New Look, Same Great Taste

I had mentioned last week how Aaron Polson is one of those authors coming up with some pretty impressive covers for his own books. Well, he just recently started offering his services for cover art and Kindle formatting. The other day I asked him what he could come up with to give Through the Guts of a Beggar a new look. And here's what he did.

If you haven't checked out Through the Guts of a Beggar yet and don't want to splurge on the 99 cents it costs for the e-book version (which gives you an additional alternate ending and two bonus short stories), you can read the original novelette for free here.

A "Multiplicity" Contest

The Best of Every Day Fiction Three is now available, which features my story "Multiplicity" along with 99 other fine stories published last year at Every Day Fiction, including stories by K.C. Ball, Gay Degani, Ben Loory, Aaron Polson, and many more. Many thanks to Camille Gooderham Campbell and Steven Smethurst and Carol Clark for including me. The anthology comes in two formats, hardcover and trade paperback, which you can purchase here. Or, if you'd like, you can win a free signed copy from me.

Last year when I gave away a copy of The Best of Every Day Fiction Two, I tried to do it as a Twitter giveaway. That had mixed results. So this year I've decided to keep it simple. You know how in high school you would take those math classes and always ask when you'll ever need to know any of those equations in real life? Well, here you go. If you'd like a chance to win a copy, simply enter some kind of mathematical equation in the comments section. That's it. The crazier the equation, the better, though honestly at the end of the week a random name will be picked. This contest runs until the midnight Friday EST. Have fun!

The Silver Ring Is A Kindle Freebie

First, let's get the important stuff out of the way.

My 18,000-word novella The Silver Ring is currently available as a free download at Amazon (US and UK). Normally 99 cents, now it is free. What's even better is that it includes, along with an excerpt from The Calling, a special sneak preview of my upcoming thriller The Serial Killer's Wife.

That's right, the first four chapters of The Serial Killer's Wife is included in this free download of The Silver Ring.

So what are you waiting for? Even if you downloaded it before, download it again!

Why, you might ask, is it free? After all, only publishers can make e-books free on Kindle, so how did I do it?

Well, yeah, that's the thing -- I'm not 100% sure. My guess is that, years ago, when I originally uploaded the novella to Smashwords, I made it available for free. It then was distributed into the Kobo store where it's been free ever since, even though I had long ago changed the price to 99 cents. It had come to my attention that Kobo still had it available for free, and I had even notified Smashwords but had heard nothing. So my best guess is that somehow Amazon caught wind of it and decided to match the price. I got an email the other night telling me that they were changing my price to free and that there was really nothing I could do about it (okay, the last part isn't quite true, but it was between the lines).

At first I thought: Huh?

And then I thought: This is great!

I already had an excerpt from The Calling included with The Silver Ring. After all, they're both essentially young adult thrillers with supernatural elements so it made sense. But then I thought about my newest novel, The Serial Killer's Wife, which I plan to release shortly. And I realized that this was an opportunity to really help spread the word about not only one novel, but two. After all, novels are where you really make money (or at least where I really make money), so it was a no-brainer. Of course, there's no guarantee that everyone who downloads The Silver Ring for free will actually read it (many people just download free books for the hell of it), but even if a small percentage reads it (and I think it helps that it's 18,000 words long and really fast-paced) then, who knows, maybe they'll want to take a chance on one of my novels. It's like what most writers hope for with their 99 cent books but here I'm able to do the same with a free book.

How long will Amazon keep The Silver Ring free? Who knows. It could be a few days or weeks or months. It could even be a year. But I'm not upset. After all, at 99 cents I'm only making a 35 cent profit. Last month I only sold 9 units. So far this month I've "sold" 40 units, and those have only been in the past few hours. I get no money from these "sales," but that's okay. Sometimes free exposure really does pay off in the end. Here's hoping.

The Honeymooners

I have a new story up at Dark Sky Magazine called "The Honeymooners." It's a story inspired by this news article.

A few weeks ago Kevin Murphy, the editor and publisher of Dark Sky Magazine, emailed me asking if I would be interested in participating in a kind of, well, literary experiment. As he said:

We assign you a particular date in May. On that date, you pick a news story of some sort from the headlines. In reaction to that news story, you come up with a story of your own, or it can be a poem, or an essay, or a piece of art, video, music, etc. All we ask is that the piece you contribute relates to the news headline you choose and that you turn it in to DSM no later than 3 pm Pacific time.

I of course jumped at the chance and the day I was assigned was yesterday ... which I sort of forgot about until, around noontime, I suddenly remembered and went: Oh shit.

I hurried to the computer and started searching the online news and came across a few articles. As I had to head to work later in the day, I only had about two hours to find an article and write the story. So I decided on the news article about a recent in-flight disturbance and, after a few minutes of thinking, knocked out the story. I walked away from it for about a half hour, came back and read through it again, and sent it off. And there you have it.

Interview And Review At We Zombie!

Bill Nelson reviews The Dishonored Dead and interviews me at his website We Zombie! Here's the first paragraph of the review:

What happens when you reverse the roles of humans and zombies, add an upside down government along with mother earth’s hidden energy? You get a remarkably inventive, fresh story line with a plot that keeps on surprising you at every turn. Robert Swartwood’s eBook, The Dishonored Dead, kept me on edge and turning pages the entire way through – just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, Swartwood introduces a new twist that blows your mind. I spend a lot of time reading books in the zombie genre, and I’m always amazed when I run across a totally new idea that extends the realm of the genre.

In the interview, I talk pretty in-depth about the novel, like how it came about and how it almost never was and the challenges of keeping the dialogue consistent throughout the book (i.e. replacing "living" with "existing").

Also, over the weekend I spent about an hour coming up with this website where you can now read "In the Land of the Blind" -- the story which was the inspiration for The Dishonored Dead -- free.