July Writing update

Hello again!

It's summer, and up in Oxford on my annual research trip. I'm delving into the archives of the famous Bodleian Library to research the 1930 election in Germany and the independence movement in Egypt. I love doing research for my historical novels.

New books in both the Masked Man of Cairo series and The Berlin Murders will be out by the end of the year. I also intend on having a sequel to Cordelia Cracks the Case. Currently I'm working on a post-apocalyptic thriller called Bunker. Those should be out by the end of the year too More on that soon!

In the meantime, Radio Hope, book one of my post-apocalyptic series Toxic World, is only 99 cents through July 16, so if you might want to give it a try.

See you next month!

A New Website and other News

I've got a new website! It's been a while since I had one, so I hired designer Stuart Grant to design a website for author Sean McLachlan. I think it looks pretty good. It's still being tweaked, though, so if you have any suggestions, feel free to add them in the comments section.

In other news, I'm back in Oxford for my usual summer research in the Bodleian Library. This year I'm doing research for my upcoming Weimar historical mystery series, as well as some reading on the Sudan in anticipation of a trip there in the winter. Fingers crossed on that one.

On the 16th of this month I'll be releasing the next issue of Sean's Travels and Tales, my monthly newsletter that comes out on the 16th of every month. If you sign up via my website, you also get two of my books, Radio Hope and Tangier Bank Heist, for free! Not a bad deal, eh?

Radio Hope is now Free!

Radio Hope, the first volume in my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series, is now free on all platforms. That's right. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and all other vendors have it listed as free. So if you like gritty, realistic science fiction, give it a try! A blurb is below.

In a world shattered by war, pollution and disease. . .

A gunslinging mother longs to find a safe refuge for her son.

A frustrated revolutionary delivers water to villagers living on a toxic waste dump.

The assistant mayor of humanity's last city hopes he will never have to take command.

One thing gives them the promise of a better future--Radio Hope, a mysterious station that broadcasts vital information about surviving in a blighted world. But when a mad prophet and his army of fanatics march out of the wildlands on a crusade to purify the land with blood and fire, all three will find their lives intertwining, and changing forever.

A Free Book, A New Look, and New Markets for the Toxic World Series!

As you can see from the photo, my cover designer has switched out the cover for Radio Hope, Book One of my post-apocalyptic Toxic World series. The old cover was a bit flat and this one has more pop. I hope you like it.

I've also taken the series out of Kindle Select and published it wide. You can now find the series on Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Scribd, and many other outlets. Click on the title to find a list of links for Radio Hope. Hitting on your favorite store will take you to that title and the rest of the series.

Also, I'm giving away The Scavenger, a novella set in the Toxic World, for free on all those venues. Click on the link to grab your copy today!

July Sale: Two Ebooks for 99 Cents Each!

You folks deserve some cheap summer reading, so until the end of July, I'm slashing the price of two of my novels to only 99 cents each. Radio Hope and Trench Raiders have both been around since 2014 and they've sold steadily, but in the past year they've been eclipsed by some of my more recent efforts. So this is a chance to rediscover some of my earlier writing. While both are the start of series, they can be read as standalones.

Radio Hope is the first of the Toxic World series, which has three books and a spin-off novella. Book Four is coming out in the autumn. A blurb is below.

In a world shattered by war, pollution and disease. . .
A gunslinging mother longs to find a safe refuge for her son.
A frustrated revolutionary delivers water to villagers living on a toxic waste dump.
The assistant mayor of humanity's last city hopes he will never have to take command.
One thing gives them the promise of a better future--Radio Hope, a mysterious station that broadcasts vital information about surviving in a blighted world. But when a mad prophet and his army of fanatics march out of the wildlands on a crusade to purify the land with blood and fire, all three will find their lives intertwining, and changing forever.

Radio Hope is available on Amazon, Amazon UK, and all the other Amazons. Enjoy and please spread the word!

