The New Death and others

Author: James Hutchings
Genre: Fantasy
How long it's been on sale: September 27 2011
Current price: $.99
Marketing: I've contacted around 1000 blogs asking for reviews, interviews, guest posts and/or giveaways. I've also promoted it on my own blog.
Total sold so far: 24
Link to book on Amazon: The New Death and others

Product Description:

Death gets a roommate...

An electronic Pope faces a difficult theological question...

A wicked vizier makes a terrible bargain...

44 stories. 19 poems. No sparkly vampires. There's a thin line between genius and insanity, and James Hutchings has just crossed it - but from which direction?

First 300 Words:

The God of the Poor

In the beginning of the world the gods considered all those things which did not have their own gods, to decide who would have responsibility and rulership.
"I will rule all flowers that are sky-blue in colour," said the Sky-Father.
"I will listen to the prayers of migratory birds, and you all other birds," the goddess Travel said to him. And so it went.
At last all had been divided, save for one thing.
"Who," asked the Sky-Father, "shall have dominion over the poor?"
There was an awkward silence, until the Sky-Father said,
"Come - someone must. Those with no gods will grow restless and cunning, and in time will cast us down, and we shall be gods no more."
"Not I," said blind Justice, and her stony face flashed a momentary smirk at the thought. "Why not Fame or Fortune?"
"Darling I don't think so," said the sister goddesses together.
There was a long pause. The gods shuffled their feet and avoided one another's gaze. At last a voice broke the silence.
"I will," said Death.


How the Isle of Cats Got Its Name

Death stalked the cats of Telelee.
Throughout the city there was much hiding under couches, and a yowling fear of shadows who came in the night. These shadows gathered squint-eyed kittens and cats trembling with age. Starving alley cats like leather bags filled with bones and pampered house-cats more spherical than cat-shaped, alike were taken. The shadows asked not whether a cat was tom or queen. White cats and black, tabby and orange, grey and tortoiseshell, cats that looked like their owners and cats that looked like nothing but cats, the shadows hungered for all.

Vicki's Comments: I like the cover art. I do. But I like ink drawings from the early 1900's, and this is what this book cover art reminds me of. The style makes me think this was public domain art that the author took and used for cover art. Which is great if the book was written in the early 1900's. But not so good if you're trying to sell it to people looking for new stuff. I usually advise people to stay away from public domain art. It makes people think they are looking at something written a long time ago. I would highly recommend getting a new cover.

The description is pretty anemic, however I like the end paragraph. I'd keep that. The short descriptions of the stories don't hook me. I would get help reworking those hooks, because you want those bits to really make the reader want to buy the book. You want to give enough information about the stories that the reader knows what they are getting. Death getting a roommate isn't a story. What's the hook? Where's the conflict? Is the story humorous? I want to know these things before investing my time. (Because, I throw away 99 cents all the time on crap. It's my time that really is more precious to me.)

After reading the sample, I think this collection should be selling better than it is. I liked the quirky nature of the writing. I do think this book needs some editing. For instance: "Starving alley cats like leather bags filled with bones and pampered house-cats more spherical than cat-shaped, alike were taken." This sentence reads like the leather bags were filled with bones and pampered house-cats.

The title could use some tweaking. It could be a regional thing, but I would expect to read: The New Death and Other Stories.

I would suggest a new cover, reworking the blurb, and having an editor correct the little things in the book. Now, short stories and poems don't sell like best sellers, but I do think this book should be selling better than it is. The writing is good and the ideas in the book are interesting, at least in my opinion. In fact, I just bought a copy because I want to read more. What do you guys think?

Edgy Hours

Author: Ederyn Khushrenada
Genre: Dark Fiction
How long it's been on sale: Feb 2011
Current price: $.99
Marketing: I mention it now and then at the MOA forum on Amazon; listed it on the blog of Mistress of the Dark Path and 1500 Authors; have a page for it on Goodreads; created a thread for it at Kindleboards
Total sold so far: 18
Link to book on Amazon: Edgy Hours

Product Description:

Horror doesn't need zombies or vampires; the most frightening animal in the universe is man. This anthology of five short stories explores the disturbing side of human nature:

Wire: A terrorist questions the ethics of his cause as he wires a small child with explosives for a suicide mission.

Always Mine: A secretary finds herself in an awkward position when her employer confesses his romantic interest.

Canvas: A farm boy from a close-knit family suffers nightmares while away from home for the first time.

The Kiss: After watching two friends kiss, a gay soldier seeks therapy.

Six Minutes: A condemned prisoner reviews the events that brought him here as he awaits execution for an accidental murder.

