The Reviews Are In!

Well a review (singular) is in but it's a good one.

Check it out here, but I'm reposting it below too.

Wow! I liked the product description for Limbo's Child, and I figured for $0.99 I'd give it a try. It was definitely a bargain! Limbo's Child is a fun, intriguing book, with complicated, well-defined characters and a fascinating plot. I liked the dual story-lines alternating between Lucy's adventures in reality, and Nephys' adventures in Limbo. Jonah Hewitt has also created an interesting world, with vampires, zombies, necromancers, and other dead creatures roaming among the living in Reality, and a complicated afterlife/underworld consisting of Limbo with it's various levels of bureaucracy, and the surrounding swamps and further pits and levels with their variety of denizens, hinting at Dante's Hell. I had a hard time putting the book down, as I tried to figure out who the real villains were, who were trustworthy allies, and how everything was going to get pulled together.

There is a definite horror element to the book, since vampires and zombies and other creatures are characters, but the gore is pretty mild, which I appreciated.

This is a very good book! I'm going to read it again!

Thanks so much to the reviewer for the great review!  Please stay posted for more chapters and excerpts from this book, and the upcoming book, Silver Chains, on the blog.

And please...if you've read the book, make sure to put up your honest and heartfelt review on Amazon.com.  And tell a friend!!
 
Thanks again!!

J.

Update:

I got another one!!  Another Five STARS!!  Awesome.  Check it out here.

The Cowboy

Many of you know that I'm in the middle of writing the second Novel, Silver Chains, due to be out next October.

I've been writing the thing as part of the NaNoWriMo Challenge. (You can follow my progress here.)

In the future, I will post excerpts of the upcoming novel here on the blog, but I'm just having such fun writing about a particular character I thought I would introduce him today.

This is a bit spoilerish below, but not too much.
He is known as "The Cowboy." 

He is an affable, handsome character, charming, gregarious, friendly, if given to an overuse of hoakey western colloquialism.  He's also a country-western music performer and an internet and YouTube sensation who's about to hit the big time.  He's got a huge loyal fan base and is taking the country by storm.

He's a really compelling character loosely modeled on some of my favorite contemporary country music stars.  If you want to get a sense of his looks, charm and style, just check out the awesome Josh Turner below. 

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Oh!  And he's also a 500 year old vampire intent on enslaving the world and that he has to capture and torture the heroes of the first book in order to do it?  Did I mention that?  Hmmm. Must have slipped my mind.

Believe in Yourself

Just a little inspirational lift for your day.

Reading a Book!

Don't you ever interrupt someone reading my book.




From the always funny Julian Smith

It doesn't cross over into genius however until the bagpipes arrive. And as you know dear reader, we are always down with bagpipes.

NaNoWriMo

No, it's not the name of some new alternative band, NaNoWriMo is the acronym for National Novel Writing Month!  It's a challenge writers to write a 50k word novel by the end of the month.  The rules are simple.  You can have notes, outlines and whatnot, but the actual text of your novel must be written during the month.

The prize is bragging rights and not much more, but it's a great way to get disciplined about writing.

Basically, if caffeine and lack of sleep were gods and they needed a ritual to worship them, this would be it.  Think of it as a marathon for writers.  Not for everyone but I thought it might be a fun way to meet some people and get a big chunk of the next installment knocked out.

As many of you know I started writing the second installment just a few weeks ago before I even heard about NaNoWriMo, (I wish I had known earlier.  I had already written 8000 words on the prologue just days before November started! Darn.) so I can't count that according to the rules, but everything I've written this month so far will be.

I'm already up to 12,000 words and you can follow my progress here.

They even have a great website with advice and forums of other writers to cheer you on. 

So ask yourself...do I really need sleep or rational thought or free time this month?  Of course you don't.  It's late to get started but it's not really about winning.  If the only people who ran marathons were those that were competitive enough to actually win, it would be a race between five guys and not the thousands who actually turn out.   It's more about the mental challenge and I just want to know if i'll collapse before the finishing line.

Wish me luck!

Like the Book? Tell a Friend!

First of all, let me say "Thank You" to all of my fans.

That wasn't big enough. 

