new releases

Why have I been so quiet lately? Well, there’s two possibilities on that front. Either the publishing industry has gone back to normal, becoming too static and boring to write about. Or.. I’ve been spending every spare second writing this 215,000-word monster:

Not pictured: the 215,000 words inside

The Black Star is the third and final entry in the Cycle of Arawn, my epic fantasy series. Right now, the first book (The White Tree) is free, the second book (The Great Rift) is cut to $0.99, and The Black Star is $2.99, meaning you can buy ~1600 pages of fantasy for less than it would cost you to purchase $4.00 of alternate goods and services. You can get The Black Star at all reputable online bookstores:

Amazon  |  Amazon UK  |  B&N Nook  |  Kobo  |  iBooks

This is the first series I’ve ever finished, and it feels pretty good. Not just because these books are wayyy long and I was stressed for months about how long it would take me to finish this one. But also because, when I wrote the first book in the series, I couldn’t get an agent for it. So.. that was it. There never would be a series.

I wrote that book in 2007, spent the rest of the year revising it (and multiple times afterwards, too), and spent 2008 trying to find representation for it. In those bygone days of yore, there was no Kindle, no self-publishing as we know it today; self-publishing was still that thing you only did if you couldn’t sell anything to New York and you wanted to use your garage for storing 5000 copies of your book instead of one copy of your car. (Note: I’m being facetious. I think it’s safe to say that was the perception of self-publishers, but after spending the last two years glimpsing what they went through, I’ve got a lot of retroactive respect for the old schoolers.)

Anyway, point is, I always knew how the rest of the series would play out. But due to the realities of the industry, I was never going to get a chance to write it. Not unless—and this is how delusional I was—I became a big name with different books, then forced(?!) my publisher to publish this other, older series no one wanted in the first place.

Uh.. not going to happen, haha. Which stunk. Because I really liked The White Tree. It was the third book I’d written to that point, but it felt like the first one that might be any good.

Don’t get me wrong, it has flaws. Plenty. The structure of its suspense, for one, is less than perfect. In fact, if for some reason you’re possessed to read my books in the order they were written, you can see that structure evolve from The White Tree (third book written) to Titans (fourth) to Breakers (fifth). I think a similar evolution is evident in the sentences, too. For the record, I don’t think my recent books are unassailable works of genius, nor that The White Tree is garbage; I wouldn’t have it available unto the world if I didn’t believe in it. I do. And sometimes, the rawness of a book is part of its appeal.

But in hindsight, I can see why it attracted neither an agent nor a publisher. Even if it’s a fine book, it’s rough in many ways, and getting a foot in the door of traditional publishing is so competitive that you need a book to be as close to perfect as possible. I used to keep track of agent acceptance rates—see, I was a numbers guy even before going all self-pubby—and for all the manuscripts submitted to them in a given year, the typical agent would accept somewhere between 1 in 1000 and 1 in 10,000.

The numbers aren’t quite as dire as that sounds, because of course there is more than one literary agent out there. Even so, it seemed like (very roughly) 1 in 100 novels from unpublished authors wound up being represented and published.

Here is one of the major truths self-publishing has exposed: you don’t need to be in that 1% to connect with readers. A book doesn’t have to be PERFECT. It just has to be.. well, I don’t know. Very good? Good? Good enough? Competent? I have no idea where the Line of Acceptability is drawn. If you had 100 prospective novels in front of you, I don’t know whether the cutoff is generous (whether 33 or 50 or 67 of those 100 “makes it” as readable) or miserly (3 or 5 or 10). I do know that number is more than 1. Possibly by a lot.

Anyway, to return to my long-lost point, The White Tree wasn’t that 1 in 100, and that made me sad. Over the course of writing it, I really fell for the two main characters, Dante and Blays. And Dante’s discovery of magic, and his pursuit of it as a calling, was inspired by all the things I felt about writing. The sense of purpose it gave me. The dedication I’ve found for it. How fun it is. It may have been about swords and gods crazy shadow-weapons, but at its core, it was a very personal book to write.

Without self-publishing, it would have been lost forever.

The second and third books—which I feel much more confident about; to date, I think The Great Rift is my best book, for what that’s worth—would never have been written. The story would never have been told. Now, it’s finished.

