The Cat-alyst Chronicles Coming Soon

On Friday, November 7, book 5 of The Library Saga will be available to buy on Kindle Unlimited and in paperback, then a day later, as an audiobook as part of Audible Plus. If you’re into parody, with mix of fantasy, sci-fi, noir, and other genre mashups, then check out the series. Except for the first two, which was to pretty much introduce the characters and their world, books 3 through the rest are (or will be) the length of the novels I usually write.

Every character gets their own book and an adventure in different genres. The Unwritten Fallout was Alexandria’s, book 6 will be the Archivist’s, book 7 will be Bonnie, and book 8 will be Nora Clue. Books 9 & 10 will have them rejoin each other with new characters from their own adventures to take down the overall antagonist of the series.

Dewey has to team up with six cat heroes in his own adventure. They must rewrite their fate one thread at a time, but the saga is fracturing and a multiversal crisis is calling. They’ll have to deal with animal-verse fanfiction, a threat to their nine lives as cats, overlapping boss fights, and a genre-mashing antagonist before they can continue on. The Cat-alyst Chronicles is a surreal, genre-savvy adventure.

Amazon

The Library Saga Series Amazon page

Teaser from chapter 3

Dewey hit the ground with a thud, rolling through a patch of hay that smelled faintly of ink and cotton candy. He spat out a tuft of narrative fluff and staggered to his paws, blinking at the bizarre landscape around him. Wooden fences stretched in every direction, painted in garish carnival colors. Signs dangled from posts, each one scrawled with cheerful slogans:

“Pet the Plot Devices!”
“Feed the Foreshadowing!”
“Don’t Tap the Fourth Wall!”

Behind the fences, enclosures writhed with impossible creatures. A herd of Chekhov’s Guns clattered their triggers nervously, each one mounted on spindly legs like startled gazelles. A flock of Red Herrings flopped in a shallow pond and their scales glittered with misleading clues. In the distance, a towering Deus Ex Machina dozed in its pen, its golden wings twitching as if waiting for the perfect moment to swoop in and resolve everything.

The Cat-alyst Team tumbled in behind him, landing in a heap of capes, wands, and hoverboards. Pawlette scrambled upright, brushed hay from her fur, and exclaimed, “We’re alive! The system redirected us safely!”

Clawdia rose more slowly, her eyes narrowing as she scanned the enclosures. “Safely is a generous word. This place reeks of narrative containment.”

Meowgenta laughed, spinning her hoverboard in a lazy circle. “Containment or carnival, it’s all the same thing. Look at all the exhibits! It’s like a theme park for tropes.”

Dewey flicked his tail, unimpressed. “Yeah, a theme park where the rides eat you if you get too close.” He eyed a nearby pen where a pair of Love Triangles hissed at each other, their sharp angles sparking whenever they collided. “And I’m not buying a ticket.”

The HUD blinked back to life, its fonts now styled like a zoo brochure.
[Welcome to the Genre Petting Zoo!]
[Objective: Learn Cooperation by Touring Exhibits with Your Team.]
[Warning: Do Not Feed the Metaphors.]

Dewey groaned. “Great, a field trip, that’s just what I needed.”

The Cat-alyst Team perked up at the directive, as if the HUD had handed them a mission. Pawlette clapped her paws together. “This is perfect! We can bond as a team while exploring the exhibits.”

Clawdia’s ears twitched. “Or we can watch him fail again.”

Meowgenta grinned. “Either way, it’ll be fun.”

Dewey sighed, already dreading whatever “lesson” the zoo had in store. He padded toward the nearest enclosure, muttering under his breath. “If this ends with me singing another theme song, I’m using one of my lives to escape.”

The HUD blinked insistently, its fonts now styled like a cheerful zoo brochure.
[Objective: Learn Cooperation by Touring Exhibits with Your Team.]
[Warning: Do Not Feed the Metaphors.]

Pawlette perked up immediately, with her wand twinkling as she pointed toward the nearest enclosure. “Look! The Red Herring Pond! This is the perfect place to start.”

The pond shimmered with fish that glowed in misleading colors. Some were painted with arrows pointing toward nonexistent exits, while others had flashing signs like “This Way to Destiny!”

Dewey crouched at the edge, unimpressed. One particularly gaudy herring leapt out of the water and slapped him across the whiskers before flopping back in.

