Category: Announcements

SHADA cover reveal

Those of you who have been following me for a while know that I have been hard at work on my next release, a short novel known as SHADA, the first installment in the EMBER COLE series of young-adult paranormal suspense books. SHADA is on track currently for a September release, and will be introduced at the friendship price of only $0.99 in eBook format.

To help whet your appetites for the release of SHADA, I wanted all of you, my friends, to see the finalized cover for the book. The design is by Glendon Haddix of Streetlight Graphics and I believe he’s outdone himself once more. Take a look… and get your $0.99 ready, folks. It’s worth it just for the cover alone!

SHADA cover
The cover for SHADA was designed by Glendon Haddix of Streetlight Graphics.

LibraryThing Giveaway! And CreateSpace version pending!

Hey all.

Good news for those of you wanting to try out MOST LIKELY. I’m hosting a 50-copy eBook giveaway at LibraryThing! If you’re a member over there and signed up for Library Thing Member Giveaways, hop over and claim your copy!

The giveaway is designed to spread great word-of-mouth about MOST LIKELY, as well as celebrate the pending print debut of MOST LIKELY later this month, through CreateSpace. (I’ll be opting into the Expanded Distribution thing over there, so any bookstore will be able to order MOST LIKELY in print, once it’s up and available!)

The physical book will be in 6×9 format, on lovely cream paper, with Glendon Haddix of Streetlight Graphics handling the extended wrap-around cover design, building on the great work he already did on the eBook version. I’m hoping winners of the free copies will choose to review Most Likely on LibraryThing, as well as Amazon, Barnes and Noble and wherever else.

Solid progress is being made on SHADA, the first short novel in the EMBER series. More on that soon.

Interview appears in Seattle Post Intelligencer!

As I’m winding up my one-week blog tour in support of MOST LIKELY, I received a very pleasant surprise.

Indie.ebooks blog founder Nadine Earnshaw was kind enough to interview me for BlogCritics.org, part of the Technorati network somehow, which is a sort of syndicate that gets unique content out to newspapers and other media sources in the US and around the world.

I was quite pleased when Nadine offered me the opportunity for this interview, because just appearing on BlogCritics is an honor. But I was tipped off that the interview on Saturday was picked up by no less a media outlet than the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which is basically the newspaper of record for Seattle residents.

It’s an especially fortuitous outlet for the interview, because my family and I will be moving to the Pacific Northwest in late August, and while we’re planning to be in Oregon, we’ll also be not that far away from Seattle.

Incredible exposure for MOST LIKELY and for me in general. Thanks again, Nadine! The interview was an honor for me to do even before this. The Seattle newspaper appearance is, well, the icing on the cake.

Most Likely in German… or is it?

No, I don’t have the entire book in German… at least not at this point.

But just for a laugh, and a potential courtesy to my Amazon.co.de readers, I have used Google Translate to attempt to put a free sample chapter of Most Likely in German.

If it’s bad German, well… I didn’t translate it.

But hopefully it gets the idea across!

Read it here.

New interview with me at 1st Author Interviews!

There is a brand new, very nice interview with me up at the new author blog, 1st Author Interviews. It’s a terrific interview site and features chats with plenty of other terrific indie authors, as well.

Show them your support by dropping by and browsing all their fascinating interviews. Then show some indie love by snapping up a few books from indie authors … and if one of those is MOST LIKELY, that’d be terrific, too!

MOST LIKELY Summer 2011 Blog Tour!

Thanks to Julie Ann Dawson of Positive Publishing Perspectives, I’m pleased to announce that later this month, I will be taking part in a five-stop book tour in support of MOST LIKELY, my recently-released young adult novel available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords.

Here is the tentative schedule, which begins June 20 and runs through June 24. Be sure to join me for the entire week of MOST LIKELY fun!

June 20, 2011: I’ll be doing a guest-post on T.L. Haddix’s blog.

June 21, 2011: Ten Random Facts feature at Bards and Sages.

June 22, 2011: Book excerpt at Speak Without Interruption.

June 23, 2011: Guest post on indie publishing at Prissy Fit.

June 24, 2011: Author interview at Jerry’s Writing Corner.

June 26, 2011: Author interview at BlogCritics.org’s Books blog courtesy interviewer Nadine Earnshaw.

It’s going to be a fun tour, and be sure to check back here for any last-minute changes. Join us for the entire week!

Nice interview of me up at Aussie site Indie eBooks!

Hey all!

Just wanted those who are following me to know that there’s a pleasant interview with me, featuring an excerpt from MOST LIKELY, up at the Australian book blog site, Indie eBooks.

