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For a chance to win a signed copy of Whisperings books one: Along Came a Demon, or Whisperings book two: The Demon Hunters, become a Facebook Whisperings Fan!
A random drawing on December 30, 2009, will pick two lucky fans, who will receive a signed copy of Along Came a Demon, or (if they've already read it) The Demon Hunters. It's easy! Just become a Whisperings fan!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Whisperings/126692584745
I am happy to announce that a second editon of Along Came a Demon will soon be on Amazon.com. Same book, different publisher, hence cheaper price. You will be able to get Along Came a Demon for just $6.55! (as opposed to $13.60 which is the asking price via Lulu Publishing.) Next up - volume two, The Demon Hunters, will also soon be on Amazon. Boy, am I excited!
If you'd like a peek at The Demon Hunters, read on for an excerpt. Note: Please forgive the formatting. My blog doesn't seem to like indents, and also has problems with spaces between paragraphs.
I haven’t always seen dead people. Until eleven years ago, I’d have looked sideways at anyone who told me they did. And of course, I was in a real public place, a popular little sidewalk café crowded with people on a Saturday afternoon, when it happened. I’d just finished my iced chai, and as I fished in my pocket for change, noticed a woman standing near the door of the café. That left her right out in the heat of the sun and at that time of the afternoon it burned, but she wore a gray plastic raincoat with the hood over her hair, and black rubber boots peeked from beneath her long black skirt. Another loony, but I envied her for her pale skin and the fact she didn’t sweat. I sat under a big umbrella and I know my face shone pink from the heat.
I laid two dollars and some change on the table, got to my feet and walked past her, and noticed her tears. They streamed down her face, and she held her hands clenched tightly at chest level, obviously in some distress.
I went on past, but I turned my head and caught her eyes, and she stared right at me.
I couldn’t help myself. I stopped and half turned to her. “Are you okay?”
She looked fixedly back at me and shook her head. I guessed she was saying “no.”
That’s when I saw the big red patch on her chest just above her clenched hands, where the raincoat fell open.
She’d been shot, or stabbed.
“Oh my God!” I turned and found every person outside the café looking at me.
“Someone call 911!” I yelled. I turned back to the woman. “Don’t worry, help is on its way.” I stepped nearer to her. “Let’s get you out of the sun.” It registered that I didn’t hear any movement behind me. I looked back over my shoulder. They were still watching me, and as I looked from face to face, each dropped their eyes or turned their head the other way, or became interested in their lunch. I could not believe what I saw. “Did someone call emergency services?” I asked. Not one person looked my way. I couldn’t understand it. I know a lot of people in big cities tend to mind their business, which is why the police often have a hard time finding witnesses to a crime, but this lady stood right in front of them and they were ignoring her. They were ignoring me. "What is wrong with you people?" I yelled. I had never been angrier in my life. I took a couple of steps to the door of the café and stuck my head inside. “Hey! Someone call an ambulance. You got a wounded woman out here!” I was going to raise hell when this got over, but the woman needed my help, since nobody else seemed inclined. When I stood in front of the poor woman again she started moving her hands and fingers in an odd way. She was signing, which meant she was mute. I didn’t know handsign. I put my hands to her shoulders and spoke gently. “I think you should sit down.” My left hand went through her shoulder and hit the wall behind her, the brick grazing my knuckles. My brain stopped working properly. My hand, wrist and part of my forearm were inside her body. I had just stuck my arm through someone. There should be blood. She should be screaming. I should be screaming. She must be in shock and I wasn’t far behind her. A heard a siren. The paramedics were a block away. I couldn’t pull my arm free because then her blood would come gushing out, wouldn’t it? My arm plugged the gigantic hole I’d made in her body. Inches from her white face, I saw the tears on it were static, like strings of clear wax pasted to her skin. Although my knuckles burned where they hit the wall, I didn’t feel anything other than hot Californian air. I felt nothing of substance, nothing at all. My right hand shook as I put my palm to her cheek and it started to sink into her flesh. I guess I couldn’t process anymore because I blacked out. I came to in the ambulance, thinking, I fainted? Wow! So that’s what it feels like. Laying still, my eyes closed, I thought about the reason I passed out. I didn’t imagine the insubstantial weeping woman, I knew that. The café staff called emergency services for a wounded woman and instead carted off a loony, the same loony who yelled at their customers and talked to thin air. This loony had better keep her mouth shut if she wanted out of the emergency room. I didn’t argue when the doctor diagnosed sun stroke. I returned to the cafe a week later. She still stood there, to the right of the entrance, hands clenched at her chest, tears streaking her sad face. He faced her ten feet away, and she cried because she was going to die and couldn’t call out for help. She didn’t know him, just a guy who popped up in front of her as she sheltered from a fierce downpour. He didn’t look like he hated her, or killing her would bring him satisfaction. He just stared, and stared, and for an instant she thought he was only trying to scare her. Then he pulled the trigger. That just came into my mind, the way it does now when I see a shade for the first time. But that first experience knocked me to my knees. I found articles about the murder in the library. Nineteen-year-old May Wentworth worked as an assistant teacher at a private school for the deaf and blind and lived with her grandmother. They never found her killer. I learned to sign. I “talked” to her, but I couldn’t help her. I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve wished meeting May Wentworth was an isolated incident, but after that it seemed I couldn’t turn a corner without seeing dead people. I packed up and came back to Utah. It’s universal, I suppose: when you’re in trouble you go running home, and Clarion was my home. My foster homes, the foster-parents and the other kids meant nothing to me, but the city itself. I knew Clarion, I knew the people there and their mentality. I felt safe in Clarion and I wouldn’t see many violently slain people in my little old hometown. Except the two in my house and a couple more down the street.
