romance novels aren’t your thing. Maybe F/F love stories don’t really do anything for you. That’s cool.

But if you should happen to like reasonably clean coming of age stories about teenage tomboys, pansexuality, love, romance, and accidental facial trauma, I’d appreciate it if you bought and read An Accidental Fastball to the Heart, because I poured a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into it, and it’d be kind of nice if the last year of my life wasn’t completely for naught.

It’s available at Amazon.com here and at Amazon.co.uk here.

Thank you very much.

Tim is a softhearted dealer at a science-fiction convention who just wants to make it through the rest of the day without any unnecessary drama or excitement. Trying to avoid a stalker-ish lunatic that wants to buy a magic ring from him, he stumbles across a woman with a hole in her head who is, to his considerable surprise, not quite as dead as he expected.

He impulsively offers his assistance, and thus begins an afternoon he’ll never be able to forget. Going shopping with her isn’t much of a burden, but keeping up a conversation with the green-haired stranger is trickier than it seems – and when the woman who keeps insisting she’s not a zombie says she’s hungry, well… things could get awkward in a hurry. Will Tim work out who or what she is? Will she make him pay for everything on what begins to seem like a very strange sort of date? And will Tim get anything out of the whole business, or will it just cost him an arm and a leg?

A 9500-word / roughly 40-page short story, Hamaika is a slow but almost entertaining tale of thrift stores, ethnic food, urban avians, vintage jewelry, zombie jokes, the always-interesting people you encounter at science-fiction conventions, and the strange need everyone – and everything – has to feel like they belong, from the award-unwinning author of several books you’ve likely never heard of.

Like most of my books, it’s light on plot and character development and ideas and creativity and, well, quality, and heavy on bad jokes, dialogue, self-indulgent nonsense, and stupidity. It comes complete with a six-hundred-word author’s note/apology, and an unbearably horrible cover lovingly designed—or so I’m informed—to intentionally confuse, mislead, and deceive would-be readers. (That’s sarcasm, please note. Indie writers are apparently contractually obligated to loathe book covers with illustrations like this on the cover.)

It’s completely clean, containing not a single dirty word, adult situation, hint of romance, or slightest suggestion of homoeroticism. Suitable for anyone roughly twelve and older.

Gunning Fog index : 7.71
Coleman Liau index : 7.94
Flesch Kincaid Grade level : 6.04
ARI (Automated Readability Index) : 5.48
SMOG : 8.83
Flesch Reading Ease : 72.75

…so readable, according to a computer, by anyone at about an eighth-grade level.

Available at Amazon, or Smashwords, in various lending-enabled DRM-free formats, yay. Retail price is 1.44 USD / 1.15 EUR. I’ll post whenever it becomes available at B&N, iTunes, and so on. You can view a sample at Smashwords, download a sample for the Kindle at Amazon, or grab this sample EPUB file from this website.

In a way, it’s kind of liberating for me, because not having fans means I can worry less about disappointing people with each new release than might otherwise be the case. Not that I’m cutting corners or being sloppy or putting out excessively sub-par work, mind, but I rarely write in the same genre or about the same subject or even in the same style twice. Which is good, most of the time – people who read my thriller probably aren’t going to be interested in my YA romantic comedy, and people who read the YA romantic comedy probably aren’t going to be interested in my historical adventure, and… yeah. You get the idea.

Last month, however, I somehow accidentally experienced a modest degree of success with my latest book, which wound up becoming a Kindle Single on Amazon and camping firmly in the top ten short stories on their site. It also sells a lot of copies, and keeps acquiring generally positive reviews. People – including other writers who I greatly respect and admire – have praised it, and demanded a sequel.

Before I get to that, I’m working on finishing my next novel, and this is leaving me plagued with worry and self-doubt.

