I just noticed the price of Bell Mountain in paperback has been cut down from $14 to $7. I have no idea how long the sale will last, so… get it cheap while you can!
Tell your friends, tell your family.
I don’t know how to promote the book, so, please–help me out if you can.
Bell Mountain is currently free in Kindle format at Amazon.com. Click the image to go to Amazon.
Spread the word.
Be on the lookout for a great freebie deal on my books.
For the week of Feb. 1-5, and for that week only, Bell Mountain will be available free. Yes, we’ll be giving it away, in hope that this will get you interested in the series. More details will be posted as they become available.
Yeah, I know–I ought to be writing about the State of the Union speech today, or some other dreary news. But as this blog is the only advertising I have for my books, every now and then I ought to use it for that purpose.
I have only 22 Customer Reviews on amazon.com, all told, for the five books of the series: 21 of them are five-star reviews, and one four-star. That should tell you something, right?
So, please, help me to push some of the dreck out of the market–give my books a shot. And if you already have, thank you very much–and now get your friends to do the same.
Every time I turn on Rush Limbaugh lately, he’s schlepping his book. His daily radio program has 20 million listeners, he’s already famous,his book’s been on the New York Times bestseller list for several weeks in a row–and still he’s plugging it.How many gazillion copies is he going to sell?
Then we come to my books…
For a long time we were thinking of biting the bullet and hiring a publicist. Then we began to notice that it seems all a publicist will do is send out emails to people who immediately delete them. Gee, I could do that myself. I get several dozen emails a week from assorted publicists, inviting me to review books I never heard of, written by people I never heard of, usually on subjects that either don’t interest me or that don’t fall within any of the areas I write about. With all due respect, the saga of an aspiring Country & Western singer’s struggle to kick this or that disgusting habit just doesn’t float my boat. I don’t have time even to read the emails, let alone the books.
Somehow I just can’t bring myself to do what Rush does and subject my tiny audience to a perpetual commercial. No, I must be more subtle and polite than that.
So, look, if you’ve read any of my books and liked them, tell your friends about ’em. And if you haven’t, try ’em. Because people do ask me about this fairly often, let me say you can order my books from amazon.com right here on this blog: just click “Books.”
There, I’ve said my piece.
Yup, yesterday afternoon I finished writing The Glass Bridge, Book #7 of the Bell Mountain Series.
This is the kind of writing I love best of all, and I have loved this book from the first page to the last. So it’s gonna be kind of dreary around here without it. But a Book #8 will come along, by and by, because the general arc of the story requires it.
So what’s this one about? Oh, the usual. Danger, adventure, love, hate, treason, courage, honor, weird animals, just another day in the neighborhood. If you’ve read the first five books, you know there’s a huge treasure-trove of gold at the top of Golden Pass–and who is going to wind up owning it? And what’ll they do to get it?
But first Book #6, The Palace, has to be published. We’re waiting for the cover art from Kirk DouPonce.
By the way, if you’ve read the books, and if you know how to do it, I really could use more Customer Reviews on my amazon.com pages. You know, in the Young Adult fiction market, I’m competing with books about boys who want to be girls, witchcraft, teens having sex with vampires or zombies or whatnot. Help me elbow some of this crap off the shelves!
There’s a company out there now that offers to jazz up your life by helping you to commit adultery. I won’t give their name because I don’t want to give them free advertising; but they do run ads in several major media outlets. Let’s just call them “Sleaze Inc.”
They offer to introduce married men who want to cheat to married women who want to cheat, on the premise that neither of the two will want to spill the beans. “She won’t talk if you won’t,” is the general idea. I don’t know how much they charge you for it, but I hope it’s a lot.
Ah, fanapoli–why am I telling you this? You already know our culture’s down the chute. Repent. Pray. Ask God to put our heads on straight.
On a more cheerful note, my Bell Mountain #7, The Glass Bridge, seems to be coming down the home stretch. I hope it proves as much a joy for you to read as it’s been a joy for me to write.
Meanwhile, Storehouse Press just may be able to get #6, The Palace, published in time for Christmas. We’re still waiting for another slam-bang cover from artist Kirk DouPonce, but almost all the editing is done. And the first five books are now all available in Kindle as well as paperback.
Buy one for your Congressman. It may keep him out of mischief for a while.
I hate to tear myself away from Bell Mountain #7, The Glass Bridge. I thought I might have started writing it in late March or early April, but my notebook tells me May 2.
At the rate it’s going–despite tons of interruptions–I can expect to be done before the leaves fall. And yet as fast as I’ve been going, every step forward has been a step into the unknown. I say a prayer, sit down with my pen and legal pad, and trust in God to give me the story, bit by bit.
I have also discovered that I’ll need a Book #8 to finish all that business with the Thunder King. And then what? Stop?
Well, I hope not. This is the work I love best. I’ve got a whole fantasy world to explore: my books so far have only scratched the surface.
Unlike Democrats and other left-wing jidrools, I don’t expect you to actually believe my fantasies and take action based on that belief. Unlike their fantasies–e.g., redefining marriage won’t hurt our culture one little bit–mine are clearly understood to be products of the imagination.
And I’m pretty sure my fantasies can’t hurt you.
I think I must be more than halfway done writing my new book, The Glass Bridge. All sorts of things are happening in this story. I wonder how it’ll end.
Meanwhile, one of the issues that comes up all the time in both my writing and my reading is… to what extent is anything I read about or write about ‘real’?
Ray Harryhausen used to say nobody wants to go to the movies to see a sinkful of dirty dishes. Ah–but there are a lot of movies (and even more novels) that show you nothing but stacks of dirty dishes, and even mold growing on them. This fixation on decay and ugliness is always called “realism.”
To impress college professors and literary critics, Stephen King filled The Shining with infinite detail about the protagonist’s whole life, starting with early childhood–all of it ugly, painful, perverse, etc. Betcha it added 100 pages to the book. He provided this excess of unedifying information because it is what intellectuals and literary wallahs consider to be “realistic” detail. If the author writes about someone who has led a wholesome and happy life, that would be pooh-poohed as unrealistic.
What this teaches us is an important lesson about what Godless humanists think about reality: only the bad stuff is real. This comes across in their literature all the time. It is a world-view that also works its way into their personal lives.
They can keep it.
Bell Mountain won Bronze in the 2013 Global Ebook Awards for Fantasy/Other World! You can see a list of the winners at their website.
