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Planet Pluto Audiobook and New Novels

I am excited to announce a new audiobook for Planet Pluto (Pluto’s Ghost) featuring veteran Hollywood actor Steve Carlson is underway.

Also set for release this summer is Cataton, an alien invasion thriller.

Deep Mind, a sci-fi adventure in the spirit of such classics as Michael Crichton’s Sphere or Robin Cook’s Abduction, is in the works for release later this year. When an octopus communicates with divers on the sea floor, the most powerful tech mogul on earth launches an expedition to investigate.

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Powered, winged flight evolved prior to the latest Jurassic

According to a new study that examined the wing structure of three Archaeopteryx specimens, the  animals which have been assigned to the late Jurassic period (150 mil. years old) likely flew short distances through the use of a quick flapping action (very much like modern birds).  This is news because, according to extant literature, dinosaurs of this type were incapable of this kind of flight but were rather thought to be gliders.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03296-8

As with so much, what was thought to be set in stone is now up in the air (puns intended).

-B.C.

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Fraud on Amazon.com

 

Fraud on Amazon Kindle has become a serious problem, and it is getting worse.  Two troubling tactics are being used to skim money from Amazon’s customers and the authors who legitimately publish there.

  1. Fraud artists are placing links saying “Free Ipad” or some such thing in the front of their books which, when tapped, take the reader to the backs of the books, while the thousands of pages inside are filled with Lorem Ipsum or other nonsensical text.
  2. Scam artists, and even real authors who are drawn into advertisements promising instant success and thousands of readers, are using “click farms” to receive income from millions of pages read in the Kindle Unlimited Program.  The problem is that no actual readers are reading the pages.  Computer robots, using illegitimate accounts, are clicking through the pages of the books over and over again.  Because Amazon pays authors by the “page read,” and the amount of money available to be paid to authors each month is fixed by Amazon based upon the amount of income Amazon receives from Kindle Unlimited subscriptions, the amount of money paid to legitimate authors is being severely diluted.  This problem has become so severe that author earnings have dropped to $0.004223 per page.  This is a 30% drop since the program began.  It means that if a reader reads every page of a 200-page novel, an author receives a token 84 cents (and the way Amazon counts pages is not the way pages would be counted for a hardback novel these days).

See this concise article by David Gaughran for additional information: https://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2017/07/15/scammers-break-the-kindle-store/#more-4447

And please share this with your reading friends!  The only way this can be stopped is if Amazon is aware of the problem.

-B.C.

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The Lord of Elves audiobook and a new novel

Welcome to the brand new website!

Production is underway on The Story of Santa Claus (The Lord of the Elves Book One) audiobook.  I am very excited to announce that the audiobook will include music from legendary composer Jo Blankenburg (he has scored a trailer for the Harry Potter movies and most recently wrote music for the Wonder Woman trailer).

Many readers have expressed a wish that The Story of Santa Claus was expanded and included more backstory.  With that in mind, I have completed a second edition of the book, this one for adult readers, to be released in the upcoming days.  It will retain the same title, but it has a fresh cover and will be categorized separately.  Be on the lookout for the new cover, as well as a video trailer.

I am also busy working on another forthcoming novel.  In the future I will be posting some hints about the subject matter.

Thanks for reading,
-B.C.