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BOOK BOMB! Today! Fire with Fire by Chuck Gannon! Tell your friends!

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Today’s Monster Hunter Nation BOOK BOMB is for Fire with Fire by Charles E. Gannon.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=monshuntnati-20&o=1&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=1451638833

For those of you unfamiliar with these BOOK BOMBs this is how it works. Every so often I pick out a book that I think is good and I think the author needs to receive more attention.  So we get as many people as we can to buy the book from Amazon in the same day. We have had some crazy levels of success in the past.

Amazon has this weird, rolling average algorhythm that updates a book’s sales rank every hour. If we can get a book into the top sellers lists for the different genres, then it sells more books. Success breeds more success. If we can get a book into the top ten of a genre, then that book gets all sorts of attention.  The more of you who spread the word, on your blogs, Twitter, Facebook, word of mouth, overpass graffitti, sky writing, smoke signals, etc. then the more of the authors books we sell and the more attention they get.   (our record is still for Robison Wells’ first book where we basically took over all of Amazon and beat everything except for the Hunger Games).

Normally I update these BOOK BOMB threads through the day as we make the stats rise. Except for my ungrateful children brought some form of Mongollian Death Flu into my home, and though I slept in my office and tried to hide from them like something from an Edgar Allen Poe story, I woke up last night at 1 AM with cold sweats and the shakes to barf my brains out… So I’ll try, but can’t promise the updates will be quite as prompt. (this is also my excuse for any spelling errors).

Right now the book is at:

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #38,147 in Books

And people always ask what if they buy an eBook, does that count? No on the main best seller list, but the most important thing about eBook sales is that the author still GETS PAID! So we’re going to see if we can’t bump them both up.

  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #18,457 Paid in Kindle Store

So here is the direct link to the Kindle version.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=monshuntnati-20&o=1&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=B00BVBRMDK

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Now, about the actual book and why I think Chuck deserves a Book Bomb. Fire with Fire is an unabashed hard core SF novel. It isn’t afraid to back away from big ideas. This isn’t wussy fluff sci-fi. This is a first contact story with with lost civilizations, assassins, and adventure. Here is the review from my friends, the HUGO NOMINATED (oh, the irony) Elitiest Book Reviews: http://elitistbookreviews.blogspot.com/2013/03/fire-with-fire.html

I met Chuck at a convention a couple of years ago. I can’t remember for sure which one it was, but I think it might have been DragonCon, and if you’ve ever been to DragonCon, you’ll know why it is easy to forget the details of a particular DragonCon. And I was one of the few sober people there!  Anyways, Chuck is a super nice guy. He’s one of those folks that as soon as you start talking to them you realize, holy moly, this dude is smart. Like big brain, guest star in a Ringo novel in order to save the world from aliens smart, but he was cool, and humble.  This isn’t his first rodeo, having coauthored two other Baen books, and also having risen up through the ranks with lots of short stories in anthologies and Analog.

Another author that has done that is Brad Torgersen, (another dude who has worked his ass off in the word mines of the short story industry) who is a really good friend of mine. I’d not talked to Chuck for a long time, and then one night Brad came over to my house with an ARC of Fire with Fire. He’d just seen Chuck at a Con, and had been asked to present it to me on his behalf and ask for a Book Bomb… My wife was there, and said that the moment had a very creepy Godfather like vibe, and since I look like Tony Soprano, how could I say no?

So Bombs away! Please tell your friends! Spread the word! This is a good book from a relatively new author, and the hardest thing in the world for a new author is making new fans!

If I don’t die before then, I’ll be updating this all day. 🙂

EDIT:  FINALLY!  Amazon is being weird today or something, because I can see the click throughs on my affiliates link so I know people are buying it, but it has been stuck all morning.  Moving on up!

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #17,667 in Books

EDIT: Yeah, don’t know what the deal was with Amazon today, but not being able to see it climb sort of kills the point. 🙂

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,348 in Books

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,654 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

EDIT: Better late than never!

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,935 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

zon Best Sellers Rank: #3,759 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

EDIT:  I passed out and slept for like 12 hours last night, so I don’t know if this is the highest we got, but as of this morning:

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,492 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,336 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

 

The Sad Puppies Hugo campaign… Sorta successful for everybody but me. :)

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So the Sad Puppies Hugo stacking campaing was a success for almost everybody else I pushed, but me, as we didn’t get enough to break MHL into best novel.  It will be interesting to see how close we got when the numbers come out after the awards.