Not intended for young readers, some of these stories contain homosexual themes and possible triggering material if you're a trauma survivor. Reader discretion is advised.

840 pages
15k words

This complete collection is also included in the anthology 'Blue Forest'
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0057HCEVE

First 300 Words:

The last one had gone off without a hitch. Why did things have to f*** up today of all days, when the new so-called commander was here? Commander my ass. He's nothing but a squat walrus with a mustache and a power fixation. How much longer before they'd have to genuflect before this poor man's Kommissar? This was a small separatist faction, not a military superpower. They didn't need a damn commander. Commander or no, the bastard was the one who now claimed the title and no one was arguing with him, so Bodin wasn't about to make waves. He'd been trying for years to impress the people who mattered, so why the hell did everything have to go wrong the day his first opportunity for advancement came along?

Not that it'll make any difference, he reflected as he stripped the rubber coating from the tips of the wires and rolled the ends together. The only real advancement around here was a better bed to sleep in and a little more respect from the grunts than you'd normally get. Still, a decent bed was worth dying for, and lately he'd been waking up every morning with a backache from Hell. How did they expect him to do his job without mistakes when his back was killing him like this?

Camp commander. Ha! Talk about a Napoleonic complex. What was it Korać used to say? "Don't step on the runts; they go off." Yeah, that was it. Korać knew the lay of the land, which was more than he could say for this pinheaded dictator from Sarajevo. He was going to miss Korać. Korać had never called himself commander of anything, but everyone knew he was the boss. He simply commanded respect, and Bodin hadn't lost any respect for him when he died, unlike some of the guys. Anyone could have been ambushed like that—anyone. They all had to bite the bullet in the end, and Korać had died heroically as far as he was concerned.

Vicki's Comments: I think the cover is a real problem. It doesn't define the book for me, and I can't read the word "dark" at the bottom. I don't see an author's name on it, which is odd to me. The gradient of color makes the cover appear home made, which is definitely not the look you want to go for when trying to sell a book. I would suggest an overhaul of the cover.

Since this is a short story collection, I think boiling down the stories into succinct one liners is a good idea. The descriptions right now don't hook me, so I might suggest working on the descriptions. Let's just take the first one for example. "A terrorist questions the ethics of his cause as he wires a small child with explosives for a suicide mission." The main conflict in this story is the terrorist questioning the ethics of his cause. That's not very exciting for me. Someone questioning the ethics of something probably means a lot of internal dialogue. Does this stop him from his task? Does he let the boy go? The description doesn't say either, it just says he questions the ethics. So I'm thinking the story will be a bunch of monologue from one character thinking about ethics. If this accurately describes the story, then that's fine, but the problem might be in the story then rather than just the description. It doesn't grab me as a must read.


The writing in itself I think was fine, but I couldn't get a sense of the setting at all, and if this guy is strapping a bomb to a young kid, I would want to know this from the start. Unless that's the big reveal at the end. But for me, this story isn't hooking my interest. It's pretty much what I figured when I read the description. It's a monologue of a terrorist. I'm probably not the target audience for this book, though, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

My only other concern is in the description it lists "840 pages, 15K words."  If you have 200 words per page, 15K words should be in the 75 page range. If you list that it's 840 pages, that means you've got about 17.8 words on each page. There's a major error in here somewhere, and I would hate for someone to think they're getting a 840 page book when it's only 15,000 words. Maybe it's supposed to say 84 pages?

What do you guys think?

Evolvement

Author: Isaac Sweeney
Genre: Short Stories
How long it's been on sale: June 19, 2011
Current price: $.99
Marketing: Twitter, Facebook, press release, blog. Not much else.
Total sold so far: 1
Link to book on Amazon: Evolvement

Product Description:

These nine stories are sometimes funny, sometimes sad, unusual when necessary, and always insightful. The collection displays a variety of topics and genres, from young adult paranormal, to women’s fiction, to more cerebral musings on death and loneliness. The individual stories all present intriguing characters who find sometimes-unexpected ways to grow. The collection as a whole has an inspirational theme of maturation and personal development.

Evolvement consists of stories from the previously released ebooks Hard Creek Bridge: a short story, Wouldn’t Last Forever, and Against Her Fading Hour, along with three new stories.

About 15,000 words total.

First 300 Words:

Hard Creek Bridge

Slim Jackson glided through Abe Lincoln University’s fall orientations and ‘Freshmen Only’ parties with ease and still managed to enter his second semester friendless and shy.  During his first college winter break, he did all of the things that made him miss his country home when he left for school.   He woke up every morning to Mom’s fresh bacon and eggs.  He helped Dad chop wood in the evenings.  Some afternoons, he would sit on the back porch and stare into the people-less forest.  Now, back at school, there was no wood or fresh food.  But there was especially no Mom and Dad.

