Wednesday, April 16, 2014

I'm now balancing writing Vertigo with promoting Starshine, but I still find myself stopping short several times a day in amazement at and thankfulness for how well the novel is performing and the wonderful thoughts people have shared about it, publicly and privately.

• 3 weeks after release, Starshine remains in Amazon's Top 10 Sci-Fi and Top 5 Space Opera and Sci-Fi - Adventure Hot New Releases (with several stints at #1 in Adventure). It's a Top 10 Space Opera Bestseller and Top 5 in several sci-fi subcategories. Perhaps most importantly, it holds a 4.9 star rating on both Amazon and GoodReads with more than 20 fantastic reviews. Keep them coming!

  • I've added a page to the website with Review Highlights - mostly for newcomers, but you are welcome to peruse it :)

• I have to give a special shout-out to my awesome friends in Australia: Jules, Joanna and Sarah. I don't know whether you ladies are engaging in a massive whisper campaign Down Under or it's simply good karma having you there, but I have sold more than twice as many copies in Australia as in any other country outside the U.S. You all rock.

• Want to help Starshine get more exposure in less than 60 seconds?

  • Vote for it in Cover Wars (the poll is at the end of the post). This competition continues until the end of May, and you can vote once a day. If you're so inclined, bookmark it and return to vote again when you think about it.

  • A GoodReads user? Vote for it on these lists: New Speculative Fiction Stars, Excellent Space Opera, and/or Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Books (new entrant). All you need to do is be signed in and click the "vote for this book" button. (You can always find the GoodReads Lists Starshine is on here.)

• As promised, a new, more substantive blog post on the world of Aurora Rising: The Subversive Notion of True Equality.

• Starshine is now available on Lulu.

• The excellent Sci-Fi Romance Quarterly has been added to the BlogRoll. Check them out!

• I've posted Starshine on ACX for the creation of an audiobook version: ACX: Starshine. Given it's length, securing a good narrator at a reasonable cost is going to be challenging, however, so if you know any voice actors or narrators, pass it along.

  • EDIT 4/23/2014: I have now engaged a narrator - the audiobook is a go!

• Thanks to some creative formatting adjustments to get the page count (and thus the price) down a bit, the Starshine paperback should soon be available worldwide on all of Amazon's international sites. It should also be available to order from your favorite brick & mortar bookstore, so ask! The overall price had to rise a little bit to access the additional distribution channels, which I seriously hated doing - but I felt it was more important to make it available to everyone, everywhere. If it isn't on your country's site yet, keep checking back.

A brief note: I will be away next week for my niece's wedding at the beach (yay!), so absent earth-shattering events there won't be another post before the end of April/first of May. Thanks, everyone :)