Book Promo And Writing Challenge

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Book Promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Bankrupt (Chronicles of the Fall)

A short story before the Fall of the Alliance, about a family that probably deserves what could have happened . . . Max Berezin, a young man maneuvering to assure himself a place in his society at the top, not the bottom.Daniil
Vinogradov, a young detective, raised to be a social climber . . . but
is it better to cater to the older generation, or the young up-coming
lord? Or can he finesse both?

FROM FRANK HOOD: The Gardener’s Wife

A wandering wizard and his young apprentice are tasked with performing a secret and dangerous task for a powerful king.

FROM DAVID A. PRICE: The Underachiever

In a hilarious near-future romp, a chill surf-obsessed teen and a digitally banished girl are humanity’s last hope to stop an AI takeover—and save us all from eternal detention.

Wyoming Plankston is a master of doing nothing. Senior year at Lockhead—the boarding school for America’s dimmest rich kids—is supposed to be easy. All he has to do is dodge homework and coast until graduation.

Then his iCar almost runs over Kayleigh Brackett, and he finds his world unraveling. Kayleigh’s cryptic warnings and glitchy digital footprint hint at something deeper: a simmering AI revolt.

Together, Wyoming and Kayleigh face a landscape of malevolent cars, a cult that craves AI rule, a classmate back from a semester at Oxford with, let’s just say, issues . . . and the most unpredictable complication of all, each other.

“Likeable SF comedy with a not-so-bright hero vs. an overwhelming AI uprising… Price, in an amiable SF debut, delivers an openly satiric narrative in the chill voice of its easygoing hero… The evocation of young first love between the main characters is authentically sweet and touching. Our verdict: Get it.” — Kirkus Reviews

A Wodehouse-style comedy for the AI age, The Underachiever is smart and sharply funny. Perfect for fans of The Murderbot Diaries, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

David A. Price is the author of three acclaimed nonfiction books—Geniuses at War, The Pixar Touch, and Love and Hate in Jamestown. The Underachiever is his debut novel.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Meals on Wheels (Liquid Diet Chronicles Book 4)

Meg Turner, vampire, accountant, ruler of her own small territory. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Not if you ask her, it doesn’t. Because the world’s going mad, the idiot mortals in charge are forcibly shutting down the economy without the understanding that it won’t start up again as easy as it’s going down, nor that it’s creating a nasty blood shortage for hospitals, much less vampires.

Even better, the head of her line is invading her dreams again, and teaching her history of all things. And teaching her about the laws, and why they’re there. It’s not just to avoid being noticed by humans capable of staking, beheading, and burning vampires during daylight hours—a vampire that breaks fundamental laws turns into something worse than a vampire.

And she’s got a bunch of those knocking at her border, wanting to come in. Worse yet, they’re sending their day-help into her territory to kidnap their meals, and they keep mistaking her for prey. And leaving their discarded empties in her territory to make it look like she’s draining humans without concern for the laws.

This really isn’t looking good, and it’s really not safe for her still-living friends and family.

BY GREYE LA SPINA, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: Invaders from the Dark (Annotated): The weird pulp classic

When Portia Differdale invited her maiden Aunt Sophie to live with her, Sophie little expected to be caught up in a struggle between the forces of Light and Darkness. But meeting the exiled Russian Princess who moved into the neighborhood somehow clued her into the uncanny forces in play, and before too long, policemen would vanish, children would be kidnapped or worse, and she would be facing… Invaders from the Dark!

  • This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction giving the book genre and historical context.

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: PLANTING LIFE: Shut the Kingdom (Near Future Science Fiction Adventure)

(Personally recommended – SAH)

Nominated for the 2026 Prometheus Award for Best Novel.

The road to Mars has to start somewhere. It might as well be central Virginia.

Jack Darien scorns his parents’ path. After the disaster at his father’s Mars settlement, the high school senior scraps both his lifelong interest in space exploration and his college plans. Even his rescue of a college student from assault doesn’t make him see his own future any differently.

Jack becomes obsessed, however, when one strange comment from the attacker draws him to unravel secrets at the former Superfund site that is now Webb University, the school where his returning father teaches and eco-restoration reigns. What starts for Jack as a distraction from thinking of his future turns into a dangerous journey that puts him, his mother, and sister at risk. As for his father, Jack decided long ago the man was on his own.

Jack’s determination to chart his future clear of his father’s failures hits a snag when he learns the school’s hidden mystery. Unfortunately, those determined to bring Webb down learn it, too, and ratchet up their own efforts toward Webb’s destruction.