Trench Raiders is the first in the Trench Raiders series of World War one action novels, which includes three novels and a novella. Here's the blurb:

September 1914: The British Expeditionary Force has the Germans on the run, or so they think.
After a month of bitter fighting, the British are battered, exhausted, and down to half their strength, yet they’ve helped save Paris and are pushing toward Berlin. Then the retreating Germans decide to make a stand. Holding a steep slope beside the River Aisne, the entrenched Germans mow down the advancing British with machine gun fire. Soon the British dig in too, and it looks like the war might grind down into deadly stalemate.
Searching through No-Man’s Land in the darkness, Private Timothy Crawford of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry finds a chink in the German armor. But can this lowly private, who spends as much time in the battalion guardhouse as he does on the parade ground, convince his commanding officer to risk everything for a chance to break through?
Trench Raiders is the first in a new series of World War One action novels that will follow the brave men of the British Expeditionary Force through the major battles of the First World War a hundred years after they happened. The Battle of the Aisne was the start of trench warfare on the Western Front, and it was there that the British and Germans first honed their skills at a new, vicious brand of fighting.

Trench Raiders is available at Amazon, Smashwords, and within a few days will be available at all other online outlets. 

Get Radio Hope for only 99 cents!

For the next week, through July 19, my post-apocalyptic science fiction novel Radio Hope is only 99 cents on Amazon. This is the first of the Toxic World series, which has three books and a spin-off novella. Book Four is coming out in the autumn. Radio Hope, however, can also be read as a standalone novel. I'm not pulling you into some sort of crack dealer arrangement. :-) A blurb is below.

In a world shattered by war, pollution and disease. . .
A gunslinging mother longs to find a safe refuge for her son.
A frustrated revolutionary delivers water to villagers living on a toxic waste dump.
The assistant mayor of humanity's last city hopes he will never have to take command.
One thing gives them the promise of a better future--Radio Hope, a mysterious station that broadcasts vital information about surviving in a blighted world. But when a mad prophet and his army of fanatics march out of the wildlands on a crusade to purify the land with blood and fire, all three will find their lives intertwining, and changing forever.

Radio Hope is available on Amazon, Amazon UK, and all the other Amazons. Enjoy and please spread the word!

Get the Post-Apocalyptic Thriller Radio Hope for Free!

For the next five days, through July 11, my post-apocalyptic science fiction novel Radio Hope is free on Amazon. This is the first of the Toxic World series, which has three books and a spin-off novella. Book Four is coming out in the early summer. Radio Hope, however, can also be read as a standalone novel. I'm not pulling you into some sort of crack dealer arrangement. :-) A blurb is below.

In a world shattered by war, pollution and disease. . .
A gunslinging mother longs to find a safe refuge for her son.
A frustrated revolutionary delivers water to villagers living on a toxic waste dump.
The assistant mayor of humanity's last city hopes he will never have to take command.
One thing gives them the promise of a better future--Radio Hope, a mysterious station that broadcasts vital information about surviving in a blighted world. But when a mad prophet and his army of fanatics march out of the wildlands on a crusade to purify the land with blood and fire, all three will find their lives intertwining, and changing forever.

Radio Hope is available on Amazon, Amazon UK, and all the other Amazons. Enjoy and please spread the word!

Results of an Amazon Kindle Giveaway One Month Later

A month ago, I posted my numbers from an Amazon Kindle giveaway. If you haven't read that post, click on the link and check it out. Now let's look at the numbers on month on. Has the giveaway, which moved 1684 copies of Radio Hope in nine countries, shown a significant increase in sales?

Radio Hope is the first book in my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series, which includes two more volumes plus a novelette set in the same world.

So in the four weeks since the giveaway ended, I've sold three copies of Radio Hope, seven copies of Refugees from the Righteous Horde (Toxic World Book Two), seven copies of We Had Flags (Toxic World Book Three), and four copies of The Scavenger (a standalone novelette). This is disappointing as it is not a significant rise over a usual four-week period.

