More of my Books Available in More Places!

As ebook buyers know, some ebooks are only available on Amazon while others can be found anywhere. This is because Amazon gives certain advantages to writers who make their titles exclusive to Amazon. One of the big advantages is to have the books available on the Kindle Online Lending Library, where writers get paid by page view.

There's also an advantage to going wide--not everyone shops on Amazon. Because of this, I've recently put several more of my titles in all the other venues such as Kobo, the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble, etc. These titles include:

The Trench Raiders series

The Interzone Mystery Series

Warpath into Sonora

A Fine Likeness and its sequel The River of Desperation

Writing Secrets of the World's Most Prolific Authors

The Night the Nazis Came to Dinner

The Rat Killer

The Quintessence of Absence

Tales from the Toxic World

 

Two series, The Masked Man of Cairo and Toxic World, remain exclusive to Amazon for the foreseeable future. They are quite popular in the Kindle Online Lending Library so I think it's best to keep them there for now.

Facing Tough Times? Here are two free ebooks

Stuck at home and need some free reading? We're all bored right now and many of us are taking hard economic hits, so Smashwords has come up with the Authors Give Back program. From now until April 20, heaps of authors are giving away books for deep discounts or free. I've enrolled two of my books, Trench Raiders, a World War One action novel, and The Rat Killer and Other Weird War Tales, a collection of short stories.

While some might think it odd to be promoting war novels at a time like this, I don't feel that way. We are in tough times, to be sure, but the folks in these stories had it tougher. They showed grit, teamwork, and courage, and made it through. We will too.

If my books don't appeal, check out the Smashwords website for heaps of free and cheap ebooks in all genres in the Authors Give Back sale.

Stay healthy, and best of luck to you.

Trench Raiders on sale for 99 cents!

As I mentioned in my last post, I will be getting back into my Trench Raiders series of WWI action novels later in the year. I've been away for that series for too long and I've had readers pestering me to continue, so I will. In celebration of that, and for the release of the movie 1917. I'm putting the first Trench Raiders book at 99 cents until the end of the month. You can get it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and anywhere else ebooks are sold. A blurb is below.

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?

End of the Year Ebook Sale!

Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays!

If you're stuck at home immobilized because you've eaten too much, try some discounted reading on me. From December 25-January 1, all my titles at Smashwords will be 50% off as part of their Year End Sale. My titles there include the Trench Raiders series, my Civil War novels, my book on Writing Secrets of the World's Most Prolific Authors, and a few other goodies. The discount will automatically be applied at checkout. You can find all my discounted books on my Smashwords page.

Enjoy!

(This was written ahead of time. When you read this, I'll be in Tangier working on another North African mystery. I'm really enjoying writing those.)

The End of World War One

A hundred years ago today at 11:11 am, one of the most destructive wars in the history of the world finally ended. World War One led to the fall of several governments, destroyed large swathes of Europe, and killed millions of people. Not just confined to Europe, battles were fought in the Middle East, the Far East, and Africa.

The signing of the Armistice led to wild celebrations in the victorious countries, and a huge sigh of relief in the defeated ones. German civilians were close to starvation thanks to the Allied blockade, and had long since become sick of the war. Little did they know that less than 30 years later they would be in for worse.

This photo, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, shows The Black Watch celebrating in their camp. As you can see, they are mired in mud, and the photo itself is battered and faded. I think it makes a fitting image for this post.

As regular readers of my blog know, I've been writing a series of action novels set in the Great War called Trench Raiders. I'll be coming out with book four, Under the Front, in the coming year. It will deal with the tunnelers' war, those brave men on both sides who endured unthinkable conditions to tunnel underneath enemy lines. The heroes of Company E are sent in to help, and poor Crawford, the bravest of the brave, discovers a phobia he didn't know he had.

So take a moment today to think about what our forefathers had to endure in those tough times.

May they never come again.

The Fifth Issue of my Newsletter is Coming Out This Week!

The fifth issue of my newsletter, Sean's Travels and Tales, will come out later this week. This issue includes an article on researching in the Bodleian Library, a short story from my Trench Raiders series, and a coupon for two discounted ebooks.

So click on this link to sign up to my newsletter. I promise not to share your email with anyone, because that's a sure way to tank my career!

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. 

Free Christmas book!

Back from three weeks in Morocco! More on that later. In the meantime, I wanted to mention that I'm having a giveaway on a Christmas book. It's called Christmas Truce and is about the famous truce on the Western Front during World War One. It's part of my Trench Raiders series but can be read independently.

