Crump Freebies

A couple of announcements:

FIRST, Crump, the lowest-rated, and most hated thing that I've ever written is FREE on Amazon Kindle through 8/17. Get a copy today!

SECOND, Crump 2 will be out soon! In fact, you can PRE-ORDER the next installment of Crump now. But while you're waiting for the epic follow-up to come out, get your ass on Amazon and get a FREE copy of the first book!

FINALLY, if you want some free Crump stickers (highly collectible), check out the freebies page.

Freebies

Now through 4/18/2018, you can get my science fiction novel Psalms of the Apocalypse for free on Kindle. 

This novel wraps up the series of novelettes that I started publishing in 2017 (Lumiuxx, Daddy, Paige, and Aurelie - all of which are no longer available to buy).

If you're looking for a good read, or you just want to help me out, then download my book and give it a nice fat 5-star rating!

Kindle eBook Updates

One of the coolest features of Kindle eBooks is that they can be updated to correct distracting formatting or publishing errors, to add new content, or to fix gaping plot holes. These updates happen automatically for many of Amazon's reading devices and apps (and is the default option for some platforms).

I highly recommend that you turn on these updates so that you always have the most up-to-date version of your eBooks. As an example of new content that you would be missing, if you didn't have automatic updates enabled, I've recently started to update all of my books to take advantage of Amazon's X-Ray feature. Without automatic updates, you wouldn't be able to see all this new content!

I grabbed these instructions from Amazon on how to enable automatic updates for your eBooks. Turn it on and stay up to date!

To receive updates to your eBooks automatically:

1. Turn on the Annotations Backup* for your Kindle device or Kindle reading app. This will sync your notes, highlights, eBookmarks, and furthest page read 
2. Go to the Manage Your Content and Devices page 
3. Select "Automatic Book Update" under the Settings tab
4. Select "On" from the dropdown menu

Note: The Automatic Book Update feature might not be available for markets outside of the U.S.
*The devices listed below automatically enable the Annotations Backup. As a result, you won't be able turn off the Backup.

• Fire HD

• Fire HDX

• Kindle for Android

• Kindle for Windows 8

• Kindle for BlackBerry 10

X-Ray for Kindle

I was reading through Amazon's monthly newsletter and learned about the X-Ray feature - which is essentially an on-demand index that you can pull up by pressing and holding on the name of a character, place, event, or term in the book. This is super cool, so I've been updating all of my books to have X-Ray. I'll probably have them all updated in the next week or so.

Reviews!

It's the end of October, which means that the holiday season is just around the corner and the gift-buying frenzy of Christmas is already getting started. During the next couple months many, many Amazon Kindles will be sold and many, many more Kindle eBooks will be consumed. It's a very exciting time for KDP writers. All those Kindles flying off the shelves means more and more people getting access to Amazon's massive eBook library and to the books that we write!

If you happen to be one of those lucky new Kindle owners, or maybe you're just going to be catching up on some reading during the holidays, I'd like to give you a nudge to leave reviews on all the books you read. It's super easy to review a Kindle book (you don't even have to write anything, and you don't need to attach any of your own personal information to the review), and reviews are priceless to authors! Not only do reviews help us with feedback about our work, reviews also play a vital role in how our books are displayed on Amazon. The more reviews, the better. Especially 5-star reviews. And since we are entering into the holiday season, you can definitely think of your reviews as presents to the authors that you enjoy reading.

So feel free to spread holiday cheer this season and leave reviews for every Kindle eBook that you read. Your reviews will make KDP authors very, very happy and keep them writing all those wonderful books that you love to read.

Crump Cover Reveal

I've been working on a political satire piece based loosely on the short story "Six Minutes" and it's just about ready to publish (very possibly by Monday 8/14).

Here's a look at the cover, done by JW Schmidt, who also did the cover for "Shanghai Shuffle" (available for pre-order here).

I'm not going to put "Crump" up for pre-order, it's just going to get published straight away. I'll push out links to buy the book on Amazon through Twitter.  Stay tuned!

Upcoming Releases

The summer has really been flying past this year and it feels like I haven't been getting much done. But in fact, I've got a few new releases scheduled for late summer/early fall!

The first will be the third book in the POTA series, available for pre-order now and release (on Kindle) at the end of August.

The second book will be the start of a new series called Prisoners of War. This will be a super gritty military scifi series set in a future where mass incarceration is used to recruit soldiers for use global combat. I'm really excited about this series because I'll be dissecting a bunch of important social and political issues. Book one of the series, Shanghai Shuffle, is set to be released in late September but is available for pre-order now.

The third book will be the start of another new series called Black Star. With the Black Star books, I'm stepping away from the violent realism I've been doing in POTA and Prisoners of War to take a shot at a softer, hopefully funnier sort of science-fiction. Black Star will follow a bounty hunter, employed by the mutli-system conglomerate Starfield Corporation.

That's all for now. Stay tuned for more updates and don't be afraid to pre-order these books!

What to Read

As a relatively unknown and unread author, the plight of the emerging writer is one that I can relate to quite well. Because of this, I made the decision back in May to start focusing my scarce reading time on the work of independent, new, and relatively unknown writers. I'll be honest, much of the stereotypes about independently published authors is firmly based in reality, but I've also found some real hidden gems.

That said, my goal isn't really to find authors that I enjoy reading. What I'm aiming to do here is to read and then honestly rate books so that they can be represented on Amazon in a way that provides other readers with meaningful feedback on the book and the author with the chance to get an idea of what people really think about their work. I think that this is the sort of thing that all small time authors should be doing. Not only does it help our own writing, but it also helps out fellow authors. It is frustrating as fuck to have books out there that get consistent (albeit low) sales, but garner zero reviews. Reviews help drive sales and, perhaps more importantly, reviews help keep writers motivated to keep writing.

So, I'm issuing a call to action to all independent, aspiring, emerging, fledgling, amateur, semi-pro, self-published, unknown writers out there: go and read a book by another author that's in your same situation. Once you've read it, leave an honest review. If we all did this, we would all have a handful of reviews (or at least starred ratings), and I feel that the writing world would genuinely be a better place :D