Watch your step. You’re not the first one through the door, but we know what you’ll say when you get out there. Fourteen short stories of dark fantasy.
- Necrogarchy
- Kora
- The Last Burden
- The Day They Let Bernard Leave
- Adelaide
- Voodoo ver. 1.0
- Of Sorcery and Seasoning
- Bottom’s
- Things No One Should Know
- These Modern Times
- Room 814
- Grey
- The Excavation
- With Such Permanence As Time Has
A very enjoyable reading experience; a broad range of characters and plots, most a bit on the darker side of life but some happiness and sunshine mixed in for flavor. I recommend this book to anyone with a touch of macabre to their sense of humor, or a reader looking for something a few steps off the beaten path of so many standardized plots.
By J. Adams
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What does a movie-star one-hit-wonder and ex-drug-addict do when he’s cleaned up, down on his luck, and running out of money?
In the three years since Jack Palms went clean no drugs, no drinking, no life? He’s added fourteen pounds of muscle, read 83 books, and played it as straight as anyone can ask him. Now, when an old friend from L.A. calls, he hits the streets of San Francisco to help a group of Czech drug buyers make one big score, a single drug deal that he hopes will set him up for life.
But when people start turning up dead, and an old nemesis on the police force calls, Jack finds himself with just 24 hours to track down San Francisco’s biggest drug supplier or face charges that will put him behind bars.
Only an Oscar-caliber performance will get him through this alive.
“Harwood sucker-punches crime fiction. It’s not a fair fight, he’s waiting for you to look the other way, then you get a blackjack in the back of the head. Then he kicks you in the nuts, and you actually thank him for it.”
– Scott Sigler, bestselling author of ANCESTOR and INFECTED
“JACK WAKES UP isn’t a novel — it’s a force of nature. Harwood’s writing brilliantly blends the brass-knuckled voice of Raymond Chandler with the slick plot twists of Jeffrey Deaver. This story goes for the throat, pulling the reader into a California underworld so seamy and believable, it’s a wonder that Jack Palms, Harwood’s unlikely hero, is a fictional character at all. Rock-solid crime noir that takes no prisoners.”
– J.C. Hutchins, author of 7th SON: DESCENT
Visit the author site for Seth Harwood and Jack Palms Crime
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To win at poker, the type of poker game you play also matters. No-limit Texas hold’em is popular for a reason. It’s the game that best allows skilled players to win money. In “From Novice to the Nuts” you’ll find out why this is the best game to play for making money at poker. Even if you’ve never played no-limit hold’em this ebook will prepare you. It contains a section that explains all the basic details of the game before the guide goes onto specific technical subjects related to winning.
Poker player Scott Falbe explains the techniques of situational poker in his ebook based on nearly twenty years as a player and poker dealer. He shares his advice on how to become a consistent winner in the only gambling game that truly rewards skill.
Specific information that you will learn to apply from this poker ebook includes:
- How to identify super-premium, premium, sub-premium and poor poker hands.
- How to calculate pot odds.
- How to estimate your chances of winning.
- How to take your table position into account during your betting decisions.
But a poker game is made up of people, and how you play them matters just as much as the cards in your hand.
In this valuable beginner’s guide to no-limit Texas hold’em poker you’ll learn:
- Techniques for establishing your personal table presence.
- Tips for analyzing the game play of your opponents.
- Surprising insights about poker tells and bluffing.
(1 votes, average: 6.00 out of 10)
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If you’d like to play craps, then Get Dicey is the easy-to-read reference to playing craps that you need. Written by a Las Vegas craps dealer, Get Dicey reveals everything about craps in a fun-to-read book that quickly explains how to play craps.
Whether you have already played craps or want to play craps for the first time, it’s hard to learn how to play when you’re on a live game.
Players who don’t know how to play frequently miss out on hundreds, even thousands of dollars in winnings.They don’t bet their odds or they’re wasting money on the wrong bets. With the powerful craps betting strategies laid out in Get Dicey, you’ll be able to take your game (and your winnings) to the next level.
Before you join your family or friends on that next trip to the casino make sure you are ready to win and look cool doing it. Read Get Dicey. It has everything in it your dealer wants to tell you but doesn’t have time…or can’t tell you.
