Books Don't Go Bad, They Just Page Away

As a life-long book nerd, I'm pretty pumped to be part of a bundle of novels and stories all focused on books and bookish things.

The BOOKS GONE BAD BUNDLE, from BundleRabbit, is a collection of nearly 260,000 words of 2 novels and 10 stories from 11 authors and is certain to be an excellent 24 hours or so of reading for those who revel in book-themed tales.

Using the catch-phrase "Speculative Tales about a Uniquely Portable Magic" (in reference to the quote from Stephen King), the bundle, which is available at all major eBook retailers, contains:

• "Clockwork Lives" by Kevin J. Anderson and Neil Peart (Novel)
• "Quest for the Three Books" by Dawn Blair (Novel)
• "These Chains" by Dayle A. Dermatis (Story)
• "Warning! Do Not Read This Story!" by Robert Jeschonek (Story)
• "The Page Turners" by DeAnna Knippling (Story)
• "Active Reader" by Mark Leslie (3 Story Collection)
• "Guardian of the Grimoire" by Karen McCullough (Novella)
• "The Story for the Letters" by Kate MacLeod (Story)
• "Petra and the Blue Goo" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Story)
• "Invasion of the Book Snatchers" by Ryan M. Williams (Story)

My own collection of three bookish themed stories, Active Reader, is a part of the bundle and was the genesis for the idea for the bundle. I love bookish themed stories and I wanted to see if there was a way to collect a bunch of them together to give other book nerds like me an easy way to read a bunch of book-centric tales of books, booksellers and librarians.

The bundle, as mentioned, is available at all major eBook retailers. You can get to it by following any of the links below:

BundleRabbit Page: With full synopsis of bundle and each individual eBook - and retailer link
Books2Read.com (links to all retailers, including Kindle, Kobo, Apple and Nook)

Podcast: Do You Hear What I Hear?

In my ongoing Stark Reflections on Writing & Publishing podcast series, I recent interviewed Kelly Lytle from Findaway Voices about the amazing opportunities for independent authors and small publishers to help get their books turned into audio and distributed globally.


I started using Findaway Voices in the summer of 2017 to test out their services. I had two shorter "chapbook" sized books converted into audio format.

• Active Reader: And Other Cautionary Tales About The Book World
• This contains three short horror stories where books are central to each tale. One is about an eerie bookstore eager to "take" new customers, the title story is about the macabre misuse of a bookstore loyalty card and the final story is a dark humor look at what might happen if someone takes the advice of a self-help book a little too far.
• Collateral Damage: A Sin-Eater Mis-Adventure
• A short story about an encounter that Peter O'Mallick, the main character in my novel I, Death, has in the midst of attempting to use his death curse to fight crime.

The Findaway system was easy to use and the narrators they hand-selected for me to choose from were great. I'm quite pleased with the production quality of these books and look forward to working with these two narrators again for other projects.