The picture looks very different when you look at read pages from the Kindle Online Lending Library. This is a service for Kindle Prime members. For a fee they get unlimited access to ebooks in the Kindle Select program, which includes my entire Toxic World series. While it's free for them, we still get paid for every page view, called a KOLL unit. A KOLL unit changes in value every month but is generally about half a cent. Thus is someone in the program read Radio Hope, a 268 page book on the Kindle Lending Library, I'd get $1.34.

My KOLL units for the past four weeks have been as follows: Radio Hope (8194), Refugees from the Righteous Horde (7735), We Had Flags (6419), The Scavenger (325). This is a huge jump, over ten times my normal numbers. When you consider that my novels run 268, 390, and 341 pages (with The Scavenger only running 72 pages) you can see that's a lot of new readers.

(I'm lumping the numbers from all countries. The majority are from Amazon US, with about 15% from the UK and a small amount from Canada)

So why the disparity? It seems I've captured the attention of those most loyal of Amazon customers, the Prime customers. These are the ones who don't mind paying a monthly fee to have access to lots of free stuff. This is a distinct type of customer we're seeing a lot of in this new world, in publishing, video, and music. They've found my series and are up for reading it for free. What's nice about these figures is that a lot of people have already made it through the third book in the series. I'm also getting a lot of reads of the first book in the series. So people who missed Radio Hope's initial giveaway spotted the book through Amazon's algorithms and are picking it up.

So while Kindle Prime members have found my book, my giveaway did not help earn me more traditional customers who simply plunk down their money to download the ebook. I also did not see a commensurate rise in sales for my other titles. None of them are science fiction, so that may be the problem, or maybe it's just too early to tell. It's only been four weeks, after all, and a large number of the 1,684 people who downloaded Radio Hope will not have read it yet. Some won't read it for weeks or months from now. Others will never read it. So it goes.

I've also gotten half a dozen new reviews on Amazon, critical for indie publishers. All were four or five stars except for one three-star review. I also earned a few four- and five-star reviews on Goodreads plus I got added to many people's "to read" or "reading" list. This sort of thing is great for visibility, so maybe I'll attract some more of those traditional customers in the future.

If you're an indie writer and found this useful, feel free to share your own experiences in the comments section. We can all learn from each other!

Honest Numbers about an Amazon Ebook Giveaway

As regular readers of this blog know, I just finished a five-day giveaway of Radio Hope, the first in my Toxic World series of post-apocalyptic novels. The plan was to get more attention for my series, which currently has three novels, a related novelette, and a fourth novel coming out in the late spring.

This post runs through my experience with an Amazon free ebook promotion. It's hard to get honest numbers from indie writers, who tend to exaggerate their success or make wildly ridiculous claims. If you don't believe me, waste an hour of your life on the Kindle Boards. This post will give you honest numbers and my best assessment of what's going on. I want my fellow indies to succeed, and the best way to do that is to cut through the bull and actually communicate.

I've done some giveaways before of The Scavenger, the Toxic World novelette, which I had written as a teaser for the series. My first promotion moved 391 copies. You can read the details here. I did little promotion for that giveaway beyond mentioning it on my blog and several times on my Twitter feed. Several blogger buddies mentioned it. A few nice people tweeted.

Since then I've done two more giveaways of the same book. As an experiment, during one of the giveaways I didn't mention it was free to anyone. Heck, I didn't even tell my wife because I didn't want her mentioning it on Facebook. I still gave away 54 copies. People really go looking for free stuff on Amazon.

For Radio Hope, I got a bit more serious. The giveaway ran from Thursday, March 10, through Monday, March 14. I was heavily on Twitter that entire time and many nice people retweeted me. I also bought places in two newsletters that advertise discount and free books. On Friday, March 11, I was in Ebooksoda. For $15 you go out to more than 14,000 subscribers. For an extra $6, you are mentioned on their Facebook Page, which has 8,900 followers. The next day, I was in the Fussy Librarian, which costs $16, and their science fiction list has more than 100,000 subscribers.

So I laid out $37. Book Two in the series, Refugees from the Righteous Horde, costs $4.99,which means I get $3.44 for every sale. I only need to get eleven people to go on to buy Book Two for the promotion to pay for itself.