The site host also invited me to be the site’s sponsor for today, an opportunity I gladly accepted. So surf on over and take a look; and don’t be afraid to check out the rest of this pleasant book lover’s site.

And of course, if you haven’t yet, be sure to pick up your own copy of MOST LIKELY at the eTailer of your choice, whether that’s Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Smashwords. Thanks!

MOST LIKELY giveaway winners!

Well, we had a few copies go unclaimed, but we’ve brought out first Book Giveaway to an end. Below is a list of winners.

If anyone believes their name belongs here as a winner and I’ve overlooked you, please let me know. I’ll make sure to get you a copy. But as far as my records go, this is the list I have.

Thanks to all who entered and enjoy your copy of MOST LIKELY, which will be coming to you via email shortly!

Krissie
Kayla Smith
Denise
Suzanne
Debbie Griffith

MOST LIKELY eBook Giveaway!

To celebrate the release of MOST LIKELY, I am running a contest in which I will give away a dozen copies of my new novel to a dozen people! The twelve (12) copies will be given out in the form of a Smashwords coupon, meaning if you win a copy, you’ll be able to redeem the coupon in the eFormat of your choice!

So how do you enter? How do you qualify? What must you do to earn a copy?

It’s a simple, three-step process.

1) Leave a comment on this blog entry.

2) Go to my Twitter account (@craigahansen), follow me, and send me one “hello” tweet. Or it can be more interesting, if you wish.

3) Go to my Facebook fan page, Like me, and send me a PM saying you’ve completed all three steps and giving me an email address where I can contact you to send your free copy of MOST LIKELY!

That’s it! It’s that simple!

On Sunday, May 29, I’ll check to make sure there are at least twelve winners. If there are, the giveaway will be over. If there are more than 12 entrants, I’ll put all the names on slips of paper, put them in a bowl, and do a blind drawing … the first 12 names I draw will win the free copies.

Enjoy the contest! Have fun with it! And if you enjoy the book, let me know! If you have time, feel free to review it! That’s not a requirement, but it’s certainly welcome if you feel moved to do so.

Enjoy the weekend!

NaNoWriMo Announcement!

It’s official. I’ve decided to participate in the 2010 National Novel Writing Month competition this year. It’s a great event that most people come to refer to as NaNoWriMo because… well, our society just hates formality and long names. Really.

For those of you who want to check in on me over there, here’s my NaNoWriMo profile.

I have a lot of books in the works right now, but NaNoWriMo is all about starting a new project (or re-starting an abandoned project from scratch) and just pushing ahead nonstop for thirty days in an attempt to produce at least 50,000 words… a workable first draft that you can then spend time AFTER it’s written cleaning up.

It forces a person to turn off their internal editor and just produce. And that will be good for me.

So I’m not working on my Torah stuff or my Parables book or even my mystery novel! Instead, I’m dusting off an old concept I had once upon a time for a comic book/graphic novel. I have much of the story outlined, including a series bible, and I did write one twenty-two-page issue of it once upon a time… but since the artist never showed me more than a character sketch or three, it died on the vine.

I’ve never tried it as a novel, so that makes it the perfect quick-start NaNoWriMo project for me.

The story is about a high school girl with plenty of problems and when she finds out she has some extraordinary abilities, it’s more of a distraction and a pain in the rear for her than anything. She doesn’t don tights or fight crime… she lives in remote northwestern Wisconsin, after all, not New York City!

Yet her newfound powers get her in trouble and raise deeper questions for her; and forces beyond her control may push her toward dealing with her abilities whether she wants to or not!

So it’s a cross between a superhero story, suspense, and dark paranormal stuff.

Sure, it might seem like an odd project for a person studying to be a Messianic rabbi. But who ever said a person who’s serious about God and faith can’t be creative?

So I call my NaNoWriMo project EMBER. It’ll be a fun ride, and once I figure out all the widgets and stuff available from NaNoWriMo, I’ll try to have a little widget up here on my blog so that you can all track my progress through the month of November!

Time to liven things up over here

OK, so I’ll admit I haven’t done much here in the first three months of my new site. That’s because I’ve been writing. It could get silent like this from time to time but I’ve decided that I need to start putting up some content here or, once I do get some of my books published and available on Kindle and Nook, I’ll be known as, “that author with the most dead, boring Web site ever!”

And we don’t want that, do we?

Do we?

Umm… never mind.

Anyway, I wanted to take this opportunity to say that you can expect more bursts of content from now on. I’m still deciding how I want to utilize my author’s site. It needs to be different from my writing and Kindle-focused blog, ScriptSuperhero.com. And I don’t want to duplicate content because I just hate that.

So I’m going to use this site as more of a diary of my own writing life, and see how that goes. The next couple posts will give you more of an idea of how that’s gonna look.