Tuesday, April 12, 2011

The Elemental Odyssey now available!!

I’m pleased to announce that my first YA adventure novel, The Elemental Odyssey, is now available on Amazon for just $2.99.You can buy it here.



Description:

There are all sorts of fun and exciting things to do in South Dakota: hike the mountains, see the monuments, explore the caves, watch the wildlife. But what’s not on the travel brochures is getting abducted by magical aliens!

While vacationing in the Black Hills, twelve-year-old Kyle Morgan and his new friends, Jurgen, Susie, and Veeksha, are hauled on board a strange alien ship and forced to help the animal-like Zurans!

Whisked around the world on a perilous quest, the children solve riddles to find mystical elements for their fierce captors. Scheming against the aliens, military, powerful elementals, and even each other, the kids must escape before the Zurans can complete their mysterious mission.

If you enjoyed Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, or Narnia, this book is right up your alley.

Approximately 94,000 words

23 comments:

  1. Great ! Maybe first customer then :)

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  2. Purchased. Review will be up by the weekend.

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  3. Purchased.

    Any plans to release it on creatspace or something comparable? Would love to give a copy to my niece.

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  4. Well, drat. On Kindle for PC, the paragraph spacing and indenting is not showing up. Is anyone else seeing the text without paragraph indents?

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  5. On my Kindle iPhone it also has no paragraph spacing or indent.

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  6. Okay. I'll investigate the spacing problem tonight. I don't know why that's happening. The file is formatted the same as Dead Dwarves Don't Dance which has spacing and indents.

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  7. Thanks, all!

    Burritoclock, I don't have any current plans for a print version. However, if sales warreant, I'll reconsider.

    Jon Mac, yes the cover is uber awesome! Thanks to Igor Kieryluk for the artwork.

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  8. Awesome, can't wait to check it out, Derek. Sounds like a great read.

    Don't forget to add tags!

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  9. I also really like the cover. Congratulations.

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  10. Derek:

    How long did it take you to complete this project, from the time you started to write until now?

    I wondered, if you haven't already, if you might do a post kind of going through your process and time frames. Obviously, every writer's situation is different, but for me, getting two novel-length works done in a year is a pretty big challenge. You seem to be going at a much faster pace ... just wondering how you're able to do it!

    Thanks,
    PJ

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  11. Can you link to the website of your cover artist. He did an amazing job. Look forward to reading the eBook.

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  12. Manley, yep, I added some tags. Others can too, if they want to help.

    PJ, I'm not as prolific as you might think. DDDD was written in 1994. I've been working on TEO for 3 years. But, my next book will be quicker. I'm hoping 6 months. I'll do a post on it soon.

    Jeff, the cover artist is great! You can see more of his stuff at www.igorkieryluk.com. If you use him for a cover, let him know I sent you!

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  13. I think I've fixed the formatting issue. You might want to wait two days before buying the book so you can get the updated formatting. If you've already bought the book, you can return it and buy it again, I think, in a couple days. Unless, does anyone know how to redownload a book you've already purchased?

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  14. Congrats Derek!

    I'm curious why you started at $2.99 though. From following your pricing experiments, I would have thought the thing to do would be to give it a $0.99 "introductory" price for a month or two as it climbed the charts, then switch to $2.99. Can you share your thinking?

    Thanks!

    ~Graham

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  15. Okay, I fixed the format and the updated version is now online!

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  16. Graham, I plan on reducing the price to 99 cents when I release the second book in the series. Hopefully, in about 6 months.

    I've already got a couple of other books at 99 cents, so those are my entry level books for now.

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  17. Derek,

    Congrats! I'm excited for you. How many books are planned in the series?

    Good luck,
    Neil

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  18. Found you via Konrath's blog. Good luck to you!

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  19. We had a family road trip this weekend so I bought your new book for my ten yr old son. He's been reading it in the van on our iPad and wants to report to you that he's really enjoying it. My 12 yr old son is in waiting to read it. Please promise me Noose won't be making a cameo appearance in the middle of the story with gun's a blazin...anyway, for what it's worth, he did comment that it would be nice to have a "regular book" as an option because none of his friends have a kindle yet. Nice job on the new release Derek.

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  20. wannabuy, I'm not yet sure how many will be in the series. Several, I'm guessing.

    JM, I'm glad he's liking it! Noose won't be appearing in it. ;) Suddenly, three people are asking about print copies of my books. I'll have to look into CreateSpace to see what it takes to get POD versions done.

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  21. A book via CreateSpace might be your ticket for your YA novel. I guess we haven't really thought about getting ebook readers for our kids yet. But they both love our iPad. So if they're on it, we're not! If you offered your book via CreateSpace, I could buy 5 copies and put them in our kids Elementary School Auction as our donation/inclusion to a gift basket of books to raise money, etc. The cover alone (and the writing of course) would be an easy sell in that setting. I'm just thinking that with the YA market, I'm sure the day will come very soon for ereaders, but what do I know, I'm just guessing. I do have kids that read YA every day like crazy. Your book is the absolute first they've started to read on an ereader. And the comment my 10 yr old made about a print copy was unsolicited. He was just thinking of his friends.

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