You can get it for free at Smashwords, B&N, Kobo, the iStore and various other online vendors. It's at 99 cents on Amazon because they're Grinches. Here's the blurb:

Christmas 1914
In the cold, muddy trenches of the Western Front, there is a strange silence. As a crack English trench raiding team enjoy their first day of peace in months, they call out holiday greetings to the men on the German line. Soon both sides are fraternizing in No Man’s Land.
But when the English recognize some enemy raiders who only a few days before launched a deadly attack on their position, can they keep the peace through the Christmas Truce?

Get Most of my Books at 50% off on Smashwords all July!

This July I'm participating in the Summer/Winter sale over on Smashwords. My entire Trench Raiders and House Divided series of ebooks are 50% off, as well as my standalone short story collections. You can find them all on my Smashwords book page, just use the coupon code SSW50 at checkout to get half off. The ebooks are on all formats including mobi (for Kindle), epub, pdf, and many more. You can even download them as a text file if you're weird. No one's ever done that yet. Offer ends July 31.

The only books not on sale are those in my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series. Those are exclusive to Amazon so Kindle Unlimited subscribers can read them for free (even though Amazon still pays me, nice deal).

Enjoy!

Military History Photo Friday: Tunnels Under the Western Front

While I'm busy writing the fourth installment of my Toxic World post-apocalyptic series, I'm also in the research phase for Under The Front, the fourth in my Trench Raiders WWI action series. In this book, the men of Company E won't be going over the top under  hail of machine gun fire or sneaking into No Man's Land in the middle of the night, instead they'll be burrowing under the German trenches.

As the Western Front stagnated and neither side could make any significant headway, new tactics evolved in an attempt to break the deadlock. One of these was digging tunnels under the enemy trench, filling them with explosives, and detonating them.

Digging these tunnels was a grueling job. The Germans and British, who were the main tunnelers, hired miners and made sure only to take the smallest men, often those who were too short to make it into regular service. Age restrictions were relaxed in order to get experienced miners. The men had to work in cramped, dark conditions, digging by hand through thick clayey soil. They had to work silently too, because the enemy would be listening. If a tunnel was detected, the opposing side would try to dig a counter-tunnel and break through. Then there would be a hellish underground fight in the near darkness.

A mine going off during the Battle of the Somme

Some of the most extensive tunnels were dug in preparation for the Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916. This will be the setting for Under the Front, as I continue my habit of having the book written on the centenary of the events they cover.

This tactic met with varying degrees of success. Like with everything else the generals tried, it didn't prove to be a game changer, and the war dragged on for years before Germany was finally too exhausted to continue.

Photos courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Even after a century of erosion, some of the craters made by mines at the Somme are still huge. For scale, note the people on the right edge.

My Writing Year: A Look Back And A Look Forward

The year 2015 was a pretty productive one for me. Two of my series got to book three. My post-apocalyptic science fiction series saw the publication of We Had Flags, and No Man's Land became the third in my Trench Raiders WWI action series. My House Divided series of Civil War horror got its second installment with The River of Desperation. I also came out with a collection of speculative short stories called The Rat Killer and Other Weird War Tales.

This year is going to be a busy one too. In 2016, I plan to come out with several books. Right now I'm finishing up The Last Hotel Room, a novel set in contemporary Tangier that deals with the refugee crisis. There's a reason I've been doing all those writing retreats in Morocco!

I'll also be coming out with the fourth installment of my Toxic World series, Emergency Transmission. The residents of New City have to deal with an environmental disaster that could wipe out their settlement, and discover that the Righteous Horde might be coming back. Fans of my Trench Raiders series will get Under the Front. The men of Company E join the tunnelers in an attempt to dig under the German lines. As usual, the mission does not go as planned! In addition, there will be a horror novella set in Viking Greenland, another about the Apaches raiding Mexico to get revenge on some scalp hunters, and a couple of other projects still bubbling away in my brain pan. Stay tuned!

Merry Christmas! Have a free ebook!

Merry Christmas! I'm here in Morocco avoiding the holidays. This is the third year we've hid from the silly season by going to a Muslim country.

But I'm no Grinch, and to prove it I've made my novella Christmas Truce free until the end of the month. This is part of my Trench Raiders World War One series but can be read independently. It is a fictional take on the real-life miracle of a ceasefire during the war's first Christmas. A blurb is below.

