Visit Smashwords & Fill Your E-Reader
All Quacking Alone Romances 25% Off
This week, March 6-12th, is International Read An E-book Week (RAE Week) and e-tailers all over the web are celebrating with special deals and give aways. If you own an e-reader this is the week when you can snag more free e-books than at any time in the year. If you miss this week's steals and deals you'll pay for it - literally - all year long. But as the week begins, lets take a moment and look back at the history of the e-book.
This is lucky year seven for the RAE Week celebration, which began in 2004. However, a lot of folks don't realize that while this week is the 7th birthday of the RAE Week celebration, it's the 40th birthday of the e-book. The e-book was born in 1971 when Michael Hart used a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer to create the first e-book - The Declaration of Independence. Fitting choice, wasn't it?
Mr. Hart believed that "the greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries." The creation of that first e-book was the beginning of what became Project Gutenberg. It hosts 20,000 free texts on its site and over 100,000 are available through its partners and today over 3 million e-books are downloaded each month.
E-books first appeared on the web and romance was one of the first genres to become successful in the format. They were easy to buy from home and quickly became a guilty pleasure. It was quite some time later before manufacturers and publishers became interested, but today, spurred on by Oprah Winfrey's announcement that the Kindle was her favorite gadget, the day of the e-readers have arrived. Consumers find them perfect for a hectic on-the-go lifestyle. They provide entertainment for the daily commute on the bus or subway, for long waits in doctor's offices, or to allow vacationers to take hundreds of books on one tiny little device.
So let's hear it for the e-book. Mr. Hart's creation changed the daily lives of folks all around the world - especially including the crazy duck lady writing this post. Thanks a million Mr. Hart.
To celebrate RAE Week, retailers all around the net are offering a week of stupendous steals and deals. If you follow this link, it'll take you to a site listing deals and give-aways by authors, booksellers, e-zines and websites. The one nearest and dearest to my heart is the phenomenal promotion offered through Smashwords, which is the primary non-Amazon host and distributor of my work. Through SW my e-books appear all over the place, at all its partner sites, including Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and Diesel.
STARTING TODAY, SUNDAY, MARCH 6, 2011 THROUGH SUNDAY, MARCH 12, 2011, ALL QUACKING ALONE ROMANCES AT SMASHWORDS WILL BE SOLD FOR 25% OFF. Buy 4 and you've saved 100% - in Mary Anne math, anyway. That's a real deal and you shouldn't miss it.
While you're at Smashwords, check out all the work of all the fine authors involved in the promotion. Lots of authors are offering stuff at discounts ranging from 25% to 100% off. Yes, Virginia. Some of the e-books on the site are free for the taking. If you pick any of them up, I know that the authors, including myself, would appreciate your taking the time to come back and review the work. You may or may not like it, and your review should certainly reflect your honest opinion. See, whether your review is good or bad, it shows that the book made enough of an impact for a reader to take the time to do a review. And if you get a book for free during the promotion, you should feel bloody-well honor bound to go back and do a review.
Why aren't my books free? I'd love to make them free. If anyone can get my creditors to sign off on that plan, let me know. But 25% off is a great deal for my work and, like I said, there are great deals all over the Smashwords site this week. Don't forget to go to this site to check out all the deals all over the web.
With prices of everything on the rise and income on the decline, you shouldn't miss a chance to fill up your ereader, save some money, and pick up some work by authors you already know or to check out some work by some up and coming indie authors.
So y'all come to Smashwords this week and fill 'er up.