Slim, a short, thin, young man, stepped off the bus to a crowded, unforgiving atmosphere, where socks matched every day, and peers cared about name brands.  His thin, orange backpack was nearly empty and he carried his clothes in a shiny, brown duffel bag.  He wore his late grandfather’s adjustable, blue, wordless cap over his shoulder-length brown hair.  He wore that cap every day since his grandfather died twelve years ago.  Slim always saw it as a bright blue symbol on his head, one that signified allegiance to another place and time.  The only time he took it off was when he showered.

The bus dropped Slim off in a different section of campus than it did the first semester.  He was never forced to walk this way to the dorm before.  It was early evening and getting dark.  Students would soon be tucked in their rooms to avoid the air’s chill.  The streets were already quieter than usual.  Slim walked beside a pothole-filled road.  There was no sidewalk, so he balanced on the thin section of asphalt past where the road lines ended.  He didn’t mind the stroll.  He liked to walk alone.  At least, that’s what he told himself.  The road twisted through campus like string through a knot.  Still new to campus, Slim just followed the arrowed signs to his dorm, but the road only seemed to lead him farther and farther away.

Vicki's Comments: The cover isn't bad, but I think it can be improved. My main issue with it is I can't get a feeling of genre from it. In fact, I'm not sure if the stories in this collection have a central genre, which is a problem.

I would prefer if the description took a story or two from the collection and tried to hook me into wanting to read them. Try to avoid subjective statements in the description. Some stories might be sad or funny to you, but maybe won't be sad or funny to someone else.

The writing could use some work also. The story starts with back story. Back story is boring to the reader. Most people prefer starting with a scene and then learning little details about the character as the scene progresses.

I would suggest joining a critique group, critiquecircle.com is my favorite. I see talent in the writing, but it needs some polish. If you can get the writing polished up, people will come back for more of your stories.

What do you guys think?

Silver Snakes

Author: Christian Dabnor
Genre: Short Story, including sci-fi, satire and drama
How long it's been on sale: 4 Days (It's been about a month now, but 4 days when submitted)
Current price: $.99
Marketing: Twitter and Facebook, Goodreads, designing an email signature (see below), leaving flyers in pubs, my blog, changing signatures on forums, and two review websites.
Total sold so far: 7
Link to book on Amazon: Silver Snakes

Product Description:

Silver Snakes is an anthology of four short stories by Christian Dabnor:

Silver Snakes, a slipstream love story, appears in three distinct narrative forms, each exploring the key theme of the story - memory.
Captain Smith and the Numbers Game - The marketing department are unsatisfied with sales of ace fighter pilot Captain Smith's merchandise and take drastic action.
The Folly - A shy, unextraordinary woman finds herself unexpectedly the focus of a charming young man, who extends to her a terrifying, but inevitable sounding proposition.
The Expendable Mr.Skimble - Unknowingly, Mr.Skimble has been living a lie, victim of a gross, and politically embarassing, bureaucratic error. 

First 300 Words:

I follow one of the droplets of rain as it traces its shaky silver serpentine path across the carriage window to where it disappears into the flickering pool at the rubber seal.  As the train draws to a halt, the remaining droplets cease their horizontal journey and slide downwards.  With a pneumatic hiss, the doors open.  I look towards the door and that’s when I see her.  Her brown hair frames a sylvan, unblemished face.  As she walks towards where I sit, I look at the other seats, hoping that they are all taken.  They are.  As she sits next to me, she brushes her hair behind her ear with long delicate fingers and smiles, her eyes closing momentarily.  It seems as if she slips, for the briefest time, into slow motion.  I don’t notice the train starting again.

She points at the wriggling droplets of rain and tells me that they look like silver snakes.

I smile because I think they look like silver snakes too.

She introduces herself with a shrug and a tilt of her head.  Her name is Emma and she is returning to the city from seeing her parents.  It’s something she does daily.  I find myself telling her things that I’ve never told anyone else.  It feels comfortable... natural, like I’ve known her for an age.

She gestures at a man sitting down the carriage and proposes a bet.  If he gets off before the terminus, she tells me I have to buy her dinner.  I ask her what I get if I win.  With a grin she tells me we each buy our own – her company will be enough of a prize.  I can tell that this confidence is not natural to her, that it is a joke on her part, but she’s right. 