Probably, the world would have found a way to exist without the complete Cycle of Arawn. For me, though? It’s a pretty big deal. Without question, the biggest advantage of self-publishing is the financial side; due to the ebook boom, thousands of writers new and old are now making a living off their fiction.

But it isn’t all about the money. The creative side of it is pretty dang rewarding, too. Thanks for reading.

This is the first in a sporadic series of posts examining the publishing market, specifically as it relates to self-publishing. To start things off, I want to look at pricing, and present an ass-backwards case: that it may make more sense to price your oldest, least popular books the highest—and your new books the lowest.

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Traditionally, a book is priced highest when it’s brand new. Part of this is due to the formats of a new release itself, which begin with expensive hardcovers and later move on to less expensive paperbacks, but this is frequently how ebooks are treated, too.

For instance, Stephen King’s most recent book Doctor Sleep is currently $10.99. Take a look at his backlist, however, and it’s pretty much all priced lower—mostly $5.99-7.99, with a more recent and enduring book (11/22/63) leading the way at $9.99, and running all the way down to $3.99 (The Shining, currently price-dropped to promote the new sequel Doctor Sleep).

There’s no difference in production costs for an ebook sold today and a copy of that same ebook sold on the day the title came out. So why does it cost less now than when it was new?

The answer is demand. When an author puts out a new book, there is a high level of fan demand for that title. Everyone knows you’ll be able to get it for cheaper later. But so long as the price is semi-reasonable, readers don’t care about shelling out a few extra dollars in exchange for having the specific book they want now. And publishers are happy to take advantage of that demand by setting initial prices higher.

Why reduce price of that same ebook format later? I don’t get invited to sit around a lot of Big Publishing House marketing meetings, but the probable answer is obvious. As demand wanes, you cut price, hoping to lure in new readers. Especially the segments of the market that are more price-sensitive. Over time, as a book steps down the pricing staircase, it drops below the purchase threshold of several different markets, garnering new purchases at every step of the way. Eventually, once the higher-paying markets are exhausted and demand settles down to a trickle, you slot the book into a low price—one that minimizes readers’ resistance to purchase, but isn’t so low that it devalues the author and/or the publisher’s entire catalogue.

That’s the traditional model. It makes a lot of sense. Maximize initial revenues by taking advantage of pent-up demand, then lower prices to draw new readers into the backlist (and, hopefully, convert them into fans who’ll then go on to buy frontlist).

The self-publishing/indie approach is way more fragmented, with different people trying all kinds of different things, but I think the general approach is similar: release a new book at full price, or at a slight discount, let it fade into backlist, then run sales on backlist titles to goose new releases and/or the rest of the backlist.

This makes sense, too. I don’t think it’s a bad approach in the slightest. But I think there is a stark difference between the pre-digital publishing market and the current market. Back in the day, you counted on audience growth through word-of-mouth, right? People still treat word-of-mouth like your #1 weapon for growth from book to book.

Well, I think that’s been replaced. Overshadowed, at least. By visibility.

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Yay, a buzzword! That’s how you know this must be smart. To explain this particular use of “visibility,” it’s time to dissect Amazon’s recommendation engine.

When a new book is released on Amazon—and the other stores, too, but Amazon is the one I’m most familiar with, and the one I believe does this best—its resulting sales aren’t just about the pent-up demand waiting for it. Instead, Amazon’s bots process its initial sales, then actively promotes that title to other customers likely to purchase it.

This is largely black box stuff accomplished through emails and on-site recommendations, so it’s hard to capture hard data on these processes. But I’m guessing Amazon’s system is a lot like Netflix, where people who watched/enjoyed Movie A, B, and C will be recommended Movie D, which other people who enjoyed A-C also watched and liked. Amazon has their own version of this front and center, the “alsobot” recommendations on every single product page.

So a new book comes out. Its fans buy it. And then the mighty Algorithm kicks in, recommending the book to potential customers. The people it recommends the book to are (probably) determined by taste-constellations, i.e. the people Amazon’s system thinks are most likely to buy it. And the volume of those recommendations is determined by the volume of outside sales—anything not initially generated by Amazon itself.

