If you haven’t done so yet, PLEASE SIGN UP FOR MY NEWSLETTER and you’ll get news of future sales (among other things) directly in your inbox.

Saga Press, the American publisher of my military thriller The Red, has put the ebook edition on sale for the month of June for just $1.99.

This sale comes with a couple of caveats:
• It’s available in limited territories, primarily the USA and Canada.
• It’s definitely on sale at Amazon, and it’s possibly on sale at other vendors. (This is out of my control, so I can’t say for sure.)

So, about The Red…

• Nominated for the Nebula Award
• Finalist for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award
• Selected for the Locus Recommended Reading List
• Publishers Weekly starred review
• Publishers Weekly Best Books 2015

Despite all that, it never sold well. If you haven’t yet encountered The Red, I hope you’ll give it a try. Even if you don’t like military science fiction, this one might work for you. Here’s the description:

“There Needs To Be A War Going On Somewhere”

Lieutenant James Shelley commands a high-tech squad of soldiers in a rural district within the African Sahel. They hunt insurgents each night on a harrowing patrol, guided by three simple goals: protect civilians, kill the enemy, and stay alive—because in a for-profit war manufactured by the defense industry there can be no cause worth dying for. To keep his soldiers safe, Shelley uses every high-tech asset available to him—but his best weapon is a flawless sense of imminent danger…as if God is with him, whispering warnings in his ear. (Hazard Notice: contains military grade profanity.)

Amazon US (paid link) — Amazon CA

Update: June 14, 2021:
The sale is over! THANK YOU to everyone who helped spread the word about the sale, and of course, to everyone who picked up a copy! If you haven’t done so yet, PLEASE SIGN UP FOR MY NEWSLETTER and you’ll get news of future sales (among other things) directly in your inbox.

The Bohr Maker was my first novel. It sold for a small advance and was published as a mass-market paperback with no hardcover edition. This was before ebooks, but was essentially the equivalent of an ebook-only publication. On the plus side, it had a gorgeous Bruce Jensen cover—and it earned fantastic reviews.

Then, boom! It was out of print within roughly a year. Only when it went on to win the Locus Award for best first novel did it enjoy a brief second run at the market before fading away.

That was the maddening start to my maddening career. But many more readers have had the chance to enjoy The Bohr Maker since it found new life as an ebook, and I’d like to persuade even more to give it a try.

So if an award-winning novel of nanotechnology, adventure, and high-tech revolution sounds good to you, please check it out now, because the ebook is on sale this week for just 99¢/£0.99/€0.99, etc. Available at Amazon, Kobo, Apple, and BN.

Find more info and vendor links at my website.

The Snow Chanter is a Kindle Countdown Deal!

The third and final volume of my epic fantasy series The Wild Trilogy comes out this Friday. To encourage more people to try the series, book 1 is now on sale, for a limited time. Get it for just 99¢/0.99£ (US & UK Amazon only).

Amazon US (paid link)
Amazon UK

Visit my website to learn more about The Wild Trilogy and to read the opening chapters — or head over to Amazon and grab a copy of The Snow Chanter while it’s still on sale!

Stories of the Puzzle Lands is a Kindle Countdown Deal!

99¢ US/0.99£ UK gets you two novels of dark, gritty, HUMOROUS sword & sorcery — plus a bonus short story. (ebook edition/Amazon only).

Amazon US (paid link)

Amazon UK

What’s it about?
His name is Smoke, though some know him as the Demon Dismay. He’s a charming, well-armed young murderer who is not altogether human. Smoke’s purpose in life is to mete out the stern justice of a vindictive goddess, and he is pleased to do it — that is, until he finds other things to live for. A woman, a child, a quiet home deep in the forest. He is so far from anywhere he can no longer hear the haunting prayers of those who would ask him to deliver them vengeance. But the quiet life is not Smoke’s fate.

This week only.

All the indie-publishing gurus say not to “waste” money on print advertising — but I go my own way and waste money as I please, LOL. This is an ad I have in the current issue of Locus, a trade magazine of the science fiction and fantasy field.

(click to see it big)

Every now and then I join other authors in a shared promotion. It’s great for readers because it’s a chance to discover new authors and new books. It’s great for writers, because with luck, we’ll find new readers. The crew at Sci-Fi Bridge is hosting this one. All you have to do to participate is signup for the Sci-Fi Bridge newsletter, which goes out two or three times a week with announcements of bargain science fiction ebooks.

You’ll receive five free ebooks just for participating.
Plus, 5 randomly chosen winners will receive 30+ sci-fi ebooks and one grand prize winner will receive the ebooks and a $100 Amazon gift card.

You’ll also have the option of signing up for the newsletters of any or all of the participating authors.

