Each honest review of The Prophet Conspiracy earns one chance to win the Kindle Paperwhite.
So here are the rules:
You must have read The Prophet Conspiracy to enter.
No purchase is necessary to win. If you don’t have a copy of The Prophet Conspiracy, I’ll get you a free review copy. Just click here and let me know you need one.
Entries will be tracked by e-mail address, so you will need to provide it, but subscribing to my e-mail list is optional.
After the close of the contest, the winner will need to give me a working snail mail address in order to receive the prize.
Post a review at Amazon.com, Kobo.com, Barnes & Noble, and/or Apple iBooks.
Submit a screenshot of the review using the form below.
Fill out the form completely to enter.
If you review The Prophet Conspiracy at more than one e-book retailer, you may fill the form out again with a new screenshot of each review. Every screenshot of your posted reviews gets you one entry, up to a maximum of four.
The deadline to enter is midnight, U.S. mountain time, June 3, 2017.
On June 4 2017, the winning entry will be selected by random number generator and notified by e-mail.
If, after three days, the winner has not replied and provided a postal address, another winner will be selected. This process will be repeated until a winner receives the Kindle.
Reviews must represent your honest opinion. Star rating and positivity or negativity of the review do not matter. Good or bad, each review gets a chance to win.
Provided it’s on one of the four retailers included in the contest, the retailer website on which the review is posted does not matter. No matter where the review is posted, it gets a chance to win.
Oh, and one last thing: This will not affect your chance to win at all, but if you want to do me a favor, the retailers where I most need new reviews, in order from most-needed to least-needed, are as follows: Apple iBooks, Barnes and Noble Nook, Amazon.com, Kobo.com. So if you pick the good ones, it’ll be better for your humble narrator. But it makes no difference for you. The chance to win is the same.
Contest ends June 3, 2017!
The submission form has been removed because the contest is over.
For long-time fans of the series, some of these might be a reunion, but for new readers, let’s take a look at the four main people caught up in the events of my new political thriller Deeper Secrets!
Ben Wiles: A young Congressional aide bucking to advance. With an ambitious Congressman and a Chief of Staff who might be more than he appears, Ben’s road to the top in politics looks long and rocky. But when he interrupts a murder in a grimy back alley in Washington D.C., his career and his very life are in danger.
Colleen Cristina: a cyber security consultant wide-eyed at her first inside look at politics. Once she worked on the cutting edge of artificially intelligent software, but walked away when she developed ethical concerns about the system’s power. Now she’s an independent consultant hired to deal with a computer virus no one else can stop. Risking her life wasn’t in the job description.
Senator Mike Vincent: rising political star trying to change the system for the better. He wants to be President, but the insiders just want him gone. When the cyber attack on his campaign turns all too real, Vincent must decide whether his cause is worth his life, and that of the people around him.
Alyssa Barr: last heir of one of America’s great political families, and the real fundraising power behind Vincent’s campaign. She glides easily down the halls of power, never giving a hint of the secrets she’s seen and kept. But Alyssa has her own dark past, and leaving it behind won’t be easy.
Interested? You can sign up here to get an e-mail when Deeper Secrets is released. You even get the prequel novel for free just for signing up!
A string of terrorist bombings rocks the nation’s capital. A young congressional aide interrupts a murder in a grimy Washington alley. A mysterious, unstoppable computer virus upends the race for the White House. The response: a powerful new computer system that reads everyone’s posts, emails, tweets, and more, then decides who’s a threat. But this technology has power beyond anyone’s nightmares, and democracy itself is caught in the crossfire.
To be the first to hear when Deeper Secrets is released, sign up here! You even get a free prequel novel for subscribing.
Or follow me on BookBub, and you’ll get an alert when Deeper Secrets is released.
Deeper Secrets is my new novel, coming on Amazon, iBooks, Nook and more this month. In the following excerpt, we meet protagonist Ben Wiles as he accidentally interrupts a murder.
