Darren Pillsbury

What up, folks!

Some interesting news:

My first novel, IMAGINARY FRIENDS, will soon be available in ebook format for the first time.

It’s the story of a single father who starts to see his two little boys’…wait for it…imaginary friends.

If you like the humor of my other books, you’ll definitely want to check this one out.

IMAGINARY FRIENDS should be published on Amazon.com for the Kindle by noon on 2/3/12, and in the next couple of days for the Nook on BarnesAndNoble.com.

I’ll let you know as soon as it’s available.

Also, I’m chugging along on relaunching the individual stories that make up the first three books in the PETER AND THE MONSTERS series. There are 13 of them in the books PETER AND THE VAMPIRES, PETER AND THE WEREWOLVES, and PETER AND THE FRANKENSTEIN.

In fact, by 2/15/12, I should be publishing the first new story in almost nine months, PETER AND THE HELPERS (Story #14).

And the best news is, I’ll be publishing a new PETER story every month thereafter, starting with these:

PETER AND THE HELPERS (Story #14)
PETER AND THE MUMMY (Story #15)
PETER AND THE GROWNUPS (Story #16)

That’s it!  I’ll keep you posted as the stories roll out – starting with IMAGINARY FRIENDS in the next few days!

PS – By the way, if you still haven’t got a copy of PETER AND THE VAMPIRES: VOLUME ONE yet, it’s available for free now on the Kindle as well as the Nook!

Kindle:  http://www.amazon.com/PETER-AND-THE-VAMPIRES-ebook/dp/B004ZQRLS4/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1304877609&sr=1-3

Nook:  http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/peter-and-the-vampires-darren-pillsbury/1100686093

Okay, I was previously going to give away the first 8 ebooks in my relaunched series PETER AND THE MONSTERS for free.

Buuuuut…then I signed up for Amazon’s Kindle Direct Plan.

The upside is that I get to offer my ebooks for free 5 days every three months – my choice of when and how I schedule it. It’s great because I can potentially get a lot more new readers to pick up my books.

The downside is that I signed an agreement with Amazon that I would not sell or give away those ebooks elsewhere for the 90 days of my commitment…or Amazon can withhold any royalties I’ve earned.

But if you’re reading this in December 2011, you can get the books for free over the next several weeks!

Peter And The Dead Men will be free on Christmas Day and the day after – Dec. 25th and 26th.

Peter And The Vampires (the single story, not the collection) is free from Dec. 16th thru 17th, and will be free again on Dec. 26th and 27th.

Peter And The Changeling will be free Dec. 17th thru 19th, and again on Dec. 27th and 28th.

So go get your free copies now, and keep an eye out after Christmas if you missed the initial round of freebies!

Hola, all. I’ve decided to re-launch the PETER AND THE MONSTERS line, this time as individual ebooks instead of the collections of stories.

The main reason for this is that I can publish a new story every one or two months, versus 9 to 12 months for an entire book. I figure people would enjoy seeing a new work 6 times a year, rather than one massive collection once a year.

So, starting in December, I’ll be publishing the stories in the first three collections/volumes as individual ebooks. I’ll continue publishing new ones every couple of weeks until I get up to my current story I have written, which is about #20.

The good news is, you can get the first 8 ebooks for free for a limited time!

Just enter your name and email in the box over to the right, and I’ll send you a new ebook every week, starting with PETER AND THE DEAD MEN!

Edit: I had to change this policy, which I explain here.

So go ahead, do it right now, and then check your email inbox and spam box immediately to see if you got it.

Hope you enjoy it!

Hey guys, for those of you who own Nooks, it would really help out if you wouldn’t mind leaving a review of my various books! Here’s how you do it:

1) Go to www.BarnesAndNoble.com (or just bn.com if you’re typing it). In the search bar at the top, put the title of the book you’re reviewing in quotation marks. Otherwise, if you search for PETER AND THE VAMPIRES, you’ll get a hundred other vampire-y books besides mine.

2) Once you’re sure you’re on the right page, scroll about half of the way down until you see the customer reviews. They start under the “Product Details” section. Then click on the blue ‘WRITE A REVIEW’ button on the right.

3) A new window will appear, letting you know to sign in or create an account. If you have a Nook, you probably already have an account. Your username and password are the same ones you sign in with to buy ebooks.

4) After you’ve signed in, just follow the instructions – and thank you for taking the time to do this!

How to Leave an Amazon Review

If you liked one of my books, please leave a review!

1. Go to http://www.amazon.com and sign into your account.

If you do not have an account:  near the middle top of the page, to the right of the Amazon logo, there is a link that says

Hello. Sign in to get personalized recommendations. New customer? Start here.

If you do not have an Amazon account (and you need one to leave a review), follow the link and create one.

2. Once you have signed in, change “Search: All Departments” to “Kindle.”

Type in the title of the book you want to review and hit “Enter” on your keyboard or the GO button to the right of the search window. Then double-click on the cover of my book in the results that appeared.