“Subtle,” Dewey muttered, shaking off the splash. “A whole pond dedicated to wasting my time.”
Clawdia smirked. “Maybe if you followed them, you’d finally get somewhere.”

“Yeah,” Dewey shot back, “straight into a dead end. Which, come to think of it, is probably your idea of progress.”

Two New Books

Coming soon to Kindle Unlimited, the two newest novels in The Library Saga: The Algorithmic Draft and The Unwritten Fallout. Both of these novels are available to pre-order now, or you can wait until Monday when they’ll be available. All four are exclusive to KU, and will be followed by at least six to eight more novels, depending on where the characters take me. They will be in paperback and audiobook too.

Every story has a beginning… but what if the beginning was the flaw?

When the Library fractures under the weight of algorithmic forces, the companions are thrust into a gauntlet of corrupted genres — sitcoms, fairy tales, mysteries, pulp war novels, and even the library’s own foundations. Each shard hunt becomes a parody of pop culture, but also a mirror of the heroes themselves: the Princess trapped in glass crowns, the Marine saluted by mannequins, the Detective’s notebook writing without her, the Sitcom Dad haunted by laugh tracks.

As the Arcane Archivist’s echo grows stronger, the group realizes the shards aren’t just fragments of story — they’re pieces of the library’s origin. The final keystone lies in the Founder’s Wing, where the library began on a faultline of narrative convergence. To save what remains, they must tear out the very heart of the library, knowing the victory may destroy it.

The Algorithmic Draft is twice as long as its predecessor, escalating from playful parody to existential stakes. It closes with a Pyrrhic triumph: the shards recovered, but the library collapsing, and the whisper of the Archivist promising, “This is only the first draft.”

On Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Draft-Library-Saga-Book-ebook/dp/B0FXBDJC7G

The Unwritten Fallout is Book 4 of The Library Saga, a genre-bending ensemble novel that bridges the collapse of canon with the rise of chaos. It sets the stage for the character spotlight novellas to come — where myth, bureaucracy, and metafiction collide.
 
While the library’s stories are breaking loose, a genre corruption spills into the town, and reality begins to rewrite itself. Council hearings glitch into game shows. Newsrooms dissolve into narrative loops. And the Library’s surviving staff — Alexandria, Bonnie, Dewey, and a cast of reshelved fragments — must navigate a world where every headline is suspect and every character arc is up for grabs.

On Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Unwritten-Fallout-Library-Saga-Book-ebook/dp/B0FXHJZFKN

Series page: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FVV6HM92

New Novel & New Audiobooks

This will be the first blog post I’ve done in almost three years! Back in 2016 and 2017, I was burned out from writing eleven novels in four years, so I got stuck on two that I had planned on writing after I had finished with The End Times Saga and Perilous Times series. I promoted my novels a little after that, then it got to barely, and by the end of 2022, I was over the whole idea, or so I thought. I also kind of let my website go for a while, so I have a lot of adding to it to do and freshening it up wherever pictures and links are broken.

So, one the novels I had planned on in 2017, was a sequel (or full series) to The Long Journey, where the next novel has the main character and his family dealing with the Civil War and its fallout. So, I began doing research, but due to the MC being Cherokee, I discovered the Cherokee nation had its own mini-civil war during the main war, so I got discouraged and stopped because I wasn’t sure how to weave the story correctly. At the moment, that’s really far on the backburner and I will revisit it, eventually.

The other novel that I started writing after getting stuck with the other one, is a what-if story about a Gen X man (write what you know, right? lol), this time I have it briefly set during those fun days of 2020. He’s watching YouTube videos about Gen X nostalgia and wishing he could be thirteen again so he could change some things in his life that he had always regretted. I had about four chapters done when I pretty much lost the plot, not really knowing where to go with the plotline since I myself really couldn’t remember things from 87-92 due to my general apathy towards junior & senior high. The novel started meandering and then I just hit a brick wall creatively. So, I walked away from it and writing in general, thinking I was done with sixteen novels to my name.

Then, I lost my job this last July. I’ve been having difficulty even getting interviews/jobs thanks to companies relying solely on checking resumes with ATS (Applicant Tracking System) and using video interviews (one way Zoom/Teams interviews are so stupid when I live in the same city as the company and also kind of intimidating for an introvert like myself), so I began wondering what I should do to keep busy in the meantime. I decided to see if I could restart my freelance proofreading WFH business that I stopped in 2013 due to my dads’ health failing and mom needing a lot of help, which eventually required almost my full attention for a couple years, so I abandoned the idea. I realized as I was trying to figure out what to do that I’m so far behind on what freelancing has turned into thanks to AI and tech in general, that it’s pretty overwhelming.

But, also thanks to AI and updated technology, I realized I could make every one of my novels into audiobooks, so that’s what I’ve done. For The End Times Saga, only the first four novels were audiobooks because it was easy and affordable to get voice actors before Amazon bought Audible and changed the rules, so that’s why there was only four audiobooks, instead of seven, for that series. Now, because those four are exclusive, I could only make the next three novels exclusive to Amazon/Audible, as it wouldn’t make sense to have the last three available everywhere, but not the first four. Anyway, using Amazon’s Virtual Voice, I now have the entire End Times Saga available as audiobooks in just a couple days as I listened to make sure the AI pronounced things carefully, although flatter than I would’ve liked (I’m not sure I could do any better). However, I plan on ending being exclusive to only Amazon/Audible so I can upload the entire series to sell on other platforms, including my own.

For other novels that I could add to my store on Gumroad: the three in the Perilous Times series The Long Journey, The Usurper, Don’t Mess With Earth, and The New Frontier Series, I used Amazon’s virtual voice for Audible, then used the virtual voices from Google Play books to create those so I could use Voices by In Audio for distribution to other platforms, but that takes time. With Google Play, I could have separate voices, which I only did for the female characters in the novels for the Perilous Times. Unfortunately, the female characters almost all sound the same to me, like Siri or Alexa, but with accents. Samples are available to listen to on Youtube or on the Gumroad product pages.

Now the what-if novel. I decided to restart it. I was still not sure what to do with where I was stuck in chapter 4 and my outline not being nearly as laid out as I thought. so I went to ChatGPT and gave it some prompts. It returned with clearer ideas than what I originally had, along with an outline that was laid out better than what I did. It also helped with giving me the slang of the period that I didn’t remember due to me being a nerd who spoke “proper” American English, and other sensory details and pop culture references that I didn’t remember or know either, like hanging out at the mall, since it was too far from my house.

So, now I have clearer vision of where I want my novel to go story wise, which is called, Second Chances. So, look out for that in the coming weeks or months, depending on how long I’m down the rabbit hole of Gen X pop culture videos.

Novel sales stats for 2012

First off, Happy New Year 2013 to everyone and a big thank you to all those out there who bought/downloaded a copy of one of my novels. I thought I’d blog again this year about how many sales/free downloads my novels had this year. My marketing/promoting consisted mostly of using Twitter, Facebook groups/pages, joining up with a couple Christian author groups to Tweet, and going to message boards. I did some giveaways for ebooks, like on Librarything, and sent some personal acquaintances/relatives paperback copies of Times of Trouble (which actually did help some with visibility), along with a little more than a handful of review copies to a couple of book bloggers, two of which actually gave me a review. I also tried blog interviews early in the year, along with the occasional paid post about my books, but overall, I’d say 99% of my sales would probably be from word-of-mouth. My sales on Barnes and Noble increased by a lot this year, up to 40-50 ebooks sold a month compared to 2 or 3 a month in 2011.  My number one seller is the United States, followed by the UK, Canada, Australia, and then everyone else, mostly Western/Northern Europe, but I did manage to get an Amazon Kindle sale from Japan, which was a borrow for Beyond the New Frontier, and 2 sales on Diesel from South Africa. This is without the updated numbers from Smashwords concerning Apple, Sony, or Diesel from December.

Here’s the numbers for each book in order of publication:

Out of Time
Kindle(ASIN B006GDO3BC): 1107
Barnes & Noble Nook: 37
Kobo, which includes WH Smith, Angus & Robertson, and Chapters Indigo: 42
Apple: 51
Sony: 4
Smashwords: 2 paid, 64 free
Paperback (ISBN:1453896961) : 8

Don’t Mess With Earth
Kindle(ASIN B005OOKZJI): 52
Nook: 39
Kobo: 2
Apple: 5
Diesel: 1
Smashwords: 2 paid, 47 free
Paperback(ISBN 978-1602643413): 2

The Usurper
Kindle(ASIN B007K9WDA4): 92 paid, 518 Select downloads (January – March)
Nook: 47
Kobo: 4
Apple: 14
Smashwords: 1 paid, 18 free
Paperback (ISBN 1453702725): 12

Shattered Earth
Kindle(ASIN B006M2U3O8) – 8 sales, unpublished it, but will bring it back this year
Nook: 48
Kobo: 20
Apple: 52
Smashwords: 1 sale, 61 free
Paperback (probably only available on Amazon, since I retired it on Createspace): 3

Dust Storm (western short story) – plagued by Smashwords’ meatgrinder, so it wasn’t published to Apple or Sony until later in the year. Sold on Kobo once I uploaded there myself.
Kindle(ASIN B006KH7H4E): 9
Nook: 7
Kobo: 1
Apple: 1
Sony: 1
Smashwords: 2 paid, 12 free

Voyager and the Aliens (sci-fi short story)
Kindle(ASIN B005NK19MU): 14
Nook: 2
Kobo: 5
Apple: 9
Diesel: 1
Smashwords: 1 paid, 27 free

New Frontier
Kindle(ASIN B006ONBPVU): 99
Nook: 58
Kobo: 2
Apple: 7
Sony: 1
Smashwords: 5 paid, 62 free
Baker & Taylor Blio: 1
Paperback (ISBN 1468119540): 18

Times of Trouble
Kindle(ASIN B0075CNFFI): 309
Nook: 343
Kobo: 1
Apple: 0
Sony: 0
Smashwords: 128 free
Paperback (ISBN-10: 1469964791) 43

Times of Trial
Kindle(ASIN B00824G5UA): 99
Nook: 120
Kobo: 3
Apple: 0
Sony (for some reason, not available on Sony): 0
Smashwords: 31 free
Paperback(ISBN-10 147745327X): 5

Final Frontier – published in October
Kindle(ASIN B009ORP5U0): 26
Nook: 22
Kobo: 0
Apple: 0
Sony: 0
Smashwords: 0
Paperback (ISBN-10: 1481192191): 0

Beyond the New Frontier – combo of New & Final Frontier, available on Amazon to borrow for free or buy for $3.99
Kindle paid(ASIN B009NVH76M): 28, KDP Select: 724, Borrows: 2
Paperback (ISBN-10: 1480185590): 1

The total equals 1694 free and 2858 paid sales. My goal for 2013 is to double the paid sales without having to rely on free giveaways as much. I’m also working on a prequel to Times of Trouble, most likely called “Times of Turmoil.” I also re-designed a whole new author website on weebly. I was using webs.com, but it was way too clunky, but Weebly seems to be pretty user-friendly. Please check it out http://cliffball-indieauthor.weebly.com when you have time (waiting for domain name transfer, so it night re-direct back to webs.com). Now, I just have to figure out how to transfer my domain name over to it.

#SampleSunday – Final Frontier, alternate history

For Sample Sunday, here is a part of Chapter 7 of Final Frontier.

A couple of hours went by before anything started happening. As McMurphy and Elders were hiding behind some boxes on the floor where Lee Harvey Oswald was supposed to have shot Kennedy from, both men heard a door open, with two men walking through. The man who came in first was definitely Oswald, and the second man behind him was shoving a pistol in Oswald’s back, and was carrying something large that was shaped like a rifle of some sort.

Oswald was saying, “Why me?”

“As I keep saying, we need someone who we can blame the assassination easily on. You’ve got a record of siding with the Soviets, so why not you? The federal government will blindly swallow this story hook, line, and sinker, while the Mob will get off scot-free,”

“Ruby, you know you won’t get away with this, don’t you?” Oswald nervously responded.

“Oh, stop with the bravado. We’ve got the Dallas PD in our back pocket and even some of the Secret Service, at least the ones who work for old Lyndon. This should be a piece ‘o cake. All I need from you are some fingerprints, you’ll go to a movie theater, and that’s where the police officers in our employ will pick you up. You take the fall, the Mob gets an enemy out of the way, and everyone’s happy,”

“That’s a bunch of bull. What makes you think I won’t rat you out?”

“You do and you’ll meet your maker with a couple of .38 slugs. Got it?” Ruby waved the handgun in Oswald’s face, who was clearly frightened.

“Yeah, sure. How long do we gotta wait?”

Ruby looked at his watch, and said, “Not very long. Old Lyndon had the motorcade diverted here, so it should be passing through Dealey Plaza momentarily. Once I begin shooting, you slip out of here, and go to that movie theater. No need to make it more complicated than that. Alright?” Oswald indicated he understood.

McMurphy whispered to Elders, “That’s Jack Ruby,”

“Who?”

“Oh, that’s right, you don’t know about what happened in the original timeline. Mr. Ruby there attacked Oswald at the police station after the assassination with that handgun he’s carrying. Oswald died and so did Ruby after the police took care of him. Ruby is a member of the Mob that the Kennedy’s were at odds with. Nobody really knew the whole story behind the assassination. Rumors indicated that Vice President Johnson had the Mob take Kennedy out, which is why the motorcade was diverted here and why Johnson managed to convince Kennedy to make a campaign stop in Dallas to begin with. It was supposed to be neatly wrapped up so Johnson could gain power without having to run for election. Everyone would feel sorry about Kennedy not getting a second term, so Johnson would ride the wave of sympathy to get his first full term without really trying,”

“That must’ve required a massive amount of planning. It’s a wonder that it was pulled off without anyone blowing the whistle,”

“Potential whistleblowers were taken care of, either through being paid off or through death. That was old school south Texas politics for Johnson. Now that won’t happen since we’re here. Now we wait.”

The crowd gathered around the route that President Kennedy’s motorcade was taking. Ruby set-up the sniper rifle and then told Oswald to leave, but before anything happened, McMurphy and Elders stepped out of the shadows, and McMurphy said, “Hold it right there, neither of you move,”

“What? Who are you? You’re not supposed to be here!” exclaimed a surprised Ruby.

“I give up,” Oswald responded with both hands in the air.

“Step away from the rifle, Mr. Ruby. We don’t want anyone to get hurt,”

Ruby responded by turning around, facing the window, and then ran towards it. He crashed through it, fell, and died instantly when he hit the ground. The men could hear members of the crowd reacting to seeing a man falling out of the building. Then the three heard the roar of the engines from the cars in the motorcade, which indicated they were getting the President out of there as fast as they could. McMurphy let loose a string of cuss words before saying, “Great, just great. Now we’ll have cops and Secret Service swarming this place.”

Where to buy:

Amazon US, Amazon UK, B&N Nook, Nook UK, Kobo, Apple

Or… Beyond the New Frontier, which is currently exclusive to Amazon is either free to borrow now for Prime Members or buy for $4.99. Also available in paperback currently on Amazon.

Potential novels, sequels, & other scribblings

When I started writing and publishing my works, I never thought I would publish more than maybe two novels. Well, now I’m up to eight novels, and setting to write my ninth. My goal this year was to write and publish at least two novels, and I did that, with three. I also thought I’d never write sequels or a series of novels in the same universe, but I have. I’m sure some wonder if I’m going to have any sequels to some of my older novels, and I’ve been asked, but right now, I don’t know. Here’s an update on my current novels and future works.

Out of Time It took me a long time to get this novel right, but I finally did. Anyway, I thought about writing a sequel, but at the moment, I have no idea where I’d want my time travelers to go. I did start to write something about Janet Erickson, the captain of the Einstein, but I got stuck after a page or two of writing. I have an idea of what I might want, but I’m not sure if it’s a novel length story, a novella, or a short story. If I get around to writing it out, I’ll see.

Don’t Mess With Earth – I actually sent a short story version of this in the mid-1990’s to the Writer’s of the Future contest, but got nowhere with it. I wrote a full length novel, but this is one of my stories that people either like or dislike, and I re-wrote it into a version of Shattered Earth, changing the beginning, and making the novel longer by over 25k words. I have been asked by 1 or 2 readers if I’m going to tell the story of the Ragnor after Earth destroys them for the most part, but I really don’t know. I wrote a page a year or so ago, but haven’t returned to it. We’ll see.

The Usurper – No sequel. I wrote this mostly to push buttons, and if you’ve seen some of the reviews I’ve received on Amazon, you’ll know that I did just that.

New Frontier & Final Frontier – Final Frontier is the sequel to New Frontier, so I’m not sure about another sequel. I might one day go back to Final Frontier to include a chapter or two near the end, because I glossed over what happened to the Soviet Starship Gagarin in one of the alternate timelines, but if I say more than that, it would be spoiling the story for those that haven’t read it.

My End Times Series of novels – The next novel I’m going to write is about the story of Michael Evans, starting with his grandfather, who I’ll have palling around with Hitler in WW2. The Evans’ will try to manipulate events from behind the scenes, get England to balk at giving Israel as much land as they were going to give them after the war, finance the enemies of Israel, start to interfere in American society, and have appearances by the grandparents of the main characters from Times of Trouble. How Evans finds David Collins and the Iranian, and how they manipulate events before the Tribulation. I think I’ll begin writing it in November, taking time to do a lot of research while I’m doing it, and possibly getting it finished in early 2013. I was also thinking of at least one young adult novel in the series, even though Times of Trial is kind of leaning towards that, since Greg and Laura are two of the main characters, and they’re teens, but I’ll just have to see how that works out.

As for short stories, I’ve come up with a few of those, but a lot of them are so different in genre, I don’t know if I should put those in a short story collection, but I will think about it. Next year, I want to publish at least three more novels, if possible.

New Release: Final Frontier

Final Frontier is the sequel to the novel I published last year, New Frontier. Currently available for $2.99 on Kindle(ASIN: B009ORP5U0), SmashwordsNook, and Kobo. Also, Times of Trouble is currently going for $.99 on Kindle (ASIN:B0075CNFFI) (but is available in paperback and on other e-book platforms), and Out of Time, my time travel novel is always $.99 (on all ebook platforms). Update: all of my ebooks, but Beyond the New Frontier, are $.99 for the month on Kindle.

What it’s about:

In this sequel to New Frontier, the USS Lewis & Clark begin their search for the Soviet starship Yuri Gagarin. They find the wormhole that the Gagarin went through twelve years earlier and decide to go through it. On the other side, the crew of the Lewis & Clark find a solar system that used to be populated by aliens known as Pictorians, but they’re no longer there. Neither is the crew of the Gagarin. So, the Lewis & Clark is flown back through the wormhole to report back to Earth.

Unfortunately, something is wrong, they find themselves 30 years in the past. As they struggle to wait for their future to catch up, the crew of the Lewis & Clark make changes to certain events, but they cause unintended consequences; including making another alien species mad enough to forbid humans from traveling beyond the Sol System. Find out what happens in this conclusion of the New Frontier series.

Also available is the combined versions of both novels, which is available to borrow for free for Amazon Prime Memebers, called Beyond the New Frontier (ASIN: B009NVH76M) and is currently free until the end of Thursday, the 11th of October. Tops out at 84,779 words.

Sales for the year so far

Now that it’s June, here are my sales numbers for the year so far, from regular sales to when one of my novels was in KDP Select to free giveaways. These are all from mostly just promoting online on Twitter, Facebook, and a bunch of message boards. The novels are listed in order of publication, from 2008 to 2012.

Amazon US Kindle
Out of Time – 34
Don’t Mess With Earth – 13
The Usurper  – (regular sales) – 67
KDP Select numbers for The Usurper – 329
Shattered Earth (which I unpublished on Amazon) – 8
Voyager & The Aliens – 3
Dust Storm – 4
New Frontier – 50
Times of Trouble – 89
Times of Trial – 9

Amazon UK Kindle
Out of Time – 8
Don’t Mess With Earth – 4
The Usurper – 8
KDP Select for The Usurper – 176
Voyager & The Aliens – 1
Dust Storm – 0
Times of Trouble – 4
Times of Trial – 1

Amazon Germany
Out of Time – 1
The Usurper (KDP Select) – 4
New Frontier – 1

Amazon France
The Usurper (KDP Select) – 2

Amazon Italy
The Usurper (KDP Select) – 2

Amazon Spain
The Usurper (KDP Select) – 6

Barnes & Noble Nook, which is partially through PubIt, B&N’s publishing platform and through Smashwords
Out of Time – 17
Don’t Mess With Earth – 17
The Usurper – 15
Shattered Earth – 19
Voyager & The Aliens – 1
Dust Storm – 3
New Frontier – 12
Times of Trouble – 109
Times of Trial – 7

Apple iTunes
Out of Time – 29
Don’t Mess With Earth – 4
The Usurper – 5
Shattered Earth -25
Voyager & The Aliens – 4
New Frontier – 3
Times of Trouble (only available since May)
Times of Trial (not yet available)

Kobo
Out of Time – 10
Don’t Mess With Earth – 1
The Usurper (Kobo has yet to list it)
Shattered Earth – 8
Voyager & The Aliens – 0
New Frontier – 0
Times of Trouble (only available since May)
Times of Trial (not yet available)

Sony Reader
Out of Time – 1
Everything else – 0

Smashwords paid/giveaways
Out of Time – 1/39
Don’t Mess With Earth – 1/26
The Usurper – 0/9
Shattered Earth – 0/37
Voyager & The Aliens -0/14
Dust Storm (I unpublished it because I couldn’t get the formatting right) – 2/12
New Frontier – 5/41
Times of Trouble – 0/87
Times of Trial – 0/1

Createspace Paperbacks, all of which were sales from mostly Amazon
Out of Time – 2
The Usurper – 7
Shattered Earth – 3
New Frontier – 12
Times of Trouble – 30
Times of Trial – 0

Total between January & end of May: 1423

Overall total since 2008: 26381

I’m posting this because some writers get discouraged, but you just have to keep at it. While I don’t have the money or much in the way of resources to push my novels to greater visibility, I think I’m doing pretty well. I took The Usurper out of KDP Select because my sales were actually worse overall, and I had a grand total of 3 borrows, so I didn’t think that program was worth it. Stay tuned for the sequel to New Frontier, plus a short story anthology based on minor characters in the two End Times novels, and a novel about Michael Evans, the man-behind-the-scenes in both End Times novels.

Two new reviews

In the last week, I’ve received two new reviews for two different novels, both of which are 5 stars. The first one is for Out of Time, which is my very first novel that I published in 2008 as a total newbie, where I mistakenly used iUniverse as a publisher and spent way too much for a novel that wasn’t really ready for prime time. Two years later, I went back through it, added scenes, corrected grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and fixed dialogue. I decided to do a fresh re-publish of  it on the Kindle a little over a year ago(along with a new version of the paperback on Createspace), since the old reviews reflected all the mistakes I made in it. Now, I’ve received a new review for it:

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a wonderful time travel novella.

You get to go back to some famous events in American and world history: The Wounded Knee Massacre, Sinking of the Titanic, JFK’s assassination, and more with some highly original and unique alternative timelines.

This is well written and compelling, page-turning stuff. Ball poses some interesting thoughts about how government could mess up the world if it ever got its hands on such a time device. It’s fun to read about it, but let’s just hope it never happens.

I thoroughly enjoyed this story, just disappointed it ended too soon.

James A. Anderson, Author
London, Ontario Canada”

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Now, here’s a new review for my latest novel, my 7th, Times of Trial. This is from a regular reader of mine who first found out about me by reading The Usurper. Since then, she’s given me very good reviews for The Usurper(which is the paperback version, the Kindle version is no longer linked to the paperback) and Times of Trouble.

“Another winner! May 18, 2012
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book can be read on it’s own or with Times of Trouble. The scariest part of this book is that I can see it happening with the upcoming election. The author draws you into the story and never lets go. You can feel the pain of the characters and can picture yourself in the story.
We can only hope that the story doesn’t play out in real life.”

I appreciate all of the readers who have taken a chance on me and have read my novels. Thanks!

 

Next novel, Times of Trial, possible book cover

This is a possible cover to my next novel, Times of Trial, but it probably could use some tweaking or something altogether different. I could use some feedback if anyone’s willing to give me some. I would appreciate it.

  The novel is a parallel novel to Times of Trouble. A preacher and his family, the Tyler’s,  have a church that is dying in Arizona, and they take care of the remaining senior saints, including the ones in nursing homes, etc. The remaining family, the White’s, leave the same church and head to Wyoming to live in a community that was originally started by Doomsday Preppers back in the early 2000’s so they can attempt to escape the increasing persecution of Christians. Meanwhile, President Collins orders the activation of Camps across the country that will house believers who he thinks are a threat to his rule. His patron, Michael Collins, places a new man in charge in Iran, who consolidates his power and attempts to take a swipe at Israel. Israel strikes back, but the rest of the world sympathizes with Iran. The Tyler’s end up with others in a Camp in Arizona,  the White’s and the community they live in get attacked, other events happen that also occur in Times of Trouble, and Evans continues to manipulate events as the Rapture takes the Christians, and he gains ultimate power.