12 May 2014

Fussy, Fussy Librarians

posted in: ebooks, publishing, specials, work in progress | 0

Okay, I’ve been absent here for a while, I know. I’ve been exceptionally busy with life—including but not limited to getting some new book covers done, preparing for some writing workshops, making some minor but important changes to ebook files, and, of course, working on The Reefs of Time. You’ll probably get a rash of posts from me with updates on a lot of this. And then I’ll probably go silent again for a while, because the outlook for the next couple of months is Crazy Busy, with Intermittent Chance of Madness.

My reason for emerging? I have a little promotion running today through a service called The Fussy Librarian. It’s a site that offers you a selection of discounted books, filtered by reviews and by your (the reader’s) personal preferences, such as genre and amount of sex and violence. They asked me to post today’s list of daily deals, so I am—but there are no links, so if something catches your eye, you’ll need to do a quick search. (Visit The Fussy Librarian if you would like to get your own daily email of new deals, which will have links.)

I had to chuckle when I saw the last book in the list.

Mysteries:
The Case of the Not-So-Fair Trader (A Richard Sherlock Whodunit)
Jim Stevens
Price: $0.99

Thrillers:
Death of Secrets
Bowen Greenwood
Price: $2.99

Science fiction:
Neptune Crossing
Jeffrey A. Carver
Price: Free
(Okay, if you read this blog, you probably already know that Neptune Crossing is free. But the purpose of the ad is to draw new members readers into the cult fold.) 

Young adult:
Life’s What You Make It
Theresa Troutman
Price: $2.99

Romance-contemporary:
Dangerous
Suzannah Daniels
Price: Free

The Start of Something Good
Renee Vincent
Price: Free

Fantasy-epic:
Two (The Godslayer Cycle)
Ron Glick
Price: $0.99

Romance-suspense:
Savage Secrets
Cristin Harber
Price: $0.99

Romance-historical:
The Marquess (Regency Nobles Series, Book 2)
Patricia Rice
Price: $4.99

Fantasy-urban:
A Witch’s Tale
Rue Volley
Price: $0.99

Stormrage
Skye Knizley
Price: $2.99

Mysteries-Female sleuths:
A Dead Red Heart
RP Dahlke
Price: $2.99

Horror:
Unholy Testament – Full Circle
Carole Gill
Price: $0.99

Children’s / Middle Grade:
Keeper of Reign (Reign Fantasy, Book 1)
Emma Right
Price: $1.99

Romance-western:
Jaded
Chelle Chelle
Price: $0.99

Gay / Lesbian:
Somebody to Love
Merry Farmer
Price: $4.99

How-to:
Jump Start Your Book Promotions
RP Dahlke
Price: $0.99
(Starting, one presumes, with advertising on The Fussy Librarian?)

17 Apr 2014

The BookBub Promotion Went Great

posted in: ebooks, personal news, publishing, science fiction, specials, The Chaos Chronicles | 0

If you were reading here last week, you know I marked down my omnibus ebook of The Chaos Chronicles: Books 1-3 for a week, in conjunction with a promotion on Bookbub.com. The sale went amazingly, gratifyingly well. Better than I expected or dreamed. In fact, there are more than 2500 people out there with shiny new copies of my omnibus on their Kindles, Nooks, iPads, whatever. More than 1500 people grabbed it on the first day alone. We broke into the top 100 sellers of all books in the Kindle store, and briefly lingered at #65 among all Kindle ebooks. More importantly, I’ve already heard from one new reader who discovered my work through the sale and has already ripped through it happily and gone on to download Sunborn.

That’s the most gratifying thing about it, is the new readers. The extra income is nice, too, of course.

If you’re one of those readers, I hope you enjoy the book! And if you do, I’d be eternally grateful if you’d take a moment to post a review wherever you bought it, or at Goodreads, or anywhere, really. Word of mouth means everything. And thanks!

8 Apr 2014

Bookbub Promotion on The Chaos Chronicles: Books 1–3!

posted in: books, ebooks, my books, Neptune Crossing, specials, The Chaos Chronicles | 0

Starting today, and for one week, The Chaos Chronicles: Books 1–3 (an ebook omnibus edition) will be steeply discounted, down to $1.99! That’s for three complete books—and would be a great price for just one book! Here’s another exclamation mark, for good measure! This is my second promotion through Bookbub, and I’m hoping it does as well as the first.

