I just read a great book, a must-read for anyone deeply interested in superheroes. See my review here.

At Last!

http://www.amazon.com/Bite-Me-Easy-Nights-ebook/dp/B009ITELVI/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1348928031&sr=1-1&keywords=Bite+Me%3A+Big+Easy+Nights

For more details, go here.

The first half of 2012 has been a great year for both Wearing the Cape and Villains Inc. Both have spent several months among the Top 10 titles in Amazon’s superhero category. WtC remains in the Top 10, while VI holds steady in the Top 20. Not everyone has a Kindle, however, so for readers out there who prefer Barnes and Nobles’ Nook, both titles have now been made available.
It also looks like Wearing the Cape will soon be going international; although both titles have been available in English wherever Amazon has a market, WtC may soon be translated for sale in Italy. I had no idea Italians enjoyed American superhero stories, but perhaps with the international success of The Avengers and the other Marvel superhero movies we shouldn’t be surprised.

So thank you to everybody who has enjoyed the books and shared their enthusiasm–WtC and VI have succeeded almost entirely on word-of-mouth, with only pennies spent on marketing, and the income from these titles has enabled me to work only part-time while continuing my writing; when Bite Me is finished I intend to return to the WtC titles for a third Astra story (with at least 4 or 5 planned to round out the series), and move to finish several long-time projects from years past.

Happy 4th of July!

Due to the number of comments received here and elsewhere, I have arranged to have Villains Inc. Episodes 2-4 reposted on Amazon.com until the end of March. They will be both available for purchase and for the Amazon Prime free-loan program, so all Prime members will be able to read the last episodes of Villains Inc. for free. Again, I apologize for the inconvenience.

-The Author.

Zombies are like credit card payments. If you keep getting rid of the minimum amount, you’ll never win. (From X-Heroes by Peter Cline.)

Amazon has become like its namesake river; deep, dark, populated by secret tribes of headhunters and cannibals…a mystery uncertainly navigated. A short while back I made the pleasant discovery that Amazon was mining purchaser’s archives for highlights.

That’s right; if you highlight passages in you new Kindle ebook, when you sync with your archives you pass on you highlights, bookmarks, and other bits of reader-activity to the men behind the curtains. While Orwell was obsessing about Big Brother, the Salesmen picked apart our privacy for selling pitches.

So now, on many novels published electronically, if you go down past their Amazon reviews, you will find a section called Popular Highlights. In theory, these are bits of the author’s wit and wisdom, lines that resonated deeply enough for the reader to stop and highlight it. Thus the source of the awesome quote that began this blog-post.

Another one: Neurotics build castles in the sky. Psychotics live in them. Psychotherapists collect the rent. This one is from Sugar and Spice, the British psycho-thriller Kindle bestseller by Saffina Desforges. Fourteen Kindle users underlined that one.

I suppose I could be disturbed by this latest piece of electronic transparency, but as a writer I’m feeling too warm and fuzzy right now. On my Wearing the Cape Amazon page, I found ten selected highlights. Of course one of the highlights was simply Villains Inc., Episode One: Preemption. Apparently nine Kindle users decided to highlight the last-page announcement of the sequel’s opening episode. Three others were highlighted quotes from English authors (Shakespeare, Johnson, etc), and one was a nursery rhyme. But five were mine–including perhaps my favorite line (if a writer can have his own favorites), Mrs. Lori’s acerbic dismissal of higher education.

But this got me thinking. One of the things I’ve really missed, with my fairly small alpha and beta-reader pools, is reader input. I am grateful to the Amazon reviewers who have gone beyond the standard thumbs-up (or thumbs-down), to tell me why they liked it, who they liked, etc. And feedback does make a difference; Bite Me is being written because of readers asking for more Artemis. But, being greedy, I want more.

So, here’s the deal: I’m getting ready to re-release the trade paperback of Wearing the Cape, with minor editorial corrections and a brand new, and truly awesome, cover. And I want to hear from everybody. So everyone who posts a reply to this over on my other blog (A Writer in Vegas), at least five sentences long, telling me their Faves (favorite characters, favorite lines, favorite scenes…), goes in the hat. When I publish the new edition with its new cover, one lucky poster gets a signed copy.

Feedback. Give me feedback. Believe it or not, it does make a difference; who knows what comments might make a difference in the next Astra story.

Happy New Year! For everyone who’s been patiently waiting, Villains Inc. Episode Four will be available on Amazon.com sometime tomorrow, along with Wearing the Cape: Villains Inc. (the complete novel). For more on this breaking story, see my writer’s blog: A Writer In Vegas.

A week behind schedule, but Villains Inc., Episode Three: Countermoves is now available on Amazon. Go to A Writer In Vegas for more details.