Tour hits halfway point!

Today's post at Larissa's Life address Crystal & Bone's life among the hotties. The Kindle Giveaway Blog Tour has hit the halfway point and I'm still standing. Or crawling. Hard to tell which. Don't forget to follow "hauntedcomputer" on Twitter to be eligible for the Pandora's Box of 100+ ebooks.

Red Church Rush and bonus kindles!

The Red Church at Amazon for 99 cents now ranked at #228 at 11 a.m. EST! Stoker Award finalist and Mystery Guild selection.  Buy it and put it in the Top 100 so I can give you folks an extra Kindle 3!

Can't afford it? Don't have a Kindle? Just go there and tag it--that helps more people see the book around the Amazon universe. Popular tags are: paranormal, mystery, horror, suspense, ghosts, thrillers, bestsellers, kindle, kindle books,  Christian fiction (yes, it has spiritual themes though it's not your typical category "Christian" novel), fantasy, dark fantasy.

Please review it if you've read it, even if it's just a line or two. If you reviewed the paper version, those don't carry over to the e-book so please copy your old review (even if you hated the book!).

As of today, Oct. 4, I have sixteen ebooks live for the Kindle on Amazon.

As previously announced, I am giving away (via Amazon) a Kindle DX through my 90-day blog tour and a Kindle 3 to a randomly selected newsletter subscriber, as well as the Pandora's Box of 100+ free ebooks to a Twitter follower.

And I was going to throw in a bonus Kindle if any book cracked the Top 100 on Amazon. Now I am upping the stakes: I will give away one free Kindle 3 for EACH of my books that cracks the Top 100 during the tour, in either the US or UK Kindle stores.

If one book does it, I will throw in one. If five books crack it, I will throw in five. For a total of up to 18 Kindles (well, actually 20, because I am releasing two more books during the tour--CURSED with J.R. Rain and my thriller DISINTEGRATION).

Sure, it's hard to hit the Top 100. Yet 100 books are always doing it at any given time, so it's not impossible. I'm not going to pester anyone any more than I normally do, and I am too lazy to track who does what. The tour is totally voluntary and winners are randomly selected by the local library staff.

If you want to increase your odds of winning a Kindle, you spread the word about the tour and my books. If you just want to show up at the blogs (in the sidebar to the right) and enter for free, then that's cool, too.

The idea is simple. You spread the word, I sell more books. You buy my books, I give stuff back to you. And we all sleep at night, hopefully with a Kindle under the pillow. Thanks for playing!

Today's stop: 20-Kindle Giveaway at Simply Stacie

Yesterday: See the sci-fi side of Scotty (me, not the dead engineer) at: http://cherylsbooknook.blogspot.com/

The day before: Visit the haunted church that inspired The Red Church at Inside of a Dog 

Last day to comment at Bewitched Bookworms, one of my favorite blogs

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Drummer Boy/Linville Caverns

In conjunction with my post at Megalith Books about Drummer Boy and the legends that inspired the novel, here are some pictures of the actual caverns.The coloring is caused by minerals.

Today's stop on the Kindle Giveaway Blog Tour is at Curling Up By The Fire

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Kindle Giveaway Tour one-sixth done

With today's post at Candace's Book Blog, I've passed the halfway point of the first month. People have asked "How can you keep it fresh for 90 days?" That is a good question that once in a while gives me pause. Can I do five or six Q & A's and answer honestly but different each time? How much can I write about the same topic, such as the ever-popular use of ghost hunting as used in Speed Dating with the Dead? Can I go that long without breaking into a writing-related rant, or examination of the publishing industry that few care about?

When I step back, here's how I can easily do it. I think I will have 15 books out during the tour. I can feature one title at individual stops (there's 15!) I have a few video stops to make where I visit sites from my novels, so I can double-dip on those books. I have some UK and Australian stops where I can talk about e-books as relatively new discoveries. And a few posts on the indie era and the changing nature of books, Appalachian legends, and future projects, as well as my comic books, screenplays, and side interests (Saturday's post will be about my film-acting experiences) and I should be able to keep it fresh even for people who make every single stop.

I haven't seen a huge surge of sales, but this is more about laying a foundation for readers, bloggers, and writers to meet around the digital/virtual world. I haven't even tried to quantify the tour on success/failure measurements, because it's improvisational and a moving experiment. The goal is to stay a few days ahead on the posts, stay involved with you who are commenting, and present the spectrum of all I do, and maybe show a little about the "real me," since I've mostly been just a name on a book to a lot of people.

The tour was originally called "90 Days of Nightmares." It's barely two months since I first got the idea and still not a single nightmare. So all in all I am rather pleased. I know some people are watching to see if I can make it. Hello! I'm still here.
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The Safe Play

The Kindle Giveaway Blog Tour Day #3 is now a post at Joe Konrath's blog so go over and enter for the Kindles. While you are here, take a chance to sniff some ink and paper.

