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.

Congratulations to Roland and Stan, who each won a proof copy of Edges!

And thank you to everyone who participated. Your comments are deeply appreciated! I hope you enjoy Edges when it comes out in just over a week. 🙂

Michael Patrick Hicks is a writer of thrillers and horror fiction, and also a reviewer at his own site, High Fever Books. I sent him an advance copy of Edges. He’s posted a very nice write-up, which you can read here.

In the review, he mentions the book came with “the slight warning that this was going to be a far different read than The Red books or her previous release, The Last Good Man.” And that is very true!

Over the years, I’ve explored different segments of genre and different styles of writing. Edges was a deliberate return to the earlier books. As I wrote it, I had in mind those who’d read and enjoyed the Nanotech Succession novels — and of course I am hoping to win new readers too!

But like Vast, Edges is not your usual space opera. I think that has caught some early readers by surprise. But if you like things a little bit different, maybe Edges is for you.

Click here to read the opening chapters. See if you like it.

In the meantime…

Let’s do a giveaway!

I have two proof copies of Edges that never found their way to reviewers. I want to give both away to readers of this blog.

My apologies to my international readers, but I have to limit the giveaways to addresses in the USA because of the astronomical cost of international postage.

If you are in the USA and you’d like to be entered to win a signed proof copy of Edges, say hello in the comments and let me know if you’ve read any of the earlier Nanotech Succession books, or if you’re bravely diving in for the first time to this far-future story world. That’s all you need to do.

If you’re reading this on Goodreads: please come on over to my blog to comment.

I’ll let this run for a week and then ask Google’s random number generator to pick the winners. It’d be nice to get at least ten entries.

Earlier this fall I was concerned when my print-book sales flatlined. To make sure the print-on-demand system was working properly, I placed an order for one of my books (yep, it was my lowest-cost book) and that endeavor led to some assurance that the system was working more or less as it should.

Also, I wound up with an extra copy of this book — a copy I don’t really need.

So let’s do a giveaway.
I apologize to my international readers, but I have to limit this to addresses in the USA because of the astronomical cost of international postage.

So … if you’re in the USA and you’d like to be entered to win a signed print edition of my short story collection Light And Shadow, say hello in the comments. That’s all it takes.

I’ll let this run for a week and then let Google’s random number generator pick the winner. It’d be nice to get at least ten entries.

I’m just back from the mainland and much is going on. Here are two time sensitive happenings. (Act now! Deadlines are imminent!)

Tor.com is hosting a sweepstakes. They’re giving away five copies of The Red. Comment on the post to enter. Sweepstakes ends 12:00 PM ET on August 26th. Open to legal residents of 50 United States and D.C., and Canada (excluding Quebec).

The Women in Science Fiction Storybundle ends on August 27. This is a chance to buy a lot of ebooks for not much money, including my novel Memory. Follow the link for details.

And here are some links to posts of mine around the web:

At the Women In Science Fiction blog, run by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, I talk about my novel Memory. This is in relation to the Storybundle.

At John Scalzi’s blog Whatever I have a Big Idea post in which I talk about both The Red and its sequel The Trials.

At Tor.com, I have a post titled Wired Soldiers: The Technology Behind The Red.

At Charles Stross’s blog, Judith Tarr, Nicola Griffith, and I have each posted on women in science fiction, looking at things from different perspective. Here are links to all three posts.
• Where Have All the Women Gone? by Judith Tarr
• Data, books, and bias by Nicola Griffith
• Chilling Effects by Linda Nagata

And finally, one more review of The Red, this one at LitStack Review.

I’m in a quandary. Book View Café makes use of a promotional book-giveaway offered by the website LibraryThing.com, in which a hundred ebooks are given away to early reviewers. The hope is, early readers will post reviews which will encourage other readers to try the book, who will in turn post reviews, resulting in a rapidly expanding pyramid of appreciation that will, via exponential growth, soon take over the world!

Or at least sell a handful more books.

I’d like to include my upcoming novel Hepen the Watcher in the program, but to do so I need to come up with five fairly well-known novels that could be seen as “similar” to HtW, particularly in the sense of “If you liked Book-X, then you’d probably like Hepen the Watcher.”

So I’m looking for suggestions of books to swap in for the Book-X variable.

It’s a bit awkward, because at this point none of you reading this have actually read HtW. So how would you know? But I’m hoping some of you have read the first book of this series, The Dread Hammer. And if so, are there any fairly well-known novels you might suggest on that basis? Books that are similar in attitude, whether from the same genre or not?

Help?