A giveaway and a bargain

Today I’m providing my wonderful followers with not 1 but 2 great opportunities; first up is the change to win 3, that’s right, 3 books from award winning author P D Workman, who is running a giveaway on Goodreads for her Medical Kidnap Files series.

You can enter the giveaway here but before you do, you might want to know a little more about the books, so here they are

Mito, Medical Kidnap Files #1

Gabriel has dealt with mysterious medical issues his whole life. Just when he finally thought that they had all of the answers and he was on the road to good health, he is apprehended by DFS on the grounds of medical neglect.

At first, he thought that he would be back home in a few days, once the misunderstanding was cleared up. But when Renata tells Gabriel her crazy conspiracy theories, Gabriel feels the first pangs of doubt. Is there really a conspiracy? Will he ever be able to get well and go back to his mother, or is he doomed to be another guinea pig for Doctor De Klerk?

EDS, Medical Kidnap Files #2

With a long string of unbelievable stories to explain her frequent injuries, Social Services sees Katt is the stereotypical abused child. When she is admitted to hospital with yet another broken bone, they do the only logical thing to protect her, removing Katt from her mother’s custody.

But Katt and her mother know that something is wrong, and it has nothing to do with abuse, and the longer Katt stays in foster care, the worse her health gets. Can they get the answers they need before it is too late? Can they get the answers and get Katt back home?

 

Proxy, Medical Kidnap Files #3

Fourteen-year-old Seth Wilcox has been admitted to the hospital forty-eight times, according to his mother’s latest social media posts, when Social Services steps in and takes Seth into care, believing his mother suffers from Munchausen by Proxy and Seth is not safe in her care.

Gabriel Tate is now a veteran in dealing with medical kidnap and reuniting children with their families. He knows Seth and his mom, Leva, a tireless mitochondrial disorder advocate. He knows he needs to get Seth back to Leva as soon as he can.

With the authorities hot on their trails, Gabriel and Renata face increasingly difficult challenges. Can they stay one step ahead of the authorities? Can they finally get Seth somewhere he will be safe?

There’s only 5 days left to enter if you’re in the US or Canada for a chance to win all 3 of these novels in paperback, but this is an opportunity not to be missed.

---

The 2nd of today’s great opportunities is brought to you by me, my novel, Where There’s A Will, the 1st book in my Inspector Stone series is on sale today as a countdown deal and can be had for just 99c or 99p, depending on which side of the pond that is the Atlantic you’re on.

For those of you who are new to my blog, here’s a bit about the book

Where There’s A Will

Inspector Stone Book One

An armed robbery, a kidnapping, and an enemy that’s closer than anyone realises.

A rich family, a big house, and everything her heart desires, Alice Keating has a life that many want, and now someone has decided to take it.
Inspector Stone has to put aside problems at home and an ambitious underling when Alice is kidnapped, and a multi-million Euro ransom demanded for her return.
Can he find her and return her safely to her parents when the man behind Alice’s kidnapping it closer to home than anyone suspects, and he’s not above murder to stay out of jail and get what he wants.

Amazon US

Amazon UK

Make sure you check the price before purchasing as this is a limited time offer.

A Holiday Showcase

The moderators of the Goodreads group I am part of, SIA (which stands for Support Indie Authors), a lovely group of people, by which I mean the group as a whole, not just the moderators, have put together an event for the holidays intended to showcase some of their favourite books from among those written by the members of the group.

The books that have been featured cover a wide variety of genres with prices to match all pockets. If you’re looking to fill up your kindle with some fabulous new reads, look no further, since click this link and visit the event to see what books might appeal to you form the selection on offer.

I’ve just started Jane Jago’s  ‘Shall We Gather At The River?’ and the opening chapter certainly has me interested as a body is found by a group of teens at a forced religious retreat in Devon, a place I visited as a child, and which features in one of my own, as yet unpublished, books – I’m referring to Devon not the religious retreat.

Shall We Gather At The River? A new release

Author Jane Jago today releases her new cozy mystery, Shall we gather at the river?

…for a moment the silence was blissful. Then the screaming started…

The body of a young woman is found floating in a Devon river; she has been beaten and tortured, then strangled and discarded.

Finding out who she was, and why she died, is only the beginning of an increasingly violent and disturbing trip into a world of vicious sadism and routine abuse.

