Do you like yourself a rip-roaring novel now and then? Then may I suggest you get yourself right on over to Amazon and check out Shiver on the Sky
Go ahead. I’ll wait.
If you’ve got a Kindle, the book is just $.99 on Amazon. Whether or not you have a Kindle, you can read the book free with only one small catch.
I’ll get back to that free-book offer in a second.
Shiver is a “contemporary fantasy detective novel.” Its author, David Young, is a regular reader and occasional commentor here at Living Freedom. But I wouldn’t recommend the book just because of that. I started reading it yesterday afternoon (a day after he put it on Amazon) and I’m hooked.
Unfortunately Shiver is also an example of what fiction writers have to go through with mainstream publishers these days. David shopped the book around without getting so much as a nibble, mostly because his work didn’t fit neatly into any standard genre.
Then an editor at Baen — good house for this type of story! — took an interest. She asked for some changes, which David happily made. But when he went back with the alterations: “Oh, she doesn’t work here any more and nobody else remembers anything about it.”
That sounds flaky, but sadly it’s typical. Used to be that editors were advocates for writers. A good editor helped good writers become better ones. Great editors advocated for “their” new talents even when their first efforts weren’t commercially successful. Now? It’s a revolving door for editors and all publishers want is the next teen vampire novel or the next 50 Shades of Gray.
Somebody like David with something unusual to offer has to go it alone. (Which, thank the Internet, he can. And, as he says in good freedomista style, “The self-publishing thing feels better than asking permission anyway.”)
He’s not quite going it alone, though!
This is where you — and those free copies — come in.
David is offering free e-copies to people who will promise to review the book on Amazon. He didn’t even specify that it had to be a favorable review, though if the rest of the book is as good as what I’ve seen so far, I expect most will be.
So grab yourself a copy. Whether you buy one on Amazon or take David’s free-book offer, I don’t think you’ll regret it. I’d call it a page turner if the darned thing actually had pages. 🙂
If you like this one, you might also want to know he’s got another coming out in a few months: Pagan Sex. Yes, Pagan Sex. I have no clue what that one’s about, but he’s definitely got himself an … er, interesting title.
Three ways to get the book:
1. Buy the Kindle edition on Amazon for just $.99.
2 and 3. Contact David and get a free copy in exchange for putting up an Amazon review:
email him at d.young at cabinfeversoftware dot com
or
make a request via his website.
Amazon also has a pretty generous “look inside” if you want to read a bit before your commit.
—–
NFI on my part other than the usual Amazon commission, which on a $.99 book fails to qualify as a deep financial interest (though as usual every purchase is appreciated).
Thanks, Claire! I really appreciate this.
Well, I appreciate the good read — and expect others will, too. I see you’ve already gotten a second 5-star review (this time from somebody who has actually finished the book).
Got it! I’ll be glad to leave a review at Amazon, and will probably blog too. Always looking for a good read. 🙂
That’s great, MamaLiberty! I’m about 1/3 of the way through now (neglecting my planned work today) and liking it more as I go. It’s developing layers of complexity without at all becoming confusing.
And while it’s not strictly a freedomista novel, the subject of the Patriot Act just arose …
Getting it now. At 99 cents, I’ll pay full price for the risk of a good book!
Patriot act, eh? I may have to go read the labels on the canned goods for a while after I finish the book I’m reviewing now…
A complex story involving CPS and terrible abuse… and the main character is a CPS supervisor who has major problems of her own. I’m withholding judgment until I get to the end of it… The title is “Abuse of Discretion.” I hope it lives up to it’s name.
> I’d call it a page turner if the darned thing actually had pages. 🙂
Maybe it’s a button scroller then?
Just got the book, looks like it will be worth the 99cents.
jed — Let’s see if that expression catches on. 🙂
BC — Thanks! A month from now I’d like to see David being able to sell this book for $2.99 or $3.99 (more typical price for a self-pubbed book). But isn’t it grand to be able to buy real, well-written books for the price of a candy bar?
CCC — I’m about half-way through now (trying to build shelves instead of spending the whole day reading) & while I know that with mysteries the ending is everything, I’d say there’s not much risk of a bad read.
