See here: https://www.bookbub.com/books/dover-beach-by-richard-bowker?ebook_deal
It’s now available for a mere $0.99!
Here’s the Amazon link if you want to go directly there. At a price like this, they’re bound to run out — so don’t delay!
(For new arrivals, Dover Beach is a book I wrote. It’s good!)
I’ll stop this soon. I promise. Here’s one 5-star review:
This is book 3 in the Portal series. It is readable as a stand alone novel, however it will be less confusing and more enjoyable if you read Portal and Terra (books 1 and 2) first. This is a good addition. Where it really shines is the multiverse. Lots of fiction tries to tackle the whole multiverse thing, but few do it well. This book does it well. Makes it well worth the read. The plot and characters are also well written and interesting. They aren’t why I would pick up the book, but they carry it. Great addition.
And here’s another:
This is such a fun story overall that it is very hard to not find yourself completely immersed with the feeling that you are literally walking alongside the characters themselves. “Home” may sound like it is yet another “futuristic” story that is like so many out there, but this one is really so different and so well-written that you will find yourself not wanting to put this one down. It is a great read that will leave you wanting so much more. I really hope to find myself reading some more of these stories, I couldn’t have hoped for anything more than what “Home” gave me.
If you still don’t want to read it, I’m not sure what I can do to convince you…
Home is a little tricky to promote, being the third book in a series and all. I think it works as a standalone novel, but opinions may differ–and in any case, some people might not bother with it if they think they’ll need to read two other novels to pick up the thread.
Anyway, here are a couple of things I’m trying:
Kindle Book Promotions is pretty expensive, but I used them for Dover Beach, and they delivered exactly what they said they’d deliver–a bunch of sales and customer reviews (although I’m pretty sure the sales didn’t recoup the cost). What I’m looking for now are mainly unbiased customer reviews. Haven’t seen any yet, but they will come.
I’m also trying Books and the Bear, which offers promotion on their Facebook page and Twitter page for a price that’s low enough that I thought I’d give it a try. They also have schemes to help you build your email list, which is a thing I’ve been thinking of starting. This will involve dealing with Mailchimp. Which I will probably do. Because it will help with my newsletter. Which I will probably start. With my buddies. Who will certainly do more about this than I will.
I’ll keep you posted.
Do people here use Goodreads much? I took a look at it today for the first time in years and it seems to be a pretty active place. Should I promote my books on it? I feel remiss.
Most of my own “reading” nowadays is via audiobooks, which I listen to on my endless commute. There are pros and cons to this approach, but in my experience a good narrator can greatly increase my enjoyment of a book. (The main disadvantage is that it’s hard to skim an audiobook.)
It’s not especially hard to create audiobooks nowadays. ACX, the Audiobook Creation Exchange, provides all the resources an author needs–especially the ability to hook up with appropriate narrators. So I just need to decide whether it’s worth the time and money.
The money part is straightforward–narrators charge “Per Finished Hour”, which includes narration, engineering, corrections, and so on. (Many narrators do their own engineering.) So, if your audio book is seven hours long, and the narrator charges $200 per finished hour, you pay $1400.
Depending on the model you choose, you might get as much as 40% of the retail price as a royalty from Audible, the top audiobook vendor. If they charge, say, $20, that’s $8 per book. That’s a breakeven point of about 175 copies–which is not an insignificant number.
On the other hand, there’s synergy and cross-sales and all that good stuff. Maybe audiobooks will help increase my ebook or print book sales. Or maybe not.
Help me out here.
You still have to wait till April 2 to get the e-book version of Home. But you can buy the paperback version now. How cool is that? It’s available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, as well as probably other places I haven’t checked. Barnes and Noble will sell it to you for 10% off the already low list price; it also discounts the e-book.
Here’s what the book looks like, in case you forgot:
There’s a lot of value to getting sales up when a book is first published, so there’ll never be a better time to buy it (for the author, at least). And it goes without saying that reviews are extremely helpful as well.
By the way, this is the third book in my Portal series, but I think it stands pretty well on its own. Give it a try! Or buy all three!
Here it is on Amazon, with a publication date of April 2!
I don’t really know why you’d pre-order the book instead of waiting until it’s actually available. Maybe you just want to make sure you get it at the earliest possible moment? That’s fine with me, of course. Pre-order as many copies as you like!
Something like this? By the great Jim McManus.
Turns out we now have paperback versions of my very fine novels Dover Beach and The Distance Beacons. (An old, used paperback of Dover Beach is also available, but I don’t get any money when you buy one of those copies, so where’s the fun in that?) The covers look remarkably like the covers of the ebooks:
So now, along with Where All the Ladders Start, you can buy paperback versions of all three of the very fine novels in my Last P.I. series. Need I point out that a series of private eye novels set in a dystopian future after a major societal breakdown would make the perfect gift for that special someone on Valentine’s Day?
Also, I can get you these novels cheaper than you can get them from Amazon, so if you need a few, let me know.
My wonderful kids got me an Amazon Echo Dot for Father’s Day. This is an awesome little toy. Alexa (the thing’s voice) can play music and set a timer and tell me jokes and do math problems and lots more. It didn’t take me long to discover that Alexa could read books in my Kindle library. So of course I told her to read one of my own books–in this case, Terra.
The first problem was that she insisted on narrating all the front matter–copyright statement, ISBN, etc. There should be a way to turn that off or skip through it, but I couldn’t figure it out.
Then she started reading my deathless prose. She will not be replacing professional audiobook narrators anytime soon. The meaning is reasonably clear in her narration; she pronounces the words correctly (except for the oddball name “Polkinghorne”) and she pauses between sentences. But her emphasis was consistently a bit off: she said “post OFFice” instead of “POST office”; “cell PHONE” instead of “CELL phone”. And she didn’t do dialog right: you need to drop your voice a bit when you come out of a line of dialog to identify the speaker: “Larry said” or “Vinnie said”. She didn’t do that. And of course she made no effort to characterize the speaker; they all sounded just like Alexa (she sounds great, but she doesn’t sound like Larry Barnes). I couldn’t imagine listening to her for a whole novel. I gave up after about a page.
By the way, one of the most popular posts I’ve written is the one where I contemplate whether Jeff Bezos is the Antichrist. Apparently people Google that question a lot, and my opinion comes up second, just after Jonathan Franzen’s.
Maybe I’ll ask Alexa what she thinks.
Richard Bowker 