For those of you who have followed my adventures with TimeSplash from the beginning, thank you. You now have the bragging rights to say you were among the very first to spot the book. For those who have just joined us here, welcome. For those who don’t know what this is all about and have just stumbled on this page while pootling around on the Web, why not grab a copy and see if you like it?

In the past few days, TimeSplash has started selling. It began with a free book giveaway on Amazon which saw the book zoom to the #1 spot in Science Fiction and #1 in Techno-thrillers (and several other sub-categories) in the free book rankings in the Kindle Store. Since then (just a couple of days ago) it has been steadily climbing its way up the ranks in the “paid” section. As I write, it is standing at #1 in Techno-thrillers and #6 in Science Fiction, and its overall ranking is still improving. I can’t begin to express my gratitude to all the people who have downloaded it – especially to those who actually bought it.

And not only is it selling well for the first time since it was launched, it is still getting great reviews. The three reviews below are all five-star reviews and have all been added to Amazon in the last three days:

This was suprisingly awesome! I cant wait to read it again as well as any other books from this author. Was a little worried about the time travel idea, but it was well presented and almost believable. (Mom_of_Two)

Timesplash is an excellent read. I was looking for a book to read over the long weekend and this one captured my attention. I was hooked from the beginning, and couldn’t put it down. The author has an interesting take on time travel that I found refreshing, and I also like his writing style. I will be on the look out for future works from this author. (Julie)

Great Book! This is a really great book about time travel. The ideas presented were clear and believable. I thought that the time travel lingo was brilliant. I could not put this one down. It also had a refreshing and hopeful ending. (Zelda)

Mom_of_Two, Julie, and Zelda, you guys rock! Thank you.

(And for those who like to listen to books in the car or on their MP3 player, don’t forget there is an audiobook edition available from Iambik Audiobooks, and Amazon’s Audible store.)

If you’re visiting because you are one of the thousands of people who have downloaded TimeSplash for free in the past 24 hours, welcome. You haven’t had time to read the book yet, but, when you do, I’m really hoping you’ll like it – and then come back here and let me know what you thought. In fact, if you want to do something really nice in return for your free novel, why not leave me an Amazon review – just one line would be great – and while you’re there, add a rating and tick some of the “tag” boxes. It all helps me to sell copies in between free offers.

And if you want to find out some of the background to the book, the characters, and the time periods visited in the story, here are a few of the blog posts from this blog that you might like to take a look at.

Creating TimeSplash: Finding the Right Time

When the Time Came for Time Travel

Creating TimeSplash: Picturing the Past

2050 is no Place for a Beautiful Young Woman

Sniper in World Exclusive Interview

Jay: Researching and Planning This Character in my Novel

And if you’re interested in the guy who wrote the book, I’ve done a number of interviews about myself and writing TimeSplash. Click on the “TimeSplash Reviews Index” tab near the top of this page and have a browse around (I can’t guarantee they will all still be there).

Thank you so much for your interest in my book. If you want to see what else I’m up to, I have a blog about my writing that you are most welcome to visit.

I’m trying an experiment with the TimeSplash ebook. I’ve put it into Amazon’s Select programme. This means that for the next 90 days, only Amazon can sell the TimeSplash ebook. They have total, worldwide exclusivity. I can’t even sell it on my blog (not that I do anyway). I feel kind of guilty about this – mainly because I’ve had to take it off Smashwords (and all the other sites that Smashwords sells through). And I like Smashwords. Yet the fact is that sales on Smashwords and all its third-party retailers are – and always have been – minimal. Taken all together, they are hugely outstripped by Kindle sales. So, financially, it is no great loss and, potentially, a big gain, because the benefit of being in the Select programme is that you can run promotions through Amazon. Each book in the scheme can be offered for free for 5 days out of the 90-day exclusivity period. And for the next two days (13th and 14th Jan) TimeSplash will be on offer in the Kindle Store. Let me repeat that for the people skimming, rather than reading.

For the next two days (13th and 14th Jan) TimeSplash will be available FOR FREE in the Kindle Store.

I’ll repeat the offer in February and in March (but might not bother you again with a mention of it).

And what’s the big deal about giving my work away for free? Well, there are two benefits. One is that it is extremely hard to run a free book offer while you are selling your work on Kindle outside of the Select programme. Amazon’s contract states that you can’t sell your book elsewhere for less than it is available in the Kindle Store – and nor can you give it away. To enforce this, their bots trawl the Web looking for infringements. You can move your Kindle price down to match the offer price elsewhere so you can actually run an offer, but many people find it very hard to get the offer removed quickly from everywhere it might have appeared, forcing your Kindle price to remain low (or free) for weeks and sometimes months. Using Select, having a free offer is extremely easy and they even have a clunky little tool to let you set it all up.

The other thing is that, well, it’s Amazon, and Amazon is big. I put another book into Select – a small collection of short stories called Placid Point: Tales from the History of Transhumanity – to see how it would go. This collection has been available from Smashwords and Amazon for nearly four months now and has not sold a single copy. No, not a single copy. It’s true that I have never promoted this little book, but you’d think one person in the whole world might have noticed it and bought a copy. But no. Anyway, it had a 2-day free promotion through Select just a couple of days ago and I gave away loads of copies of Placid Point. In fact, last March, during Read an eBook Week, I was giving away five ebooks through Smashwords. The result was phenomenal. Yet in just two days, giveaways of Placid Point almost equalled the total for all five books in that week. For a moment there, the Amazon rank of Placid Point, in the Science Fiction category – NB not some obscure category, so refined there are only ten books in the whole group – was #77. For the effort of ticking a box and taking the book off Smashwords, this seems like a great result. I could not have given Placid Point so much exposure if I’d blog toured for a year. (On the other hand, that result was in the ‘free on Kindle’ bucket. Once the offer was over, and the book was no longer free, the rank disappeared. Shame.)

