THANK YOU !

A huge THANK YOU to all the folks who purchased a copy of INK MAGE yesterday when it was a daily deal on Amazon.

No link.  No sales pitch.

Just THANKS!

Ink Mage is now CHEAP for your Kindle !

Amazon has made my epic fantasy novel INK MAGE super cheap for people with Kindles or a Kindle App.  Only 1.99.  This is a "daily deal" so grab the bargain before time runs out.  Click HERE.

Guys, I don't have a crystal ball or anything like that, but I get the vibe we might me close to impressing the publisher enough for a sequel.  If you like sword stabbings and magic and whatnot, give it a try.

It's a Value Menu World!

For a limited time, get some Kindle fiction for the super elCheapo price of 99 pennies.

For a limited time, There Are Aliens Behind Uranus, Mr. President is on sale for 99 cents.  One of my favorite authors is Kurt Vonnegut and I always admired his alter ego Kilgore Trout.  In a similar vein, I created Emerson LaSalle.  This is probably the pulpiest most over the top thing I've ever written.  Sex and violence and craziness galore.

I've also permanently lowered the price of Three on a Light to 99 cents.  These tales of private eye Dean Murphy and his encounters with werewolves, witches and vampires represents some of my earlier writing, and I've lowered the price to encourage more readers to give it a chance.

To the Devil, My Regards has always been 99 cents.  This is the crazy hardboiled novella I wrote with Anthony Neil Smith.  A fun game: try to guess which chapters are his and which are mine.

So ... cheap.  Enjoy.

What exactly is "Young Adult" anyway?

So, my fantasy novel INK MAGE is still going strong, a steady seller for the Kindle.  Pick it up HERE if you haven't already.

At the time of this blog post, there are 246 reviews for the novel.  Most of them are positive, a fact for which I'm grateful.  Once a book starts getting a lot of reviews, you can start to see trends.  Something that confuses me slightly is the whole notion of "young adult" or YA.  I mean, what exactly makes a book YA?  Is it the fact that it is marketed toward a certain age group?  Or is it simply that some of the characters in the novel are of a certain age?

In INK MAGE our protagonist is 19 and a few of the other main characters are of a similar age.  I specifically wanted to make these characters young, but in no way was I setting out to write a YA novel, and frankly I don't think I did.  But if you read only the reviews, you might get confused.  One reader cautions, "this is a good read but there is a lot of sex and violence and this is definitely not a YA novel." (In spite of the quotation marks, I am paraphrasing.)  Well, uh ... who the heck ever claimed it was a YA novel?  Not me.  Other reviews say something along the lines of "Obviously more for the YA crowd."  Really?  So which is it?  Definitely YA or Definitely not?

You see my confusion.  Both can't be true.  Right?

Possibly some of the confusion stems from the fact that "coming of age" is one of the categories Amazon has used to market INK MAGE.  I don't know.  All I know is that I am curious about how people categorize things and how they arrive at my novel being YA or not.  I don't think it is.  My wife is an associate professor at a large university and YA literature is one of her areas.  You'd think some of her knowledge would have rubbed off on me. It didn't.

So I ask ... what the heck is YA anyway?  Not the most original question, but since I am now applying it to my novel specifically I am at last paying attention.  If you know anything about YA then chime in.  And if you happened to read INK MAGE, let me know your opinion.  YA or not YA?