Read an Ebook Week Sale at Smashwords

It's eBook Week at Smashwords. This sale runs from March 3-9. and uses coupon codes. The codes appear on the book pages, but I have also included them below.

I have put five books on sale:

Two Novellas - FREE
(Use coupon code: RW100.)

Harsh Climate - Story was originally written as a low budget screenplay (limited locations and cast), in the light crime thriller genre.  A pair of runaway teens seek shelter from the cold in an isolated farm house, only to find it's the lair of a gang of kidnappers.

The Case of the Misplaced Hero.  This the first of the summer serials.  An old-timey serial adventure about a young man and his drunken college professor, transported to a world inspired by silent movies.  In April we'll see the sequel... well PREquel to this as we flash back to how another character came into this story.

Three Novels at 75 percent off
(Use coupon code: REW75.)

These are$ 4.95 novels, which means they are now $1.24.
 
Have Gun, Will Play - The first Mick and Casey mystery/western novel about a pair of young gunslinger detectives in the old west.  I sometimes describe this as a cozy mystery with gunfights, and gunslingers playing with dolls.  (The current serial is a Mick and Casey story.)

The Man Who Did Too Much -A cozy mystery set in northern lower Michigan, in which a compulsive action hero joins forces with an eccentric movie buff to solve a case of kidnapping and murder.

The Adventure of Anna the Great - Middle Readers/YA Swashbuckler, in which a young noblewoman disguises herself as a boy to have one great adventure before she's too old to get away with it any more.

What do these three books have in common?  They all combine humor with adventure, and I just realized... they all involve kidnappings.  (And murders!)  There's also a kidnapping in Harsh Climate.  And I guess technically, there is an off-screen hostage taking in Misplaced Hero.

Holy Mazoli, I guess I have a thing for kidnappings.  (Well it IS a perennial theme for the light crime story.)  However, some of the kidnappings involved are FAUX kidnappings.  You'll have to read them all to find out which ones.

Some New Covers

I redesigned the covers for two of these books: Harsh Climate and The Adventure of Anna the Great. I am not fully happy with either of them.

The original cover for Harsh Climate was nice, but it looked like a serious thriller and I thought it was misleading. In the mean time, I did a mock up of a cover for another screenplay I am going to adapt to a novella -- another stand alone crime comedy.  I decided to redo Harsh Climate to match that.

I had a much cooler vision of that cover for HC, but it was in lines, not shapes, and I found that I couldn't make it work and have the title and name readable.  So this is a compromise until I figure out how to do what I wanted. (I admit, this is close.)

For Anna, I just wanted to get rid of the dorky font, and maybe push the color to closer to my "house" color of a blue with a touch of green. (Not as green as the crime covers above, but closer to the blue in Wife of Freedom or Misplaced Hero -- still too purple now, but it is lighter and easier to read.) 

I did not achieve what I wanted.  I achieved what I consider to be a "concept" cover.  I need to do the typography by hand, I think, and not leave it to effects.

I have not uploaded the new cover of Anna to Smashwords (because doing anything at Smashwords is a pain in the patoot), but I decided to put this interim cover up at Amazon to see how it looks.

See you in the funny papers.