(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 10)
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At the finale of his critically acclaimed first memoir, In Search of Captain Zero, Allan Weisbecker has found his paradise at the end of the road in outback Central America (Pavones, Costa Rica), and is working of the screen adaptation of the book, commissioned by Sean Penn and a major Hollywood studio. Can’t You Get Along With Anyone? is the story of Weisbecker’s paradise, its underbelly, his fall from grace with the powers that be in Hollywood and the publishing business, plus the near loss of his life due to the writing of the book; he exposes a double murderer and, more dangerously, the love of his life as a sociopath. Interwoven through the various catastrophes that test him on every level, are Weisbecker’s reflections on the process of writing the book itself and the nature of nonfiction. Weathering his after-writing throes, writer’s queasy gut, and hemorrhaging forehead (from staring at the blank page), Weisbecker maintains his sanity and perspective through his wry, sometimes wildly funny take on his own fears and flaws, and through retreat into the purity of the simple act of riding a wave.
“As his sanity, health and existence are simultaneously mangled, Weisbecker somehow manages to solve a murder, wrestle the dark side of paradise, and wind up on multiple third world hit lists… Can’t You Get Along With Anyone? is a necessity for anyone who believes truth is indeed stranger than fiction… an entrancing, thoughtful and darkly humorous calamity.”
–Surfer Magazine
“Can’t You Get Along With Anyone? is a writer’s book about writing. And when I say writer, I mean Writer. I’ve already compared Weisbecker’s writing with Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s, and now I’m going to compare it to Mark Twain’s. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn is a Writer. Mark Twain is a Writer. And Allan Weisbecker is a Writer.”
–James Maclaren, Ink 19 Magazine
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Tor Publishing are giving away a free ebook every month at Tor.com. You just need to register with their site to access the download links. I contacted Tor to ask if I could also announce their free ebooks on eBooks Just Published.
Pablo Defendini, Producer at Tor.com promptly replied with the following:
I think it’s a fantastic idea, please feel free to post as much about our free ebook program as you want—we want to make sure that as many people as possible get to enjoy these freebies!
So I’m delighted today to announce Spaceman Blues by Brian Francis Slattery, the free ebook download for October at Tor.com. In future, all Tor.com’s free ebooks will also be announced here.
If you have an interest in Science fiction or Fantasy then it’s well worth checking out Tor.com. This is not just a token blog thrown together by a traditional publisher that wants to appear like it has a hip, online presence.
Instead it’s cram-packed with interesting news, interviews and articles, a great collection of short stories you can read online and a community discussion forum. It also manages to look quite beautiful. Just be warned – you’re likely to spend a lot more time there than you planned.
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When Manuel Rodrigo de Guzmán González disappears, Wendell Apogee decides to find out where he has gone and why. But in order to figure out what happened to Manuel, Wendell must contend with parties, cockfights, and chases; an underground city whose people live in houses suspended from cavern ceilings; urban weirdos and alien assassins; immigrants, the black market, flights, riots, and religious cults.
Painted in browns and grays and sparked by sudden fires, Spaceman Blues is a literary retro-pulp science-fiction-mystery-superhero novel, the debut of a true voice of the future, and a cult classic in the making.
“Spaceman Blues is a welcome Band-Aid for those still mourning the loss of Kurt Vonnegut and his uniquely wacky, satirical brand of sci-fi. There’s also a touch of Paul Auster’s flair for genre blending and New York mythologizing…. A strange and whimsical mash note to the city, Slattery’s apocalyptome proves that this newcomer is as thoughtful and irreverent as doomsayers come.”
Drew Toal, Time Out New York
“What’s most notable about Spaceman Blues is its intensity of feeling–of the characters towards one another, of the characters towards their city, and of the author towards both. Spaceman Blues is indeed a love song–an exuberant, exhilarating, captivating one, and one that as many people as possible should read and enjoy.”
Abigail Nussbaum
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Dreibrand Veta has killed for his country. At the frontlines of imperial expansion, he seeks to rebuild the fortune of his noble family. In his daring travels he encounters the rys, a race far more powerful than the human empire that bred him. Dreibrand cannot defy the rys Queen Onja nor defend his companion, Miranda, and her children from the wicked tyrant Queen.
Desperate for help, Dreibrand and Miranda join Shan, a rys with emerging powers who plans to challenge Onja. In Shan’s pursuit of the rys throne, he exerts his magical powers, gathers his allies, and incites rebellion among Onja’s human subjects.
Great wealth and power will reward the kings, warriors, and spies that align themselves with the rys pretender, but defeat could mean worse than death. Onja can imprison souls and her genocidal rage is legendary. Everything is at risk for Shan’s union of renegades.
