Times of Trouble is my sixth novel, which will I will upload to Smashwords, B&N, and Createspace sometime in the next few days. It’s a Christian speculative fiction thriller. I’m aiming for the group of Christian readers who read the Left Behind series back in the late 90’s, and I’m hoping they’ll enjoy reading this novel.

What it’s about:

In the near future, the U.S. government has turned into a tyranny as the government agencies known as the EPA and TSA grow with ever more power, taking away the liberty many Americans had known for over two hundred years. They’re joined by a government agency, the Health Administration, which was put together in the mid-2010’s to regulate healthcare.

Told in first person point of view, Brian Atwood, our main character, is a field agent for the FBI in Omaha. His work involves mostly cyber terrorism and actual cases of potential real world terrorism. Eventually, his wife gives birth to their third child, who has Down’s Syndrome, which does not please the Health Administration because there are rules and regulations set-up in cases like these to prevent “genetic freaks” as they like to call them, from sucking up a lot of Health Admin money. Because the Atwoods are born again Christians, they never considered aborting the baby, so now the Health people have to take him away to deal with the problem later.

Meanwhile, the Secret Service decides to recruit Brian to be the personal agent of POTUS due to his great work involving a case that dealt with terrorism that would’ve involved Offutt Air Force Base. Brian’s faith is tested every day as he deals with a man that has no morals from what Brian can see, and is tested even more when his wife finds out that she’s dying from a fast growing form of breast cancer. Trouble in the rest of the world occurs as Iran attempts to nuke Israel, which fails spectacularly, so Israel takes care of the problem. This brings condemnation from everyone, including the US, which takes the side of Iran.

When the re-election of POTUS doesn’t turn out the way he wanted it, he and his people declare the election nullified because of supposed “irregularities” with the ballots. POTUS claims that the new President-elect may take the seat sometime in the middle of next year, if everything looks to be sorted out. POTUS purges his staff of what he considers unloyal people, including Brian. At the same time, he loses his wife, but regains the son he thought he had lost.

Brian moves back to his family home in Nebraska, where we follow what happens as the country slowly falls apart. Events play out as Brian and his family sees the End Times approach.

Stay tuned for news on when it can be purchased.

Stats for The Usurper in November

I decided to let The Usurper go free in November (and it’s still free, no thanks to Kobo not changing the price) with the understanding that I was going to get blasted by the perpetual Negative Nellies on Amazon (or elsewhere), but I thought it would be a good way to get my novel in the hands of readers who would have never seen it otherwise, and who may enjoy it. I had at least one person who did enjoy it, and she even sought me out on Facebook to tell me how much she enjoyed it. Another one e-mailed me, said they enjoyed it, but nitpicked a couple of things about how this or that was wrong (like the fact that Beatniks were in 1962, not hippies. I deleted that one line that was in the novel).

On a couple of those negative reviews on Amazon, I engaged the reader, asked them earnestly how I should fix a couple of issues they had, and they were surprised that I wasn’t flying off the handle, but that I asked and responded back in a positive way. Biggest issue was commas. Apparently, I had way too many. I was taught in college that more punctuation is better than not enough, (I’m constantly editing traditionally published novels in my head when they don’t have commas or periods where they should that should break up ideas, etc.) but people say it’s distracting. Ok, fine. Another issue was the character names, which I did to push buttons, and I’d say I did a good job of that, because it has pushed a lot of peoples’ buttons. So, taking all of this in stride, I spent a couple of days looking for too many commas in the novel and fixing them, fixing stupid grammatical mistakes that are made when you do make changes, and I also changed the characters’ names that were too similar to real life names because I felt that I had pushed enough buttons to satisfy my enjoyment of pushing those buttons.

For nearly a week, The Usurper was top 100 overall for bestselling free ebooks on Kindle, topping out at #21 ( I wish I had taken a snapshot of that), along with the #1 spot on political fiction free ebooks, while currently sitting 3rd in the same rankings (snapshot November 15):

I was stunned by the amount of downloads I had in a week. It amounted to double the amount that either of the other 2 books got when they were free for two weeks. The week of Thanksgiving, I managed to set the price to $.99 (after B&N had raised the price back up), and it stayed that way until the Monday after, when I tried to go to $2.99, then Amazon discovered it free on Kobo, and its been free ever since. I had a total of just about 12,101 free downloads(I can snapshot the KDP totals if anyone doesn’t believe me), but I had more sales of The Usurper at $.99 than I had for the whole year previous on Kindle, at right around 500 (totaling 12601 downloads). Unfortunately, I also had 16 refunds for this FREE e-book. I don’t know if that’s a statistically good thing or not. Yesterday, I got the stats from B&N through Smashwords, and I sold 140 free copies there (not sure how anyone on B&N sees free e-books that aren’t trad published, I must be blind). As a side effect of the e-book sales, I even had 22 copies of The Usurper in paperback sold, more than the whole year it’s been published. Very cool.