Christmas 1914
In the cold, muddy trenches of the Western Front, there is a strange silence. As a crack English trench raiding team enjoy their first day of peace in months, they call out holiday greetings to the men on the German line. Soon both sides are fraternizing in No Man’s Land.
But when the English recognize some enemy raiders who only a few days before launched a deadly attack on their position, can they keep the peace through the Christmas Truce?

You can find Christmas Truce free at Smashwords (where you can get all formats), Barnes and Noble, Kobo, the iStore, and many other outlets. Unfortunately I could only put it as low as 99 cents at Amazon. They don't let you put it for free unless you go exclusive with them. Grinches.

Happy Holidays!

No Man's Land out now! Have a free novella!

No Man's Land, the third in my Trench Raiders series of WWI novels, has just been released. It's available on Amazon, Smashwords, and is going through Smashwords premium distribution and will soon be available everywhere. The blurb is below:

No Man’s Land—a hellscape of shell craters and dead bodies. Soldiers have fought over it, charged across it, and bled on it for a year of grueling war, but neither side has dominated it.
Until now.
An elite German raiding party is passing through No Man’s Land every night, attacking the British trenches at will. The Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry need to reassert control over their front lines.
So the exhausted men of Company E decide to set a trap, a nighttime ambush in the middle of No Man’s Land, where any mistake can be fatal. But the few surviving veterans are leading recruits who have only been in the trenches two weeks. Mistakes are inevitable.

To celebrate the launch, as well as the approaching holidays, I'm putting a related novella, Christmas Truce, out for free. You can get it for free on Smashwords and most other sites. Unfortunately Amazon doesn't allow me to put it for free unless I go exclusive with them, so it's at 99 cents there. Offer ends December 31!

Christmas 1914:
In the cold, muddy trenches of the Western Front, there is a strange silence. As the men of a crack English trench raiding team enjoy their first day of peace in months, they begin to call out holiday greetings to their enemies on the German line. Soon men are fraternizing in No Man’s Land.
But when the English recognize some enemy trench raiders who only a few days before had launched a deadly attack on their position, can they keep the peace through the Christmas Truce?

No Man's Land blurb Version 2.0--Feedback Welcome!

A few days ago I posted a blurb for my upcoming novel No Man's Land, the third in my Trench Raiders series of World War One novels. Thanks for your input! Here's my revised version of the blurb. What do you think? Blurbs are tough!

No Man’s Land—a hellscape of shell craters and dead bodies. Soldiers have fought over it, charged across it, and bled on it for a year of grueling war, but neither side has dominated it.

Until now.

An elite German raiding party is passing through No Man’s Land every night, attacking the British trenches at will. The Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry need to reassert control over their front lines.

So the exhausted men of Company E decide to set a trap, a nighttime ambush in the middle of No Man’s Land, where any mistake can be fatal. But the few surviving veterans are leading recruits who have only been in the trenches two weeks. Mistakes are inevitable. 

Blurb Help Please!

I'm getting ready to publish No Man's Land, the third in my Trench Raiders series of World War One novels. As usual, I could use some help with the blurb, because blurbs are hard. Here it is. What do you think?


No Man’s Land—a hellscape of shell craters and dead bodies. It has been fought over, charged across, and bled on for a year of grueling war, but neither side has dominated it.
Until now.
An elite German raiding party is passing through No Man’s Land every night, attacking British trenches and setting traps. The exhausted men of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry need to reassert control over their front lines. So the men of Company E decide to set a trap of their own, a nighttime ambush in the middle of No Man’s Land, where any mistake can be fatal.

But the few surviving veterans are leading new men barely in the trenches for two weeks. Mistakes are inevitable.

Trench Raiders Book Three Finished!

My World War One novel No Man's Land is finished! Well, almost finished. I still have to do edits. Then I have to send it to my beta readers, get their feedback, chew it over, make any more corrections I want to make, get a cover, do layout, write the blurb, upload it to various retailers, and THEN it will be finished. At least the initial draft is done. I always find editing much easier than initial composition.

No Man's Land is the third full novel in my Trench Raiders series of WWI action novels and is slightly different in tone than the first two. While those were more over-the-top (pardon the pun) action, this one is more about sneaking around between the trenches at night, with our heroes playing a cat and mouse game with a German trench raiding party.

I'm glad I got this done now, because in less than two weeks I'm headed off to Tangier for a month-long writing project. Yep, it's another novel, but I don't want to talk much about it since it's still in the early stages. It will be set in contemporary Tangier, so staying there has obvious advantages. I also have to get a couple of freelance projects out of the way before I go. I always seem to be busiest before going on a trip!