NOTE: one thing I learned is that you have to sign up for a place with these newsletters way early. Even trying to sign up weeks ahead of the promotion, I barely got into Fussy Librarian and I didn't get into another newsletter, Book Barbarian. Slots fill up fast!

So now, on to the numbers. I've broken them down for each day and by country.


Thursday, March 10: US (493), UK (34), Germany (2), Canada (6), Mexico (1), Australia (5)

Friday, March 11: US (337), UK (35), Germany (1), Spain (1), Italy (1), Canada (7), Australia (2)

Saturday, March 12: US (277), UK (19), Germany (1), Canada (1), Australia (1)

Sunday, March 13: US (296), UK (19), Germany (1), India (1), Canada (6)

Monday, March 14: US (115), UK (16), Spain (1), Canada (5)

Total by country: US (1518), UK (123), Germany (5), Spain (2), Italy (1), India (1), Canada (25), Mexico (1), Australia (8)

Grand Total: 1684 free copies downloaded.

A few things surprised me about these numbers. The UK accounted for fewer than 10% of the total. My sales to the UK have consistently been about 10% of my total for three years now, and have recently risen to 15%. Also, ebooksoda is a UK based newsletter. I have no idea if they have a disproportionately high percentage of UK subscribers, but it didn't seem to impact my downloads. I'm also surprised by the relatively strong showing in Canada. I've had very few sales through Amazon Canada. Heck, Germany buys more of my books than Canada.

I'm also surprised that Thursday was the best day, followed by Sunday. In my previous giveaways, Thursdays have been strong, Friday and Saturday have been the strongest, followed by lower numbers on Sunday and a slump on Monday. Sales are always bad on Mondays. For some reason people don't go looking for ebooks on Mondays.

Promotions start at midnight West Coast time, something to keep in mind if you are promoting in Europe. One strange thing I noticed was that in the first hour on Thursday, I moved 11 copies in the US. That means that between midnight and 1 am on the West Coast, or 3-4 am on the East Coast, eleven people downloaded my book. On a work day!

The strong showing in Thursday helped me a lot. It got me into the top 20 for the post-apocalyptic and dystopian lists under the free heading for both Amazon US and Amazon UK. Amazon lists its bestsellers by groups of 20, and as many studies of Internet searching has shown, most people will not jump to the second page to see numbers 21-40, or click again to get to 41-60. Getting on the front page is vital and helped my visibility and, therefore, my numbers. By Saturday I was in the top five on Amazon US and stayed there for the rest of the giveaway.

So considering that, did the newsletters help? It's hard to say. I think it may be significant that Sunday was such a good day. Since giveaways almost always stretch over the entire weekend, I suspect newsletter subscribers know this and may put off their downloading until Sunday when they have more time. That's only a hunch, though. Like with all products, marketing ebooks involves a lot of guesswork. I will continue to use newsletters for future promotions. They don't cost much and the extra visibility sure can't hurt.

The real test is whether this increases my sales. Over the course of the giveaway I sold seven copies of other books in the series, a slight rise. I also got a a nice review of Radio Hope. That all might just be a coincidence, but considering how some readers inhale books, maybe not. I'll come back in a month's time with another blog post tracking my sales and looking at what effect, if any, this giveaway has had on sales of this series.

I hope this has been enlightening for fellow authors out there. If you want to thank me, considering buying one of my books! :-)

Free Post-Apocalyptic Ebook!

For the next five days, through March 14, my post-apocalyptic science fiction novel Radio Hope is free on Amazon. This is the first of the Toxic World series, which has three books and a spin-off novella. Book Four is coming out in the early summer. Radio Hope, however, can also be read as a standalone novel. I'm not pulling you into some sort of crack dealer arrangement. :-) A blurb is below.