(2 votes, average: 10.00 out of 10)
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A new blog comes online every 1.4 seconds. There are more than 70,000,000 blogs on the Internet. 99+% of them are unknown, unvisited and unprofitable. Far less than 1% generate healthy buzz, traffic and revenues. What’s the difference between the two? What if it were just a few relatively easy-to-do things?
Well, there are, according to the most successful maestros of the blogosphere people like Seth Godin, Jeff Atwood, Aaron Wall, Eric Sink, Neil Patel and others. These are the true blog black belts, bloggers whose creations garner plenty of visitors, notoriety, and in most cases, income! And as they see it, transforming a blog from “crash-and-burn” to blast-off isn’t rocket science!
In Blog Blazers, you’ll learn the secrets of 40 top bloggers, as they all weigh in on such questions as:
- What’s your best tip for writing a successful blog post?
- What are your main avenues for marketing your blog?
- What was your most successful blog post ever?
- What’s the most common mistake new bloggers make?
- What turns you off most when visiting a blog?
- What’s the best way to make money from your blog?
- Which books and websites do you recommend to new bloggers?
- Which five blogs do you regularly read?
- and many more!
While Blog Blazers can’t guarantee fame and fortune, you ll learn what the top blogs all have in common and how to avoid the typical “blog blunders” the mistakes that doom most blogs right out of the gate.
A blockbuster blog the kind you thought only a few lucky souls had is less about luck and more about common sense and a little extra effort. And it’s within your grasp. Let the pros show you the way.
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I’ve made a couple of changes to improve the responsiveness of the site and help it scale better under load.
The first was to install the WordPres plugin WP Super Cache. This plugin will cache the pages on your site and store them as html files. This means that the PHP server doesn’t have to regenerate a page for every request. Instead it simply returns the html file from disk. This significantly reduces the load on the server and improves responsiveness. The other benefit is that WP Super Cache creates gzipped versions of the html files and will return these to browsers that support compression (just about all).
The second optimization was to move all the images on the site to CacheFly‘s content delivery network. CacheFly has a network of servers at strategic locations across the globe. Using their technology, images on the site will be delivered to your browser from the server that’s physically located closest to you. This reduces latency and also provides good load-balancing during periods of heavy traffic.
Signing up with CacheFly was simplicity in itself. As soon as I’d created an account, I had ftp access and was immediately able to upload all the site’s images. It was then just a matter of updating all the URLs to point to the cachefly.net domain. The whole process took about 45 minutes. Very impressive.
I’d be very interested to hear from you as to how responsive you find the site. There are some further optimizations I can make, such as combining and compressing the javascript and css files, using CSS sprites, etc. However these changes will make upgrading to newer versions of WordPress and the plugins I use a pain, so I’ve held off on these for the moment.
In other news, I’ve received some great ebook submissions and have a few days worth of announcements queued up. At this stage it’s looking like my goal of announcing a new ebook every day is going to be achievable. I don’t plan to queue more than about a week’s worth of announcements, so I may even be able to annouce more than one book a day very soon.
The next thing I need to focus on is promoting the site to readers. I feel like I’ve already got some outstanding books listed and the authors really deserve to have as many readers sent their way as possible.
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Calling upon her experience with online promotion and her book industry knowledge gained from assisting clients with editing, ghostwriting, and author promotion, Yvonne Perry’s new eBook gives samples and more than 100 click-n-go links to helpful sites that serve as examples to further explain the text.
This jewel was created by request of Writers in the Sky Creative Writing Services clients seeking useful information about how to promote their books online. This is a simple 52-page e-book without a lot of hype. It gives examples and gets right to the subject in steps that are easy to follow.
Tips and how-to information include: creating an online media kit, blogging tips, getting traffic to your site, virtual book tours, social media and networking, using video for book promotion, getting author interviews, and the benefits of podcasting.
Table of Contents:
- What a Web Site Must Have To Compete In Today’s Online Marketplace
- Blogging Tips
- Getting Traffic To Your Blog Or Web Site
- Other Ways To Promote Your Book Online
- Author Interviews
- Podcasting
- RSS Feed/Syndication
- Affiliate Programs
- Recommended Resources
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Timely Persuasion follows an anonymous music critic on a quest to save his sister from the relationship that ended her life. After a chance encounter at a bowling alley leaves him with the ability to travel in time, our hero uses his musical knowledge to “blink” through the years attempting to keep the couple apart by any means necessary. But is her husband Nelson really to blame?
Along the way he accidentally restructures his family tree, kick-starts his sagging love life, and launches a new rock star by borrowing songs from the likes of Huey Lewis, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Billy Joel. Reliving past events through the eyes of his younger selves, he soon finds that correlation and causation are not always what they seem.
