In the middle of all the other crazy things on the news, I think the strangest fact I have learned this week is that one of the current bestselling books on Amazon is “The Eyes of Darkness” by Dean Koontz. It’s about a mother trying to find her son in a world devastated by a virus called Wuhan-400. Now I don’t really care whether Mr Koontz is in fact a soothsayer – what surprises me is that people want to sit in their homes, under lock-down, and read about a fictional pandemic. Perhaps the Koontz story ends well and readers take comfort from that – but I’ll never know because even if it were the last book on earth, I would not want to read a book about a pandemic. No, I’m escapism all the way: for me, one of the true miracles of reading is that it can transport me to places and times and situations that I could never experience in reality.
I assume that lots of other people feel the same way as I do and are looking to fiction to take them out of themselves. And to help with this, I have decided to offer the e-book of my first Sam Plank book – “Fatal Forgery” – free on Amazon until the end of Thursday. (I would do it for longer, but I sell my Sam e-books through KDP Select – i.e. they’re available exclusively on Amazon, and I get a higher royalty rate because of this. And one of the rules of KDP Select is that you can offer a free download promotion for only five days out of every ninety. It’s a commercial decision: if I give my books away for free, Amazon makes no commission on the download. Entirely understandable, but I thought I would explain why it’s a time-limited free download offer.)
So if you would like to download the e-book of “Fatal Forgery” for free, please do so. (That’s an international Amazon link, so should take you automatically to the correct Amazon site.) I can guarantee that the plot is entirely free of any mention of plague, pestilence, pandemic, virus or pox. And please share this offer with friends and family – the more the merrier. Perhaps you’re setting up a virtual book group, and a free download for everyone would be a great way to start. I hope you like the book – and if you do, perhaps you would consider leaving a little review on Amazon. So get downloading, everyone, and happy reading!
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