I received this email from author Edward Patterson.
"The 70 authors on Operation Ebook Drop asked me to say:
More Troops please.
We have dropped approximately 4000 Free discount coupons linking our brave men and women deployed in the Armed Forces to some of the finest Indie novels in the industry to keep their reading devices filled with a variety of genres and styles. If you are a troop who has received an ebook drop, sound off here, so your comrades can step up and request our gifts.
If you want to participate and are a deployed member of the coalition Armed Forces, just drop me (edwpat at att.net) an email with your name, unit and location (and a little feedback - our authors enjoy some feedback), and I'll set you up on the program.
If you're an author and want to join the ranks of the givers, publish your book(s) on Smashwords and set up a 100% discount coupon and then drop me a line at edwpat at att.net and I'll forward you the troop list and set you up for all new incoming troop book requests.
This program is only a month old and happened by chance here in the Kindle community. Indie authors care and we want to make a difference by thanking our troops for their efforts.
Edward C. Patterson former Sp5 E. Patterson, USAR 6th Batallion, 60 th Artillery (1966-68)"
Follow Operation Ebook updates on:
http://www.kindleboards.com/index.php?topic=13352.new;topicseen#new4,000 copies seems a lot for a month-old program. But we could do so much better. If you know a deployed service member, or the family of one, let them know about Operation Ebook Drop. FREE books are available in a number of electronic formats from Smashwords. If the service member does not have a reading device, such as Amazon’s Kindle, or Sony, they can download the book to their PC as a Word document, or a PDF. If they don’t have access to the internet, their family can download the books, put them on a USB device and send that to them. This may be one of the simplest ways in which we support our troops - it’s so easy! Just contact Ed Patterson at edwpat@att.net.
It began when author Edward Patterson met a US soldier stationed in Iraq who was unable to download ebooks to his Kindle. Ed offered to email the soldier his books (all 13 of them) at no cost. The soldier accepted with gratitude. This started Ed thinking and he asked other authors on the Kindleboard forums if they too would like to offer free books to our troops overseas.
The idea snowballed. With Ed at the helm, ebooks started on their way to our troops. Authors used Smashwords to distribute the books, creating 100%-off coupons which let the troops download the books free.
When Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, found out about it, he and Bill Kendrick brainstormed on how they could help with the campaign. They began Operation Ebook drop, which allowed troops to download not only to Kindle, but to multiple ebook formats.
I think we have about 46 authors involved now and I’m excited to number among them. This morning I received a thank-you email from one of the troops to whom I sent the free coupon and a link to Along Came a Demon on Smashwords. It made my day!
If you have family in the armed forces anywhere overseas and they’d like to receive free ebooks, check out the Smashwords blog for instructions. If you’re an author who would like to participate, do likewise. Here is the link:
And check out Ed’s books on Smashwords!
http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/EdwardCPatterson
I’m back after a not-too drastic gap in communication!
Because this blog appears on my Amazon.com author page, I’m going to take advantage of that to share some Lulu reviews for Along Came a Demon which do not appear on Amazon.com, because they were written by persons who live overseas, or otherwise do not want to purchase from Amazon.com just so they can put up a review.
These reviews can be found by going to my Lulu Storefront at http://stores.lulu.com/lindawelch.
Bring on the rest of the series! 13 Dec 2008
A great and capturing story! 15 Feb 2009
A fantasy story set in the real world 21 Jun 2009
What you should know 30 Aug 2009 by Dana Donovan.