So I’m hoping to give TimeSplash a similar boost. It’s almost two years now since it was first published by Lyrical Press and, of course, sales are flagging. It needs a kick up the pants and this may well be the way to do it. It would be nice to get some momentum behind the ebook again so that when the print edition comes out, later this year, there will be some level of awareness of it.

Wish me luck.

PS I forgot to mention that Kindle Prime members can now borrow TimeSplash from the Kindle library.

PPS I just saw that somebody has bought a copy of Placid Point from Amazon since the offer ended. Congratulations on being first, and thank you, whoever you are!

I like audio books. I’m just getting over a bad dose of man flu and, for a while there, there wasn’t much else I could do except lie on my back groaning and listening to books on my wife’s iPod. I listened to Robert Goddard’s ‘Dying to Tell’ and Philip K Dick’s ‘Minority Report’ and both were terrific. I don’t get to listen to audio books as often now as I used to. A few years ago, I had a commute to work that was at least an hour each way. Needless to say, I went through lots of audio books during that period of my life. It actually made the commute something to look forward to.

And now, look at me! I have my very own audio book of TimeSplash. The good people at Iambik Audiobooks – a Canadian audio book publisher – released it today. You can download it for your own favourite MP3 player (or iPad, or smartphone, or laptop/desktop/netbook – hell, even TVs play audio files these days) for the incredibly low price of $6.99. And, if you are a rabid consumer of audio books as I have been and my wife still is, you will know that that is an exceptional price.

Best of all, you get to hear Emma Newman reading my book. I’ve written at length on my other blog about Emma’s involvement in this project, so I won’t go on about it again, except to say, even if you have already read the book, I’m pretty sure you will get something extra out of the experience of hearing Emma read it.

On another matter, let me say a big thank you to all the people who are buying the new ebook edition of TimeSplash on Amazon. Even without a big launch, or even a small one (no blog tour, no 24-hour round-the-world non-stop Twitter tour, no begging letters to book reviewers, no nothing, really) it is doing much, much better than the first edition did. And that is a BIG puzzle to me, which I’d like to understand one day! Any thoughts?

Well, after a brief period of unavailability, the ebook version of TimeSplash is finally back – and better than ever. Featuring a new cover, this is actually a second edition of the ebook. Some of the changes that were forced on me by my previous publisher – because of their “house style” – have now been undone. There weren’t all that many, but they have nagged at me, and now that I have control again, I’ve put the text back the way it should have been. I have to tell you, it feels great.

I’ve also set a new price. For those who bought TimeSplash at $5.50, I apologise. I had no control over that, either. Now the price is $4.50 – which is exactly what I pay for a large cappuccino at my favourite coffee shop. It seems reasonable to me that a full-length ebook should cost about as much as a cup of coffee, so I decided to use the “coffee standard” to fix the price. If my coffee shop puts up their price, so will I. (Don’t worry, they just had a 12.5% price hike, so I don’t expect any more rises for quite a while.)

I’ve published the ebook through Smashwords and the Amazon Kindle Store (link soon – Amazon takes longer than Smashwords to process a book). This makes two editions with two different ISBNs (so, for all the collectors out there, you probably want to buy one of each – trust me, your grandchildren will thank you). The Smashwords edition will also be released through Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Apple, Diesel, and Scrollmotion – but those links will take a while to come through too. I’m going to experiment soon with direct sales through the TimeSplash website and elsewhere – but that may be more trouble than it’s worth. Stay tuned and I’ll let you know.

Of course, the ebook edition has nothing to do with the print and audiobook editions which are due out very soon. Iambik Audiobooks tells me that late August/early September is the likely release date. eMergent press still has not confirmed a release date for print, but when they do, you will be the first to know.

TimeSplash has been out for about six months now (I know, I can hardly believe it either) and it is a good moment to take a small step back from my (continuing) promotional activities and just say a big thank you to all the people who have bought it and read it. And another big thank you to those of you who went the extra mile and wrote a review – on your blog, on Amazon, or wherever. You have all been extremely kind and I appreciate it very much. The average review rating for TimeSplash on Amazon is five stars!

If you want to see what people have written about TimeSplash, there is a list of the reviews I know about here on the blog, with extracts and links to the full review. I know it’s a cliche and terribly soppy, but it really does make it all worthwhile when I see how much my work is appreciated.

So, thanks again. You guys are great!

Just a quick note to say that you can now buy TimeSplash here at Fictionwise. As much as I’d rather you bought it from the Lyrical Press bookstore, I have to say the Fictionwise package is a good deal – multiple formats and a low price (which is available worldwide, not just in the USA like the Amazon Kindle price.)

And while I’m here, let me remind you that I have an interview with author Emma Newman up on her blog Post Apocalyptic Publishing.

And, coming up soon on the TimeSplash blog tour, Merrilee Faber will be publishing on her blog – for the first time ever – my short story “Party Time” which is a prequel to the novel and which I wrote especially for the tour.