I read the sample, and it looks like a fantastic read. Unfortunately while I do have .99 I don’t have a Kindle.
Looked at his website, but I didn’t see any way to contact him other than leaving a comment.
Hi Joel-
d.young at cabinfeversoftware dot com will work. Just let me know your preferred format.
And thanks for the kind words!
Just sent Joel a .pdf copy of the book. David earlier gave me permission to share the one he sent me.
There are a number of free downloads that allow you to read Kindle on your
PC: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_pc_mkt_lnd?docId=1000426311
or Mac: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000464931
Thanks, Claire! I’ll go check my inbox.
Joel, You can get free Kindle reader software at Amazon. You just install it on your confuser and then you can access the book and read. When you stop reading for a while, when you reopen the Kindle reader, it remembers where you were and everything. Just like the real thing.
Having the kindle reader open the book to the place you left off is great… if that’s what you want to do, of course. So far I’ve not figure out how to make it forget where I was and let me start over from the beginning. There ought to be a way to choose…
The document reader on my Linux box does that anyway – picks up where I left off. Which is a good thing, because I was always penciling in the page number on my tabletop. Very low-tech chic.
I may buy a tablet doc reader at some point, but it won’t be a Kindle. I decide who pokes around in my documents, Amazon does not.
Hey Joel-
Mine does the same thing (I use Xubuntu; not sure of the default PDF viewer package’s name). But my Kindle, until it was stolen a few days ago, was well-behaved. I just downloaded books to my computer & transferred them via USB cable. I left the wifi turned off, so Amazon didn’t have a lot to say about what was on it. Battery life was good, too.
To accomodate those books with DRM “protection” (mine has none), Amazon lets you specify the device you’re downloading for. Bizarrely, they use the serial number to encrypt the book…not exactly hard to undo. Not the most secure system ever devised, but it must meet some goal or other. For somebody.
Now I’m looking forward to the new paperwhite kindle…in a month or do.
MamaLiberty – if you go into your ‘manage your kindle’ in Amazon (even if you don’t _really_ have a Kindle, it should work), you can hoveer over the ‘Actions’ button to the far right of the item you want to reset, then click ‘Clear furthest page read’.
OK finished reading the book. I’m sorry to say but either the author’s an idiot or a genius. This book shoukd be bringing in 9-12$ a pop. It’s fantastic! I even went through the hassle of installing a kindle reader app for this. Something I swore I would never do. I’ll be converting it to my nook (hacked) reader as soon as I can. I did find it interesting that the book outlines software that is almost identical to the darknet application called freenet. I donor think that coincidence since he also outlines a programmers life very accurately. Read it you wont be disappointed. It has less bumps in the road than mist novels of similar genre.
Ah, CCC – but that’s just the problem. I don’t want to turn off the “go to last page read” thing completely. I’d like a toggle on the book being read to “save” the setting or not… Some books I definitely want to continue reading at the last place… and some I don’t. Some I’ve let sit so long I need to do a quick skim review… I read a LOT of books, often many of them at a time, and it’s easy to lose track sometimes.
The question is choices and lack of same on a day to day, item by item basis. So many of our machines have been designed to choose FOR us, often with little flexibility. sigh
Okay, book read and reviewed.
I’m not as rapturous as Claire appears to be, but it was a pretty good read. I’d have enjoyed seeing him do (a lot!) more with the premise than he did, because that was very interesting. But much pagecount is taken up with procedural he said/she said stuff that makes the book sag badly in places.
Still, I’ve certainly read worse books that were printed by “respectable” publishers. It’s like they’re trying to put themselves out of business.
Joel — As I go on, I’d say I’m pretty much in agreement with you. About midway through it gets talky and continues that way quite a while. Still, by then the story is so intriguing that momentum is carrying me through the talk-talk. And I’m getting close to that last 50 pages where I hear things start moving again.
Yep, it’s a first novel and here’s where it shows. But we’ve all seen worse from “real” publishers. I’m still dying to see how the story resolves.
3 chapters in and I’m hooked. I’d easily have paid $2.99 for this.