It’s a very niche book. I knew that when I started it, months ago, and that was fine. It’s not a great story, there’s no complicated and twisty plot to bewilder and delight people. It’s… a romance novel. Specifically, a pangender romance novel. Or, I guess, if you really want to be pedantic, a romance novel with a main character who’s pangendered, since it’s more about the trials and tribulations of finding love and happiness than angsting and wangsting about having a fairly fluid gender identity. (And just because some people love to speculate, and I’m a somewhat private and mysterious person: Nope, it’s no more autobiographical than the book about the goat is. Honest.)

See? Very niche, fated to be enjoyed by a small number of people. Which is fine, ’cause it’s a story I want to tell, lack of commercial demand be damned, and (until recently…) really low sales was entirely to be expected of something I wrote.

Now, though, I worry that some of the thousands of people who’ve read and enjoyed Midnight’s Tale are going to be considerably disappointed – or even offended – by this forthcoming book, which is about as unlike that little literary novella as possible. And that’s a problem, because it’s considerably slowing my work on the book itself.

Two or three months ago, I was writing this and the defiantly minimal appeal of the whole thing didn’t matter. Now… it’s weird. Having one little very mildly successful book shouldn’t change anything, but it has. I get frickin’ fan mail, for crying out loud. I stare at it, I try to write a response, and… nothing comes out.

Obviously, I’m fortunate – blessed – to have stumbled across the modest success I’ve found, to have the fans that I do. And as has been mentioned on a few blogs elsewhere, that success is fairly literally why I’m able to continue writing today, rather than being forced to throw in the towel and move on to something else. But at the same time, it’s a bit of a curse that I found success with one very anomalous piece of literary fiction that’s quite unlike anything else I’ve published or have planned, because the people who’ve read that, I’m pretty sure, don’t want to read a genderqueer romance novel (my next book) or an adventure story about a homeless girl, a well-meaning college student, and a sarcastic talking cat (the book after that).

It’s weird, I know. Failure is supposed to lead to self-doubt and whatnot, but I shrug off failure with aplomb. Success should bring renewed confidence and self-assurance, I guess, but… no. Not for me. Not yet.

So, anyway, that’s my current little problem of the month. Everyone who’s read or bought or reviewed Midnight’s Tale, you folks are awesome and I wouldn’t give you up for all the chocolate in the world. And everyone who’s emailed me that I haven’t replied to: it’s not you; it’s me.

That having been said, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and continue to try to sort out the heads and hearts of two confused fictional people. Who knows? Maybe I’ll figure out my own problems somewhere along the way, too.

Even if you’re not going to like the end product, wish me luck, eh? I need all the help I can get.

See, three weeks ago today I published a novella e-book called Midnight’s Tale. (Links: Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.de | iTunes | Kobo | Smashwords) It’s a literary tale of the somewhat surprising adventures of a young and rather innocent, um, goat.

Now, I know that literary fiction about a goat doesn’t sound like the greatest recipe for success, and to be honest it isn’t. I wrote it pretty much just because there was a goat in a previous short story, and one reader wanted to know what happened to it. She might even have been serious.

I did what I could; the book is reasonably original and as well-written as I could manage, it has a cover produced by a very talented artist, the sales copy you see on Amazon and elsewhere was crafted with the assistance of a half-dozen people far better at writing blurbs than I am, and the whole thing was priced at a point that suggests, I hope, a certain degree of pride and worth and value. (Inspired by something I read once about the psychology of pricing, I think. For mine own part, it was Greek to me.) But, still, when all is said and done, it’s a book about a goat that’s higher on bad sheep jokes than narrative tension. (Though, as one friend points out, you really shouldn’t underestimate the power of sheep jokes.)

Point is, any success for a book like this is something to be proud of. Well, over the last week, thanks to support and assistance from a couple dozen extremely awesome fellow writers, Midnight’s Tale has…

…achieved some very respectable sales, hit a couple of category bestseller lists…

…become the number-three “Hot New Release” short story on Amazon…

…and done surprisingly well in Germany, of all places. It’s also acquired a half-dozen favorable reviews.

It’s my tenth ebook. It’s my second-best-selling title to date. It’s sold more copies in one week, actually, than six previous books did in all of 2011. It is – stop me if you’ve heard this one before – literary fiction about a goat.

