Last Friday I spammed out a quick announcement about a really exciting promotion. One I’ve been itching to tell you guys about for a while now. Like a crawled-through-a-pile-of-insulation sorta itch. Today I’d like to give you more details to whet your appetite.
I know I’ve mentioned Jefferson Smith’s killer website, Immerse or Die before. “Killer” because it eats bad indie books for breakfast. Too be fair, he’s got very stringent criteria for who passes his 40 minute treadmill test, and he always provides a thoughtful analysis. At times, he even explains why he might be wrong about his assessment of a given title. But the fact is only 13 books out of 114 have made the cut.
I was so relieved to know I’d made it into that elite group with Crimson Son that I did a little touchdown dance (thankfully this is before the vlogging began…). Little did I know, there was a second even more excruciating test vetting not just a forty minute chunk but the entire book. Only eight survived that – including, Crimson Son.
I’ve read several of these books: Strictly Analog, The Commons, and Century of Sand, all of which I was turned on to by Immerse or Die. I’m a really picky reader. I’ve got an inner critic that won’t shut up. I can’t read a cereal box without bitching about the prose. And you know what? The inner critic mostly kept his damn mouth shut through those few hundred thousand words.
So when Jefferson contacted me and said “Hey, do you want to be in a bundle of awesome books?” I replied, hell yeah.
Jefferson has really taken the bull by the horns here. He’s heard the constant complaint of how terrible indie books are. About how “savvy” readers ignore books that aren’t stamped with a big name publisher (like say 50 Shades…AHEM). How the indie-verse is something like Reaver space in Firefly – you venture in and terrible, horrible, awful things will happen to you in the most awkward order imaginable. You’ll stumble across someone’s Grandpa in a Box or a pack of raping velociraptors (or both…in a box) and when you finally emerge, you won’t have a shred of humanity or literary sense left.
But Jefferson strapped a few dozen hastily-published trunk novels to the front of his Firefly and flew directly into the heart of this supposed no-man’s land. There, he found prose that rivals anything you’d pay outrageous trad-pub prices to read. Prose that isn’t propped up by million dollar marketing campaigns or famous authors lending their names to John and Jane Doe.
And on April 15th, every last one of these incredible books will be available on StoryBundle.com for the low-low-low price of WHATEVER YOU WANT.
Yep. You name the price.
Even if you already have Crimson Son (if you don’t and you are reading this – the killer robots are EN ROUTE TO YOUR HOUSE…), you simply can’t beat this deal. Science Fiction, Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, Noir, Time Travel, Steampunk, SUPER HEROES – you name the spec-fic flavor, this bundle has it. You won’t find any canned, re-heated, re-packaged, microwaveable, trad-pub ideas here either. Fresh, free-range, non-GMO, innovation and supremely well-executed fiction only independents can bring to the table.
Now you get to put up with the wait along with me.
Itch.
Itch…
Itch……
Categories: Author News
RUSS LINTON 
Love immerse or Die. I open that email on Saturday morning and let the learnin’ begin. Jefferson hates echoes the way a fat guy hates tofu.
Even though it is only for forty minutes (at most) I love how it underscores just how important the first chapter is. If people can’t get through the sample on Amazon, they’ll never click buy and if you’re shopping to agents and publishers, that’s often all they want to see when you first contact (if even that).