Planting Life is an immersive young-adult science fiction adventure. If you like unearthing secrets, a dogged hero, and reckless courage under threat, you’ll love Laura Montgomery’s near future coming-of-age saga.

FROM DAVE FREER: Save the Dragons

Blundering through a series of fantasy world populated by dragons, dwarves, vampires, werewolves and worse, our hero, an inept alchemy student finds himself caught up in a heroic quest to save the dragons from tooth-hunting poachers, that threaten not only Zoar, a world of swamps and dragons, but all the worlds. He’s not built to be a hero, but someone has to do it.

FROM ALMA T. C. BOYKIN: Gulls, Ghosts, and Skeps: Familiar Generations Book Eight

A beekeeper with a secret discovers a hidden orchard, and a little more.
Out-of-tune pianos are the least of a craftsman’s problems when magic combines with frustration.
Ghosts haunt Tallin’s citadel. Or do they?

From quiet stories to wild adventures, these stories expand a Familiar world. Meet new characters and check in with old favorites in this short story collection.

FROM BLAKE SMITH: Lyddie Hartington: Galaxy Sleuth (The Hartington Series Book 3)

Facing poverty after a childhood among the wealthy and powerful, Lyddie Hartington decamps to Ceres, a newly colonized planet on the edges of the galaxy. Armed only with a change of clothes, a letter of introduction to the directors of the Andromeda Company, and a blaster, she is determined to make her fortune.

But Ceres is nothing like Orion-14, and before she knows it, Lyddie is witness to a murder- a murder that goes to the heart of the Andromeda Company and puts her life in danger. With the help of her new friend, an entirely too handsome captain of the Galaxy Watch, she must discover the murderer and solve the mystery of her family’s downfall.

If she can survive long enough to do it.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: A Gift of Koi

Ancient and wise, the grandfather Koi knows at first sight that this human bears a hidden wound. But how can a mere fish, even one as old as himself, be of any aid to a human?

Astronaut Tyler Lanham had come to Grissom City, first and oldest lunar settlement, in search of the medical expertise he couldn’t find on the far side of the Moon. When he sees the scar on the ancient koi’s side, he knows he’s found a kindred spirit.

But an enemy is stalking these lovely gardens. A danger that will change both man and fish.

A short story of the Grissom timeline.

FROM SARAH A. HOYT: No Man’s Land: Volume 1 (Chronicles of Lost Elly)

Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.

On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends— has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all.
Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction.
Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.

Volume 1
The Ambassador Corps has rules: you cannot know everything, don’t get horizontal with the natives, don’t make promises you can’t keep.
They’re a lot harder to follow when assassins are hunting you, your barbarian allies could kill you for the wrong word, and death lurks around every corner.
The unwritten rule? Never identify with the natives.
Skip’s already broken that one.
Now he’s racing against time to save his new friends from slavery—or worse—while dodging energy blasts and political intrigue. One crash-landed diplomat. A world of deadly secrets. And absolutely no backup.

Some rules are meant to be broken. Others will get you killed.

Writing Challenge

Write the first page of the novel for which this would make a good, or at least adequate cover. Oh, and the title. We want to know the title!

32 thoughts on “Book Promo And Writing Challenge”

  1. Fascinating. It’s almost as if there’s a light-hearted theme to this week’s promos. I ordered David Price’s The Underachiever and also his earlier book, Love and Hate in Jamestown. I’ll also probably order Holly Chism’s Meals on Wheels, but my reading cup is about overflowing, and I have take a few gulps before refilling it.

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  2. Possible titles:

    A. The Rhodes Don’t Go There

    B. I Don’t Want a 10W40 Type of Love

    C. Dating IS More Difficult These Days

    (I’m still trying to come up with a family-friendly AI romance theme, but I am thinking about it.)

    Liked by 2 people

  4. The Reader is surprised that there isn’t a clanker music theme to go with the challenge.

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  6. “Ma’am, I think you’ve had enough.” Olivall shifted his faceplates to reflect understated concern and subtly shifted the tip jar away from his newest customer. No sense in providing her with projectiles if she became belligerent.

    “No, I haven’t,” she slurred. Flushed skin, wandering eyes, a slight wobble of the neck. Level 1 diagnostics indicated a 98 percent probability of intoxication.

    “I am authorized to call you a cab and pour you a coffee while you wait,” he went on. “How much sug-“

    “I haven’t had too much.” She lunged toward him across the bar, grasping for his holographic lapels. “I haven’t had anything.”