I guess it just goes to show that you shouldn’t be too quick to give up, and that you shouldn’t be too quick to second-guess yourself, to say “nah, people would never buy that.” I’m the first to admit that this was basically a fluke, a stroke of unbelievable, once-in-a-lifetime luck, aided in no small part by the kindness of a bunch of strangers who bought, liked, and helped promote the book. But, you know, if I’d never written that one weird romantic comedy, I’d never have been prompted to write a sequel about the goat in it, and people wouldn’t have been able to buy it, and I wouldn’t be sitting here writing about how lucky I am that Midnight’s Tale has been bought and read by enough people that I’m constantly staring at the numbers in befuddled awe.

Thank you – all of you – for being your wonderful, overly-supportive selves. You’re all much more awesome than little old me.

He’s faced hordes of screaming children intent upon his destruction. He’s endured close confinement with a hostile camel. He even narrowly averted being the star attraction in a Satanic ritual sacrifice. Yet, despite handling these crises with aplomb, poor Midnight is ill-prepared for his latest, greatest adventure: a perilous foray into the affairs of the heart. He knows all there is to know of love that a farm can teach – but will it be enough to see the young goat through his darkest and most trying times?

Midnight’s Tale is a 12,000-word literary story of life and love in the treacherous, apple-laden world beyond the comforts of the barn.

My tenth published book, Midnight’s Tale is my singular effort to write extremely beautiful Serious Literature. It’s rich in ambiguous symbolism and evocative imagery, laden with meaningful, universal insights into the human condition, then leavened with tasteful humor and beautiful writing. But don’t let that put you off; it’s pretty good, actually. Honest. Someone seems to have liked it, at any rate; you probably will, too.

You can view the book at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk, where it’s available for the Kindle, and at Smashwords, where it’s available in pretty much every other ereader format. It’s DRM-free, lending-enabled, and all that good stuff. It’s also just $2.99 or the equivalent in GBP and EUR.

So, go on, view a sample, and see what you think…

What’s forthcoming? I hope to finish novel number three in the next couple of months, as well as one or two more pieces of short fiction. Then a collection of all my short fiction—which so far runs to about 250 pages worth—and after that… we’ll see.

Why a goat?

Why not a goat?

Okay, well, actually there’s a goat in the last book I published. It’s a bit character, it doesn’t say or really even do anything. But a couple of people wanted to know what happened to the goat…

…and that was just stupidcrazy enough to spark my interest.

Hence, my next book being about a goat.

What, when you get right down to it, is it actually about, though? I’ll offer more details when it’s actually published, but in a nutshell it’s the extraordinary life and times of a very ordinary little goat. Deep, insightful, serious literature kind of stuff. Rich symbolism and layer upon layer of meaning, and all those other things that my books are generally lacking. (Or are they?)

I don’t normally talk about what I’m working on or what’s forthcoming or anything like that, but I’d be very amused if I was able to generate a little bit of pre-publication excitement (really, I’d settle for anything other than antipathy, let’s be honest) for what a lot of people are calling “that goat thing”. Hey, a girl can dream, right?

So, anyway, keep an eye out for Midnight’s Tale, coming soon to an e-reader near you!

“The author, on his website, says the book was written in 2010 by a man with a wife and two kids, but uh, that would be pretty hilarious if it were true! Because it reads as if it were written by a very precocious 15-year old boy sometime in the mid- to late eighties. Early nineties? (Don’t get me wrong, the style, grammar, and editing all deserve high marks!) If these are contemporary kids, then where are the cell phones, the internet, computers, etc? Do people still use rolls of film?

I freely admit, she’s got me. Mendacities was not written in 2010 by a guy with a wife and two kids.

But it was written in 2010. Honest.

