Fifty Shades of Free…

FREE FOR ALL:

Starting in a matter of hours, at 3am Eastern time on Saturday, June 30, you can download my short story, “Welcome to the Real World”, absolutely free.

The story’s one that was written too recently for inclusion in Enough Rope, my omnibus collection. It’s a golf story, and its sole appearance in print was in Otto Penzler’s golf anthology, Murder in the Rough. It’s one of the dozen Stories From the Dark Side I recently enrolled in Amazon’s Kindle Select program, and that means I get to give it away.

So that’s what I’m doing. This is not sheer altruism on my part; it’s my wistful hope that you’ll like the story enough to sample some of its dark-side fellows. But I won’t feel betrayed if you don’t. What I’m aiming at right now is the highest possible number of free downloads while the deal lasts. So spread the word!

The story’s free for three 24-hour days, and the window doesn’t slam shut until 2:59am Eastern time, Tuesday, July 2. It’s a Kindle exclusive, but you don’t need to be a Kindle owner in order to take advantage of it. A free Kindle app, readily available from Amazon, will enable you to read Kindle books on your Mac or PC, iPhone or iPad or Android, and almost anything else. (And at least two enterprising fellows figured out how to read Kindle-only books on a Nook; scroll through the comments that follow this recent post. While you’re at it, you’ll see the full list of Stories From the Dark Side.)

I should add that the offer’s good worldwide. Here are links to Amazon’s overseas sites: UK and Commonwealth  France Germany  Italy  Spain

FREE FOR SOME:

One interesting element of the Kindle Select program is a benefit restricted to Kindle owners who belong to the Amazon Prime program. As a perk of membership, they get to borrow one title per month at no charge. Borrowing a 99¢ short story is probably not the best possible use of one’s monthly slot, but a full-priced book for free is not bad, and I’ve had a decent number of borrowings already of Ehrengraf For the Defense, the 11-story collection just published earlier this month. (If it’s a bargain at $4.99, it becomes an absolute steal when it’s free.)

Some of you have expressed concern that borrowing the book might deprive me of my royalty. Not so. Amazon pays authors for borrowed books. By all means, feel free to borrow any available titles of mine.

ALMOST FREE:

Open Road, ePublisher of several of my writing books, has dropped prices of The Liar’s Bible, The Liar’s Companion, and Writing the Novel From Plot to Print to $3.99.

I’ve been assured these prices are good through the end of July. I hope they’ll be made permanent, but there’s no guarantee of that. All the more reason to act now.

And, also for writers but for readers as well, my Open Road eRiginal, Afterthoughts, remains a stupefying bargain at 99¢. (But you snapped it up months ago, right?)

ALMOST FREE IN LB’S BOOKSTORE:

The Specialists, a one-book series and a signed small-press hardcover first edition, for $4.99.
Break Writer’s Block Now!, Jerrold Mundis’s groundbreaking how-to primer, a simple approach to a complicated problem, reduced to $5.99.
The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza and The Burglar in the Rye, signed hardcover firsts reduced to $9.99.
Tanner’s Tiger, the Subterranean Press hardcover, signed, for $9.99.
46 different Large Print Books, most of them one of a kind, most of them hardcover, all of them signed, $9.99 apiece.
20 different Audiobooks, most of them one of a kind, almost all unabridged, $9.99.
20 additional items, including UK editions, anthologies, a little of this and a little of that, and all for—yes, $9.99.

A LONG LONG WAY FROM FREE:

While $9.99 may look like our default price at LB’s Bookstore, we have some high-ticket items as well. As an alternative to the trade edition of The Specialists, on special at $4.99, you could dig deep and opt for the signed-and-numbered limited edition of that title, housed in a custom slipcase and yours for $29.99.

We had three copies of the ASAP limited edition of Ronald Rabbit is a Dirty Old Man, a very special item which we offered for $49.99. They’re all gone, but we found a few more in another carton, and will list them soon. (Meanwhile, if you want to read what Isaac Asimov called “either the dirtiest funny book or the funniest dirty book ever written,” we’ve got the Subterranean Press trade paperback for $19.99.)

And what else have we got that’s nowhere near free? Well, how about the Dark Harvest hardcover first editions of The Sins of the Fathers and Time to Murder and Create? The first has an intro by Stephen King, the second by Jonathan Kellerman. Each is priced at $99.99. The true worldwide first of Even the Wicked is Orion’s UK edition; it was on-sale in October of 1996, with Morrow’s US edition delayed until February 1997. Orion printed around 1000 copies, and most of those went to libraries in the Midlands. We’ve got 7 of them for—you guessed it—$99.99.

We’ve listed six titles at $49.99, including the Subterranean Press signed-and-limited edition of Cinderella Sims and Crippen & Landru’s signed-and-limited of The Lost Cases of Ed London. That’s two of the six, and I’ll leave you to ferret out the others on your own.

HOW MANY SHADES IS THAT?

I’m not sure, but the question brings to mind a favorite exchange:

Q: What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy?

A: I don’t know and I don’t care.

But you know, don’t you? And you don’t have to care a whole lot to click your mouse a couple of times and download Welcome to the Real World. And enjoy the summer!

LB