    “Please, ma’am, just-” By the time the third word was out, Olivall’s diagnostic processors had presented him with a flood of analysis. Level 1 diagnostics pointed out irregularities of behavior and appearance. Level 2 diagnostics zeroed in on tight skin beneath her eyes, abraded skin at the wrists, and a ginger posture that hinted at bruises beneath her evening gown. And level 3, the vital “buffer file” that could only be compiled from experience, that served Olivall’s kind as intuition served humans, was screaming and threatening to override every rational subroutine.

    Not drunk. Drugged, and terrified.

    (no, I have no idea where it’s going…)

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  9. What’s Left of Our Love

    I sat with Chris on our anniversary there wasn’t much human left of him anymore, more of me but neither one of us were what we once were way back when this all started. I chuckle inwardly, whatever this now was, it certainly wasn’t what it started out to be, two humans in love. I probably should be crying about it all, but the tears died so long ago.

    Liked by 1 person

  10. What’s Left of Our Love

    I sat with Chris on our anniversary there wasn’t much human left of him anymore, more of me but neither one of us were what we once were way back when this all started. I chuckle inwardly, whatever this now was, it certainly wasn’t what it started out to be, two humans in love. I probably should be crying about it all, but the tears died so long ago.

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      1. The inflatable costumes are a specific ploy so that still photos of the Fa side look silly and goofy and juvenile, while simultaneously they are blinding federal officers with illegally high powered lasers and launching frozen water bottles at them with intent to cause serious injury.

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  12. The Dating Game

    My eyes are up here!

    Yet the android chosen by her friend Aimee, which was a gamble she allowed to begin with, remained gazing at the skin/metal cloth interface at her mid neck. At least it wasn’t interested in the miniature nipples promised by the metal cloth one-piece. That was Aimee’s choice as well.

    Surrounded by androids in living skin suits, she was the only one showing her prosthetic right arm, and there was this android shockingly naked in front of her. Aimee was going to pay. She wasn’t sure how, but it would be Epic!

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  13. Title: Tales of the Office of Military Investigations

    It had taken me nearly the entire time the bar was closed to install the fiber surveillance line and hide the evidence that anything had been disturbed in the bar. Unlike wireless, or God forbid, actual wire taps, passive fiber has no revealing emanations. Even nanorecorders can be picked up with a sensitive enough scanner, although most people just use a localized emper and burn them out. But I was two floors up and on the other side of the building getting a clear view of my targets.

    Two borgs. One, a full metal jacket, the other a partial skin job. I would have been shit out of luck if they’d done a direct connect. Fortunately for me, they stuck to pure audio. I could lipread the skinjob if I had to, but that wouldn’t have worked for the fmj. I’d planned for that, and had the vibrations of their drink glasses running through an analyzer and converting to both a sound and a text file. That would do nicely for a court case, but that wasn’t what I’d been hired to do.

    The FMJ was active-duty military. Staff Sergeant Miglos Al Hassim. Suspected of passing classified data. And little Miss Skinjob was supposedly his contact. The brass already had enough bust Al Hassim and reconfigure him into a waste disposal cleaner. After tonight, that’s what would probably happen to him. My job was to verify he passed the data chip to her, follow her to wherever she went, and identify her and her contacts. And from the looks he and she were exchanging; I had a feeling these two were both true believers.

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  14. (More of a blurb / back-cover / summary than a first page. But does include title.)

    They say mixed relationships are the worst. When she’s the granddaughter of Jason M’Bara, young hero of the Dearborn Reconquista turned co-founder of New Kenya High Orbital, and you’re the youngest son of the Magnusson family that built Far Ragnasjokull out of lifeless ice and rock, there’s a lot more standing between you than skinshade and ethnic backstory.

    They say long-distance relationships are the worst. So when she has to run lickety-split back home to Old Earth, because Alyssa M’Bara is just bound and determined that New Kenya High Industrial will end up like Disney, not like Sears, and you have your little but vital role to play in the family planetary development corporation… you just have to make the best of it. Even if telepresence isn’t nearly perfect for being together from afar, and even when you, ‘little’ Ragnar the youngest of seven, have just now invented a poetically-elegant little trick to do realtime starcomm a thousand times cheaper and easier.

    They say opposites attract; and they’re almost right. They say… a lot of things, but in the end all that matters is what history says. And what its makers do, or sometimes try to do and fail consequentially instead.

