Free and discount ebook giveaway

This is just a very short note to let you know I'm participating in a three day free and discount book promotion with a whole bunch of other Indie authors. The Support for Indie Authors-organised bargains (within GoodReads) consists of over 100 books, covering literary, young adult, and seven genres. Here's a detailed breakdown:

20 sci-fi

40 fantasy

20 romance

12 mystery & suspense

8 horror

15 LGBTQ

15 literary

15 humour

8 young adult

The promotion started at midnight (PDT) on March 31st (so that was 6pm AEST, or 7am UTC). It ends on April 2nd.

I've made Wild Thing free for all three days (actually, a bit more: both before and after). Unfortunately, because Harsh Lessons's Kindle Select Term ends (rolls over) on March 31^st, the best I can manage is to make it free on the 1^st and 3^rd days: Amazon have no way of pre-allocating free days in the next term, nor can they set the price to free on the current day, even if you do it at the start of that day.

The purpose of the promotion very much aligns with what I think is the key issue for authors working outside the traditional publishing environment: being discovered by readers. It also helps readers discover books they've never heard of. And who knows, some of those writers in the promotion might become your next favourite author! So I'd encourage you to have a browse of the titles available over there at the Support for Indie Authors event.

Various writers there have been working hard creating promotional images for the event and sharing them for all the participants to use. C.B. organised a Thunderclap; Christina McMullen organised the event and put together the event site, and all the authors helped with promoting and discounting their books. One member, Missy Sheldrake, even made a couple of promo videos you might like to check out, and uploaded them to Youtube here and here!

I'll be back at work on Shadow Hunt from April 1st, having received an interim critique of the 1^st 200 pages from Dave at ThEditors.com on Friday night. (He said it's looking pretty good so far.)

(I'll post this same article over on my other blog.)

March 2017 news

This is a very brief update on what I'm up to.

I've teamed up with a bunch of other authors from Support for Indie Authors (not the talented Aussie singer/songwriter, Sia!) of Goodreads) who will be running a large free-or-discount book promotion event from March 31^st - April 2^nd. The site will go live on midnight of Mar 31^st at VM's Spring Attack, when a big bunch of books will appear.

In other news, on Sunday March 26^th I uploaded a draft of Shadow Hunt to Amazon, to make it available for pre-order on April 30^th. Dave is still working through his final critique, but felt that April 30^th sounded a reasonably manageable date for me. But I will be busy between now and then!

Right now, I'm basically doing some marketing type stuff, as well as doing what I can to get Shadow Hunt ready for publication, while waiting for Dave's final critique. Jon Marshall has kindly acted as a Beta reader (x2), and said the book is noticeably better after my revisions following Dave's critique of Jan 11^th. But Jon had some notes/comments, which I'll be working through this week.

I will also be attending Swancon 42, April 13^th—17^th, the speculative fiction convention in Perth (Western Australia). It'll be my first visit there. I think the flight is over four hours — it's a big country!

In the meantime, I've made myself a little list of all the things I need to do between now and the end of April. My dream is that I'll have the ebook ready before that, and will be able to publish earlier. And that I'll be able to use the last week or two of April to prepare and get the printed books ready, once again via IngramSpark.

I also have several blog articles that I plan to write (both here and on A Toe in the Ocean of Books): including a Q&A article from some good questions from my first fan.

Excelsior!