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He scanned the crowd for danger. In his mind, he rehearsed the techniques he might need: how to break a one-handed grab, how to break a two-handed grab, how to counter a right punch, how to counter a left. From the first day he tied on a belt and tried the martial arts, his old teacher told him that if he ever used the skills to always take it seriously. Bouncing at the Neon might be just a night job to earn extra income, but Ben never stopped following that advice.
Around him, the dancers swirled like dandelion seeds on the breeze. The music sounded more like gale force winds, though. Hard, loud, with bass that rattled his teeth, and more beats per minute than he expected to have dollars in his paycheck, the DJ’s current selection drove a frenzy.
The back door to his right slammed hard in its frame. Hard. This wasn’t caused by some drunk stumbling down the alley and bumping it. The metal door clanged as if someone had driven a battering ram into it.
Ben eased out of his leaning position on the wall, standing up straight. Brows furrowed, neck craning forward slightly, he peered at the door, then eyed it warily. Whatever made that noise was big enough and strong enough to rattle a steel door in a brick wall. It wasn’t something he felt any great eagerness to face.
Then he heard a cry. Not even one word, just most of one:
“Hel—”
Help. Someone out there was shouting for help. Or at least they had been. Something cut it off.
Praying he’d find nothing more than a delivery truck that had missed the loading dock, Ben flipped the hidden switch that would stop the fire alarm from sounding when he cracked the door open. He eased it open.
It didn’t want to move.
Surprised, Ben stared at the door for a moment, wondering whether he really wanted to look outside.
He pressed down the handle and gave a firmer shove. This time it yielded.
As he opened the door and stepped out, a heavy thump barely made itself heard over the music from inside. Poking his head around the door, Ben saw the cause of the sound.
Bloody, messy, dead, a man sprawled in the alley. He had, apparently, been leaning up against the door before Ben opened it and knocked him down. Possibly, him collapsing up against the door in the first place had been the cause of the sound that had drawn Ben outside.
Snow covered the grime of the alley, now stained with blood. A biting wind hurried between the buildings. Ben’s T-shirt felt woefully insufficient even before he finished opening the door, let alone once he stepped outside.
A very definitely live man stood next to the dead one. Ben stared at him for half a second, taking in close-cropped hair shorter than his own and an unshaven jawline in the glare of the club’s exterior lighting. He wore a baseball cap and a leather jacket.
Then the man lunged at him.
Ben’s right arm delivered a downward block, but it wasn’t enough. The stranger hit him hard in the gut. He grabbed Ben’s black T-shirt and pulled him out into the alley. All of Ben’s techniques for breaking a one-handed grab started from a standing position. Halfway laying on the ground, being held up by the scruff of his shirt, wasn’t an ideal way to execute them.
He curled his fingers into a claw-shape and raked them as hard as he could over his attacker’s shin. The man cried out and dropped Ben, who scrambled to his feet.
When he did, he saw a pistol aimed right at his nose.
Where before Ben had picked out many details of the man’s face, now he could see nothing but the weapon. He felt his skin tingle as a tide of adrenaline rose in his system. He found that his limbs would not respond to mental commands to move. The barrel of the gun looked wider than the gates of Hell. He realized, at that moment, that he had never before known the meaning of terror. Now, as he saw a gun pointed right between his eyes, he learned what fear really was.
Yet, from somewhere deep in the depths of his psyche, a lesson from his college self-defense classes bubbled to the surface. He swore he was hearing the instructor’s voice right in his ear.
“The chances of this working are fifty-fifty at best. Never do this. Never, never, never try this. Unless your life really is on the line. If you’re about to die, only then should you try this.”
Well, his life really was on the line.
Ben put his hands up in the universal surrender position but down a little bit closer to his head rather than fully extended into the air. The difference might have been attributed to an understandable fear of moving with a gun pointed at his head.