(No, no, don’t look at me like that. All of my author biographies are filled with lies that contradict one another. Hello, the novel is called Mendacities, and dishonesty is a major part of the story. The subtitle of the book could easily be “You Are Being Lied To”…)

Anyway, just because it was written in 2010 doesn’t mean it’s set in 2010. It’s actually set in the late 1970s, or, more specifically, an alternate-history science-fiction version of the 1970s we were all promised in the 1950s. (The 1950s’ Popular Science vision of the World of The Future, if you will.) There are no cellphones, no digital cameras, just film ones. No GPS. No OnStar. No Internet. People still listened to the radio. There is antigravity technology, which has been around long enough to become unremarkable…

Simpler – and I think one might argue – better times.

So, hilariously bad contemporary novel written by a kid, or a bad historical SF YA novel written by an adult? Apparently nobody believes me when I tell them the truth. (Or do I?) I mean, hey, it is sorta a book about not blindly believing everything you’re told, I guess, so there’s some delicious irony at work, right?

But really, so long as we all agree the book isn’t very good, does it really matter who wrote it or when?

It’s a 9,500-word clean romantic comedy novelette, and is available DRM-free for the Kindle at Amazon.com, at Amazon.co.uk, at Amazon.de, and for pretty much every other e-reader at Smashwords.

Useless trivia: This is the 9th ebook I’ve published. It was produced – from idea to outline to first draft to editing to final revisions, plus publishing, cover design, and writing advertising copy – in just under eight days. Special thanks to my cover artist, my patient and understanding cats, and the various other folks who helped out along the way.

Why the short timeline? Because today is Friday the 13th, and I try to release a new book every Friday the 13th, whenever possible. About a week ago I realized that none of the other things I’m working on were going to be finished in time. So, being a masochist, I set them all aside and started something completely new from scratch. Here’s hoping you enjoy the fruits of my labor.

It’s called The Crimson Scars, and it’s a bit different from the other fiction I’ve published. (And no, it has nothing to do with The Elder Scrolls.)

Now, anyone who’s read some of my writing is likely aware that pretty much everything I’ve published has been different, in one or more ways. This story, though, is a bit different, even for me.

If you go look at the Amazon page and scroll down a bit, you’ll see it’s listed under “short stories”, “contemporary fiction”, and “women’s fiction”. That’s not an error. No, I’m not trying to, wink-wink, nudge-nudge, tell you anything.

So, what’s it about? A youthful (mis-)adventure of a now seemingly perfect and unexciting woman, mainly. The inexplicable and unfathomable ways in which romance seems to function against all odds. Frat boys. Stuff like that.

Don’t worry! It’s not “serious literature”. There’s a bit of a plot and characters with a little bit of depth to ‘em, and not a lot of pining and sighing in the ethereal rays of the shimmering moon or crap like that at all.

If you like slightly amusing short fiction (it’s about 6,200 words long – somewhat over twenty pages, in a printed book – not counting the author’s note, which is another 600 or so. What, me, long-winded?) completely free of sex, drugs, violence, and bad words, why not read a sample of The Crimson Scars? You can sample the Kindle version at Amazon, and most other versions at Smashwords’ website, or you can grab an epub sample right here.

Who knows, you might actually like it.

(It’ll eventually be available on iTunes and at Barnes and Noble, and for the Kobo, and most everywhere else, directly. These things just take time, that’s all…)

Overpriced at $0.99 or the regional equivalent, it’s the tale of a cynical high-school student’s first awkward forays into love, for all the wrong, crassly materialistic, reasons.

It’s poorly-written, and bound to be both disappointing and unsatisfying, but if you do read it, you can discover for yourself why it was rejected by both short-fiction markets to which it was submitted. As a bonus feature for Amazon customers, it includes an illustration of the main characters that’s almost as good as the prose.

Nothing Like Love, by George Berger. Available now for the Kindle. It’s pretty much crap, but at least I’m honest about that…

Which is great and all, in a level-playing-field sort of way. But does it actually work? Is there, to be blunt, any measurable benefit to this strategy?

If you’re a talentless hack like me… not really.

I’ve had a short story free on all the various e-book markets since September, so… four full months. I think that if any benefit from this were to be visible, they’d show up within four months.

Not all merchants report free “sales”, so I can’t say with confidence how many people have copies of this story, but it’s at least 2,500. I also, of course, have no way of knowing how many of them actually read it (or attempted to), though it did pick up two reviews.

Now, the idea, in theory, is that some of the people who read a free e-book will reward the author’s charity by buying some other title of theirs, happy that the writer has—hopefully!—demonstrated some degree of proficiency with plotting and characterization and the written word.

Has this happened, for me? Maybe. It’s impossible to be sure, but there are two sales—of a novella of mine, earning me a theoretical $1.22 I’ll likely never actually see—that might be attributable to the free short story. (Actually, more attributable to my efforts to promote the free short story, but let’s not pick nits, or get into a theological chicken-and-egg discussion.)

Yay me. Sorta kinda not really.

Now, it’s a short story, which not everyone likes, and it’s kind of weird and strange and all that, which not everyone likes, and I wrote it, which means it kind of sucks, which not everyone likes, so poor performance is kind of to be expected.

On January 1st, my latest novel was free on Amazon for a single day. About 4,900 people downloaded a copy while it was free. I don’t know how many have actually read it, but, again, two people have reviewed it, that I know of.

To be fair, it’s only been three-and-a-half weeks, but I can guarantee I haven’t sold anything else to anyone who downloaded that book, because I haven’t sold a single other title on Amazon this month. (Save the free short story.)

Now, the incessantly perky e-publishing cheerleaders will at this point be jumping up and down on their ergonomic chairs, eagerly over-caffeinated and ready to point out all the things I’ve “done wrong”: I “only” have six titles out, neither title that’s been free is part of a series, the covers suck, the books suck, I suck, blah blah blah.

Okay, fair enough. But the popular, successful people aren’t in quite as desperate need of every promotional opportunity they can get their hands on, however tenuous and useless they might be, as talentless hacks like myself. Free seems like a great strategy, in no small part because pretty much anyone can play, from the talented and fortunate gurus of self-publishing right on down to crap merchants like myself, and those misfortunate souls who somehow manage to sell worse than me.

Going free has earned me a couple of dollars (mostly from a handful of sales after the novel returned to being paid) and gotten stuff I’ve written in the hands of somewhere around 7,500 people—which is, regrettably, not at all the same as acquiring 7,500 “readers”. I’ve gotten no emails from people who’ve read either title, I’ve acquired no new followers on Twitter… I’ve seen pretty much no benefit, tangible or intangible, from having “gone free”.

I poured an unhealthy amount of blood, sweat, tears, and time into my most recent novel. On one hand, it’s slightly gratifying to think that 4,900 or so people have a copy, even if the majority will never get around to actually reading it. On the other hand, I can’t help suspect I’ve just saturated what little market existed for the title, that everyone who might conceivably want a copy, got one when it was free—and it’s more than a little depressing to know that I will never sell, for money, even in a decade, as many copies as people downloaded for free in one day. The market has spoken, and what I write is, by and large, worth nothing to readers.

In a nutshell, I think that my free promotions have done me absolutely zero benefit, in the long term, and I suspect that, my lack of talent aside, the same is probably true for many, perhaps even most, other less-than-successful writers. If you’re naive, or incurably optimistic, it’s easy to interpret results, especially in the short term, how you’d like them to look, to deceive yourself, basically, but I see no reason whatsoever for long-term optimism about free pricing as a promotional strategy for self-published e-books.

Anyway, on to various bits and bobs of news. After eighteen months as a self-published author, I’ve finally seen my first payment. It was for less than eleven dollars, but it’s something. Barely.

The discount promotion on the Kindle edition of Mendacities ended on January 1st, so the book is back up to its new price of 2.88 USD there. Sorry, but it was kind of unavoidable; I write and publish short stories, novellas, and full-length novels, and the minimum price I can charge anywhere is $0.99. That means if I want three meaningfully different pricing tiers, well… something had to move. Hey, if it’s any consolation, Mendacities is arguably my best book, so it’s not like you’re getting screwed.