The recommendation algorithms are highly adaptive. Both the targeting and the volume of that targeting are influenced by the book’s performance when Amazon puts it in front of potential customers. The better a book converts potential customers to actual purchases, the more the algos ramp up the juice. The worse it does, the more the juice dries up. (For the record, I make no judgments here about a book’s literary quality—just its commercial potential, as predicted and then tested by Amazon.)

For a brief foray into concrete examples, last month, I released a new book. I was able to push about 250 sales through my own devices. Over the course of the month, it saw “organic” algo-driven growth, and finished September with about 1950 sales. Thanks to Amazon’s marketing, it sold 8x as many copies in its first month than I conjured up on my own.

For anyone who spends any time on Amazon, this general process is obvious. But look at what’s happening here: Amazon’s sophisticated recommendation system is identifying potential customers and then pushing something they’re likely to buy right in front of them.

In other words, they’ve slashed a huge shortcut through word-of-mouth. They have replicated an organic process that used to take weeks, months, or years to really kick in, and condensed it to a matter of days.

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Back to the launch. Which is no longer just about pent-up demand. It’s about the additional visibility Amazon will hand you on a platter. One that can dwarf the fanbase you bring to the table yourself.
And which you can maximize by releasing a new book at a lower price.
The next question raises itself: What price point will make you the most money? Specifically, what is the best price to maximize visibility (and thus sales) without losing out on too much money in other areas, such as the initial fanbase who’ll happily pay higher prices, or by dropping into an unfavorable royalty rate?
The answer is.. there is no one answer. It’s immensely complicated. It depends so much on how well a book does in those recommendation algos, which is completely out of your control. I mean, besides little things like writing a damn good book with a damn good cover described with a damn good blurb. It depends on if it’s part of a series, and if you expect the new book to lift every backlist title in that series with it. It depends on how many owls you sacrifice to Athena, who probably isn’t even the goddess of books, but whatever, I don’t have time to check Wikipedia right now.
I have no concrete answer. That’s why I titled this “challenging assumptions” and not “slaying assumptions and smiting their ruin on the mountainside.”

I’ve got one bit of data to help approach this, though. In my observation and experience—anecdote alert!—given equal visibility, a book priced at $0.99 will sell roughly 2x as many copies as one priced at $2.99. This is in SF/F; in particularly price-sensitive genres, like New Adult and possibly Romance, the difference may be higher, maybe as high as 3x.

Working from a 2x figure, though, let’s crunch some numbers. Say you have the option of 1000 sales in your first month at $2.99 or 2000 sales at $0.99. $2.99 earns 70% royalties—$2100, in this hypothetical. $0.99 earns 35%—$700. That is a huge difference, one that I have no doubt Amazon intentionally laid out to create a soft floor for ebook prices.

But let’s say you can convert 1 out of every 20 purchases into core fans, people who’ll happily sign up for your mailing list/Facebook page/blog so you can reach them directly when the next book is out. At $2.99, you’ve added 50 core readers. At $0.99, you’ve added 100. Your next book will have twice as many purchases to impress the recommendation algos with than if you’d launched the previous book at $2.99. Multiply by as many books as you intend to write in the series.

Caveats here, of course. A few of the people who signed up for $0.99 books may not buy a sequel at $2.99. And conversion rate naturally degrades the deeper you get into a series. And a 20:1 purchase:signup ratio is generally too high (though it doesn’t really matter what the absolute ratio is, it’s more about the relative ratio of sales between $2.99 and $0.99).

So you can downplay this idea a little bit. Even so, the long-term implications of launching cheap are pretty interesting. And obviously there are more ways to look at this besides $0.99 vs. $2.99. Such as this:

This is from Smashwords’ yearly survey on self-publishing trends. The first thing you’ll note is that it directly contradicts what I claimed above about a title selling twice as much at $0.99 vs. when it’s priced at $2.99. So it’s kind of hilarious that I’m going to use other parts of the data to make a point. But whatever, apply the salt grains as necessary. This Smashwords survey isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. It’s looking at sales across its entire catalogue, not just at the difference in sales volume when a specific book with constant, equal visibility is switched between different prices.

Anyway, that’s outside what I want to look at here, which is that big ol’ hump in unit sales for books priced $2.99-3.99, the slope between $4.99-6.99, and that floor at $7.99+.