Right from the get-go, “Along Came a Demon” by Linda Welch, grabbed me. “There’s a naked woman in the garden.” Okay, you have my attention. What follows is a fast-paced drama, built on suspense, wrapped in mystery and sealed in the uncertainties of the paranormal. In her character, Tiff (don’t call me Tiffany)Banks, Welch convincingly conveys the reluctance of an ordinary woman, driven to exploit her uncanny ability to talk to dead people just to pay the bills, and in the process, maybe help solve a crime or two. Tiff is a casual narrator, leaving the cold, impersonal prose for the hard-boiled detective genre. Instead, her personable approach of articulating her case makes it easy to relate with her, giving the reader a sense of familiarity in her cause, and fostering an emotional attachment with the other characters in the story that carries all the way to the end.
coolI’ve read that Blogging is the most successful marking tool for an author. I believe it, and I know I’m a totally inadequate blogger. I hope I can be forgiven?
I have submitted The Demon Hunters to CreateSpace and should receive the proof copy in a few days. I decided to go with CS over Lulu for a number of reasons. After tracking my sales, or lack of sales, on the many national and international internet book sites on which Lulu placed Along Came a Demon, I see that I only made sales on Amazon.com. I can (hopefully) get those results by publishing through CS, plus CS gets a book onto Amazon.com a lot faster than by using Lulu, the Look Inside feature comes up sooner, the cost of the book for purchasers is cheaper, and I can purchase copies vastly cheaper from CS than I can from Lulu, with a lower shipping cost. I will still publish on Lulu; the same book but probably in a different size and lacking the ISBN. Why? Because I value the feedback I receive from other Lulu authors.
I also put Along Came a Demon up as an e-book on Amazon Kindle. That was quite an adventure in formatting, especially as I don’t own a Kindle. Now I know what I’m doing, formatting The Demon Hunters for Kindle will be a breeze. I hope.
The LL Book Review recently reviewed The Demon Hunters. Thanks LLBR and LK Gardner-Griffie! My review for Nicole Tanner’s The Red Fog went live on LLBR this past Monday. My review for Tightening the Knot by Amanda Hamm is upcoming. I will be the featured author on the Meet the Author discussion, on Lulu’s General Discussion forum, on Tuesday September 1st.
Now, I must get back to Demon on a Distant Shore. I am about half way through and there are many additions and alterations in the works. One of my readers made a suggestion for the Jack character. I can’t imagine why I didn’t come up with the idea myself. When I look at Jack, I know that idea must have been lurking in the back of my mind. Obviously, the reader clearly saw what I had been missing. So, thank you, Ryan. Your suggestion is PERFECT! I am going to have SO much fun with this!
On the home-front, the days are winding down. The sun disappears behind the westward mountain peaks at 7 PM, and after that, temperatures drop fairly drastically. Late August is a strange time of year temperature-wise, with highs in the near 90s and lows in the 40s. I see that some of the trees are already changing color and many of my plants are starting to wilt. Soon be time to get out into the garden and tidy it up for winter. Winter is, for me, the best time to write, with nothing much happening to take me away from it.
The child abuse prevention agency for which I work is in the process of purchasing a big, new building. I will have a lovely new office!
Be sure to check out the Whisperings Facebook page for little tit-bits about The Demon Hunters. You can also follow me on Twitter if you so wish! Links to the above are to be found on my website www.lindasworlds.net.
I will try to be a better blogger. Really I will!
I finally published the Kindle edition of Along Came a Demon. That’s one step forward. And I’ve just about finished the updated version of The Demon Hunters which at the moment appears only on Lulu. This has been a busy week for me as I also edited another author’s book and am working on a review for the LL Book Review. That, and working at my other job.
My Whispering Facebook page is up and running and has fans from all over the world. Okay, so not many of them at the moment, but they are from all over the world. On the Whisperings page readers can find progress updates and every now and then Tiff gives them a little inside info on what is happening to her in Along Came a Demon. She won’t be able to go on much longer without totally giving away the plot. Perhaps she’ll start talking about her adventures in The Demon Hunters.
Here is a short excerpt from Chapter One of Along Came a Demon. Please realize that the original text does not translate well into the Blog - there are no spaces between paragraphs in the actual book!
Then I had to ask. "Lindy, what happened to you?"
She let her hair loose and wrung her hands together.
Until I became accustomed to it, looking into the faces of the dead was an alarming experience because they are stuck with the expression they wore when they died. Lindy went through the physical motions of pulling on her hair and wringing her hands as if distressed, but her expression didn't alter.
"I was taking a bath and I know I locked the front and back doors. A man came into the bathroom and went behind me. I couldn't even scream. I wanted to, but I opened my mouth and nothing came out. I was gripping the sides of the tub, trying to haul myself up when he touched me on the forehead. I barely felt it. But then it was like a . . . a jolt through my body. It took my breath away. I went under the water, just for a second, came back up and I still couldn't breathe. That's all I remember until I woke up again."
I stepped closer. "What do you recall after that?"