Let’s see, what else? Um, the first couple of reviews for my latest novel, Without A Spark, are in, and can be read here. I’m pretty pleased, understandably.

As to what the new year holds in store from me, well… I’ve got quite a bit of stuff in the works. There should be an almost-love-story at the end of January (just in time for Valentine’s Day), followed by a more straightforward romance novel in late February or early March. Then, sometime in late March, I estimate, there should be another wacky/zany/strange light novel kind of “thing” in a similar vein to Mendacities. I won’t say too much about it at this point, except that there’s a cat in it, and a mysterious redhead.

Like all my e-books, it’s DRM-free and lend-able. (Also text-to-speech enabled.) For the immediate future, at least, it’s also available for free “lending” by qualifying Amazon Prime members, as part of the Amazon Select program. Pretty neat, non?

You can still get the paperback edition, of course—and the paperback for Mendacities, naturally—at Amazon or elsewhere, and both make great gifts for the reader(s) in your life. At less than ten dollars each, they make great stocking stuffers or random but thoughtful inclusions in gift-exchange schemes. It’s not too late to buy a copy of one, or both. Buy my books for the holidays? Please?

How do you kind of accidentally promote a book? Well… Someone pointed out that Kindle Nation, a quite popular website for owners of Amazon’s Kindle devices, still had advertising available this year, whereas most other e-book sites are booked well into 2012.

So, I went and I looked at the info there, and I bought advertising for a day as the Kindle Daily Deal sponsor. The problem was… what book to advertise?

I wanted to advertise my new novel, Without A Spark. However, I knew from talking to other authors that the owner of Kindle Nation sucks pretty badly at communicating with advertisers, and that I would have no idea when the advertising was going to actually run. Since the e-book edition doesn’t come out until early December, and December is when a lot of authors want to be advertised, there was no guarantee I’d be able to get promotion for a date after the Kindle edition was out, but before Christmas. And even if that did happen, there was no guarantee that the book would have picked up any reviews, which are, regrettably, kind of important to selling books.

So, it’d have to be a book that was already out, preferably one that had a review. On Amazon, that means either my novella Stanley and His Sword, or… Mendacities.

I went with Mendacities, basically, because it’s priced higher, and I make more per copy sold. Crass, but the advertising wasn’t exactly cheap.

So, anyway, how’d advertising at Kindle Nation work out? Well, I doubled the total number of copies of Mendacities that have been sold, in a day, and briefly got up into the mid four-digits, for Amazon’s sales rank:

So, I guess in that respect it worked out fairly well. I mean, I sold a bunch of books, to people who might someday even read them, if I’m lucky. That’s a good thing.

I sold no copies of any other title. I sold no copies of the book in paperback. I got no traffic to this website. I got no new followers on Twitter. I sold no copies of the book on other websites like Barnes and Noble. The book gained no momentum, no lasting boost in sales or visibility – it went right back to not selling on Amazon, for two weeks and counting. And I came nowhere close to breaking even on the advertising – the royalties I’ll eventually see come to one-sixth of what I paid Kindle Nation.

So, all in all, not exactly an overwhelming success.

Still, that’s the highest the book has ever ranked – the highest any of my books has and probably ever will rank – on Amazon, and the first and probably last time I’ve ever been in a top 100 position. As a final hurrah, then, a going-out-with-a-bang sort of moment, then, it was an unqualified success. As an actual advertising or promotional effort, though? It pretty much sucked. Which is no real surprise.

So, yeah. There you go.

Hey readers! It’s been about six months since anyone’s bought a paperback copy of Mendacities. You know who should do something about that? You! Buy a copy for yourself; you’ll enjoy it, I promise. In fact, buy two – you must have someone in your life that could use a quirky book for Christmas, after all.

Thanks!