These three novels are enough to get you well into the Chaos story, starting with Neptune Crossing, and continuing with Strange Attractors and The Infinite Sea. I hate blowing my own horn, so can I let some others do it for me? Here are some honest-to-God quotes from other people:

  • Neptune Crossing – Called one of the best SF novels of the year by Science Fiction Chronicle 
  • Strange Attractors – “An irresistibly readable story line reinforced by fascinating speculative science.” —Booklist 
  • The Infinite Sea – “Another splendid adventure, with intriguing puzzles, first-rate problem-solving, and an impressive array of alien characters, motives, and methods.” —Kirkus Reviews

The Chaos Chronicles — click to biggify

It’s available at Nook, Amazon, Smashwords, and iTunes. It’s now also marked down at Book View Café. And at Kobobooks.

If you haven’t already added this set to your ebook collection, what are you waiting for?

6 Apr 2014

A New Look for Neptune Crossing—and First in a Series at Itunes!

posted in: books, ebooks, my books, Neptune Crossing, specials, The Chaos Chronicles | 0

A lot’s been going on since I last wrote. One exciting thing is that I’ve put a new cover on Neptune Crossing, which will join my list at Book View Café next Tuesday. It’s still free everywhere, both as a thank-you to my readers and as a way for new readers to discover my work.

In addition, Neptune Crossing has been selected as part of an iBooks promotion called “Free First in a Series at iTunes.” This is via my Smashwords edition which distributes to the Apple store, so a big thanks to Mark Coker of Smashwords for that. To see all the books being promoted as free first books in a series, go to the iTunes store, click on Books, and browse the front-page banner until you come to it.

Here’s the new cover, designed for me by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, fellow BVC author. In her spare time, she’s now working on a new cover for Strange Attractors.

Neptune Crossing cover

I have to get back to doing my taxes now, but look for another book-related announcement in a few days.

12 Mar 2014

Report on the BookBub Promotion

posted in: ebooks, specials | 0

I recently finished a special promotion on Eternity’s End, via BookBub. For a little over a week, the book was deep-discounted to $.99. On opening day, when the promotional email went out, it sold over a thousand copies at the Amazon Kindle store! After that, it tapered off pretty quickly, of course. But in all, it sold over 1600 ebooks, some in the Nook store but most in the Kindle store.

Now that the promo is over (the price is now $5.99), things have really fallen off at the Nook store, but at Kindle, although numbers have decreased, it continues to sell better than it did before the promotion. I hope it continues!

My writer friends told me to expect a lot more reviews as a result of the sales. (Reviews are considered by some experts to be one of the most important factors in continuing sales.) Well, at first I didn’t get any new ones. But today, two new reviews appeared at Amazon. Let’s just say they canceled each other out nicely.

The first one reads:

I had to force myself to read this book . It was a very dull and boring read . Entirely too much fill .
It drones on an on with no real action .
THE ONLY THING I COULD SAY TO PUT IT SIMPLY IS THAT IT , REALLY, REALLY SUCKED.
I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND THIS AUTHOR OR HIS BOOKS TO ANY ONE AT ALL

 Well, what can I say, except: We aim to please! You can’t go out and buy that kind of customer satisfaction. Out of curiosity, I looked to see what this reviewer’s other reviews were like. He has reviewed three other SF books. He thought they all sucked. (Including one by Andre Norton.)

The next one, fortunately, is more charitable:

Eternity’s End is a high-space adventure that hearkens back to the days of sailing ships, complete with space pirates and romance too. This is one of those rare books that has stuck with me long after I finished reading. I enjoyed it from cover to cover and hope to find time to read it again someday.

That’s more my style!

Ordinarily I don’t pay much attention to reviews, because that way lies madness. You fixate on the bad ones, and try to hold to the good ones to salve your pride, but it doesn’t really work. Best just not to read them at all.

Having said that, I would like to encourage you, if you’ve read Eternity’s End, to go post a review at your favorite store or book-related social networking site. (Even if you thought it sucked!) It would help me, and it might even help new readers discover the book!
 