Her eyes slid away again and I knew she was trying to remember. "People there. Police. In the bathroom." Her gaze darted back to me and her tone turned indignant. "It was so embarrassing! One of the officers picked up my thong and said he wondered if his girlfriend would like one. The detective said he'd get one for his wife but it would cut off her circulation¾not that it would matter because her crotch atrophied years ago. I was stark naked in my bathtub and they were making jokes about my underwear! And then the other officer said he'd heard on good authority if you --"
I cut in. I didn't need that much information. I kept my voice and expression neutral although I wanted to grin at the mental picture invoked by her narration. "Making jokes at a crime scene is a coping mechanism. A kind of barrier they put up between them and the reality of what they see and have to deal with. Your underwear was just an excuse, a distraction if you like."
Someone up there must have been listening to me gripe, or reading my Blog because Book Finder now finds quite a few online booksellers who list Along Came a Demon AND it is on Barnes and Noble (although not up there in its entirety.)
Am I embarrassed that I jumped the proverbial gun? No! I'm still not totally happy with the Lulu expanded distro because the online book sellers (except Amazon.com) have listed a higher price. It ranges from $17 up to $33 for my novella. By not happy, I mean that I have doubts that those book sellers will get any sales at the price they are asking.
So I suppose it boils down to do I go with Lulu, paying for expanded distro, basically for listings on Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble, because I don't think I'll see results from the other sellers. Or do I go with CreateSpace just for Amazon.com. I can, actually, still sell the same books on Lulu so long as they're a different edition to that on CreateSpace/Amazon.
I think I will wait a couple of months and see if I get any sales from Barnes and Noble. If I do, and can build a following of readers, then I will probably stick with Lulu. If not, I will think again about CreateSpace.
Tune in for the next exciting installment of Linda's dilemma!
not sure
Lulu or CreateSpace? I am seriously thinking about publishing the second in my Whisperings series, The Demon Hunters, using CreateSpace. I used Publish By Lulu expanded distribution for Along Came a Demon because it says your book will appear on “Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com, Amazon.uk, Amazon.ca (Canada) and many more online retailers,” but that didn’t happen.
I found it on Amazon.ca, but only by searching for my name (searching for the book title or ISBN does not find it.) It is unavailable, and no price is listed. Hardly going to encourage anyone to buy it, is it. It is listed on Amazon.uk, but at a price no Brit is likely to pay. It is also listed on Amazon Japan. And of course it is listed on Amazon.com, but at the ridiculously high price Lulu ends up with when it doubles the distribution costs and adds your royalty, as meager as that may be. It does not appear on Barnes and Noble, or any other online book seller.
I’ve already published using CreateSpace. Granted, CS books only appear on Amazon.com, but at half the price Lulu would put them up there for, and if you purchase from the CreateSpace store, the shipping is a lot cheaper than Lulu charges, as is Amazon’s shipping fees. Your book, including the Look Inside feature, gets onto Amazon.com a lot faster than when published through Lulu.
Let’s face it, I don’t think I’m going to make sales in the UK and Canada, because the UK price is stupidly high and, as I mentioned, Canada’s listing is pathetic. Lulu has not lived up to their part of the deal and got my book on Barnes and Noble and “other online bookstores.” So my sales will come from Amazon.com, and I can get my latest book on there faster using CreateSpace than Lulu, and at a lower cost to me and customers.
If anyone advises me to become an independent publisher and manage sales myself, well I’m not ready to go that route yet. Right now I market my books as selling on Amazon and Lulu. I can just as well market them as selling on Amazon and CreateSpace.
And whatever I do, I can still sell my books as Kindle. In fact I’ve had requests to do so. So look out for Along Came a Demon and the Demon Hunters, coming to Kindle in the near future.
irritatedI can hear you now: oh dear, not ANOTHER gripe! I promise, this is a small one.
You see, Amazon.com keeps changing my product page for Along Came a Demon. At first that didn’t bother me all that much, until I started looking at it from the point of view of a prospective customer instead of an author.
Firstly, every now and then, at the top, the page says there are no customer reviews. There are indeed reviews down there, but if I was a customer I wouldn’t bother to scroll down the page looking for reviews Amazon says do not exist. And reviews help to sell books.
Secondly, every now and then the estimated shipping date changes from “in stock” to “1 to 2 months.” One to two months? They have to be kidding! If I were a prospective customer I would probably zero in on the “2 months” part. Would you order a book if you had to wait two months for delivery? I wouldn’t. The stupid thing is that the book is never actually “in stock”, it has to be ordered from Lulu Press, but neither would delivery be “1 to 2 months." Lulu Press takes 3-5 days to print. Then they ship it to Amazon. Amazon processes it and ships it to the customer. An acquaintance who ordered the book received it in 3 weeks.
I got quite irate. I sent a message to Amazon saying it seemed they were in actual fact trying to discourage people from buying the book, because that’s what it seems like to me.
Today the product page is back to how it should look. But who knows what Amazon will do to it tomorrow.