Why the price reduction? Largely because I’ve some advertising coming up, hopefully, and desperately hope a reduced price will entice more people to buy the book. (Pretty much everyone who reads Mendacities loves it. It’s just the getting-people-to-read-it part that’s proving difficult.)

Why the slightly odd price of $1.44? I could tell you, but it’s much more fun if you guess. E-mail me (mendacities / Google’s well-known five-letter e-mail domain) with your guess. The first correct answer gets an e-book of mine of their choice; incorrect answers before that point get an e-book edition of Stanley and His Sword. In their choice of format, of course. I’m not a monster.

We’re leaving the discounted ordering option mentioned last week up through the end of October, just because it seems to be popular with people who like PayPal.

I hope you enjoy it…

A short story I wrote a long time ago, “Grease is the Word”, is available for free on iTunes, as well as at Smashwords in all major e-book formats. It’s short, it’s humorous, it’s free. You should give it a try.

Long ago, I produced a free deconstruction of internet erotica, which is sort of amusing in its intentional horrible-ness. Called “The Nurse’s Dirty Secret”, and long available only as a PDF file, I found the original files and have now made it available as an ePub file compatible with most modern e-readers. Because that’s not terrifying enough, I’ve also converted the reading-group guide (no, really) to ePub format, as well.

Also, a reminder: You can download samples of Mendacities here or here, and there are a bunch of links to the sample of Without A Spark over at its own website.

Yay for technology and progress and free goodies!

The retail price is $9.95. If you’re in the United States, however, you can not only get a copy of the paperback before everyone else, but you can get one cheaper than anyone else!

Here’s the deal: I’ve teamed up with my webhost to accept PayPal payments for Without A Spark, before the book is available elsewhere. For the next week or three, you can get a copy for 8.55 USD, and that’s with shipping included. Books are drop-shipped direct from the printer, and should reach you in three to five days—meaning you can get a copy before the book is even available on Amazon. Sweet, huh?

The above link should take you directly to PayPal.

My host promises to turn orders around same-day, and you’ll receive a tracking number from him via e-mail, at whatever address is associated with your PayPal account, and most queries about orders should be directed to him, not me. Because of shipping costs (and shipping times…) this is only good for folks with U.S. addresses.

Thanks!

It’s a thriller-ish adventure novel about ecoterrorism—ecoterrorism, the people who commit it, and the people who take the blame, in fact—called Without A Spark. I just received the proofs of the paperback edition today:

More details, including an excerpt, spoiler-free dramatis personae, and so on, can be found at the Without A Spark website, which is still a work in progress.

It’s not a sequel to Mendacities. It takes place more-or-less in the present-day United States, rather than the vaguely 1970s Anywhere of my first novel; none of the characters are the same; and it’s not really appropriate for young adults.

Whether it’s a spiritual successor to that novel is something I’ll let readers decide.

It has the same irreverence and humor that Mendacities has, and involves more secrets and conspiracies and whatnot, so if you liked my first novel, you’ll probably like the second—and hopefully vice-versa.

If you’re a book reviewer, I’d be happy to provide a free review copy; just e-mail me or contact me on Twitter. Otherwise, you can head over to the Without A Spark website to learn a little more about the book, read the first three chapters, and subscribe for updates—like the opportunity to pre-order paperback copies for $9 each, shipped anywhere in the United States.

For all of you in the sales doghouse with me, I give you The Kindle Author’s Prayer:

Because, really, if we don’t laugh, we’ll probably all commit suicide en masse… right?

This was cover #1:

After some gentle criticisms, I realized the cover was maybe-okay, but didn’t really work well in the itty-bitty thumbnail size on Amazon, ’cause you couldn’t really read the title…

So, I came up with this, which is awesomely retro, and very readable:

And that’s great and all, but two things bugged me: It has no connection to the contents of the book at all, and it’s more square than rectangular. While cover shapes and aspect ratios for e-books are pretty arbitrary, people expect covers to be noticeably taller than they are wide, except on children’s books. (And this is not a children’s book.)