Considering how many of the Monster Hunter Nation picks made it, that’s pretty cool, since my fans aren’t exactly the WorldCon type.  Oh, but we will be back… Just out of spite. You think Sarah McLachlan music is sad? You ain’t seen nothing yet. 🙂

Toni Weiskopf is up for Best Editor, long form. She really really deserves to win, but SMOF hates all of Baen except for Bujold, so we’ll see what happens there. Jim Baen, who launched tons of careers of some of the biggest names and series in sci-fi, had to die before he got a nomination, and even then he lost to David Hartwell, who has spare Hugos cluttering up his house.

Vincent Chong, who did the Mage Brute (French Hard Magic) cover is up for Best Artist.

My friends at Elitist Book Reviews are nominated, and deserve a win for having the best review place on the internet. If they lose, it will be because somebody in SMOFdom discovered I like them.

Stan Schmidt needs to win best editor, short form. He’s retiring now, but he’s only run the leading sci-fi magazine for like the last couple of decades, launching the careers of literally hundreds of writers.  But he’s no Doctor Who.

Here is the list of all the nominees:

http://elitistbookreviews.blogspot.com/2013/03/2013-hugo-award-nominees.html

And for those of you that follow this stuff, it is pretty much what you expect, as in a big SMOF popularity contest where various people with lots of WorldCon factions politicking for them are insta-noms, and everybody else is shut out.  Luckily, only one of the nominees for best novel is a dying polar bear story of global warming sadness and evil capitalism, which would normally win, but it will surely lose to Scalzi, who is liberal blogger who happens to write books too, and God help us if they ever start doing Doctor Who novelizations because that will be your five nominees a year.

For the other Best Novel noms, Lois Bujold is awesome, but she’s won like 8 Hugos. Mira Grant is cool as heck. In person, she’s really great, and I like her, but notice that since she is beloved by SMOF, she is nominated in every Hugo category except Car of the Year. Saladin’s a nice guy, and beloved by SMOF (we were up for the Campbell at the same time), but I’m predicting he’ll come in last, becasue this is his only book and he’s not built up a huge SMOF backer faction yet, but just having nominated a guy with an ethnic name will make the SMOFers feel all warm and tingly inside and good about themselves, so that’ll be enough for them. (Note, I’m not actually placing any bets that the voters actually read all the works).

My buddy Brandon Sanderson is up for Novella, but he’ll probably lose for not being popular enough with the SMOFers, which is too bad because the story is unfreakingbelievable. Mira Grant would normally win this one because of how many WorldCon fans she’s got, but Jay Lake will win this category easily. Sure he’s very talented, but he’ll win because he’s fighting cancer, and the votes aren’t decided on the actual books. Once again, I’ll be surprised if half the voters actually read the stories.

My buddy Howard Tayler is up for one for best graphic story, but he’ll probably lose for not being trendy enough because he’s only been telling this story every single day for 12 years. Both Brandon, Howard, and my friend Dan Wells are up for Writing Excuses again (a Podcast which helps thousands of aspiring writers improve their craft and learn the business) but they are up against something Doctor Who related, so they will inevitably lose.

In Novelletes, Seanan McGuire has two noms, and she is Mira Grant, so she wins this one.  Also, the way the Hugo votes work so the lowest count nom is dropped, then the next, and the next, and your 2nd and 3rd places votes count too, you don’t have a problem with faction’s splitting the vote. To be fair, Seanan got screwed a couple of years ago for best novel, and had the most 1st place votes, but still lost once they worked out their weird Hugo vote tabulation magic.

Game of Thrones isn’t being considered a movie this year, because it got its Hugo. And now it is back to the Doctor Who love, because you know, there were absolutely no other TV shows made over the last decade.

I found this because of the blog trackback to my Sad Puppies campaign. It is a pretty good overview of some of the problems with the Hugos. And I think he is only scratching the surface of the issues:  http://www.staffersbookreview.com/2013/04/can-we-stop-talking-about-the-hugos-now.html

Reminder! BOOK BOMB tomorrow! April 2nd!

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That’s right. The next Monster Hunter Nation BOOK BOMB is tomorrow, April 2nd.  We will be trying to spike Chuck Gannon’s Fire with Fire as high into the ratings as possible.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=monshuntnati-20&o=1&p=8&l=as4&m=amazon&f=ifr&ref=ss_til&asins=1451638833

Tell your friends. The more people we can get to jump aboard on the same day, the higher it will go, the more attention Chuck will get.  More details to come tomorrow.