science fiction

New #SciFi #Comedy

Free scifi novel DeadlineMake a great start to the new year with a fun, light-hearted science fiction novel, available for free on LitNet for a limited time only.

Being made redundant almost a billion kilometres from Earth was a bad way to start the week, and Blake Horton did not expect it to get any better.

This light-hearted sci-fi novel covers the misadventures of an out-of-work life support systems engineer on his way back to Earth and a reporter desperately in need of a scoop to save her career. He needs to get back before the reading of a will. She needs a breakthrough in her story before her time limit is up. With each other’s help getting back to Earth in time should be possible but life certainly isn’t about to make it that simple for them. An alien intruder, a rogue robot, space pirates and government agents are just some of the obstacles conspiring against them.

It will be moving to Amazon later on this year (where it will no longer be free), so read it now while you don’t have to pay for it and please leave a comment to let me know what you think!

Click here to see more.

Reviews are SO hard to get!

Astronomicon: The Beginning cover 3DI don’t have any figures comparing the rate of reader reviews between genres, but I can report from personal experience that getting readers to write a brief review of science fiction novels isn’t easy. My readers are more than happy to send me an e-mail, write a PM on Wattpad or Twitter etc., but persuading them to write a review (even a few words would do) on Amazon is another matter.

I’ve been preaching the line of “don’t tell me, tell everyone else” for months now, but it’s still not making much headway. I am extremely pleased to be able to report that Astronomicon: The Beginning has received nothing lower than 5-star reviews on Amazon.co.uk since the latter end of 2016 and the same on Amazon.com since July 2017. It looks like that last revamp of the novel really paid off – and it’s still FREE on both sites!

These consistently higher reviews have pushed my rating up to 4.3 stars out of 5. I’m very pleased with that.

My quest for the rest of 2018 is to find new and better ways to encourage my readers to post more reviews on Amazon. If I could just get 5% to post reviews I would more than double my total reviews in a month.

Maybe, when Behemoth is released on Amazon in a couple of month’s time, I should offer free copies to anyone who reviews one of my novels on any of the Amazon sites?

 

Can I finally call myself an Award Winning Author?

A while back, I was nominated to enter a writing competition on Wattpad. I’m not big on entering competitions. Too many times I’ve entered and heard nothing back from then on. This time, as it had been recommended to me, I entered my novel Astronomicon: Icarus and assumed that I would most probably never hear any more.

For the first time ever, I did hear something afterwards. Better still, much better, I was informed that I had actually won the competition. Now it’s not a massive competition and there’s no cash prize, but I am still thrilled to be recognised in any writing competition.

If nothing else, I will feel much more inclined to enter more competitions in future.

A Deadline that won’t be missed

Astronomicon Deadline Christmas offerIt’s been over a year since I published Astronomicon: Deadline on Amazon. Unlike all the other Astronomicon novels, it has performed embarrassingly poorly. Astronomicon #3 Those Left Behind has routinely sold more copies per week than Deadline has sold in total in over a year.

I’m not too upset though. I understand that my books are not all the same and that not everything will work. It would be great to just call it a learning experience but I’m not too sure what I’ve learned from it. Does humour not work in the Astronomicon universe (I don’t think that’s the case)? Was the story not up-to-scratch? Or was it just not as funny as I thought it was (probably likely)?

My problem is that I got very little feedback and what I did get was not too helpful. I suspect that it was a catastrophic failure on my part to successfully advertise its existence. Anyway, whatever the problem, Deadline is no more and is no longer available on Amazon. At some point in the future, I will probably rework it, create a new cover and re-release it, but it is not on my todo list.