Vicki's Comments: I think the cover needs some work. Is that DNA on the cover? I wasn't sure, and if I'm not sure, you can bet others aren't sure what they're looking at either. I think the type on the book is too small and there's nothing to indicate it's a short story collection. I'd love for it to say "Silver Snake and Other Stories" or something like that. If it were me, I would pick a different image. I think there's too much white space that the cover just disappears into the background.

The descriptions of each story don't draw me in, probably because they are too vague. What merchandise is the Captain selling? What drastic measures do they take? What is the proposition the man gives the woman? What error are you talking about? The questions I'm left with don't make me want to buy the book to find out. They are key in helping me decide if these stories are going to be worth me spending my time and money on. (And really, 99 cents is nothing, so I want to know if my time is going to be well-spent more than my money.)

I also don't know what length these stories are, which is very important me. I always add word count and page count at the end of my descriptions, mostly because I like to know what I'm getting before I purchase and that information is so helpful to me. I would add total word count and page count.

The writing could use some polishing up too, in my opinion. I'd much rather read a conversation than be told about it. There's no dialogue at all in this snip, and yet I'm being told about what was being said. I feel very distanced from these characters, in a bad way. But I think the author has talent, and with the help from a critique group I think this can be greatly improved.

Lastly, this is a short story collection and therefore won't be selling like gangbusters. Make sure you have realistic goals for sales. I think with some minor adjustments, this can do well for a short story collection.

What do you guys think?

Alain Gomez: The Eclectic Mix

Author: Alain Gomez
Genre: Short Story Collection
How long it's been on sale: 6 months
Current price: $.99
Total sold so far: 0 (Only gifts given.)
Link to book on Amazon: Alain Gomez: The Eclectic Mix (3 complete short stories)

Product Description:

A collection of three complete short stories written by Alain Gomez.

Titles include:

A Model Railway Man - Working on his model railroad set is more than just a hobby for John Wilson, it's his desperate attempt to fix the ghosts of his childhood. But his obsession with his creation may have an unexpected side-effect...

The Sacrifice - Set during the Spanish Civil War. The Captain of a naval vessel is sent away on a secret mission to destroy an enemy fort. Before he leaves, his fiancée begs him not to go. But he tells her he would give his life to protect Spain....

Celebrity Space (Part 1 of the Space Hotel Series) - Set in the not too distant future, a worker hopes that his new job at the spaceport will allow him to get his life back on track. While taking passengers to the space hotel "Moonwalk", a collision with an unknown object brings his dreams... and possibly his life... to a screeching halt.

Short Stories, approx. 6,500 words total

First 300 Words:

“Don’t go!”  the young woman begged.

“I must” said the Captain.

“Why?” she demanded.

He looked at her resolutely.

“Spain needs me.”

His resolution made her back down a little.

“I need you” she said weakly.

“I would sacrifice my life to protect Spain.  So that I know you are safe.”

He took her in his arms and bent his head to kiss her.  After a pause he released her and left.

****

“It is a perfect day to sail, Captain.”

The Captain turned and acknowledged his first mate.

“Indeed it is” he said.

“God has blessed our voyage.  The enemies of King Ferdinand must die!”

The Captain smiled.  His first mate was young; perhaps too young to be on a mission such as this.  But the Captain knew that men on this ship were handpicked for their zealous loyalty to Spain rather than skill.

“It is a suicide mission” the Captain thought.  One ship assigned to destroy an entire enemy fort.  Their only possible hope was the element of surprise.  The King knew that even rumors of a Spanish fleet setting sail would put the enemy on guard.  He wanted this fort destroyed as quickly and as bloodlessly as possible.

“One ship” he had told the Captain.  “One battle in one night.  If you do this you will earn the gratitude of Spain and be compensated accordingly.”

Vicki's Comments: The author did tell me that there are three stories in this collection, and each story sells individually, but the collection isn't selling. I'll do my best to give my opinion as to why.

Cover: The cover doesn't appeal to me. Since this is the first thing people see, the first thing that draws them in, it's one of the most important things. I would definitely try a redesign.

Description: The way this is done, with short descriptions of the stories in this collection, I think is fine. I would tweak the description for The Sacrifice, to me the description doesn't have any draw. I would want to know what the major conflict of the story is. With some tweaking, I think it could be much better.

First 300 Words: There were quite a few things that jumped out at me while I was reading the sample. I highly suggest joining a critique group to help tighten up the writing. I'm a huge fan of critiquecircle.com. I think running these stories through a crit group a few times would greatly improve them. Also, this needs an editor.

My best assessment on this is the writing needs to be tightened first, and then the cover needs to be changed. With a few minor adjustments, I think this collection can start selling.

What do you guys think?