Let me try again. 

THANK YOU.

Still not big enough.  One more time.

THANK YOU!!!

Now imagine that you are seeing that "Thank You" from space written on the North American Continent and that it spreads from Eugene, Oregon to Pennsauken, New Jersey.

Here's a map to help you visualize.

View Larger Map
Got it?  That's how much I want to say "Thank You" to my fans.  I really mean it.  You guys are great.

Ten people have bought the book online and thirty more downloaded when it was available for free.  Many more have read the snippets on this blog and elsewhere.  All of the response has been overwhelming positively.  I expect about one hundred people now have been exposed to the book and have read part of it, and most seem to like it.  About a dozen have actually read it cover to cover and they all seem to really love it.

I have really appreciated all the positive comments, and even more so, the helpful criticisms.  I really could not have come this far without my fans.

"Fans!"  the word still blows my mind.  There may not be many of you, but the fact that I have ANY fans is just incredible, and frankly, you're the most important part of this popsicle stand operation right now.

Let's face it, this book is still in "beta."

We (Travis and I) have great plans for this book.  I have an outline for a five-book epic series and Travis wants to see the book not just online, but in print in an actual bookstore, a special edition complete with glossy cover and full page illustrations.  I want to see that too.  Small problem.  This is not our day job.  We have bills to pay.  Travis believes so much in the book he has been willing to do the cover, the formatting and this webpage all on donated labor, but there's only so far we can go on the faith of our friends.  But there is no limit to how far we can go on the faith of our fans. 

Think about all the books you've read, all the books you've loved.  How many of them did you find out about from an ad in a magazine, or a TV ad?  Not many I bet.   You don't even get that kind of marketing push in traditional publishing until the book has already sold a hundred thousand copies.  Chances are you learned about your favorite books not from some ad, but from someone you knew and trusted who read it first.

Marketing, advertising, cover design, compelling life story, stunning good looks, world's largest collection of slime molds, none of the usual gimmicks will help you as an author if people don't like the book.  Books don't really sell on marketing. They really get sold by word of mouth.  Stephanie Meyer and J.K. Rowling wouldn't be anywhere if a small group dedicated fans hadn't recommended it to everyone else.

So please, if you like the book, get out there and tell your friends.  If you bought the book online on Amazon and have finished it PLEASE write an honest and heartfelt review.  If you have finished the downloaded version, share it with a friend and tell them about this website.

If you have a blog or a website, consider putting up the link to the blog here or to the book on Amazon.  If you are part of a book club online, or even better, in person, make a push to get the book on your group's reading list. 

Think about the friends you know who like reading and especially those that like fantasy.  Recommend the book to at least ten different friends.  Out of those ten, only two or three may actually read it, but if we assume that everyone takes a month to read the book and then they send it on to two or three friends, that's more than enough to double the fanbase every two months.  With that kind of arithmetic, the book will definitely be a success, and that means that I can afford keep writing and bringing you more fun stuff to read.

If enough of you do this, some day, not too long in the future, we will reach a tipping point and the whole thing will turn into a real phenomenon like Twilight or Harry Potter.

Is that possible?

I didn't used to think so, but I have discovered that you, my fans have even more faith in the book than I do!  So yes, it's possible and you can make it happen.

Thanks again for all you have done so far, and for making the book a hit in the future.  I know you can make it happen.


J.

Last Day to Get the Entire Novel of Limbo's Child for FREE.

This is the very last day to get the novel, Limbo's Child (The Dead Things Series) for FREE.

(Part II will be available for one week more for those that have already downloaded the first part, but this is the very last time I'm going to make the whole thing available for free online, though the first 15 chapters will eventually be posted on this webpage.  Chapters 1-8 are already available here.)

Download the entire novel, Limbo's Child, NOW for FREE! Why not?  It's a great book, a fun read and it's FREE.   Give it a shot.

Part I is here.

Part II is here.

After today, you'll have to get it on Kindle, but it's still only 99 cents.

And remember, you don't have to have a Kindle to read a Kindle formatted book.  You can get the book on your iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, PC or Mac.

Check out the multiple varieties of Kindle Readers HERE.

Here's the link for the Kindle version.