In a world shattered by war, pollution and disease. . .
A gunslinging mother longs to find a safe refuge for her son.
A frustrated revolutionary delivers water to villagers living on a toxic waste dump.
The assistant mayor of humanity's last city hopes he will never have to take command.
One thing gives them the promise of a better future--Radio Hope, a mysterious station that broadcasts vital information about surviving in a blighted world. But when a mad prophet and his army of fanatics march out of the wildlands on a crusade to purify the land with blood and fire, all three will find their lives intertwining, and changing forever.

Radio Hope is available on Amazon, Amazon UK, and all the other Amazons. Enjoy and please spread the word!

A new Toxic World short story available free online!

I've had another of my short stories published. This one is in the Toxic World setting I use for my post-apocalyptic novels, the first of which is Radio Hope. The short story is called The Garbage Miners and is available on the webzine Perihelion Science Fiction.

And if you missed my previous announcement, there's another Toxic World story called The Fish Eaters that's been published at Daily Science Fiction.

Happy reading!

Free Post-Apocalyptic Ebook and Kindle Countdown Deal!

Hello from Worldcon! I'm in London at the world's largest, and oldest science fiction convention. I'll be turning 45 here on Saturday, surrounded by science fiction fans. There are worse places to to grow old.

In honor of Worldcon and my oncoming decrepitude, I'm running a special promotion for two of my Toxic World titles of post-apocalyptic books. Radio Hope is on a Kindle Countdown deal. It's usually $3.99 but for August 14-15 it will be 99 cents. On August 16-17 it will be $1.99. On August 18-19 it will be $2.99.

Also, my short story The Scavenger will be free August 14-18.

Grab these titles while they're cheap, and tune in next week for a full convention report and plenty of photos!

Looking forward to Worldcon, plus an upcoming giveaway!

On Thursday I'm heading down to London for the World Science Fiction Convention, otherwise known as Worldcon, this year hosted by Loncon. It's five days of panels, movies, special events, making new friends, and of course a giant dealer's room!

I'm doing a panel on Thursday, plus a signing on Saturday, the same day yours truly turns 45. Yipe!

I'll be writing up a full con report next week for Black Gate and will post the link here.

In honor of Worldcon and my oncoming old age, I'll be running a special promotion for two of my Toxic World titles of post-apocalyptic books. Radio Hope will be on a Kindle Countdown deal. It's usually $3.99 but for August 13-14 it will be 99 cents. On August 15-16 it will be $1.99. On August 17-19 it will be $2.99.

Also, my short story The Scavenger will be free August 14-18.

Blurb help please!

I'm busy putting the final touches on Refugees from the Righteous Horde, Book Two of my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series. It picks up where Radio Hope left off.
Right now I'm working on the blurb, and blurbs are hard. Here's what I have so far. I'd love to get your input.

When you only have one shot, you better aim true.
In a world shattered by war, pollution and disease, civilization’s last outpost is reeling after fighting off the fanatical warriors of the Righteous Horde. Newly elected sheriff Annette Cruz becomes New City’s long arm of vengeance as she sets off across the wildlands to take out the cult’s leader. All she has is a sniper’s rifle with one bullet and an unlikely ally, a former cultist who has his own agenda.
Meanwhile, one of the cult’s escaped slaves makes a discovery that could tear New City apart.
Refugees from the Righteous Horde continues the Toxic World series started in Radio Hope, an ongoing narrative of humanity’s struggle to rebuild the world it ruined.

Toxic World Book Two almost ready!

Book Two of my post-apocalyptic Toxic World series is almost ready for the readers. I'm doing final edits now and my cover designer is hard at work. It's titled Refugees from the Righteous Horde and picks up where Radio Hope left off. Like the previous book, it will follow the adventures of three main characters. Annette Cruz is back, now in her new role as sheriff of the Burbs. Good luck with that one, Annette!

You'll also be meeting two people from the Righteous Horde, everyone's favorite crazy cult. One went along with the mad crusade willingly, one didn't.

The book should come out in late June. Stay tuned!

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Radio Hope now available in print!

I just got my author's copies of Radio Hope from Createspace. They came out looking beautiful thanks to my talent brother-in-law Andrés Alonso-Herrero for the lovely cover!


