Badge is Now Available for Your Kindle Devices, plus Upcoming Portland Badge Event!!!

It's been a great week here at Badge central. I'm getting lots of comments from people digging Badge, and it really feels wonderful. I work on these things for so long, it's almost surprising when someone comments on it. For a second I'm like, "How do they know that?"

Anyway, love the comments. Please keep them coming, and feel free to review Badge at GoodReads. That's very helpful to me at this stage.

For you ebook fanatics, I have great news. Badge is now available for your Kindle devices. That's a week before its publication date! Get yours now!

Also, I need to start prepping you for a Badge-related Portland event coming up in just nine days:

It's on Wednesday, Feb. 5th, at everyone's favorite NE Portland bookstore Broadway Books. I'll be taking the podium with two really amazing Portland writers/people: Monica Drake, whose The Stud Book is a must-read for those who love our fair city; and Mark Russell, whose God is Disappointed in You might be the most important book you read this year. And the best part is, all writers will have a multimedia element to their reading/presentation! This will not be boring.

Badge aside, it will be kind of a special day for me. It's been over a decade since my last reading at a Portland bookstore. Here's a photo of that day.



Were any of you at this reading at 23rd Avenue Books in August 2003? There were 12 of you (yes, I counted).

So, plan on Wednesday 2/5 at Broadway Books at 7 PM. (Free!) I'll be the one with the perma-grin.

Yours in laying down the law,

Art

Watch the Book Trailer for Badge.



Buy Badge.

Get Ghost Notes as an ebook for 99 Cents!

I just published a piece at the Nervous Breakdown dealing with, among other things, my feelings about Amanda Hocking's success via ebook. (In short, yee haw!) Come join the fun.

And speaking of Amanda Hocking, Ghost Notes, my award-winning second novel, is now available for 99 cents as an ebook! You can read it on your ebook reading device, or as a .pdf on your computer. And for you Kindle-philes, I've reduced the Kindle version of Ghost Notes as low as it can go, which is $2.99, which makes it the same price as the Kindle version of Stuck Outside of Phoenix. If you've ever been the least bit curious about my work, now is the time to jump aboard. I can't promise these deals will last forever.

Yours in laying down the law,

Art

Try Ghost Notes, the award-winning novel, in print form for just $5.




Try Ghost Notes the Audio Book as an unabridged digital download for just $4.99.



Or try Ghost Notes the 99 cent Ebook.

Not of the Soul but of the Glands

You can now buy the digital download of Ghost Notes the Audio Book at CDBaby.

First of all, no blog next week. I'm going to the coast and will only have sporadic Internet access. Check back here on Monday, October 5th.

We've got a self-publishing success story on our hands, folks! This guy did what many in the publishing industry thought unthinkable. He self-published his novel, and he reached the bestseller list of the San Francisco Chronicle! A task both amazing and long overdue, in my opinion. The publishing world is finally a-changing, at least in this one instance. Three cheers to Kemble Scott for blazing a trail some of the rest of us hope to follow someday.

Anyone hooked on their Kindle? I dropped the price of the Kindle versions of both Ghost Notes and Stuck Outside of Phoenix! Follow the links above to find out how low I can go.

To conclude this week, let's listen to Bill Faulkner lay down the law, shall we?



That's what I'm talking about, people.

Yours in laying down the law,

Art

Buy Ghost Notes, the novel or brand new audio book.



Buy Songs from Memory, the album


Buy Stuck Outside of Phoenix, the novel

*Ghost Notes* and *Stuck Outside of Phoenix* Now Available on Kindle, Plus Updike

It's true. You can now get Ghost Notes and/or Stuck Outside of Phoenix for your Kindle device. Go here:

Ghost Notes

Stuck Outside of Phoenix

If you buy one, I'll be curious to know what you think. This is my first foray into this realm, and I have no way to test them. I need to know how it looks, if it looks the way it's supposed to look, anything weird that might jump out at you. So if you buy, don't be shy.

Or you can write to tell me how much you love the novels. I'm always open to that.

"When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, have them speak to him. The reviews, the stacks in Brentano’s, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf."

-John Hoyer Updike (1932-2009)



It wasn't exactly east of Kansas but in San Francisco, and I wasn't exactly a teenager but about 29, and it wasn't at a library but at a used bookstore where I first took the plunge into Rabbit, Run, the first book of the Rabbit Tetralogy by John Updike. Many times I'd walked the row of his novels at Changing Hands bookstore on Mill Avenue in Tempe--downstairs, in the used books section--in the decade I spent in Arizona. John Updike. I knew the name, but I'd never read anything by him. Frankly, he sounded a little tame compared to what I was used to reading--Faulkner, Vonnegut, Beckett, Miller--major stylists who broke all kinds of literary rules to become lions of the genre. Updike's work--I knew nothing of it, but still I was convinced--was decidedly safe and conventional by comparison. Didn't he write "domestic realism," about normal people in the suburbs doing barely deviant things? (Hell, that was me.) So for years I skipped the U section at Changing Hands (he seemed to take up the whole thing), and moved on to what I thought of as more adventuresome pursuits.

But when I moved to San Francisco in 1999, I was ready for change. I'd just finished my tenure in the Refreshments, and I was ready to explore life after rock music. I guess something more tame didn't sound half bad. So I broke down, bought a copy of Rabbit, Run at a used bookstore, and took the Updike plunge.

That was ten years ago (to the month, in fact), and it began my decade of reading Updike. I was immediately hooked by the beautiful prose, the spot-on tropes, by the insights into life in the latter half of the 20th Century. Try this one on from Rabbit Redux:

"We make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation."

I could think about that all day and never quite unriddle it.

Oh yeah. I loved the sex, too. (Woo hoo!)

I immediately plowed through Rabbit, Run and finished the tetralogy by the end of the year. I reread all four books a few years ago, and I'm now convinced this series is the single most rewarding literary experience of my life. I place it above all of my other loves: Proust, Vonnegut, Faulkner, Bellow. I'd start the whole thing over again right now, but I'd like to forget more of it so it retains its freshness. Maybe next year, or the next time I've earned a treat.

Rabbit, Run was also the literary model for my first novel, Stuck Outside of Phoenix.

In the last decade, I've read most of Updike's novels (a few I couldn't finish, but hey, that's what happens when you write twenty or so), and I've become aware of the biggest gripes against him. Most offensive is the fact that he seemed to live the life any aspiring writer would want to live. He wrote beautifully and widely, sold well, was critically acclaimed, was published in all the right places, and seemed to hang on to his slot in magazines like The New Yorker for far longer than other writers would've cared for.

Fortunately, I don't write many short stories, and I don't read The New Yorker, so this jealousy never penetrated me. I was free to enjoy his work.

So, it saddened me when I heard John Updike died last week at the age of 76. For me, he will always be this author whose work I walked past in the used section at Changing Hands, the volumes taking up the entire U row, waiting patiently for me to be ready for them.

What about you? What's your Rabbit Tetrology? What single work or series of fiction would you rate as the one that most rocks your world? And why?

Yours in laying down the law,

Art

Buy Ghost Notes



Buy Songs from Memory


Buy Stuck Outside of Phoenix

What Do You Read?

There's a great article in Time magazine this week about how the publishing industry is changing.

Change, a popular theme these days, eh?



Here's a snippet from the article:

"...More books, written and read by more people, often for little or no money, circulating in a wild diversity of forms, both physical and electronic, far outside the charmed circle of New York City's entrenched publishing culture. Old Publishing is stately, quality-controlled and relatively expensive. New Publishing is cheap, promiscuous and unconstrained by paper, money or institutional taste. If Old Publishing is, say, a tidy, well-maintained orchard, New Publishing is a riotous jungle: vast and trackless and chaotic, full of exquisite orchids and undiscovered treasures and a hell of a lot of noxious weeds."

I love that people are reading so much from so many different sources. I remember when I first started talking amongst my writer friends in 2000 about how I'd planned to self-publish Stuck Outside of Phoenix. Long story short, they thought I was crazy. I write more about it here.

It's clear that the writing/publishing world so many of us fell in love with--the world of traditionally published, respected authors and dusty new and used books as the sole bastion of literary entertainment and insight--is no longer the rule. In a way, that's hard for me to take, but that it's being complimented by so many new realms of possibility in publishing, that makes it easier to take.

Sticking it to the man has always had its charm.



An example of the expanding world of publishing? This weekend I'm getting both Ghost Notes and Stuck Outside of Phoenix ready for Kindle.



I don't own a Kindle, but my sister does, and she raves about it. I get the sense a new subculture is developing of people who read on these things, who actually prefer to read on these things.







Make no mistake, this could all go the way of Fruit Brute.



But if people like it, so be it. I hope they all buy and love my books on Kindle. I'll let you know when my books are ready for your Kindle (very, very soon).

And there are so many other non-traditional avenues for getting your work published. I'm pursuing another one right now. More on that later.

In the end, we don't really care what form our fiction takes...or do we? Are you a reader of serialized books on the web? Have you ever read a novel you downloaded for free off the Internet? Do you read self-published work, or do you even bother to notice if the work you read is self-published? Or do you say, "To hell with all of that. Give me a 'real' book or don't give me anything?"

Just curious.

Yours in laying down the law,

Art

Buy Ghost Notes



Buy Songs from Memory


Buy Stuck Outside of Phoenix