I'm happy to announce the publication of a special sneak preview of my forthcoming (keep touching wood there) novel, D-BOYS. (*)
This one's free as the clouds. How's that for a price point to hit? Like, the others it's available for the Kindle reader (for any conceivable device). Or you can grab it from Smashwords in the format of your choice (HTML, Kindle, ePub, PDF, Sony Reader, etc…). Or also on iBooks for your iThing.
Here's the jacket flap copy for you:
A cyber-security guru suddenly getting shot at and blown up rather more than usual.
And nuclear-armed terrorists rolling with impunity through a lawless and brutal virtual world.
The year is now. Islamist terrorists hack into America's most sensitive defense networks, launch chemical weapons attacks on Western cities, and stage a raid on the vulnerable nuclear weapons storage facilities in Pakistan. They are using a massively-multiplayer online video game (or "virtual world") as a platform for planning and rehearsing their attacks – forcing a squad of supremely elite Delta Force operators (reinforced by an info-security expert from the Department of Homeland Security) to go inside the game to fight them.
But the fight only begins there. Michael Stephen Fuchs' forthcoming novel is a high-tech special-forces nuclear terror thriller - featuring perilous night-time supercarrier landings, clockwork safehouse takedowns in bandit country, combat helicopter assaults into north London mosques, virtual fights to the death for control of an enormous dry dock in the largest first-person-shooter online video game of all time, breathless aircraft shoot-downs in the remote mountains of Pakistan, brutal and precise close-quarters battle sequences, waterborne SEAL Team assaults of hijacked super-container ships, Predator drones with real-time video feeds to smart-phones, and CheyTac Intervention sniper rifle systems that can kill you from a mile and a half away.
Are you ready for D-Boys? Get an advanced preview of the incomparable adventure, today.
Here's a list of the e-stores where you can e-buy which e-books.
- Amazon: Everything – the indie titles plus the properly published Macmillan titles.
- Barnes&Noble: Just the indie titles.
- iBooks: Everything – indie and Mac! Very exciting. Just search for me from your Bookshelf in your iThing. You can also get quite long-ish previews sent to you for free. Finally, they'll also give you the D-Boys preview for the correct price of $0.00.
- Smashwords: The indies.
- Sony: The indie titles are supposed to be there, but aren't showing up yet.
- Waterstones: The Macmillan titles.
- WH Smith: The Macmillan titles.
The Independent E-Book Revolution seems to be going gangbusters. The semi-official posterchild is Amada Hocking, who – with no publisher, no agent, and after having gotten turned down by every publishing house in New York – has now sold just shy of million books.
Unfortunately for me, at the moment, I've now sold just shy of, well let's charitably agree to call it several orders of magnitude fewer books. Is this going to be another winner-take-all economy, as is traditional publishing? (Where a handful of authors account for the vast majority of all book sales?) It's early days yet, I suppose. And no one quite knows what the winning formula is. Which I suppose is a good thing.
Closer to home, Ian Hocking – having been another great, promising author that the publishing industry chewed up and spat out – has quickly sold 1,000 copies of his novel Déjà Vu, so that rocks.
Also definitely worth noting is John Locke. Guy came absolutely out of nowhere: again, no publisher, no agent – and, in his case, absolutely no desire or intention of ever getting them. He saw independent e-book publishing as the business opportunity of the millennium, and undertook to make himself the King of E-Books. And he is: all six of his titles have lingered in the Kindle Top 100 bestsellers list, including three in the top 10. (*)
Even more compellingly, at the time of writing this (admittedly several weeks ago now), 27 of the Kindle Top 100 sellers were by independent authors – no publishing house and (in most cases) no agent. Just writers connecting with readers. That's pretty damned amazing.
Oh, here's a dialogue with thriller writer Barry Eisler – who just turned down a $500,000 advance from St. Martins Press to independently publish. Money has emphatically met mouth – and everything has changed in an eyeblink.
Though, at this rate, I'm soon going to be publishing a free preview of the sequel. (Which has gone through two working titles, if you were wondering: initially Delta of Man and now The Bad D.)
Here's an awesome interview with Locke on J.A. Konrath's blog, which is turning into ground zero for the indie e-book revolution. (If you read Locke's responses to the nearly 200 comments, you'll also see that he's a horrifyingly nice, understated, and classy guy.)