“I surrender,” he said. “Please don’t kill me.”
“Sorry,” the man with the gun said. “Nothing personal. It’s just that you can identify m–”
Before he finished speaking, Ben slapped both his hands inward and across in front of his face, as fast and as hard as he could.
His left hand hit the barrel of the gun, shoving it away from his head and off to his right.
His right hand slapped the inside wrist of his attacker, intended to sting the nerves in his hand and make it almost impossible for him to keep a firm grip.
Between the two, the gun pointed wide of his right ear when it went off.
The gunshot sledgehammered Ben’s hearing into powder. Nothing went through his ears to his brain except a painful ringing. It scared him so badly that he failed to follow through on the rest of the technique. He should have grabbed the grip of the pistol, stripped it out of his attacker’s weakened hand, broken his finger in the process, and shot the man, according to his old teacher. But even if Ben had the nerve to shoot someone, he had lost all voluntary control of his muscles in the panic from the gunshot. The gun fell to the ground, fortunately not going off again.
Behind him, the door to the club opened.
“What’s going on out here?”
The baritone voice of one of the other bouncers was a lifeline thrown to Ben. It was a whiff of bright clean hope to nostrils awash in the scent of the grave.
The man with the gun moved only his eyes. He glanced at the newcomer, then back at Ben, then back at the newcomer. Confronted by yet another witness, he scooped up his gun, turned, and sprinted down the alley. The attacker disappeared into the night.
My novel Death of Secrets is free on Kindle today! If you’ve never read it, here’s a brief summary of the plot:
The end of privacy as we know it?
Kathy Kelver nearly trips over a murder victim on her way back to her dorm room late one night. In his last words, the dying man gives her stolen data about a secret project that could blow the lid off a shocking conspiracy. From the halls of Congress to the National Security Agency and beyond, Kathy must run for her life from shadowy forces who want her dead, while trying to build a relationship and hang on to her faith. The secret she’s carrying could end the right to privacy forever, if she doesn’t survive to warn the world.
My new novel, Life of Secrets, islive on Amazon.com today. Life of Secrets is the story of a woman framed for assassinating a Presidential candidate.
Alyssa Chambers is rich and privileged by birth, but a criminal by choice. She steals secrets from the powerful and influential, and sells them to whoever pays – and they pay very well. But when someone assassinates a Presidential candidate in an office Alyssa just robbed, she’s framed for the murder and her whole life goes up in smoke. Now she’s running for her life, hunted and alone. The last man she can trust is the one she can’t stop betraying. To survive, clear her name, and uncover the assassin, she must face the truth about her past, the truth about her family, and the truth about her Life of Secrets.
Tonight I uploaded what should be the final version of Life of Secrets to my Kindle and my Android phone, to make sure everything works. If my normal job leaves me some free time tomorrow, I will try to set up an “early edition” purchasing system so people can buy the book in different file formats for a day or two before it goes exclusive to Amazon.
If you signed up to be an ambassador, get your reviews ready! The time to post them is coming right up!
Life of Secrets, the sequel to Death of Secrets, will be available for sale on June 23, 2014.
I ordered the proof copy today. If it checks out on Wednesday, I’ll order a bunch of paperbacks so I have them available.
I love this book. I feel like it represents tremendous growth as a writer since Death of Secrets. This is a roller coaster thrill ride with twists, turns, and surprises at every new page. Hidden in all that fun is a powerful emotional story about forgiveness and redemption.
It also represents growth as an indie-author-businessman. The book is much more professionally presented, with far better editing.
Warm up your Kindles, friends. Life of Secrets is almost here!
I’d like to recruit some Ambassadors to help spread the word about life of Secrets when it launches. As an independently published author, there’s no publishing house marketing budget behind my books. I manage all the promotions myself. And word of mouth is a crucial part of that marketing. Ambassadors will have specific things they can help with. Read on!
Who should be an Ambassador?