Military History Photo Friday: German Artillery of World War One

I'm hard at work on No Man's Land, book 3 in my Trench Raiders series, and the guys are having a bit of trouble with German artillery. They've been mucking about in No Man's Land, trying to assert their primacy over the space between the opposing lines, and now the Germans are telling Willoughby, Crawford, and the rest of the gang what they think of their antics by lobbing over a bunch of shells.

It's only a year into the war, so the Germans are still using a lot of older field guns, like the 7.7 cm Feldkanone 96 shown above in this image courtesy Wikimedia Commons. As the name suggests, they first came out in 1896 and by 1915 were well out of date with current technology. The piece had a significant recoil that meant it needed to be adjusted after each shot, thereby reducing the rate of fire.

Most were remodeled just before the war with a recoilless system plus a new carriage and front shield. They were given the added specification n.A. (neuer Art, meaning "new model"). This model proved much more useful and was the standard German field gun throughout the first two years of the war. One can be seen in the photo below photo courtesy Drake Goodman. Both models used a crew of five, so I'm not sure who the extra guys were. Perhaps they just wanted to have their photograph taken!

These two models were specifically designed as mobile field artillery. It soon became apparent, however, that the Germans were going nowhere fast. The guns' effective range of 5,500 meters was considered insufficient and in 1916 a new model came out, the 7.7 cm FK 16 with an effective range of 9,100 meters.

It had a much longer barrel that could be brought to a higher angle, as can be seen in this Wikimedia Commons photo, and it weighed considerably more. By this point in the war mobility no longer mattered, range and destructive power did. While this proved a more useful gun, shortages in German industry by this point meant that older field guns remained in use until the end.

The average British soldier came to know these guns all too well, being on the receiving end of their shots day in and day out. In fact, they probably knew more about German artillery than their own. No one wanted to get near the artillery of their own side because it was so often a target of the enemy!

Get my ebooks for half off!

Over at Smashwords I'm participating in their great summer/winter sale. Whether you're sweltering in the summer of the Northern Hemisphere, or chilling out somewhere south of the Equator, it's always a good time to read an ebook. Through July 31, all my ebooks at Smashwords are 50% off. You can see an entire list on my Smashwords page.

The books include my Trench Raiders World War One action series, each now $1.50; older works such as the short story collection The Night the Nazis came to Dinner and the historical fantasy The Quintessence of Absence, both $1.50; and my Civil War horror novels A Fine Likeness and The River of Desperation.

Use the coupon code SSW50 at checkout to save 50%!

Military History Photo Friday: WWI German Trench in Cameroon

While the iconic image of World War One is the trench, the trenches we usually see were on the Western Front, that jagged line from the North Sea to the Swiss border. The bulk of the fighting and dying for Britain, France, and Germany was done there, and those years have been seared into the national memory. My own Trench Raiders series takes place on the Western Front. There were other fronts, however, including those in the Alps, Eastern Europe, Turkey, the Near East, and Africa.

This shot shows a German trench in Cameroon sometime between 1914 and 1916. The Germans had a number of colonies in Africa and their colonial forces fought the colonial forces of Belgium, France, and Britain. The majority of soldiers were local recruits fighting in colonial regiments. Civilians, too paid the price.

In a fascinating article on the BBC about the East Africa Campaign, the author tells how more than one million died just in that one region of the continent. No one is clear just how many died in Africa as a whole since the colonial rulers didn't bother counting.


Photo courtesy Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (DKG) - Koloniales Bildarchiv, Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt am Main.

Happy Holidays! Have A Free Ebook

I'm headed to Tangier on Friday for a couple of weeks so this blog will probably go quiet until the new year. In the meantime, enjoy a Christmas story on me. I just published Christmas Truce, a novella in my Trench Raiders series of WWI books. It looks at how the men of Company E react during the real-life Christmas Truce of 1914, when British and German soldiers skipped the war for a day and met as friends in No Man's Land. The blurb is below.

Christmas 1914: In the cold, muddy trenches of the Western Front, there is a strange silence.
As a crack English trench raiding team enjoy their first day of peace in months, they call out holiday greetings to the men on the German line. Soon both sides are fraternizing in No Man’s Land.
But when the English recognize some enemy raiders who only a few days before launched a deadly attack on their position, can they keep the peace through the Christmas Truce?

You can get it as a free ebook on Smashwords or, if you have a spare $2.99 you not doing anything with, you can buy it on Amazon.