If this data is trustworthy, you can use it to explore the various mini-markets of the overall ebook market. For many people, up to $3.99 is a bargain, an impulse purchase. Another smaller segment doesn’t think much of paying up to $6.99 for an ebook. Move to $7.99+, and you’re at frontlist prices. There’s no bargain at all.

Thus I think there’s a pretty crazy case for punting new books out the door at $3.99, max. Even if you’re an indie and you don’t charge much to begin with—few of us go higher than $4.99—just a small initial discount could pay off.

Whatever the case, applying traditional frontlist prices to new releases maximizes earnings from preexisting fans, but drastically reduces your ability to create new fans. Not just over the long-term, but during the short-term recommendation-driven visibility Amazon will grant you as a new release.

That by itself is a strong argument for inverting the traditional pricing structure. On top of that, you’re actually rewarding your existing fans for their loyalty by charging them less than the book’s eventual list price. Treat your readers well, and they’re more likely to stick around for the future. Yay, a lasting career.

I know there are a lot of good arguments against this general premise. Particularly in series, where you can put out new releases at whatever price you want and use the visibility of the new release to push potential readers toward the (bargain-priced!) beginning of the series. Even so, I think it’s worth thinking about. Particularly for standalones and the beginning of a new series, launching at a lower price than your “list” might be the best move.

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And here’s the other end of the equation. There is demand for backlist, too. And it’s not all that different from the pent-up demand a fan of an author has for an author’s new books.
All books slide eventually. If you’re so successful that all your books never drop too far in the rankings, this won’t really apply, I guess. But there comes a point when a book has essentially lost all visibility on Amazon. It isn’t on any bestseller lists. It’s buried on the popularity lists. It may be in some alsobots, but mostly of books that aren’t selling anything, either. Amazon is sending few if any recommendation emails about it (which it will do for all books, it’s just more aggressive about new releases).
Meanwhile, a bargain price no longer matters, because no one else is seeing the book to take advantage of an impulse-purchase price. The only people seeing it are those who want it enough to search for it specifically. If your new release has earned you a reader who loves you enough to go hop through the rest of your unrelated catalogue, they’re not likely to blink if that book costs a dollar or two more than the popular stuff.
In practice, then, you might launch at $0.99 and gradually raise to $2.99-3.99 as you exhaust your visibility. Or launch at $2.99 and later move up to $4.99 as sales dwindle to the few who are ignoring the 2,000,000 other ebooks on Amazon to hunt down yours. (Or who are hunting for very specific books through keywords or whatever—though in that case, you will have competition among similar titles, so.)
I don’t care what specific prices you’d want to run with, personally, because everyone’s calculations are going to be different, and because I don’t ascribe to any philosophies about “devaluing your work” (let alone the entire ebook market—take that, books as we knew you!). Personally, all I care about is reaching enough readers to guarantee I can keep writing new books until the day I die and/or am replaced by a long-winded robot. Speaking of, I could have summarized most of this post with “Hey, loss leaders work.”
But given the way online bookstores promote new titles, and the sensitivities potential customers display toward various price points, I think there’s a case to do things backwards. To build your strategy not around preexisting demand, but around visibility.
The best way to do that? Start low, my friends. Devalue your work like there’s no tomorrow! And reap the benefits in the long run.

A couple days ago, I rejoined the Self-Publishing Podcast once again. This time, we’re talking launch strategies, box sets, sales trends, and how to give a big boost to later releases in your series, among other things. This is either the third or fourth time I’ve been on the show—apparently I’m now the Justin Timberlake to the SPP’s SNL—but I had a particularly great time on this episode, and feel we covered an awful lot of ground.

My August and September were far and away my best months ever, so I was really happy to be able to break down what I did and explore how to replicate it. Hope it’s helpful.

Well, I’ve been pretty quiet lately. As usual, that means one of two things: either the police have finally caught up to me, or I’ve got a new book out. Luckily for me, it’s the latter: Reapers, the newest book in my post-apocalyptic Breakers series. In it, a hunt for a missing person leads former agent Ellie Colson through the wastelands of New York State–and right into the middle of an explosive gang war.

AVAILABLE AT:
Amazon  |  B&N  |  Kobo
“Oh,” you say. “That’s nice, but that’s the fourth book in a series, and I like to start at the beginning.” Yes, I can see how that would be a problem.. but hey wait what’s this??

AVAILABLE AT:

Amazon  |  B&N  |  Kobo
“Yeah, but a set that fine must cost like two million dollars.” It sure looks like it! But for the next few days, it’s just $0.99.
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For the writers out there, this is the second prong of my release strategy (the first being the typical “alert my mailing list/Facebook page that a new book exists”). Most of the big advertisers won’t run a brand-new book. BookBub used to, but no longer, and places like ENT generally require a decent number of reviews before they’ll feature something. But they’re obviously happy to run an older title, so long as it meets their standards, and right now they love featuring steeply discounted box sets, because their readers love the value.
I can’t afford to leave this set at $0.99 forever, but I’ve got some ads on it running in a couple days which will hopefully lead to spillover on Reapers. I’ll see how the ads go, and then, after a few days, I’ll probably raise the price on the box set to something like $5.99–still a bargain, just not a no-doubt choice over the individual titles, which will be temporarily reduced to $3 each. I’ll be playing it by ear as to when exactly to tweak prices up, but the set’s standard list price will wind up at $9.99 ($3 off the first three books’ list).
I’m hardly the first to say “Hey, you know what people like? More books for less money.” But with new releases, it’s all about how high you can fling them into the ranks. Since a box set is one of the most potent sales tools there is, to me, it makes extra sense to pair it with a new release.
I don’t have any ads or donation buttons on this blog, so if you these posts helpful, consider picking up one of the above books. I’ll never know if you don’t, but who knows, you might even like them.

What’s up everyone. I’ve been quiet lately–working furiously, if there’s anything furious about “sitting in a chair seven days a week”–but in the meantime, here’s something new: the complete book of my previously serialized time travel thriller The Cutting Room. And for the next few days, it’s just $0.99.

AVAILABLE AT:
Amazon  |  B&N  |  Kobo  |  Apple

Thanks for taking a look. Once I’ve got a bit of breathing room with my work in progress, I’ll start blogging again–including a look at my experience with The Cutting Room as a serialized novel. It’s been an interesting process.

As usual, a quiet blog means I’ve got a new book on the way. This time, I’m trying a new format, too: a serial.

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In the future, there are many parallel Earths–but only one of them has time travel. Its criminals break into the pasts of other worlds, far beyond the reach of conventional police.

Blake Din is the top agent of the Cutting Room, the group tasked with stopping these trespassers. But on a mission to undo the murder of a young boy, he steps into a far-ranging conspiracy. For the first time, it isn’t one of the other Earths under attack. It’s his own.

A sci-fi thriller in the mold of Minority Report and Quantum Leap, THE CUTTING ROOM: EPISODE I is the first in a six-part serial novel. New episodes weekly.

Get it on any store you like:

Amazon  |  B&N  |  Apple  |  Kobo

Additionally, if you’re a Kobo reader–and they’ve got an app–I’ve got a limited amount of copies to give away. Just follow the (very quick and easy) instructions here.

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If you’re new to serialized fiction, it’s pretty much like a TV show: each episode tells its own little story, and the complete book tells an over-arching story of its own. With The Cutting Room, I’ll be releasing new episodes every Wednesday. Each episode is about 30-50 pages long (12,000-15,000 words), and there will be six in total.
Writing in this format was more of a challenge than I expected, but it was really fun. If this book does well enough (and frankly, my standards for “well” are pretty mild), I’d love to write another. Thanks for taking a look.

This morning, I broke 100 sales on my new book Knifepoint (don’t go hitting me up for riches yet, they’re all at $0.99). Since it’s in several stores, including a bevy of international ones, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at where those sales came from and see what if anything pops up.

Here’s how those first 100 sales break down:

83 – Amazon
4 – Amazon UK
1 – Amazon DE
10 – B&N
2 – Kobo (1 Canada, 1 Portugal)
0 – iBookstore

That’s 0 at the iBookstore because it was under review until just a few minutes ago, which is kind of a funny commentary on Apple in general–high standards that sometimes get in the way of their ability to sell shit. (But I’ll give them this, they have incredible customer support. After 36 hours of my book being under review, I inquired about its status. They got it live less than an hour later.) The rest of it follows common perceptions about the various storefronts: Amazon is the biggest by far; B&N is several times smaller than Amazon, but a few times larger than Kobo or the iBookstore; Kobo cleans up in Canada but also has a smattering of sales across the rest of the entire world.

