Yahoo! The audiobook is finally finished and lots of exciting things are happening. In the last newsletter, I mentioned that I have a big announcement to make. Well, here it is... I cancelled my contract with Windstorm Creative. Yep. It’s true. I now own all of the rights for Paraworld Zero (well, I just sold one of them, but I’ll talk about that later), but I’m already getting a lot of interest from various publishers and agents. To prevent any rumors, I’ll just say that I dropped my publisher because they breached the contract regarding my royalties (they didn't pay me) and complimentary books I was supposed to get. However, my main motivation was the horrible distribution issues. Tons of book orders were not getting fulfilled, and I was receiving lots of complaints from bookstores, schools, and libraries because of this. I don’t think Windstorm meant to drop the ball with my book. I think they’re just overworked and might have some communication/accounting/health/financial issues. I wish them good luck and adieu. Read on to find out about the exciting future for my series and an offer to get the audiobook for just $5.

I mailed out all of the MP3-CD’s last week, and I’m mailing out the MP3-DVD’s this week. I went all out on the DVD. In addition to the audiobook, it comes with about 2 hours of video extras and 2 hours of audio extras, which include interviews of the book cover models, bloopers, "making of" videos of the audiobook and artwork, school presentations, radio interviews, photo slide shows, etc. My twins just finished listening to it. Since they’re 8-years old, it was great to see their reactions and facial expressions. They’ve been talking about it all week. One tender moment I’ll share is when we finished listening to a dramatic chapter near the end. One of my boys, Dean, ran to his room because he got so emotional. My wife found him twenty minutes later, crying. Wow. It’s a strange feeling that I wrote something so powerful for a young boy. I think the audio makes it even more powerful, especially since my wife and I did all of the character voices (about 100 of them!).

I’m going to offer my newsletter subscribers a special on the audiobook. Order it in July, and I’ll send it to you for just $5 plus $1.50 shipping. Believe me, I won’t ever do this offer again. In fact, I plan on raising the price of the audiobook in the near future to around $30, before I start marketing it. To order, go to http://paraworlds.com/sample/ but instead of using the coupon found on that page, use this coupon instead: newsletter08cd

If you want the premium DVD, I’ll give it to you for $8. Just use this coupon: newsletter08dvd

Sony bought the non-exclusive eBook rights for Paraworld Zero to go onto their Sony Reader (kind of like the Amazon Kindle). I’ve already converted my book and the 30 chapter art images into eBook form. It’s a much more involved process than I had realized. The acquisitions director for Sony requested my book over a month ago, but it looks like it won’t be ready until later this month. I’ll keep you updated on the progress.

Paraworld Zero received another honorable mention (that’s three now in the past couple months). This latest one came from the New York Book Festival. I must be crazy, but I flew to New York, signed books for a few hours, and then got a phone call from the airport letting me know that they changed my flight. I had to leave the festival four hours early and rush to the airport, only to sit around for two hours because of a delay. So my first stay in New York, outside of the airport, was about 6 hours. Whew!

I’ve been invited to participate in the World Science Fiction Convention in Denver (I’ll be doing a panel on Publicity) and the World Fantasy Convention in Calgary (I’ll be doing the September podcast for their website). If anyone is going to be there, let me know, and perhaps we can meet in person.