Photo courtesy my eight-year-old son Julián. He took his first photos when he was three. You can see them here.

Post-Apocalyptic A to Z: Quick update on my writing

I'm guilty of being a letter behind on the A to Z Challenge, but I plead Innocent Due To Writing! Just last week I finished the next book in my post-apocalyptic Toxic World series, titled Refugees from the Righteous Horde, which is book two after Radio Hope. At the same time I was promoting a free giveaway of my short story The Scavenger. I'll be writing an article about my experiences and what I learned doing this in the next week or so.

Right now I'm chilling out in Oxford on my usual Easter working vacation. I'm taking some time off the apocalypse to research a series called Trench Raiders, which will be a line of action books set in World War One. I'm also doing a bit of travel writing, so if I'm a bit slow with the A to Z over the next two weeks, it's because of a marginal case of burnout.

I hope there's coffee in the apocalypse. . .

Post-Apocalyptic A to Z: Justice

One aspect of a post-apocalyptic society that writers need to consider is how the survivors feel about what happened. If something like the American Civil War can inflame passions 150 years after the fact, what kind of reactions would the fall of civilization bring on?

In my Toxic World series, people are forbidden to speak of it in the one surviving civilized town, New City. The rulers of New City are terrified that the old social splits that destroyed the Old Times might return, and so anyone who is found guilty of Blame is branded and exiled.

In Radio Hope, we meet Jackson Andrews, one such exile. Jackson is a Marxist and publically blamed the rich for starting wars and polluting the world for their profit. Since he's already been branded and exiled, he's not afraid to continue his Blaming in the wildlands. Most people dismiss his ideas, but find they can't quite ignore him.

In the second book, which is in edits right now, Blaming religious groups becomes a problem in New City thanks to an attack by a mad cult, and in the third volume (in the outline stage) the most crucial divisions of the Old Times get shoved right into everyone's faces.

But I still need to write that story!


Statue of Lady Justice on the Well of Justice in Bern, Switzerland. Sculptor: Hans Gieng, 1543. photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Post-Apocalyptic A to Z: The Apocalypse!

This month I'm participating in the A to Z blogfest, during which I and hundreds of other bloggers work our way through the alphabet throughout April (getting Sundays off). My theme this year is post-apocalyptic books and films. I've always been a big fan of the genre and have written a post-apocalyptic novel called Radio Hope and a novelette titled The Scavenger.

Writers and filmmakers are full of ways to wreak our civilization. In The Road it appears to have been a meteor or comet strike. Back in the Cold War it was trendy to write about nuclear war. Now Zombies seem to be the main threat. I wrote about my own feelings about how we'll go under during the Choose Your Own Apocalypse blogfest back in 2012.

So join me for a month of worldwide destruction and woe, with a few hardy survivors trying to rebuild what we've lost, or destroy the last remnants of civilization. What are your favorite post-apocalyptic books and movies? What are some of the overlooked gems of the genre? I'm always on the lookout for more post-apocalyptic entertainment!

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons. It shows a ruined house in Fatxes, Spain. This village was suddenly abandoned in the mid-twentieth century. It was rumored that people left after a series of murders there, but no one knows for sure. Now it's considered an accursed place.

Forging ahead with my next novel

I'm on the home stretch for my next Toxic World novel, tentatively called Refugees from the Righteous Horde. The action takes place right after the story in Radio Hope.

Actually, I wanted to be done by now. I'm only 15,000 words from what I think will be the final word count. Last week, though, I went on a press trip to Belgium with some other journalists to tour the Western Front. That gave me heaps of ideas for my next project, a World War One action novel titled Trench Raiders. I knew focusing on outlining it would throw me off from my science fiction novel-in-progress, but you don't pass up an opportunity for inspiration like that!

Anyway, once I got settled back in my home office on Monday, I went through the existing 60,000 words of Refugees to get my head back into it. Now I'm writing full steam ahead and hope to have the first draft done by the end of next week. We shall see!


Painting "Refugees" by Karl Glatt, 1942, from Wikimedia Commons.