Thank you to everyone who bought/downloaded a copy of The Usurper, whether you enjoyed it or not.

The Same Six Questions Interview

The Same Six Questions – Cliff Ball from http://andyrane.blogspot.com/2011/11/same-six-questions-cliff-ball.html
Welcome to the last interview of November 2011! Where has the year gone?! Today’s guest on The Same Six Questions is author Cliff Ball.

Cliff Ball is 37, lives in Texas, has a BA in English, possibly going for an MA in Technical Communications, but is currently pursuing Certification in Technical Writing. He has independently published 4 novels and won 3rd in a contest for a short story that was written in high school.

The Same Six Questions

1. Have you published a book yet? Yes. I have 4, but here is one of them: The Usurper is a political thriller.

Gary Jackson is raised to hate. Hate the United States, its people, and everything they have ever stood for. His mission is to destroy the country from within, allying himself with the worst of America’s enemies, and one very powerful and malevolent billionaire, to accomplish the deed. Once elected to the highest position in the land, Gary puts his lifelong goals to work, and puts the USA onto the path of ultimate destruction. He stops at nothing to rid the USA of his political and spiritual enemies, until a small group decide they’ve had enough, and they want to stop him. Will they succeed or will the United States be relegated to the dustbin of history? Also available at B&N and Smashwords

2. When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

I remember wanting to become a writer when I was about 8 years old.

3. What was your first lengthy piece of fiction (say, >1000 words)? What was it about? When did you write it? Do you still have it?

My first piece was a science fiction story that I wrote in jr. high (around 1988 or so). It was some inane story about the US and the Soviets 150 years from now fighting over a planet in Alpha Centauri, and discovering humans who already lived there. I do still have it, somewhere in a big Rubbermaid box.

4. When was your first indication, “I can do this (write)”?

I took a Creative Writing class in my senior year of high school, and we sent short stories to magazines. I wrote one that ended up winning 3rd in a contest for a religious magazine for youth. I made $35! (a lot for an 18-year-old in 1992). I decided that someday I would publish something, and I always wanted to be self-published. Luckily, technology has evolved where its easy now.

5. If you could meet one of your characters in real life, which would it be?

I have a character from my novella, Out of Time, who is a clone of Dr Hawking a couple hundred years from now. He figures out the means to time travel, which I think would be cool to do.

6. It’s a dark and stormy night…you’re alone in the house…there’s a knock at the door…you open it, look out, and proceed to scream like a little girl. What’s on the doorstep?

The Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes people who have a million $$$$ for me!

____________________________________

Thanks so much for sharing, Cliff!

My sales for year so far

When I started self-publishing in 2008, I didn’t really have any kind of goals on how big of a number I wanted to reach. When I hit 100 sold by the end of 2009 without any promoting except for Facebook, I thought that was cool. When I managed to get a little over 500 sold last year, I thought that was awesome. Well, as of September 2011, I have now reached 2000 sold for the year so far, and I’m only 200 away from reaching 3000 sales. Earlier in the year, around March, for some inexplicable reason to me, my sales took off on both Amazon and B&N at 400 combined a month mostly for one title, but, just as inexplicably, two months later, I went back to selling maybe 30 a month. I can’t explain that, but, boy, do I wish I knew how I manage to attract that many readers. Well, anyway, here’s the totals as of right now, from 2008 until now, on each platform for each book. My paperback sales are listed under the publisher I used. Links to each novel are located at each novel’s page at the top of this blog or at http://cliffball.webs.com.

Amazon Kindle, combo of US & UK
Out of Time – 317
Don’t Mess With Earth – 703
The Usurper – 294
Shattered Earth – 260
Voyager and the Aliens short story – 1 (uploaded this week)

Barnes & Noble Nook
Out of Time – 53
Don’t Mess With Earth – 163
The Usurper – 49
Shattered Earth – 33

Kobo
Out of Time – 32
Don’t Mess With Earth – 5
The Usurper – 3
Shattered Earth – 5

Apple
Out of Time – 53
Don’t Mess With Earth – 19
The Usurper – 2
Shattered Earth – 62

Sony Reader
Out of Time – 4
Don’t Mess With Earth – 3
The Usurper – 0
Shattered Earth – 2

Smashwords
Out of Time – 32
Don’t Mess With Earth – 97
The Usurper – 160
Shattered Earth – 173
Voyager and the Aliens – 98

iUniverse, the original publisher of Out of Time
Out of Time paperback or e-book – 55

Virtualbookworm.com, publisher of Don’t Mess With Earth
Don’t Mess With Earth paperback – 62

Createspace
Out of Time – 7
The Usurper – 24
Shattered Earth – 20

and when I used Lulu.com for a couple of months:
Out of Time – 3
The Usurper – 1

To re-cap the grand totals:
Out of Time: 551
Don’t Mess With Earth – 1056
The Usurper – 532
Shattered Earth – 558
Voyager and the Aliens – 99

Two new book videos

For the heck of it, I created this video of my book covers.

This is the version 2 of The Usurper book trailer. Tweaked the music, added the current cover, and made the end credits slightly longer.

My $.99 ebook sale.

Until September 19th, all four of my novels in e-book format are on sale for $.99 each.

THE USURPER: a political thriller

Where to buy:

US Kindle, UK Kindle, B&N Nook, Smashwords for all e-book formats

SHATTERED EARTH – science fiction

Advanced humans, called Terrans, leave Earth when its threatened by a massive meteor. The remaining humans on Earth fall back into primitiveness. The advanced humans, and a group of aliens, the Ragnor, involve Earth in an interstellar war. Thousands of years later, the humans of Earth decide to do something about this. Interstellar politics will never be the same again once Earth is done with their revenge.

These Terrans involve themselves throughout human history. Some play as King Arthur and Merlin. Another is a scientist, whose name is Galileo, and he gets into all sorts of trouble for challenging official orthodoxy about the sun, the Earth, and which one is revolving around the other. Then, we have Amelia Earhart, who has a very valid reason for disappearing. When an alien spaceship gets shot down over Roswell in 1947, President Truman orders the creation of Area 51, Project Blue Book and Sign, and has the United States embark on a plan that will culminate 60 years in the future. Nothing will ever be the same again when the United States gets involved in interstellar politics. But, the whole plan backfires when Earth ends up the worse for wear over it. Other species find out what Earth did, since no one else was bold enough to even try, so they want to help bring down the Ragnor once and for all. The new President of the United States imagines a galactic federation or a republic, but, none of the other species wants anything to do with it. Once they destroy the Ragnor’s technology, they leave the Ragnor to ponder why all the other species hated them enough to attack them. Will the galaxy remain at peace?

Where to buy: US Kindle, UK Kindle, B&N Nook, and Smashwords

OUT OF TIME: a time travel novella

Dr. John Hawking, a clone of famous 20th/21st century scientist Stephen Hawking, discovers time is actually fluid; past, present, and future all exist at the same time. What he doesn’t know, is if the current timeline can change when something is changed in the past. The US government wants him to find out. The theme being to make right what once went wrong. The time travelers meet all sorts of 20th century icons, from the Titanic to Anne Frank to Roswell to the Apollo 13. However, someone is trying to stop them, and the future may never be the same again.

Where to buy: US Kindle, UK Kindle, B&N Nook, & Smashwords

New book review of The Usurper

This is a new review of The Usurper that was done on Manic Readers:

MR Review
Rating:

Reviewer: Amanda
Review:

The usurper, Gary Jackson, is a hateful soul. His entire life was planned by the Soviet Union before he was even conceived by a volunteer KGB agent. Gary was raised to hate the USA and all of its citizens and ultimately be the man of the countries undoing.

In The Usurper, we follow Gary’s mother for a short time but the star in the novel is undeniably Gary. He is trained and educated with the sole purpose of ending the USA during his middle aged years. The Usurper is filled to the brim with conspiracies and some elaborated history lessons. This is a terrific thriller but I would advise the reader to be open minded when reading due to Gary’s and the Soviet’s cold-heartedness. It would be relatively easy for a conspiracy theorist to become enthralled with this novel and the intricacies of Gary’s life. I did notice there are some points in the novel when the storytelling is very brief and dry, which I am not a huge fan of. However, there are many more other parts of this novel that are gripping and make up for that dry style of writing. Overall, The Usurper is an attention-grabbing story and an eye opener on many levels. Although The Usurper is a work of fiction, many instances could be comparable to some going-ons in our world today. Ball indeed did a terrific job with his imagination.

Sales numbers for February and $.99 ebook sale

First off, I have reduced the prices to all 4 of my novels to $.99 on all ebook formats for the month of March, Smashwords, B&N Nook, and Amazon US, and Amazon UK. I’m also happy to report that I’m nearing the 1000 sold overall mark, which, as of right this minute, I’m one away. So, a big thank you to anyone who has bought any of my novels.

Here are the sales stats for each title and what platform:
THE USURPER
sold 3 paperbacks
Amazon US: 24
UK Kindle: 2
B&N Nook: 6
Smashwords: 45
Was also featured this month on: Daily Cheap Reads, No Trees Harmed, Karly Kirkpatrick’s Bookaday, and Kindle in the Wind