3 Mar 2014

“Read an E-Book Week” Specials

posted in: ebooks, specials, The Chaos Chronicles | 0

It’s that time of the year again! Smashwords is sponsoring their annual Read an E-Book Week blowout sale. Tons of books discounted or free, through March 8. I’ve put up two boxed sets at 50% off. Just use the coupon code REW50, which you can also find on the books’ product pages, in case you forget it.

My colleague Doranna Durgin has not only put a slew of her own books for sale, but also invited other authors to list theirs. (I imagine a list will begin growing on Doranna’s blog over the next day or two.)

And I say, why not? If you’re an author with a book or books on sale, list it here in the comments section! The more, the merrier!

By the way, my Bookbub promotion has been very successful, and Eternity’s End is still on sale, through March 7.

26 Dec 2013

Half-Price Ebook Sale at Book View Café

posted in: ebooks, my books, personal news, specials | 0

My friends at Book View Café and I are having a big Boxing Day Week sale on a huge number of books. All of my books there are half-price for a limited time, and there are a ton of other great half-price books by my fellow BVC authors. The list includes many familiar names from the science fiction and fantasy world, including Ursula LeGuin, Vonda McIntyre, Pati Nagle, Linda Nagata, Judith Tarr, David Levine, Chris Dolley, and many others in a variety of genres. This is an excellent chance to stock up on some terrific books for half price, and maybe discover some new favorite authors along the way. Here’s where to look:

The books are all DRM-free in both Kindle and Epub format, so you can read them on pretty much any reading device you like. It doesn’t get much better than that, in the ebookosphere.
20 Dec 2012

For Some Very Good Free Ebooks…

posted in: ebooks, free ebooks, specials | 1

Show us your Nook! Or your pretend-Nook, if you don’t have a Nook. From now through Dec. 31, a bunch of authors, including the one attached to my fingers, are giving away a free ebook from Book View Café. All you have to do is visit Katharine Eliska Kimbriel’s Live Journal page at http://alfreda89.livejournal.com/. She has the instructions there. The idea is you post a picture of yourself with your Nook to Cat’s Livejournal or Facebook page, and in return you get some coupon codes for free books. Just go to Book View Café to collect. Nothing to register—just use the coupon codes to download epub editions of the books.

I’m giving away Eternity’s End, a Nebula finalist. You’ll also get Cat’s Fires of Nuala, Vonda N. McIntyre’s Starfarers, and Jennifer Stevenson’s King of Hearts, all in DRM-free epub editions. (Which means, among other things, that if you have a Kindle pretending to be a Nook, you can easily convert the epub to mobi-Kindle format with Calibre, a free program.) See Cat’s page for a list of other participating authors.

Here’s where you can go to collect your epub copy of Eternity’s End once you have your coupon code: http://bookviewcafe.com/bookstore/bvc-author/jeffrey-a-carver/.

Hurry! Before we run out of ebooks!


3 Dec 2012

Holiday Specials!

posted in: ebooks, my books, personal news, specials | 0

Before this gets away from me and I forget to promote it (What good are specials if you keep them to yourself?), I have a few book specials lined up for the holiday season.

Ebooks first. At Book View Café, you can pick up my two short story collections, Going Alien and Reality and Other Fictions, for just $1.99 each through December 31. (That’s a dollar off the regular low, low price of $2.99!) Epub or mobi (Kindle) format, your choice, DRM-free.

In the Kindle store, the price of my spaceship-racing thriller, Clypsis (Book One of the Roger Zelazny’s Alien Speedway trilogy) has been marked down by the publisher, at my request, from $9.99 to $5.97. That’s a 40% markdown! Gentlebeings, start your engines! A rousing collaboration with the late, great Roger Zelazny, for young adults of all ages! (Plus, when you compare the ebook price to $89.56 for a new, vintage paperback, it’s a no-brainer. Never mind the $.01 used paperbacks. I’m sure they’re not as good.)



Finally, for lovers of tree-books, I remind you all that personalized, autographed paper books make fine gifts for the discerning gift giver.  Why not visit my virtual bookstore at http://www.starrigger.net/order.htm? Take 10% off the book total (not off the postage, please) for any order you send me in the month of December. This sale is not listed on the website. Just take the discount and mention you read it on my blog or Facebook page.

The book is dead? I don’t think so. Long live the book!

   

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