Writing team Leo and Mike Johnson will be lucky to get out of this one with all their fingers and toes

Available from Amazon for 99c/99p or free if you’re a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, just click the link below

Amazon

Pre-order my debut

As I revealed the other day, my debut novel is coming soon, well thanks to some hard work that soon is closer than expected. I have set the release date as November 3rd and you can pre-order the book between now and then

Where There’s A Will

(excerpt)

Crash smashed a fist into the chauffeur’s kidney a second time, he then pulled him away from Jim and threw him into the side of the van. A kick to the back of the knee made Brian fall forward, and Crash smashed his head into the side door of the van. Twice more he did that until the chauffeur’s body went limp and blood ran down his face.

“Get on with it,” he snapped at his partners, who were still trying to drag Alice from the car. From the back pocket of Jim’s combat trousers, he took the envelope that was sticking out, which he shoved into the inside pocket of Brian Jacob’s jacket. That done, he returned to his previous position behind the wheel, where he revved the engine impatiently.

With two men pulling at her, Alice found it impossible to save herself, and, with a final heave, she was yanked from the Bentley to land with a painful thud on the concrete.

---

If that sounds good, you can pre-order the book at the following links

Amazon US

Amazon UK

To be brief, or not to be brief

As regular readers will know, I have been posting my work in progress, Where There’s A Will, on Wattpad; I’ve been doing so to get people interested in my work prior to the book being released on Kindle, and also to get some feedback so I can make the book as good as it can be.

Advice has been limited, and I understand that it can be hard to get comments, but what I have been told is that my book is overwritten. Objectively I can see they are right, and I have been working on that issue with my current draft, but now I’m worrying that I am going too far and cutting more than just the padding, and in the process perhaps losing some of what makes people like my writing.

What occurred to me today is that Wattpad is largely populated by teens, while my target audience is older, 20+, and that perhaps I’m adapting my style of writing to suit a group of people who aren’t likely to either buy or read my books. Teens seem to want books that are shorter and more to the point, while I think adults prefer, or at least are more willing to read, books that are more descriptive.

Let me know in the comments what you think; do you like a stripped back book that is little more than plot, or do you like to see descriptive writing with a decent level of scene setting.

Why?

Sometimes I wonder why I’ve chosen writing as a career. Okay, so I haven’t exactly ‘chosen’ it, I’ve been writing for most of my life, I believe I’m better than average at it, and I have been out of work for a while so it seems sensible to try and make a living out of a hobby that does have a potential income attached to it.

Days like today, though, make me wonder if I’m really cut out for it. I had a writing career previously under another name, it was only a hobbyist kind of thing then, and circumstances forced me to give it up, but before they did I was starting to do well enough that I was making enough money to believe I could do it full time.

Now I am back at the beginning, trying to get my books ready for release, and trying to promote the novella I have already released. My novella is free on Kindle today and tomorrow to try and generate some interest and I have been looking around for places to promote and let people know about my freebie; one of the places I visited is the Amazon discussion boards, where I made one post before getting discouraged and deciding not to bother.

The rules of the discussion boards have changed since I was last there, several years ago, and apparently you are no longer allowed to promote your own books there, as was pointed out to me almost straight away – that’s fine, I can live with that, I wasn’t aware of it but am now; my problem is that the person who pointed it out to me spotted one typo in my post, which was written quickly, and immediately declared that if my post is anything to go by my book must be unreadable.

I don’t mind that I was told what I posted was against the rules, I don’t mind either that my spelling mistake was pointed out to me, what I mind is the pretty rude way my book is declared bad – without it even being looked at – on the basis of 1 post on a forum. This has reminded me of why I didn’t much like the amazon discussion boards when I was using them before, there’s a lot of rude people on there, people who feel they can be insulting just because they can; as I remember, the behaviour tripped over into trolling on a few occasions, which gets to me.

This kind of thing does nothing to help me with my issues surrounding socialising and interacting with people; I’m already struggling with them. I don’t do well at dealing with people, and encountering rude or inconsiderate people makes me want to withdraw and avoid the entire social media world, whichever corner of it I might be trying.

My first full-length novel is due out in January, and I know I’m going to have to work something out before then. Right now I’m thinking I will be doing very little with social media, it’s just not me, and sticking with paid advertising, at least until I can afford to hire someone to handle the social media stuff for me.

If anyone has good suggestions on how to handle this stuff without making my brain go into meltdown and giving me panic attacks that send me running for the hills, I’d really appreciate it.