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Tue, 10/21/2008

First, a little “flogging” by Alan Gratz:

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So this is a great week for me to be blogging here on the Penguin Blog, as my new Horatio Wilkes mystery, Something Wicked, officially hit the shelves last Thursday. You can read more about it in last week's introduction to me, or by heading over to www.alangratz.com.

I post almost every day over at the blog my wife and I share, Gratz Industries, which focuses on our attempts to pursue a meaningful, creative life together. Interspersed, of course, with YouTube videos of ukulele orchestras playing the theme song to Shaft and old Planet of the Apes action figure commercials from the seventies.

We do manage to talk about our creative projects every now and then though, which feels strange. I grew up in the South, and among the many things I was always taught about being a Southern gentleman was that I should never brag or talk big about myself. The trouble is, that's kind of tough when you're an author. There are so many great books published every year-every season-that you have to do a little crowing to make yourself heard above the clamor.

So over at Gratz Industries, we talk big about ourselves and our projects every now and again, out of necessity. But we have a word for it, a way of labeling our posts that acknowledges that instead of posting a really great video of Star Trek's Captain Jean-Luc Picard dancing around the bridge of the Enterprise and singing "A You're Adorable," we're going to take a moment to brag. We call it "flogging," a combination of "blog" and "flog," as in to sell or promote without shame.

So for this first post, a bit of flogging.

To celebrate the release this week of Something Wicked, my contemporary young adult mystery based on Macbeth, Dial Books is offering a special promotion: they're letting you read the first Horatio Wilkes mystery, Something Rotten, for free.

You read that right. Free. Gratis. Complimentary. No charge.

You don't have to register, you don't have to give your e-mail, you don't have to buy something else to read it.

All you have to do is click here.

Why are we letting you read Something Rotten for free while it's still on sale at your favorite bookseller? Because the number one challenge facing most authors is obscurity. Of all the people who didn't buy Something Rotten today, the majority did so because they simply didn't know it existed--not because someone gave them a free copy of it. Like Cory Doctorow says, we think it's more important to get more people into our tent than to make sure everybody inside bought a ticket.

So click on the link in this post, or the banner stuck to the top of the Gratz Industries blog, or go to www.alangratz.com, and read Something Rotten. The book is free (did we mention?) but this special promotion ends on November 30th.

So what are you waiting for? Go. Now. All the cool kids are doing it...