Exciting news! The Kindle version of Aliens, Spaceships and the Occasional Latte is going on sale for 99 cents! Okay, maybe that’s not exactly a free give-away as the blog title might suggest, but I thought the title was catchy, and it is still almost a give-away. Cheaper than a Latte, that’s for sure.
The promotion will be on November 18 and then again the 25th, featured on Booksends and Bargain Booksy.
I’ve got a promo running this month for a couple of my books, The Girl With No Shoes and Aliens, Spaceships and the Occasional Latte. The picture to the left with the cute pink flip-flops has nothing to do with anything, but I like it for its winsome cheerfulness.
The fun starts this week. I’m giving away the Kindle version of The Girl With No Shoes for free, from August 6 to 9. You can download it from Amazon here. After that, it goes on sale for 99 cents for the rest of the month.
Aliens, Spaceships and the Occasional Latte will be free (Kindle version) starting August 7 through to the 11th. Then it goes on sale for 99 cents to the end of the month or longer if the promo is going well. Download it from Amazon here.
Be sure to get your copy! I hope you enjoy the books as much as I loved writing them.
A paperback version of ‘Coffee To Go’ is now available, however it may be a few more days or weeks before Amazon has them linked together in all markets. If you search on the title, you will still see them listed separately. I’m told by the folks at Amazon that it sometimes takes a week or so before their automated algorithms link the two.
The paperback version has a different cover, and you may ask why… well, since you are asking, the answer is simple. Economics. All publishers operate on a budget for each title they publish, and indie publishers like myself are no different. Print versions represent a very small fraction of over all sales. In fact, I basically produce a print version to make it easier to give copies away to friends and family, and I probably give more paperbacks away than are sold. So since the bulk of my sales are digital downloads, that is where I decided to spend my money on the cover.
It’s kind of crazy how much extra it costs to get a paperback version of the same cover art, so I made the executive decision to make my own cover for the paperback and use the free images available.
Just a quick note to my readers that I’ve changed the title of my time-travel romance, Sand Angel, to The Girl With No Shoes. It is the same great story, just a different cover and title. My wife looked at me funny when I told her, and maybe you are too, but I have my reasons. First, like most creatives, I can be flaky. That’s just the way we are. Kind of goes with the territory, unfortunately.
But secondly, I just never really liked the original title and went with Sand Angel because some close relatives liked it and urged me to use that. But the title always made me feel itchy and recently I decided to do something about it. I really like the new title. Here is the new blurb I’ve put up on Amazon along with the new title and cover:
When the new girl moves in next to Jake’s beach house, he is immediately interested. She’s beautiful, intelligent and mysterious, and it’s not long before he’s head over heels in love. What he doesn’t suspect, and what Octavia can never tell him, is that she is a time-traveller from the 23rd century. A time-traveller on a mission, because the world is about to end in a terrible plague and the lives of Jake, his precocious young daughter, and everyone around her is in grave danger.
But as their romance blossoms Octavia is troubled by the dark secrets she is keeping from him and all the lies she has to tell. How do you tell the person you love that you are from the future? How will they ever believe you? But how do you continue living a lie by keeping secret the single most important thing about you?
As Jake grows suspicious, Octavia’s secret threatens to tear them apart and she is forced to make a horrible decision. Does she stay in the past with the only man she has ever found true love with, risking her life in the plagues to come, or return to the safety of her own time? Equal parts time travel adventure and romance, The Girl With No Shoes is a touching story about how love can change the future.
Coffee to Go, With a Spaceship is now available on Amazon! Yeah!
I started on the sequel to Aliens, Spaceships and the Occasional Latte in the spring of 2016. Fans have been asking about it ever since I announced that the 2nd book was in the works, and many of you asked to be put on my mailing list so you’d be notified when it was released.
Well, it’s finally here and available on Amazon for Kindle.
The title is slightly different than what I had originally announced, but I felt that it was a bit of a mouthful and decided to shorten it.
In this sequel to ‘Aliens, Spaceships and the Occasional Latte’, the alien bounty hunters are back and bent on revenge against Jack. They kidnap his son, Johnnie, and take him to a desolate slave world. Donna accompanies Jack into space on a rescue mission to get Johnnie back, and along the way she learns how to fly a spaceship. With them is Montclair, a little elf-like man from another world who offers the use of his spaceship to go after the bounty-hunters. But Montclair’s generosity comes with a price, and Jack is forced to make some promises he may later regret.
I hope you enjoy the sequel as much as the first one. If you find the time, I’d love to hear from you after you have read it and let me know what you think.
Thanks again for reading my books! Being a writer is so much more fun when there are readers who enjoy it 🙂
And yes, I did leave a huge opening at the end of the 2nd book for a third installment…
Cheers
Mike
The long-anticipated sequel to Aliens, Spaceships and the Occasional Latte went out to beta readers this week. I’m
looking forward to hearing back from them. Polishing a manuscript is a real process and beta readers are an invaluable part of it. A big thank-you to all my brave beta-readers!
It’s been a while since I’ve blogged or done much of anything on this site. I’ve been on a long sabbatical from writing, and a couple of days ago a posted a blog in which I listed all my excuses for the year long break, so I won’t repeat myself here. But right now I want to tell you about an exciting promotion coming later this week for Aliens, Spaceships and the Occasional Latte.
Marketing and promotions has never been my forte, and most of my writer friends I talk to don’t like it any more than I do, but it’s something that has to be done.