Do you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited?

Kindle Unlimited is a subscription service offered by Amazon, in which readers pay a set fee each month to read as many “Kindle Unlimited” books as they want.

My impression is that the majority of indie writers make most of their income through KU, but despite this, I’ve long kept my books out of the program because it requires exclusivity. To participate in KU, the ebook edition of a title can only be sold through Amazon — and in the past, it’s been my preference to keep my books “wide,” offering them through several vendors so readers can choose.

But in November I decided to experiment with KU. Two of my books — The Dread Hammer and Hepen the Watcher (The Puzzle Lands fantasy duology) sell almost nothing outside of Amazon, so I pulled the ebook editions down from other vendors and enrolled both titles in KU. I didn’t advertise this at all and I haven’t updated the covers yet, which is something I want to do. Instead, I kept everything the same, except that the books are now available to KU subscribers.

The results? Well, they weren’t extraordinary, but they were intriguing. I suspect I made a few dollars more than I would have otherwise and I look forward to further experimentation.

If you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, I encourage you to try the books. They are short, violent, darkly humorous fantasies — a variety of grim-dark, I suppose.

For those who prefer to avoid the Amazon ecosystem, the books are still available elsewhere in print editions.

Starting this week, I’m going to be sending simple, text-only emails to people who are subscribed to my newsletter but who haven’t opened an issue in a very long time. I’ll simply be asking you if you want to remain as a subscriber.

Here’s why:
While I understand that some of those who never open the newsletter are simply not interested, I suspect that many are just not seeing the newsletters at all, probably because they’re ending up in a spam or a promotions folder. This is a problem, not just for a single recipient, but for all recipients. When copies of my newsletter emails get auto-classified by gmail as promotions, gmail is ever more likely to hide other recipients’ newsletters in the promotions folder, so that fewer and fewer people will actually receive it in their inboxes. I suspect the same process occurs with other email systems.

I don’t want to send newsletters to you if you’re not interested in my work (or if you’re just not into newsletters). So if my mail service tells me it’s been a long time since you opened a newsletter, I’m going to ask you to let me know if you want to continue to subscribe. If you do, awesome! If not…hey, you can always visit me here on the blog, on Twitter, or on Facebook (though keep in mind that the latter two are no guarantee that you’ll ever see my posts).

I’ll be sending out the text email in small batches.

If you think you might be one of the non-openers, you can help me by checking your promotions folder (gmail) or your spam folder. My last newsletter went out on October 17, with the subject line “Announcing: SILVER – Inverted Frontier #2”. If you find the newsletter and want to remain a subscriber, please OPEN IT, MOVE IT TO YOUR INBOX, AND WHITELIST ME in whatever way your email system allows.

If you no longer want to be a subscriber, simply click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email.

Among the non-openers, there are many names I recognize as long-time readers. I know you’re long-time readers because you’ve told me so! I want to stay in contact with all of you who have been, and continue to be, interested in my work, so I’m hoping the text email will have a better chance of getting through to people’s inboxes. If I send you a text email and I still don’t hear from you, I’ll sadly assume we have a broken connection. I’ll unsubscribe you on my end, but of course you can always sign up again later.

Thanks for your help! And thank you for subscribing! 🙂

And if this post nudges you to look for my elusive newsletter, please let me know in the comments. (I like to know what works! :))

Many of you already own a copy of The Red: First Light. But if you’re new to my work or just haven’t picked it up yet – and you live in the United Kingdom or Australia – the ebook is on sale.

(I wish I could discount The Red for all of you, but I control pricing only in the United Kingdom and Australia.)

If you live in those places, The Red is just £1.99 (UK) or $1.99 (AU), but the sale will last only a few days, so get it now.

The Red: First Light is near-future military science fiction. It was a finalist for both the Nebula and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards, and was a Publishers Weekly Best Book. Even if you don’t generally read military SF, I hope you’ll give it a look. You might like it!

My September 5 newsletter included a book giveaway. I put up three sets of the paperback edition of the Red trilogy, one set each to three lucky winners. To participate, newsletter subscribers only needed to email me at a special address, indicating their interest.

(I had to limit participants to USA addresses only, because of the cost of international postage.)

The giveaway is over now.
Fifty-one people participated. I used Google’s random number generator to pick the winners. Congratulations, John, Lori, and Paul!

If you’re subscribed to my newsletter but didn’t receive it, please check your spam and/or your promotions folder, and white list my email address.

If you’re not yet subscribed, I hope you’ll sign up. You can use the form in the righthand column of this blog. You’ll receive an email asking you to confirm your subscription. Once you confirm, you’ll be signed up.

The next newsletter goes out on September 26.