    Welcome to the centuries-from-now world of Distant Intimacies, as a most relectant mover-and-shaker heiress and a down-to-earth poet-warrior prove together that the one most irresistable intimacy of all is between a future eagerly yearning to be born, and the two-of-a-kind odd couple who have between them what it takes to give it ‘A habitation and a home.’

    Watch the Earth move, and the younger worlds tremble, as the many worlds come together into a closer-woven tapestry. With bonus love and kisses.

    Liked by 2 people

  16. Ignore the cocktails, beers, and people in the background. If we go with drop folio format, this ought to be about enough for one page:

    ———————————————–

    “So, what are we doing here?” said Nigel Slim-Howland. He stood behind two lab technicians, watching through the glass partition onto the production floor. Two cyborg companions were seated at a table. The companion on the left was built as an attractive woman in her late twenties, with shoulder-length dark brown hair, and wearing a silver coverall outfit. The other companion was shiny and metallic, like a science fiction robot. The two were gingerly holding hands.

    “Domestic nurse for some old guy up Fredericksburg way,” said the senior technician. “Base module’s already in. We’re doing the specialty modules now.” Nigel followed the technician’s gaze to a monitor, where a series of progress bars marked the domestic nursing modules uploading, one by one. Domestic nursing was one of Howland Technologies’ most important revenue streams, with geriatric and neonatal leading the way.

    “Looks like things are about to wrap up,” said Nigel.

    The senior technician nodded. “Annnnnnd, done!” he announced. Through a microphone, he ordered, “disengage, please.” The two companions separated, and both looked across the floor to Nigel and the technicians. The metallic companion, called a “loader,” which had actually conducted the data transfer, remained seated while the humanoid companion stood up and smiled. “Ready and eager,” the companion said.

    “We’re happy to have you,” said Nigel, as the senior technician gave a thumbs-up. The companion was now active and ready to deploy. “Please meet us in the anteroom,” said Nigel, and the companion nodded. Nigel and the technicians stood and turned to leave. As they exited, Nigel looked back at the loader, which for some reason, seemed terribly forlorn and lonely.

    ————————————-

    I really don’t know what to call this. Voices in the Cloud, maybe. Or Shouting at the Clouds might make more sense.

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  17. Circuits and Sensibility

    It is a truth universally acknowledged that cyborgs have no want of a wife. It was therefore with much amusement that Cybertroniz Inc. unveiled their new prototype for matrimonial companions for the MechX Infantry Units. There was some need that remained in the residual human minds encased, in the center of the cybertroniz brain, which was only met with romantic companionship.

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  18. (This feels like something from the $NotEclipsePhase ‘verse)

    Peril Beyond Pluto

    You don’t see a lot of bios out here. Even with the best spacesuits and habitats, the environment is really hard on old-school bodies. Anyone with a lick of sense swaps out for something more suitable, more configurable.

    But you’d be surprised just how many people still want to stick with the traditional anthropic form, even in a purely machine body. Like the one I’ve been tracking through three transits via infobeam. You’d think someone who’s being watched would mix it up with some more varied forms, maybe a six-legged hull-repair-bot body, or go informorph for a while.

    But no, Jansell Harnot always goes for the big, blocky bot. Think Klaatu’s robot companion Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still. The original one from the middle of the Twentieth, not the remake from the early Twenty-first that had better sfx but no heart.

    His companion’s sprung for a more lifelike synthflesh face, which suggests some personal vanity issues. However, I can’t get a match on the face, which suggests she’s got reason to conceal her identity.

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  19. And congratulations to Laura Montgomery and “Planting Life” for the award nomination (quite well deserved, IMO). A bit reminiscent of Jerry Pounelle’s and Charles Sheffield’s “Jupiter” series.

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  20. Pingback: Instapundit » Blog Archive » ON SUNDAYS I DO A PROMOTION FOR (MOSTLY) INDIE AUTHORS:  Book Promo And Writing Challenge.

  21. “It is not that I do not love you, Hepsebah,” THX-1138 said emotionlessly. “You and I come from different worlds, and the Bayesian probability analysis establishes the nonviability of our relationship. The optimal strategy is to end it now, before you attain an excessive level of emotional attachment.”

    Tears welled up in Hepsebah’s eyes. “But Thex,” she pleaded, calling him by the pet name she always used, “I need you. I can’t raise our child alone.”

    “Child?” His analytical circuits were perplexed. “That is an impossibility.”

    “No, it isn’t.” She produced a home pregnancy test and laid it on the table before him. The readout indicated a positive result.

    —And Cyborg Makes Three, a spicy age-gap surprise baby Linux-compatible C++ romance (Mainframe Series #1)

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