Actually, just to follow a rabbit trail for a bit, I do have one writer friend who absolutely loves promoting and marketing. He wrote one book, then spent 4 years marketing it. He went on books tours and even landed a TV spot. He always carried a copy with him and he would tell everyone we met, even the waitress serving our lunch when we met at a restaurant. It got a bit embarrassing, actually.
About the same time he finished his book, I finished mine. But I stuck mine in a drawer (okay, a virtual drawer), and then immediately started writing another, never giving marketing a thought. And then I wrote another. I’ve finished 7 novels and my friend still hasn’t written his second. But then he’s made more money at it then I have.
Well, enough of that rabbit trail. I just wanted to let you know I’ve engaged the services of a nice marketing outfit going by the name of Bargain Booksy. Maybe you’ve heard of them. They email a newsletter to a big list of subscribers every day in which they feature novels. When subscribers sign-up they pick the genre’s they want to see, so the newsletter they get will only have books they might be interested in. Booksends is another group of nice people who do the same thing, and I’ve engaged their services as well.
I’ve dropped the price of Aliens, Spaceships and the Occasional Latte and Sand Angel to 99 cents. Aliens and Latte will be featured in Booksends April 7 and Bargain Booksy April 8. Sand Angel will be featured in Booksends April 8.
Both newsletters feature a picture of the cover, a small blurb about the book and links to Amazon where you can buy them.
Sign up for Bargain Booksy and Booksends, or go right to Amazon and buy the book. They really are extremely well written and clever, and for 99 cents you can’t go wrong.
Cheers
I’m launching a new promotion for Aliens, Spaceships and the Occasional Latte later this week. I’ve reduced the price for the Kindle version to 99 cents (crazy, I know), and it will be featured on BookSends April 7th and Bargain Booksy April 8th.
Both these advertisers use an email newsletter sent out to a list of subscribers, and subscribers can sign up to see book features in their favorite category. I’ve had good success with both of them in the past! After the promo is over I’ll post the results (for better or worse) on this blog.
More details to follow in tomorrows blog!
Okay, I owe my fans an explanation. The second book in the Jack Winters series has been on the back-burner for a year now. And I have a very good reason – I took a badly needed break from writing. Yup, I set writing aside for a year. My sanity – and my long suffering wife – both needed it.
I’m an 80 per-center. I belong to that group of writers that have to work a day job to pay the bills – and that’s 80% of all writers. So that means getting up early – and I mean crazy early, like 3 and 4 AM, to get in a few hours of writing before leaving for work. I did this for 9 years straight to be exact, and finished 7 full novels.
It was starting to make me a bit crazy, and a bit too much, with a home and a full time job, six kids and three grandkids. No dogs or cats, thankfully. The cat died a few years ago and we’ve never replaced it, and I don’t have time for puppies, as cute and adorable as they can be. (Who’s got time for those?)
To top it off, two of our kids got married last fall, within a month of each other, so it was a bit nuts. I did ask them to consider rescheduling, just to spread the craziness out a bit, but they weren’t listening to Dad on that score. Go figure.
I read a book by a well-known writer on writing a while back, in which he pontificated upon the traits of the successful writer and the necessary commitment that required. And while I agree it takes commitment and hard work, he took it too far. He extolled the virtue of making it the number one, absolute top priority, without which you won’t be successful (according to him). And just to underscore the point, he used as an example another famous writer who missed his son’s funeral – a son who died by suicide in his early twenties – because he was too busy writing.
Yup – he wouldn’t leave his writing long enough to attend his son’s funeral. Kinda sick, eh?
Sorry, but I won’t sacrifice to those gods.
But I will be getting the manuscript to my beta readers next week, once I’ve finished another pass through it. (I don’t want to torture my beta readers any more than necessary.)
So my game plan is to publish the sequel this spring.
Please feel free to drop me a line with any questions, comments, or thoughts on how we can attain peace in the middle-east, cure cancer, encourage Trump to leave office early, or anything else that might be helpful to humanity.
This past week several fans of “Aliens & Latte” have emailed me to ask about the sequel. It is heart-warming to know so many people enjoyed the first book and are eagerly awaiting the second.
Well, the good news is that I finished the first draft last month. Now, first drafts always have to be proof-read, edited and polished. No sane writer would ever inflict a first draft on his fans. Heck, I wouldn’t even inflict it on my editor. So I will be going over the manuscript again to clean it up, then send it to my ‘editorial staff’ for final polishing.
I hope to have “Coffee to Go, With Spaceships & a Bounty Hunter” ready this summer. But please be patient. Most writers, myself included, hold down a so-called ‘real job’ for a living. So I get my writing done between the hours of 4 and 7 in the morning before getting ready for work, which means progress is not always as fast as I’d like. It’s a good thing I’m what my wife calls an annoyingly perky morning person, and all I need is a good cup of coffee at 4AM and I’m ready to go. (BTW, according to recent stats, 80% of all writers work at other jobs to pay the bills unless they have a spouse that supports them. This includes traditionally published NYT authors.)
This is my first post since last fall, so admittedly I’ve really sucked at blogging. I’ve been too busy writing and working and keeping up with my kids. But I promise to keep you updated on the progress of the sequel more faithfully in this blog.
And always, if you have any questions or want to know more about Jack Winters and his adventures, please feel free to drop me a line.
Cheers!
Mike