This story of death, life, love, and rock and roll defies genre conventions while paying tribute to the classic time travel tales that came before it. Fans of Quantum Leap or Back To The Future will love Timely Persuasion.
PDF: $5.00 / HTML: Free
234 pages
(1 votes, average: 8.00 out of 10)
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Hal glanced round at the fugitives, then jerked his thumb at the taller, bronze robot. ‘You can be Clyde, and he can be Albion.’
‘I think that’s Bonnie,’ said the shorter robot, in a deep voice.
Hal looked pleased. ‘I’m glad you like it. My name’s Hal, by the way. Hal Spacejock.’
An incompetent, accident-prone pilot is given one last chance to save his ship. An ageing robot is trusted with a midnight landing in a deserted field. And a desperate businessman is prepared to sacrifice both of them to get what he wants…
Combining relentless action with non-stop laughs, Hal Spacejock explodes onto the science fiction scene with the subtlety of a meteor strike and the hushed reverence of a used car salesman.
If you enjoy TV shows like the Young Ones, Firefly, Blackadder, Red Dwarf and Dr Who, or books by Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Tom Holt or Jasper Fforde, then the Hal Spacejock series is for you.
(6 votes, average: 9.67 out of 10)
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You’re a developer that against all the odds have created a commercial desktop app or web service, working long hours to create something you can be proud of. But you’re not a marketing person, a suit, one of those people who somehow makes sales happen.
Good! I wrote MicroISV Sites that Sell! – Creating and Marketing your Unique Selling Proposition because developer-to-developer I wanted to demystify one of the strongest, fairest, best marketing design patterns reputable software companies can use to substantially increase their sales.
Design Pattern? You mean like Gang of Four, the way programming gods write software design pattern? That’s exactly what I mean. The Unique Selling Proposition is just that – a proven, deployable, debugged robust way of helping your prospective customers get the value of what you have to sell.
Now there’s a bizillion ebooks out on the net promising you Money! Money! Money! – all you have to do is send them yours first. So how do you know MicroISV Sites that Sell! is worth your $19 and much more importantly your time? Because I beta tested it with a group of people who know their stuff and have a zero tolerance for Internet Marketing BS.
Here’s what a couple had to say (more on 47hats.com):
“The smallest software startups rarely have in-house expertise in marketing, and they end up making common mistakes that scare customers away. You see this again and again among the small ISVs: no contact information on the web site, laundry lists of features without explaining the benefits, bad graphic design, and more. If you’re a MicroISV, Bob’s ebook will pay for itself with the first extra sale you make.” – Joel Spolsky
“The latest from Bob Walsh offers concise advice on some key things every microISV needs to do, complete with a discussion of real examples. Recommended.” – Eric Sink
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We’ve just announced our first 3 ebooks in the last 3 days. This has meant I’ve been able to remove the sample posts and finally the site looks like a real site, albeit one with very little content.
The challenge now is to keep up the momentum. I want to be able to announce at least one new ebook every day.
I’d like to extend a special thanks to the first three authors who were brave enough to consent to having their ebooks announced on the site. David Meerman Scott (The New Rules of Viral Marketing), Stephane Grenier (How to Generate Traffic to Your Website) and Rina Slayter (Blue Root). Thank you very much for your support.
One of the side benefits of running this site is that I’m discovering a lot of interesting reads. My reading list is growing daily.
The photo is of a New Zealand adrenalin activity called Zorbing – Hop inside a large, inflatable ball and roll down a hill. You’ve got to love it (by the way I’m a Kiwi now living in Australia so I’ve got a soft spot for NZ).
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Blue Root is a serialized humorous, erotic, science fiction romance novel in which a networkable, programmable sex toy nearly takes over the world.
No, really, it’s funny, sexy, futuristic and there’s lots of romance in it…plus the iPhone of fancy schmancy sex toys!
Businessman/programmer Bradley March and store clerk/high profile hacker Jeuley Crissin join forces and fall in love while cultivating Blue Root’s innovative technology.
During that process—well, after she’s kidnapped—Jeuley discovers that Blue Root’s inventor, Ordal Laverock had intended to take over the world by addicting everyone to his product and then controlling them. His evil empire must be stopped! Brad rescues Jeuley and Jeuley rescues the world, ensuring a global happily ever after.
Warning: This book contains adult content. If you’re not 18 years of age or older, do not follow the link.
(3 votes, average: 6.00 out of 10)
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