Did you read Death of Secrets? Did you like it? Have you been looking forward to Life of Secrets? Are you comfortable telling other people that, including strangers and friends? If so, you’re the perfect candidate.
What do Ambassadors get?
You will get a FREE e-book version of Life of Secrets, and you’ll get it weeks before anyone else. (So, one more qualification for Ambassadors: you should enjoy reading electronically, whether on a Kindle, iPad, tablet, nook, your laptop, or whatever.)
Sounds great! What do I have to do?
Ambassadors commit to three things:
Posting an honest review of the book on Amazon.com within 24 hours after the official launch date. This is the biggest, most important duty of an Ambassador. The most successful e-book marketing tools are all based on the number and average star rating of your reviews. It takes at least 4 to get listed in some places, and as many as 20 in others. I need reviews, and I need them quickly, in order to get started on the advertising campaign to sell the book. Remember: honest reviews. Ambassadors are not obligated to write a good review, or give it five stars, or anything like that. They only commit to posting a review that tells how they really felt about the book. The official launch date is likely to be the last week of June, so you’ll have quite some time to read the book and craft your review to get it ready to post on Amazon.
Sharing Life of Secrets posts on Facebook. This really helps increase the awareness of the book.
E-mailing me any typos or edits you might find. The great beauty of electronic publishing is that mistakes can be corrected at any time, even after the book is published. Life of Secrets has already been worked on by very skilled editors, but the lesson I learned from Death of Secrets is that typos still crop up no matter how many times you think you’ve polished it.
Ambassadors are a fundamental part of my marketing strategy. I want to be clear about this: I am asking for your help. If you’re willing, and the above description sounds good to you, then fill out the form below and I’ll get you started!
UPDATE: Life of Secrets is published, so the Ambassador program is over now. Grab your copy on Amazon!
For Indie authors trying to promote their books, the name BookBub looms very large. Once I finished blindly flailing about, I discovered that BookBub is the leading name in promotion of e-books by e-mail. I also learned that they’re hard to get in with. But eventually, they accepted Death of Secrets.
Bookbub has certain requirements: The price you give them has to be the lowest for which the book has been advertised anywhere else. It has to be a limited time special. Unfortunately, I had put Death of Secrets at $0.99 as a regular price starting in March, which made it hard to get listed in bookbub for that price.
I put the novel on free promotion, and paid BookBub $220 to list it. I also sent the free promotion to a few smaller e-mail lists that promote free e-books. As usual, I scheduled like a bazillion tweets over the course of the free promotion.
What happened?
Over the course of the free promotion (April 29-30) the book was downloaded 40,000 times. Let me repeat that: Forty Thousand. My previous free promotion had 5,700 downloads. So yeah, BookBub can move e-books.
But of course, those are all free. Your humble narrator makes zero. Obviously, it’s a great audience builder for the sequel, which is the main point at this stage of my writing “career.” But still, one yearns for entrepreneurial success as well.
Good news!
Amazon. of course, lists books based on their sales. So by spiking the downloads so hard, Death of Secrets was all of a sudden much more visible on Amazon to people who are looking for thrillers. What that means is, after a free promotion, there’s always a spike in paid sales. In this case, that spike was pretty impressive.
I set the price back to $2.99 after the free promo, rather than $0.99. (more on the pluses and minuses of the two price points in a later post). And at that price, the day after the huge free promo, 220 people bought Death of Secrets. In the intervening days, the number has grown to 320.
Since $2.99 qualifies for the 70% royalty rate on Amazon, I get roughly $2.05 per sale. That means, of course, that I’ve made $656 in royalties so far in May. Given that the BookBub promo cost $220, that qualifies as a smashing success!
Now, the trick is to keep the success going. I have a couple other promotions scheduled today and later this month. I’ll post again about how things develop.
My novel Death of Secrets is free on Kindle today! If you’ve never read it, here’s a brief summary of the plot: