Filed under: Amazon, Kindle, Marketing, Promotion, Publishing, Science Fiction, tech, Titan
Well, it’s official:
To ‘launch’ the publication of Communion of Dreams, the Kindle version will be free to download for just three days: January 27 through 29. Of course, you’re welcome to buy it outside of those dates, to get a paperback copy, to get a signed copy, or to even just make a donation in appreciation. The links for all those are there on the side.
I’d really appreciate your help, and ask for it with the following:
- Please just go download the Kindle version during this free period. It’ll cost you nothing. Even if you don’t have a Kindle – you can get the free Kindle app for a wide variety of electronic devices. Just by downloading it you help boost the ranking, and that helps me a lot.
- Tell others about the book and this free offer. Please – word of mouth is far & away the best advertising. Don’t spam people/sites, but if you know anyone who likes speculative/science fiction, please let them know about the book & free offer this weekend. And this goes like triple for any well-known writers/bloggers/personalities you may have a connection to. This would be a *huge* help to me.
- Lastly, wherever possible please “like” or “+1” Communion of Dreams. On the homepage. On Amazon. On Facebook/Twitter/G+/whatever. Each time you do this it helps to boost the ranking in search engines, and so will be a great help in the long run.
And if/when you actually read the book, you’d be willing to write a review or give a ranking on Amazon, that would be very much appreciated. But I want this to be an honest review/ranking – BS doesn’t help.
Thanks – it has been a long haul to get to this point. Now it is a matter of marketing. The next three days are critical, as they could help get enough attention to get the book established. Already today (just about 7 hours after the promotion started) there have been well over 100 downloads of the book and the page rank has jumped to under 5,000. I’d love to give away a thousand books this weekend – help me out.
Cheers, one and all!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Art, Emergency, Flu, Government, Pandemic, Publishing, Science Fiction, Survival, tech, Violence, Writing stuff
As we’re closing in on having Communion of Dreams ready to go out in both digital and print form, I’ve been thinking about changes in story-telling formats. And I’ve just seen an exceptional example of just that, even though I’ve never been fond of horror movies/books, and the zombie genre in particular. It’s brilliant, though some of the images are disturbing.
Be sure to start down at “Day 1”. http://www.reddit.com/user/Vidzilla/submitted/
Jim Downey
(Via MeFi.)
Filed under: Art, Blade Runner, movies, Philip K. Dick, Predictions, Ridley Scott, Science Fiction, tech
My, my, my. Hit the mother lode: Future Noir.
Just one of the gems there is the Blade Runner Sketchbook.
Less than 8 years to go.
Jim Downey
Via Mefi.
Wow: a milimeter-long pulse of laser light caught with a camera taking images at a trillion frames per second.
Description from the site:
Volumetric Propagation: The pulse of light is less than a milimeter long. Between each frame, the pulse travels less than half a milimeter. Light travels a foot in a nanosecond and the duration of travel through a one foot long bottle is barely one nanosecond (one billiongth of a second).
There’s complete description of how they do this, along with other videos and images of this effect, there at the MIT site. To see a bunch of great high speed video of actual bullets, check out the work done by Brass Fetcher.
Jim Downey
Via MeFi. Cross posted to the BBTI blog.
Filed under: BoingBoing, Civil Rights, George Orwell, Government, movies, Predictions, Privacy, Science Fiction, Society, tech, The Prisoner
I’m beginning to think that Orwell was an optimist:
Oxford taxi conversations to be recorded, council rules
By April 2015 it will be mandatory for all of the city’s 600 plus cabs to have cameras fitted to record passengers.
The council said the cameras would run continuously, but only view footage relating to police matters would be reviewed.
Big Brother Watch said it was “a total disregard for civil liberties”.
When I first saw this on BoingBoing, I thought “oh, another DailyMail exaggeration piece, blowing something relatively innocuous all out of proportion.” Then I saw it was from the BBC. Reading the full article makes it quite clear that this is not exaggerated in the slightest.
>sigh<
How long before you think someplace in the US follows suit? I give it five years.
Jim Downey
Do yourself a favor, and watch this:
(Remember to run it full screen, in HD, for best effect.)
Jim Downey
I’ve always loved Tery Fugate-Wilcox’s phrase “Without art, we are but monkeys with car keys.”
And it looks like you can push that differentiation back a lot further than we previously thought:
Ancient ‘paint factory’ unearthed
The kits used by humans 100,000 years ago to make paint have been found at the famous archaeological site of Blombos Cave in South Africa.
The hoard includes red and yellow pigments, shell containers, and the grinding cobbles and bone spatulas to work up a paste – everything an ancient artist might need in their workshop.
This extraordinary discovery is reported in the journal Science.
It is proof, say researchers, of our early ancestors’ complexity of thought.
“This is significant because it is pushing back the boundaries of our understanding of when Homo sapiens – people like us – first became modern,” said Prof Christopher Henshilwood from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
There has been other evidence of early human art, shell jewelry and carvings which date back almost as far. But this latest discovery shows a level of planning and preparation which clearly indicate complex thought – it is the difference between a toddler picking up a rock and marking a wall and someone finding just the right rock, crushing it, adding in several other quite different but necessary ingredients in the proper proportions, mixing them all together in order to make a paint with which to mark the same wall.
Fascinating.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 