So… after a couple days of that cover on Amazon, I finally found a piece of stock art which both broadly fit the book, and had adequate room to add the all-important (and legible!) cover. Thus, Stanley’s third cover was born:

It looks more than a little bit like a movie poster, but that’s maybe not a bad thing. It’s a guy, there’s a sword… it’s even the right kind of sword! I think we’re going to call this one good, at least for the time being.

I no longer hold out any hopes or dare to develop dreams for anything I write, but Stanley and His Sword is a fun and entertaining story, and I’d like to see it fulfill its potential, such as it is. The cover, sadly, probably plays a large part in that.

The new cover should go live on the various websites by mid-to-late September, before which some places will still show one of the older designs.

Well, now you know!

I’ve covered the individual figures and impressions for Amazon, Smashwords, and Createspace in previous posts. I’ve covered the expenses and other facts and figures elsewhere. This post is more big-picture stuff.

Mendacities has not been a resounding success. It’s not even been the very very modest success I’d hoped it would be. Still, I must confess that, a third of the way through its anticipated life (it is planned to go out-of-print in late 2013), it’s doing slightly better than I’d feared would be the case, early on.

The original plan was that I’d have sold roughly 100 copies in the first year. When that quickly proved it wasn’t going to happen, I revised that to 33 copies. When that looked like it wasn’t going to happen, I moved the target again, to 12 copies a year.

For a while, even that looked optimistic. Of late, though, thanks to some mostly-ineffective advertising, sales have picked up, to a brisk pace of… one every three weeks, roughly. Overall.

For three months running, I’ve managed to sell two copies in a calendar month. And today, the first anniversary of the book’s public unveiling, I made my first-ever sale in the UK—a Kindle copy – which also happens to be the twentieth reported sale, anywhere.

It’s a nice round number, only 80% off my original target. I’m fairly thrilled.

To help celebrate the book’s anniversary, I’m giving away five paperback copies to U.S. members of Goodreads. As of this writing, 163 people have already entered, which is about 153 more people than normally notice my book on any average week. The giveaway ends August 18th, 2011 – which is, according to my notes, the first anniversary of the first reported sale.

So, go enter. It’s free, and free is always good. And, you know, if you’re not in the US, you could always buy a copy between now and then, as an anniversary gift to both yourself and me.

Would I do it again? Well, yeah. I’m dumb that way. In fact, if all goes according to plan, I’ll have a new novel for sale just in time for the holidays. It’s not a sequel to Mendacities, but I think and hope you’ll like it nonetheless. Keep an eye on this site for details…

Of course, just because someone wrote a book doesn’t mean they don’t read books, so you just might make the odd sale or two by bringing your book to the attention of other authors, but it’s not exactly ideal. (This is also largely why advertising in Amazon’s “Meet Our Authors” forum isn’t a great long-term strategy – the sheer majority of people there are authors, who’d much rather try to promote their own books by, say, word-of-mouth, than yours.)

This state of affairs was demonstrated pretty clearly this past week when the book of the day on Daily Kindle Bargains was Haunted by Kaleidoscope-chan. I have high hopes for her book, not just because it looks very interesting, but because it looks to be an OEL light novel, just like Mendacities. Jeremy Shipp (who runs Daily Kindle Bargains) seems to have high hopes for it as well, as he’s promoted it quite heavily on Twitter.

End result? Haunted sold a number of copies during its first week on Amazon… probably all to authors. How do I know this?

“Customers who bought this item also bought” Jeremy Shipp’s Cursed (no surprise, he was promoting Haunted heavily on his personal Twitter feed) and Writing Fiction For Dummies.

Authors advertising to authors. What a shock.

You should buy a copy of Haunted, if you have a Kindle. It’s a good book, and one of the very, very few English-language light novels in existence. It’s also written by a slightly snarky ghost, which is, y’know, something most books can’t claim.

It’d be nice if you bought Mendacities as well, but at least please support the light novel genre. (And her book’s almost certainly better than mine.) Also, tell your friends…

…at least, the ones who aren’t also writers.

Domo.