For the next month, Smashwords is giving away ebooks from many many authors in a stay-at-home event called Authors Give Back.
If you’re like me and not into romance or covers with chiseled torsos, you might be put off by the Smashwords best sellers. But there are plenty of other types of books there. Worth a bit of digging.
All of my ebooks will be free there during this giveaway.
Thousands of free and reduced-price ebooks now on Smashwords in the end-of year sale.
The free loot includes all of my novels.
What’s free?
On Saturday, April 30, Nica of Los Angeles will be free on Amazon (as an ebook).
This is the first book in the FRAMES trilogy of speculative fiction/detective novels.
If you’ve been meaning to read Nica of Los Angeles, now would be an excellent time – book 2 is coming soon.
What’s the book about?
When rookie private eye Nica takes on a mysterious case, she enters a world of multiple dimensions called Frames, where buildings and lawn chairs can be sentient, a stray cat has great powers, books can be killers, and clouds can be spies. At home, Nica tackles missing person cases, while in the larger reality of the Frames she is swept into an escalating battle with stakes that could not be higher…
What do other readers think?
Nica has been blessed with a few dozen extremely positive reader reviews, including this one:
This is a fantastic book. The characters are interesting, the dialog witty and the story straddles the line between strange and believable perfectly. If Neil Gaiman and Douglas Adams got together to write a Raymond Chandler-style private eye story, this is what would come out.
You’ve got a few hours left to take action…
Until the end of July, 2013, you can download free and discounted ebooks from Smashwords, an indie publishing distribution site. I hope you will start with mine!
Get free ebook versions of my novels Scar Jewelry or C.R.I.M.E. Science.
Here’s how: click on the title, which will take you to each book’s page at Smashwords, where you will find downloads that work with every common e-reader. Use the code SW100 to get each free book.
If you are an especially cautious individual, you may first want to read free excerpts, available under the Novels menu on this blog.
This giveaway is part of the annual Summer Promotion at Smashwords.
And – remember to write a review! Readers’ reviews are incredibly important to indie authors.
Brief descriptions of each book follow.
Cover art by Lars Huston.
What do we really know about our parents or the ways they shape us? For twins Deirdre and Langston, 20, the answer is: not enough. With their father long dead, and their mother now in a coma, they realize they don’t even know whom to notify. In fact, they understand almost nothing about their mother. They delve into her life and uncover secrets that revise the past and transform the future.
====================
Cover art by Lars Huston.
A misfit group of scientists and tech whizzes form a detective agency in order to solve crimes and right wrongs. In this, the first book of a series, they investigate the death of a renowned volcano scientist. He dies in a volcanic eruption in what everyone considers a terrible accident. Everyone except his widow, who insists he was murdered.
Until the end of July, 2013, you can download free and discounted ebooks from Smashwords, an indie publishing distribution site. I hope you will start with mine!
Get free ebook versions of my novels Scar Jewelry or C.R.I.M.E. Science.
Here’s how: click on the title, which will take you to each book’s page at Smashwords, where you will find downloads that work with every common e-reader. Use the code SW100 to get each free book.
If you are an especially cautious individual, you may first want to read free excerpts, available under the Novels menu on this blog.
This giveaway is part of the annual Summer Promotion at Smashwords.
Please help spread the word about this giveaway.
And – remember to write a review! Readers’ reviews are incredibly important to indie authors.
Brief descriptions of each book follow.
Cover art by Lars Huston.
What do we really know about our parents or the ways they shape us? For twins Deirdre and Langston, 20, the answer is: not enough. With their father long dead, and their mother now in a coma, they realize they don’t even know whom to notify. In fact, they understand almost nothing about their mother. They delve into her life and uncover secrets that revise the past and transform the future.
====================
Cover art by Lars Huston.
A misfit group of scientists and tech whizzes form a detective agency in order to solve crimes and right wrongs. In this, the first book of a series, they investigate the death of a renowned volcano scientist. He dies in a volcanic eruption in what everyone considers a terrible accident. Everyone except his widow, who insists he was murdered.
Elmore Leonard published the novel Pagan Babies back in 2000 but I just read it this week. It is an Elmore Leonard book, therefore the plot is full of cons and double crosses, the dialog is witty, the prose is terse, and the characters are gritty and lively – oddball yet believable. In this book, Father Terry leaves Detroit half a step ahead of the law to become a rural priest in Rwanda during the recent genocide. During his first mass, some forty souls are slaughtered in front of him where they have sought sanctuary. After five years, Dunn returns to Detroit and gets caught up in the schemes of local mobsters and with Debbie, an aspiring stand-up comic who just got out of prison for hitting her ex-boyfriend with her car. The ex-boyfriend conned her out of $67 grand and she hatches a succession of schemes to get payback.