I was thinking this morning about playing it safe, partly because of some peripheral things in my personal life and partly because of some good comments over at A.P. Fuchs's blog regarding self-publishing. What he says makes sense: if you are just a generic genre writer, you probably won't be able to stand out in any environment, whether in NY or out in the world of readers. I made my original launch of the tour with The Skull Ring, a fairly well-crafted suspense thriller with a few good twists. Satisfying, but nothing ground-breaking or earth-shattering, nothing that would have you closing the book and thinking about it for weeks.

Even back when I wrote it, it was more with the idea of writing a popular book, and it has sold pretty well, but perhaps its most damning feature is that everyone likes it. At Amazon, it has nothing but four- or five-star reviews. It's the best reviewed of all my books, and I believe it has the most number of reviews. I don't generally read my reviews though I occasionally check a couple just to see if people are pointing out the same things, which may indicate a problem I can learn from. This book just doesn't make people angry. It doesn't make them want to throw it (or their Kindle) across the room.

I have this novel Disintegration that is bleak, written at a really dark time for me, and I have never done much with it, partly because I am not sure I want that message in the world. The Left-Handed Puppeteer tells me somebody out there might need that message. But I was planning to revise it, to make one or two characters more redeeming or virtuous and have some hope of a happy ending for someone. In fact, I left the original ending--those final five pages--unwritten for months because I knew what had to happen, and I hated to write it. It nearly made me physically ill (and, no, not because it's gross, but just because it felt that intense and irredeemable.)

Changing it would have been artistically dishonest. Sure, change for plot clarity, change for coherence, change for consistency. But never change to please. Because I knew the original ending would enrage a certain portion of the readership. But I've learned over the years that it is better to enrage than have someone close the book and not remember a thing about it, as has happened to me with some commercial bestsellers. So Disintegration will be out in Full Scotty, the way it was meant to be. I still have a final revision pass to make and some beta readers to knock it around a little, but it doesn't need surgery just because someone might not like the size of Frankenstein's monster's ears. Look for it in October.

At times I have tweeted or posted something and lost a follower or two, and I review what I might have said to offend someone. But then I get two or four followers in their place, and I realize what is actually happening is I am losing the people who don't share the message and finding people who do share the message, meeting people on common ground. And I also am a better receiver of their messages, too, because we're talking the same language. We are the people who choose to spend time with one another.

This tour is meant to be The Full Scotty. No hiding, no more playing it safe. It's not even about selling books, though that is always nice. It's about sticking with a vision and being who you are. I've hidden a lot, especially in my personal life, though they say it's all buried in the stories if you know where to look. The writers I admire, and the people I admire, do just that--keep the faith. They lose a few people along the way but were those people really on their side in the first place?

Okay, while we get the Kindle Giveaway Blog Tour back on track, let's do a random giveaway here of a limited edition hardcover copy of Brimstone Turnpike from Cemetery Dance. Features novellas from Thomas F. Monteleone, Mike Oliveri, Harry Shannon, and Tim Waggoner, edited by Kealan Patrick Burke. Also contains my novella "Burial to Follow," which is also available as a 99 cent e-book. Signed by all contributors, I believe the market value is $40. Only 600 copies made, but this is a "PC," a personal copy, which is even rarer. If all contributors got four like I did, that means there are only 24 in the world.

EBay here we come. But please, wait until we are dead. Value will increase.

Simply comment below with your email address and I will randomly select a winner in seven days. Good luck!

(P.S. If you ARE into the whole PUSH FOR TOP 100 thing, then tomorrow may be a good day to ask your friends to buy Speed Dating with the Dead for Kindle. That's a hint, not a command!)

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Kindle Giveaway and new releases

Dark Eva says it better than I can--the tour is about to get underway. Three (or four) ways to win. I'm already putting together the posts and prepping a couple of more titles--Forever Never Ends (formerly The Harvest), the crime thriller Disintegration, and the metafictional thriller As I Die Lying for release during the tour, as well as the mystery story collection Gateway Drug. Join us!

Kindle Giveaway ramp-up

The Pandora's Box of prizes is growing with the addition of M.J. Rose, Zoe Winters, Vicki Tyley, Debbi Mack, and more, and I will be adding the "bonus Kindle 3" if any of my books break the Top 100 in the US or UK Kindle store.

If you are interested in how the tour came together, I posted at the writer/industry blog Buzz, Balls, and Hype. Help spread the word--the bigger it gets, the better your chances of winning, because thee will be more to give away!

TWO kindles for giveaway!

Thanks to generous support from sponsors (Amazon, Kindle Nation Daily, and Dellaster Design), I now have TWO kindles to give away as part of the Kindle Giveaway Blog Tour.

A Kindle DX will be given away through the participating blogs--simply visit the blogs and comment at one or more of my guest posts. You can only enter once per post, but you can increase your odds by stopping at all 90 posts. Winner will be randomly selected at the Watauga County (NC) Library in early December.

Another way to win a Kindle 3 is to subscribe to my Inner Circle newsletter at scottsinnercircle-subscribe@yahoogroups.com to get tour updates and a link to each day's stops--do both and double your chances!

And if that's not enough, sign up to follow my Twitter account at www.twitter.com/hauntedcomputer and be eligible for another prize package of ebooks and signed books.