Kindle Book
Light Speed: Ultimate Destiny is now available as an Amazon Kindle ebook.
Book #2 in the Light Speed series, Light Speed: Struggle for the Stars, will be available soon in both trade paperback and for the Kindle.
Stay tuned.
Not long after Save My Dreams LLC was formed we started receiving mail, email, and even phone calls from companies wanting to help us market our books. Of course, at first we didn’t have any books to market, so such overtures were ignored. Now that Light Speed: Ultimate Destiny is finally available for sale, and All About Love: Elizabeth’s Story is getting closer to availability, these offers are being studied more carefully.
A few weeks ago I “attended” a free telephone presentation (90 minutes!) explaining and extolling the virtues of becoming an online best seller, especially at Amazon. The jist of the presentation is that if a publisher can get a book into Amazon’s top 100, maybe even their top 10, people will notice. And if the right people notice, like newspapers, radio, television, and so on, the attention could snowball into greater sales still. Makes sense, right? Maybe.
So if you buy into the “Become a Top Amazon Ranking Book” then the rest of the pitch makes sense, too. Maybe. The idea is to tell thousands of people (at least 300,000) to buy your book at Amazon at a predetermined date and time. In order to reach this many people you’ll have to partner with other publishers, bloggers, and anyone willing to send emails plugging your book and the scheme to buy books at the predetermined moment. The goal, to get 300 people to make their purchases within minutes of each other, should easily get your book above 100 in Amazon rankings. And when you achieve that you can focus on driving potential buyers to Barnes and Noble to climb in their sales rankings.
This is great (I’m thinking), all I have to do is tell 300,000 people about my book so that 300 (0.1%) will buy my book one morning and I’ll have a best seller on my hands! After 90 minutes of listening to an apparently pre-recorded sales pitch, I never heard the price of the exclusive mentoring program to achieve this lofty (and instant) sales ranking. After a little research I discovered it costs less than $3,000. Well, that’s a dollar per book if I reach the sales goal. Of course, a dollar to sell 300 books is nothing compared with the hundreds of thousands of books I’m going to sell after becoming an Amazon bestseller, right?
Wait a minute! Stop. Take a deep breath. . . . This sounded quite similar to a promotion that Jeremy Robinson of Breckneck Books was using to promote his latest title, Antarktos Rising. Jeremy sent out a series of emails with links to a series of clever ”viral” videos that he posted on You Tube, all leading up to a specific date and time asking recipients to purchase the book, but only at the appointed time. The stated reason for this massive promotion and coordinated purchase scheme was so that the book would hit the Amazon top 100. Well, on the specified day (8/1/2007) Jeremy’s book hit #536 for about a second and slowly dropped to the 3,000 to 4,000 ranking within a few days. This morning (10/2/2007) the Amazon ranking is 4,448. I hope he didn’t spend $3,000 making this happen.
In the end, I now believe that slow, consistent marketing will work best, not the one day blast. No one is impressed that Antarktos Rising made it to #536 at Amazon for a brief, fleeting moment. But they might be impressed if the book keeps its ranking over a long period of time. So far Light Speed bounces several 100,000 in rankings everytime someone buys a book and then goes back down quickly, so maybe I’m the last publisher who should be commenting.
The same company promoting the one-day campaign now promises that I can sell “boatloads” of books by following their advice. I cannot improve on Morris Rosenthal’s comments about this scheme: http://www.fonerbooks.com/2007/10/selling-boatloads-of-books.html.
Light Speed: Ultimate Destiny is now grinding its way through distribution channels at Lightning Source Inc. After some minor revision to the proof copy, today the final version was approved for distribution. As soon as the book becomes available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell Books, and so on, the retail links will be posted here.
Congratulations to author Paul Harrington and cover artist Mike Gager for the fine results of their efforts. Now let’s sell some books!
Finishing touches on Light Speed: Ultimate Destiny are in the works, including some minor editing and layout work, and fixing a problem with the cover art (stars aren’t showing up as much as they should). The book is expected to be released by the middle of September 2007. Stay tuned!
In the meantime you can read an excerpt here.