3. Click on the cover or title of the book in the results that appear.

4. You should now be on the page where you buy the book. Scroll down until you see a button that looks like this (it should be on the lower right side in the Customer Reviews section), and click on it:

5. You will be taken to a page that looks like the following. Just follow the directions!

If you enjoyed the book, please leave a review. It increases sales by letting browsers see what other readers liked about the book!

Thanks!

What up, peeps. Sorry it’s been forever…I really need to get back to blogging and promoting the books online.

I have a few interesting things I’ll tell you about soon, but the best thing is to check out an article I wrote for CuriosityQuills.com:

http://curiosityquills.com/trying-to-promote-your-work-maybe-its-time-to-go-back-to-school/

It’s all about my recent experiences in reading at middle schools, and my advice to other authors if they want to try to grow their fan base and get paid in the process.

Hope you enjoy!

More and better updates coming soon.

Hi ho -it’s been awhile, I must admit, and I’m falling down on the marketing part of being a writer.

Which is why this article was so interesting to me. Go check it out!

http://curiosityquills.com/from-rejection-to-sales-this-guerrilla-writers-tale/

I’ve been having a horrendous time getting new people to try my books. Seems Lizzy Ford anticipated this at the beginning, and has been using the last year to build awareness of her name, a mailing list, and a fan base.

By giving away everything she wrote for free. Until December 2011, when she’s hoping to capitalize on all her hard work.

Not bad. I’m actually thinking of adopting her plan…sales are pretty tough to come by. My books generally get very good reviews when people read them…but it’s difficult convincing folks to read them. Adults think they’re for kids, and teenagers think they’re for children. And not too many children are trolling the Kindle store, as far as I know.

What’s even more interesting is that even though she gives away everything for free, her sales have jumped from 20 or 30 a month to above a thousand.

Crazy…even spread across five or six books, she’s making far more sales per month on one book than I’ve made on all three of my PETER AND THE… books in any of the past months.

So, if you’re thinking about publishing your ebooks, go read Lizzy’s article. It’s got some fascinating ideas in there that have yielded real-world results I’m envious of.

I started off the PETER AND THE VAMPIRES stories back in 2007, blogging them a page-a-day. I slowly built up a readership, and then decided to publish the first three novels (PETER AND THE VAMPIRES, PETER AND THE WEREWOLVES, and PETER AND THE FRANKENSTEIN) in May 2011.

I quickly ran into the problem that I needed a much bigger fanbase.

So I decided to try Twitter.

Trouble is, I had very little to tweet about. Or, at least, I wasn’t that confident in flooding the Twitterverse with witticisms on my currently boring life.

So, what could I tweet about? What could I give away for free that might interest people?

How about the same thing I used four years go?

And thus I’ve decided to relaunch the PeterAndTheVampires.com blog.

This time, though, I plan to play up one of the series’ greatest strengths: the badass villains.

Reading the stories is fine and dandy, but it’s hard to suck in new readers – especially when most of them think that it’s a series aimed at 10-year-old kids. (All 10-year-old kids are welcome to read, but the intended audience is like HARRY POTTER – all ages. And truthfully, most of my fans from the first go-round were college students and adults in their 20′s and 30′s.)

So I’ll be doing some illustrations of certain scenes involving the villains every couple of weeks. See, I visualize these stories as movies or television episodes in my head: I can see how freaky some of the villains are, and hopefully my words do them justice, but it’s one thing to read about Darth Vader’s appearance without ever having seen him…and then seeing a picture of the Dark Lord of the Sith.

So come on by PeterAndTheVampires.com to read (for free!) the earliest adventures of Peter and Dill, and to get a view at some of the twisted, grotesque villains and monsters they fight.

It’s gonna be awesome.

Sorry I haven’t been posting lately. Things got crazy with a big promotion, and then I kind of sank into lassitude.

Anyway, a quick note: thanks to everyone who bought the book on May 25th. I sold the following:

26 copies of PETER AND THE VAMPIRES on Kindle US.

6 copies of PETER AND THE VAMPIRES on Kindle UK.

15 copies each of PETER AND THE WEREWOLVES and PETER AND THE FRANKENSTEIN on Kindle US (so 30 total for the two books).

1 copy each of WEREWOLVES and FRANKENSTEIN on Kindle UK.

4 copies of VAMPIRES on the Nook.

2 copies each of WEREWOLVES and FRANKENSTEIN on the Nook (so four total).

That’s $80 US in royalties, of which I’ll be donating 50% to the charity www.SaveTheChildren.org.

Thanks for those of you who helped out, I appreciate it!

And by the way, J.E. Taylor was kind enough to let me do a guest post on her blog at http://jetaylor75.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/manic-monday-with-darren-pillsbury/.

Go check it out if you’d like to know what a bad blind date said to me that made me start writing again after I’d given it all up.

And leave a comment on the piece! A testament to your presence, like footprints on the digital sands of teh internetz!