Well, not everything’s free, but that’s where we’ll start. Not long ago I made the first Ehrengraf story, The Ehrengraf Defense, available free on Kindle. During the several days the offer ran, some 1500 of you picked it up—and enough of you went on to buy the complete collection, Ehrengraf For the Defense, for me to decide to Do It Again.

Hence the second story, The Ehrengraf Presumption. It’s free for several days, starting at 3am Eastern time, Friday July 6. Just click the link, then click the button, then boot up your Kindle and start reading. Kindlers outside the US can use these links for the UK, France, Germany, Italy, or Spain.

If you see where all this is going, you might want to speed things up by splurging $4.99 for Ehrengraf For the Defense. But if you just take it a story at a time, perhaps your patience will be rewarded and you’ll be able to get them all for free.

Our LB’s Bookstore page got a full remake; David pointed out that it was unwieldy, and impossible to keep up, so he erased all the endless lists and is just posting when he’s got something to report. He had something yesterday and something more today, including some additions to the store stock and some policy changes resulting from eBay’s upgrading the store’s status. Here’s part of his post:

“One perk is a discount in the fees they charge us, provided we reduce our posted handling time from 3 business days to 1, and maintain a 14-day return policy. We already had the return policy on everything but audiobooks, but we’ve now extended it to include them as well. And, since we’ve filled all orders within a day of receipt, we were happy to embrace that policy as well. So now it’s official: we’ll ship your order right away, and we’ll accept returns…”

I hate to quote the lad at great length. He’ll want royalties. Just click here and read the rest on the Bookstore page. And you might want to take his advice and check out some of the new listings, esp. Ronald Rabbit, an extraordinary example of small-press publishing. Here, because I just can’t help myself, is one of the covers:

He’s also added audiobooks. Previously we just listed those on CD, but now we’ve added around twenty unabridged audiobooks on cassette, many of them long out of print and otherwise unavailable. If cassettes work for you, there are some gems to be found here, and the price is right.

If you ordered the Subterranean Press / Hard Case Crime double volume of Strange Embrace and 69 Barrow Street, your copy’s probably arrived by now. If not, I expect you’ll be getting it shortly. I won’t be offering these for sale, at least not for the near future, so signed copies will be hard to come by. I did drop in to sign for the Mysterious Bookshop; if they have any left, a call to (800) 352-2840 will get you one. I’m also signing tip-in sheets for John Hutchinson of VJ Books, and an email to john@vjbooks.com will get you details on price and availability.

If you just want to read the books, well, that’s easy. Open Road’s bringing them out July 17 as individual eBooks, and you can pre-order to spare yourself having to remember this. Strange Embrace and 69 Barrow Street list at $14.99 apiece, which seems high to me, but they’re discounted to $9.99, which doesn’t seem so bad. They’ll also be available for Nook, Kobo, Apple, and others as well, and you shouldn’t have trouble finding them.

Speaking of Open Road, they’ve got a lot going on and a good deal more on the horizon. They dropped prices on my three writing books (Writing the Novel From Plot to Print, The Liar’s Bible, and The Liar’s Companion) to $3.99, and then further reduced Writing the Novel all the way to $1.99. This last reduction is very short-term, and in fact when I first found  out about it I thought it was a mistake. It’s intentional, but won’t be around long; they guarantee it only until July 10, although some retailers may not get around to boosting the price right away. If this is a book you can use, don’t wait; if you bought a ratty used paperback for 1¢, you’d pay more than $1.99 in shipping charges. Again, all the platforms have this deal; my links are to Amazon, but you can find all the writing books readily enough at B&N, Apple, Kobo, etc.

More about Open Road’s writing books, and the ones from HarperCollins as well, at A Few Words for Writers…

Open Road’s also planning a summer promotion for Jill Emerson. They’ve already reduced the seven Jill Emerson novels to $2.99 apiece, so you don’t have to wait. (You can find links on the About LB’s Fiction page, more information and a good photo show on Jill Emerson’s Page.) And they’ve got something planned the last week of July for Campus Tramp. (And did you know there was a vocal group called the Campus Tramps? News to me. Gosh, my mom would be so proud…)

LB