House on Bear Mountain

Three things I’ve learned from the comments on Beasts of the Walking City so far: The characters and overall plot seem to be working well for most of you overall.  (Glad to hear it!) “Hey, Doug, another round of copyediting is probably not a bad idea.”  (On it!  Updated version coming in two weeks.) The definition of ‘trope’: (n) a common theme or device  (Ok, I knew that one, but still cool to have a classy word show up in a review.) Thanks to everyone who’s commented—all of the feedback has been great, and I really appreciate your help.  Every review does make a difference. If anyone else was planning on leaving a review for a chance to win a Kindle Fire (or a donation in your name to Habitat for Humanity), it’s last call!  Reviews should be into Amazon by midnight, PST, on Friday 8/31.    Reviews later are completely welcome, too, of course.  But you'll have to BYOK.

…going to be determined in a week!   Have you left a review for Beasts of the Walking City yet? If you get it in before the end of the month, you're eligible for my drawing for a free Kindle Fire. And remember: all proceeds from this month are going to Habitat for Humanity. If you haven't yet picked up the book, you still have a few days left to go and still have your money going to help out a fine charity. Please pass the word:  it's not too late!   To the rest of you: thanks to everyone who has downloaded, read, reviewed, or are in the middle of reading Beasts! At the moment, I'm not doing any external promotion (aside, of course, from this post) and am still seeing sales happening regularly, every day, which I'm assuming are coming from work Amazon is doing to market it to other book buyers. I'm not ready to retire, of course. Nor am I quitting the day job any time soon. But it is great to see the book getting into the hands of readers on a s

So, good news--the results are still coming in, but so far Beast did much better than I'd expected during its free weekend on Amazon's Kindle Publishing program. The book broke into several lists at its peak, including… Top 5 on free Science Fiction Top 2 on SciFi Adventure Top 9 on free Fantasy Top 5 on Contemporary Fantasy #141 Overall in the total free Kindle store I have to say, it was a blast watching it ride up through the ranks, and I will confess to checking the sales ranks a little too often, driving my family nuts with number updates, and likely oversharing on Facebook, too. Sorry about that, guys. But it was a lot of fun. Thanks to everyone who helped, through passing the word or forwarding or sharing a link--I think it really made a difference. I ran a small plug on Freebooksy.com, too, which helped get things running as well. Once the book started hitting Amazon's lists, I believe that drove a lot of sales too; sort of a self-fulfilling prophec

Book update: Beasts of the Walking City is now available @ Amazon, and is selling about 10 books a day now--not bad for the first couple of days, with no real publicity. Thanks, everyone, for the support! Going forward, the challenge is to draw enough attention to the book so Amazon starts selling it to other readers. The best way to do this is through Customer Reviews on Amazon (which is where I can use your help, below), and get a lot of purchases or free downloads (oh, yeah--you can help here too if you'd like). Interested in helping out? If you're interested in a free review copy of the book, just drop me a note and I'll send you one. The only request here is that you leave a review on Amazon (and Goodreads, if you have an account there). The book is available in a format you can read on your Kindle, iPad, iPhone, or desktop machine with a free Kindle app. I can also send review copies in other formats--just let me know what works for you. On August