RADIO’s first publishing anniversary is coming up fast and with it comes some new, exciting opportunities for reading. The first I’d like to share with you is that RADIO is now available on Kindle Unlimited.
For those who subscribe to the service and have been tempted to give RADIO a go, now is a great time. For those who are unaware of Kindle Unlimited, it’s a monthly service that offers over one million selected books, audio books, magazines, and more.
For those who aren’t Kindle Unlimited subscribers and don’t plan to join, don’t worry. You can still purchase the kindle book as well as the paperback from Amazon as well as paperbacks from other outlets such as Barnes & Nobel, Book Depository, Powell’s City of Books, and more.
Thanks to those who have supported my writing during this past year and I’m excited to see what year two will bring.
Today, I’m excited to announce something I’ve had in the works for quite some time now. Something that I hope will not only be fun but also enlightening. I’m officially launching my international social media book tracking experiment #WheresRADIO using little libraries, bookboxes, neighborhood libraries, lending libraries, or any of the many names for the small, free libraries where people can access books for free.
The goal of this experiment is to explore how books move into, out of, and around communities using RADIO as a guinea pig as well as provide free access to my book for people who might not be able to afford it. Here’s how it works.
With the help of friends around the world, I’ll be placing numerous copies of RADIO into these free libraries with a sticker on the cover showing #WheresRADIO and another inside with instructions on how to participate. If the reader decides to help out, they’ll just need to take the book to a new, free location, take a picture of that location, and leave the book for someone else to discover. Then they’ll post those pictures to Instagram or Twitter using #WheresRADIO. I’ll then repost/retweet to help my followers in that area know that the book is nearby. If they choose not to participate, they can just put it back where they found it for the next reader to enjoy.
As of today, the first copy is available at Wasserwerkstrasse 93 in Zürich, Switzerland. Click the link for map directions. I’m excited to see who’ll stumble across my little tale of mind control and mythology.
You can follow the adventures of these books on Instatgram or Twitter using the hashtag #WheresRADIO and by checking in over at my #WheresRADIO page.
October was one hell of a month. We successfully moved into a new apartment and checked out of our old one, which in Switzerland is a tense situation. Amongst all the sweat, and fatigue came joy and excitement. RADIO was chosen as a 2020 Self Published Fantasy Blog Off semi-finalist.
While I didn’t make the finals, I’m ecstatic to have my weird tale of opium, jazz, and mind control receive this level or recognition and praise. I’m truly honored and grateful. The judges over at the Fantasy Inn took on an epic task and I thank them for their hard work and time spent. It must have been stressful.
And speaking of stress,I’ve come to learn that the universe has decided that any big event in the life of RADIO must come with a heaping spoonful of stress. Gather ’round and hear the tale of how a calendar year viciously messed with a poor, innocent author.
RADIO was launched this spring and in true 2020 fashion, it’s been dealt some challenges. First, as I was preparing the book to launch, beginning to organize launch events and readings, and researching possible cons to attend, the pandemic set in, throwing all of that out the window. As many other authors who were forced to debut during a global pandemic will tell you, this was definitely stressful. However, one set back does not a trend make.
Fast forward to April and the day RADIO launched. I’d been both prepping for launch and working with Google to sort out some Google Drive issues I was having and all this culminated in discovering, on launch day, that I’d managed to accidentally delete 10+ years of Goggle Docs and Sheets. All of it, gone including most of my writing research. Let’s just say that there was a lot less celebrating that evening than I would have hoped. Luckily, I was able to to get them all back over the next few weeks.
Fast forward again to the launch of the paperback version of RADIO. Time to celebrate? Nah, time to learn that Amazon won’t ship author copies to Switzerland due to customs issues and that Ingram Spark has screwed up a ton of my distribution. A few months go by and it all eventually gets sorted.
Fast forward finally to the end of October where I’m simultaneously moving apartments, trying desperately to navigate shipping, the pandemic, and language barriers to get some stuff for the new place, worrying about how the check out process for our old apartment will go (the Swiss have been known to actually take out white gloves to check for cleanliness) and, on top of it all, stressing about where RADIO will end up in SPFBO. At this point, I can plainly see a clear trend. I’m assuming you can too. The part of that trend I keep reminding myself about is that it always works out in the end.
Did it?
Today, everything is peachy. I’m thrilled with my outcome in the competition, our new place is fantastic, and I have some exciting plans for promotion and interaction coming up. I’m feeling really good about the future of RADIO and my writing.
I just hope the stress+big event combination ends along with this god-forsaken year.
When the virus lets up and it’s safe to do so, I’ll be scheduling those book launch events that I’d planned. I hope to meet a lot of new faces and new readers when that time comes.
J·Rushing Writes 