Title: Survival Op: The Fear in the Wilderness
Author: Scott Allen
150 pages, 6″x 9″ trade paperback
Publisher: iUniverse (iUniverse.com)
ISBN: 978-0-595-42062-9 (paperback)
List price: $12.95 paperback
Ebook available.
Recommended as 3 out of 5 (GOOD)
Two weeks ago author Scott Allen sent me an email asking for permission to send me his teen fiction title, Survival Op: The Fear in the Wilderness. The book came in the mail last week, and in between finishing up Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I read Scott’s novel.
Marcus, a homeless teenager, is left alone in the wilderness of an unknown and uncharted southwest Atlantic island, somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle, as part of a dangerous and unauthorized survival experiment. The staff of Survival Op, the top secret government agency that kidnapped Marcus, adds Lynn, a teenaged girl, to the experiment. Together Marcus and Lynn learn how to survive in the island outback, eating Bursting Berries, Honey Hole catfish, and wild boar meat. As they fend off assassins hired by Survival Op headquarters to kill them, the two teens become comrades in arms with the common goal of survival.
One day Lynn is captured and presumed dead, but Marcus strikes back and captures one of the Survival Op staff, another teenaged boy named Jay. After days of talking and working together the two boys learn to trust each other enough to plan their escape from the mysterious island. The odds are stacked against them as Survival Op’s fire power and not-so-close watch on their activities make escape all but impossible. But Jay has useful information about Survival Op and Marcus is motivated to find out whether Lynn is dead or alive. In the end, two of the teens are left behind on the island to survive for further adventures.
The story reminds me of the 1984 John Milius film Red Dawn where a few teenagers hole up in the Colorado mountains and wage war against Russian invaders. They, too, must learn how to survive in the wilderness and strike back at an evil oppressor. The book is also reminiscent of the Survivor television series as the narrative describes the specific ideas that Marcus, Lynn, and Jay invent in order to survive and succeed at hitting the enemy.
At first read everything indicates that the story is set in the present day. There are microchips implanted in the back of the neck of each teen. We have DNA analysis and genetic scientists on the staff of Survival Op. A solar-powered electric vehicle shows up. And Lynn even sings a parody of the theme song from the television series Cops. But there is one single bit of information that requires the reader to switch gears and reset the story in the 1970s: Lynn was born during the Vietnam War and raised by her Green Beret father when her parents divorced after the war. The 1970s it is!
I wrote to author Scott Allen and asked about the Vietnam connection because virtually every other clue about the time frame of the story screams out 2000s or 1990s. There would be no “Bad Boys” song for Lynn to sing in the 1970s, no individual DNA analysis, no subcutaneous microchip telemetry, and so on. His reasons for the Vietnam connection and the 1970s setting are unclear to me, but he wants the reader to perceive that Survival Op is a highly advanced, top secret government operation, far ahead of its time. With the exception of the theme to Cops, I stretched my imagination enough to believe that everything mentioned in the narrative could have existed in the 1970s.
Scott Allen is an eighth grade English teacher in the Oklahoma City area. I was surprised to find several typos scattered throughout the text. Also, he has an affection for not using the ordinary “he said” and “she said” when identifying dialogue. Instead his characters exclaimed, yelled, screamed, replied, mentioned, asked, informed, pleaded, stated, giggled, whispered, said loudly, said softly, and so on. Using the words “he said” is functionally invisible and adding to or changing them distracts from the dialogue and blurs the scene, when used to excess. For example:
“I am so tired of Bursting Berries! You should have called them Puke Berries. We need more food,” Lynn exclaimed . . .
“After we explore the cave, we will try to find a different food source,” I explained . . .
Lynn exclaimed, “Race you to our new home.” . . .
“Hey, thanks for helping me carry the torches,” I said sarcastically.
“Oh yeah, I forgot,” she giggled.
“We’ll just light one torch at a time,” I informed her.
Most of the time who said what is obvious and the extra words just get in the way, and using so many different ways of saying “said” is really a distraction.
With a little better editing and a lot better proofreading, I look forward to Scott’s next adventure in the Survival Op series. I recommend this book with a good rating of three butterflies.