Blood Skies Cover Art and Book Giveaway Contest

A two part post this week.  Be sure to read to the end.

Later this week I’ll post an article about the publishing jitters, as well as a new installment of the “Tales of a Blood Earth” series.

Next week, I’ll provide Chapter One of “Blood Skies” as a free download.

 

BLOOD SKIES COVER ART

Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words (or, in the cast of a blog post, between 400 and 800 words):

BLOOD SKIES

Cover art by Syd Gill

264 pages

Paperback Edition (6″ x 9″): $10.99

Kindle/E-Book Editions: $2.99

ISBN: 0615488617

On sale at Amazon.com and Smashwords in just 2 weeks!!!  (The Kindle and Smashwords editions, at least.  Hopefully the print edition will be ready by then, as well.)

It’s been a long time coming, but we’re almost there.  This is the cover that will appear on the e-book versions. The print cover is this plus a gorgeously rendered spine and back.

You can stare at it all day.  I know I do.

 

BOOK GIVEAWAY CONTEST

So I really wanted to have a cool contest to give away a couple of free copies of “Blood Skies”, but…well, I couldn’t think of anything.  The contests that I’ve seen my fellow authors put on seem to work well for them, but I’ve had the hardest time coming up with something that would work for me.  I thought about it so hard I nearly had a brain hemorrhage.

And then it came to me.  I’ll have a contest to determine what sort of contest I should have.  It’s like taking delegation to social networking!

So, welcome to the Official Help Steve Come Up With A Contest…Contest.

The rules are simple: post an idea for a contest that I can run from the “Blood Skies” site here, under this blog entry.  If you’re not on Twitter or Facebook, you should probably leave something in the post about how to get a hold of you in case you win (or else you can send me an e-mail through this site).

What I’m looking in my dream contest is something that…

a) Promotes “Blood Skies” and gets people to buy it.

b) Gets people to this site.  (If it involves getting them to actually prove they were here, such as leaving a comment or Tweeting or Liking something, all the better.)

c) Is not too complicated.  I don’t want to have to ask people to send me a link and an e-mail verifying that I saw their Tweet about my Facebook page while I enter every contestant’s IP address into a massive spreadsheet. I don’t want to have to use a Ouija board to run this contest, folks.

I’ll run this contest for two weeks, up until the day of release for “Blood Skies”.  Type your contest idea as a comment here, and your name is entered into a list.  I’ll select from that list (probably using some geeky dice) to determine the winner, who will receive a free copy of “Blood Skies” once it’s been released*.

In addition, the BEST contest idea (according to a committee of one, which consists of myself) will also receive a free copy of the book, and that winning idea will be used some time in the future (maybe for this book, and maybe for Book 2.)

So, I’m giving away 2 copies of “Blood Skies”: one to a random entry, and one to the winning entry.  (If it so happens that your entry turns out to be both of those…well, we’ll work something out.  Chances are you don’t want two copies.  Unless you’re really hard up for a gift idea for someone you don’t like.)

Thank you everyone for your support, and I look forward to seeing your ideas!  =D

 

*(I guess I’ll sign it if you really want me to.   Not like you’d be able to read my handwriting, anyway.  You’d be better off writing my name inside the book yourself and claiming it was mine.  It’s bound to look nicer.)