100 sales is a pretty small sample size, but oddly enough, this lines up very closely with my sales for the last four months, which break down about like this:

85% – Amazon (all domains)
9% – B&N
4.5% – Kobo
1% – iBookstore, Smashwords, print

Those are just my numbers, of course. In reality, I think the iBookstore’s share of the ebook market is pretty similar in size to Kobo’s–I just haven’t been able to get anything going there. Meanwhile, Amazon’s market share these days is supposed to be 60% or less, but 85% of my sales come from it. While I’m no longer interested in being exclusive to Amazon through their Select program, without Amazon, I wouldn’t be making a living at this. That right there is why so many of us indies are Amazon-boosters.

Here’s the big question I’d ask myself, if I were a crazy person who talks to himself: Could I make up for the 15% of my non-Amazon sales by returning to the exclusivity of Select? I suspect I could right now, but I couldn’t begin to project how things would look a year from now. There’s an advantage to being in a store early on. For instance, I think the iBookstore’s ranks are getting harder and harder to crack, whereas 12-18 months ago, it wasn’t too tough to get a foothold. The same thing could wind up true for Kobo, which doesn’t have awesome discoverability, yet is growing by the day. Sneak up their ranks early, and it could give you a lasting advantage.

That said, if my non-Amazon sales were 10% of my total, I might be reconsidering Select. And if they were 5%, I would almost certainly hop back into the program. It’s hard to get going in the other stores, but Select is the easy-button. That’s why so many indies come off like they’re pro-Select. Well, few of them are fans of Select qua Select. They’re fans of things that let them sell books.

7% of those first 100 sales are non-US, by the way. I’ve been doing pretty well in in non-US markets lately, with nearly a quarter of my Amazon sales for February coming from the UK. It’s tough to get going there, too, but if you can, it’s like having access to a whole new market on par with one of the major non-Amazon stores.

…and I guess that’s it. Was it actually interesting to look at those first 100 sales? I don’t know, but it was certainly easier than writing that damned “how to interpret Select giveaway numbers” post I’ve been putting off.

It’s here: book three in the post-apocalyptic Breakers series, Knifepoint. Picking up a few years after the first two books, Knifepoint is the story of the survivors’ struggle for control of Los Angeles, and what it means to grow up in a world where plague and war have killed 99.9% of humankind. Oh, and Walt’s back, too.

Because it’s a new release and I want it to do really really well, it’s just $0.99 this week:

KNIFEPOINT

Amazon  |  Barnes & Noble  |  Kobo  |  Apple

What’s that? You don’t already have the first two books, Breakers and Melt Down? Well, good thing they’re also $0.99 for the next week. Because I love you. If you’ve got any friends who might enjoy the read, now’s a good time to let them know. All three books won’t be on sale together again for a while.

BREAKERS:

Amazon  |  Barnes & Noble  |  Kobo  |  Apple

MELT DOWN:

Amazon  |  Barnes & Noble  |  Kobo  |  Apple

NOTES:

Everything’s now live!

What’s got two thumbs and has a new Breakers novella out for you all? This guyyy. You can’t see it, but I’m pointing my thumbs back at myself.
Outcome - Breakers

Outcome is a novella set at the beginning of the plague outbreak in my Breakers series:

“Ellie Colson is the only one who believes in the end of the world.

As an agent of the Department of Advance Analysis, she’s one of a handful of people who knows about the spread of a new virus—one she believes will wipe out mankind. With her bosses in denial, she flies to New York to get her ex-fiance Chip to safety.

But he’s already been scooped up and quarantined—and so has his adopted daughter. Pursued by her own agency, Ellie will stop at nothing to break Chip out before the virus claims them all.”

    Amazon  |  Barnes & Noble  |  Kobo  |  Apple iBookstore  |  Smashwords

Note that it’s free everywhere but Amazon and B&N–I want Outcome to be a gift to my readers, and a way for new people to check out the series and see if they like it. It’ll (hopefully) be free on Amazon and B&N within a few weeks, but they make you jump through some hoops first.

In the meantime, please grab it from whichever store you prefer. Oh, and you won’t hurt my feelings if you want to spread the word.

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