On LibraryThing and Goodreads I gave this book 4 stars. It probably only merits 3 stars. Consider the fourth a gratitude star. I can always depend on a Leonard novel to be worth reading.
I really needed a good read after having just forced my way through Quinn by Iris Johansen. My first and last Johansen. The writing was flabby and weak. All the dialogue sounded just like the narration and I hated the narration. The characters were romance novel cliches crowbarred into a thriller format. And the plot. Oy, the plot. Sensual, fragile yet tough forensic artist Eve quests for decades to find out what happened to her missing daughter, aided by hunky FBI man and former Navy Seal Quinn. One suspect is her hunky ex-lover, former Army Ranger and father of the missing girl, who doesn’t know whether he killed the girl or not because sometimes his brain short-circuits thanks to torture by North Koreans. But he must be innocent because the daughter’s ghost appears to him as well as Quinn and Eve. Aaaaaaaaaaaa. I can’t say why I wasted the time to finish this (I skimmed the second half) except I knew it was a best seller and wanted to see why. I found no explanation. To restore my faith in book buyers, I tell myself that the other two books in this trilogy must be way better. You won’t get me to test that theory.
Johansen fans – I regret if I have offended you. Looking for a positive – we will never compete for her library books!
(This post comes from this Daily Prompt.)
Until sometime on March 9, 2013, you can download a free digital version of either Scar Jewelry or C.R.I.M.E. Science.
Here’s how: click on the title, which will take you to each book’s download page at Smashwords, where you will find formats for every common ereader. Use the code RW100 to get your free copy of each.
If you are an especially cautious individual, you may first want to read free excerpts of either or both, available under the Novels menu on this blog.
This giveaway is part of the annual Read an EBook promotion at Smashwords.
Please help spread the word about this giveaway.
Brief descriptions of each book follow.
Cover art by Lars Huston.
What do we really know about our parents or the ways they shape us? For twins Deirdre and Langston, 20, the answer is: not enough. With their father long dead, and their mother now in a coma, they realize they don’t even know whom to notify. In fact, they understand almost nothing about their mother. They delve into her life and uncover secrets that revise the past and transform the future.
====================
Cover art by Lars Huston.
A misfit group of scientists and tech whizzes form a detective agency in order to solve crimes and right wrongs. In this, the first book of a series, they investigate the death of a renowned volcano scientist. He dies in a volcanic eruption in what everyone considers a terrible accident. Everyone except his widow, who insists he was murdered.
Saw a statistic today about how rapidly brick and mortar bookstores are dwindling in numbers. I confess that overall nowadays, I prefer reading a screen to reading a page. But I would hate it if there were no bookstores. Wandering among books is such a great pleasure.
I think printed books will turn out to be like vinyl records. Simply too good to go away.
Cover art by Lars Huston.
So. I’m a writer who didn’t write for a couple of decades. Life is short and I’ve squandered a lot of it. But let’s just say I went in other directions. I tried other things. Certainly the hiatus was worthwhile. I became the mother of twins and completed graduate school in earthquake science. Bu the reality is that I fashioned a life where writing fiction became well nigh impossible, and for a long time I didn’t even try. At the beginning of that long hiatus – before I admitted defeat and succumbed to all the non-writing demands of my existence – I wrote a novella, envisioned as the first book in a detective series. I wrote it, and I shelved it, and I mostly forgot about it. Rhetorical Q: What kind of writer doesn’t even try to get a book published and/or read?
The thing is that I really liked the characters and they kept poking me for attention. So, now that I have resumed writing, I have also unshelved the first book in the series C.R.I.M.E. Science, about a misfit group of scientists and techno whizzes who solve crimes and right wrongs. As of today, it is available on Smashwords in every common ebook format. Coming soon to additional venues.
I am lucky enough to live near Once Upon a Time bookstore in Montrose, California. It is a small space crammed with a very large number of treasures and surprises – and a dangerous room to enter if you are in a hurry. For me, time stops at the threshold. More than one book on my Best-Books-Ever list came into my life during some meandering browse of Once Upon a Time shelves.
No wonder this bookstore has held on during so many economic roller coasters and is now the oldest independent children’s bookstore in the nation. Certainly the children’s book collection there is wondrous, but so are the other collections. In addition, the store provides the heart and hub for numerous book-loving groups and communities.
Needless to say, the e-book revolution has affected Once Upon A Time bookstore. Wisely, through its website, the store now sells Kobo-formatted books – and if we buy Kobo books by starting at this link, Once Upon A Time gets a cut of the sale. Kobo folks, please bookmark the link and do your shopping from it henceforth!
P.S. BTW and FYI, my novel Scar Jewelry is available from Kobo (as well as other venues).
Required Writing 
