# Bargain Books by Rick Russell and More!



## Rick (May 22, 2009)

Tried a $.99 thread on the Kindle boards and a post there told me this was the place to tell everyone, so here goes:

Just finished lowering the books to $1.99 which Amazon said was minimum and an "also bought" on one of the books tells me I might be able to go $.99, so I tried and apparently succeeded. It's a sale, a special? You'd think Amazon would advertise it better. In any case, sold a lot at $1.99, but no reviews, so you can take that as meaning Kindle readers are kind, and they suck, or kindle readers are lazy and you don't know, or Kindle readers were so awed by them that they are speechless. I think the last one is probably the reason, but for $.99 you can make up your own mind.

I spent some time on my books working with the Kindle idea, ie: books that sound good read out loud, an old idea from when people hired readers, and a more staccato prose style, so the screen doesn't just lay there as often. I'm not even sure how they would work in print, they were really written to the medium (ie: it is rare but may not be well done.) I sort of look at them as an electric guitar and print as acoustic. I've been working on an "Internet"/electronic writing style since I started with The Mining Company (now About.com) and Suite 101 in 1996, Kindle is the first showcase for it. The Carlson series is in this style.

Some of the books are mine, some are classic reprints and some are other people's, in any case, now for $.99 they are:

Mystery/Thriller - The Carlson Series
Premise- Nick Carlson returns from almost six years in Southeast Asia, almost a burnout. He is a journalist, not a detective, so the solution to the mystery may come in a postscript (after he finishes the story.) He narrates most of the books. The series so far takes him to the editorship of a major news magazine, the final book, chronologically is narrated by his adopted daughter and he is only a character. As Kindled the series is:

California Tumbles Into the Sea - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0029DNKJO
War correspondent Nick Carlson comes home to a murder mystery he only agrees to solve because his former fiancée's brother has been convicted of it. "Almost six years of making obituaries interesting while doing some really serious ducking had ripped the covering off of my nerves and calloused my feelings." Nick has more baggage than O'Hare on Thanksgiving weekend.

"I spent too much time zipping up body bags full of good men,...good friends, who got sacrificed to a greater good. Three weeks ago in a Cambodian jungle, I did it one more time, and I realized that there wasn't any greater good, in fact there was precious little good around at all. That all I could say I was was the supercargo on Charon's ferry across the Styx, dutifully recording the names of those who stepped on board and making sure the names were spelled right.

"This isn't a story I wanted, if it had been anybody's name but yours on the first page I'd have thrown it in the ashcan and be down the coast somewhere trying to let the surf pound the bitterness out of me."

Tori, raven haired and blue-eyed, and beautiful. "Was I even up to the emotional impact of Annandale? Or for that matter seeing Tori again?"

Sheila, town chippie, now murdered angel. "Sheila was a mess. Three quarters of the men in town under thirty got into her pants at one time or another. She certainly never had a halo, that one. But her being murdered gave her one, from the town chippie to sweet little, innocent high school girl."

All this to wind up with, "the Wine Country Ripper," a faceless serial killer with a taste for young girls.

On a Morning from a Bogart Movie http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0029F1Y6S
Nick Carlson ends up married (to Tori) and becomes the guardian of a thirteen-year-old ex-child prostitute named Kat. The three run into a body on a California beach and try to solve murders of a character actor and a movie queen, forty years apart; and end up bumping into a slavery ring using Asian labor, as Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos fall to the Communists. Who killed Thelma Todd? Adventures in old Hollywood.

Don't Forget to Say Grace http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0029LHL5A
Nick and Tori expose a new "triad" based in Vietnamese officials who stole American arms and allied themselves with Afghans to control drug traffic. Kat graduates high school and helps.

Secrets are the Things We Grew http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0029NZW90
Tori and Nick Carlson, their friends and Journalists play cat and mouse with La Cosa Nostra on both coasts.

Little GTO http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0029U2OQC
Kat Carlson with the help of her family and friends find and takes down a child pornographer in Mexico. Kat marries Ken and adopts an abused little girl.

Paranormal Romance - The Apocryphon
I talked Myra into this. I met her through my publication of Pistis Sophia in 1984. Basically her books are Gnostic allegory/Myth adapted to modern times. I found them fascinating and talked her into letting me Kindle these two. If they work she said I could do more.

The Apocryphon Book One Corinthus by Myra Westcott http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0028Y53WQ
The discovery of the Gnostic universe by a writer who seemingly relives the same basic time frame and has to resolve his love for two women in order to advance. A Gnostic fable in modern terms. Paranormal romance, while not hard-core involves some erotica.

The Apocryphon Book Two Psyche by Myra Westcott http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0028Y561E
Two people who are meant to be together come together through a group of Gnostics who have uncovered the secret of Ouroboros. A fable of how we relate to one another as we travel back through the aeons to perfection. Paranormal romance again not hard-core but involves some erotica.

Experimental Fiction - The Works of Dorian Taylor
Just read the blurb for Modern Problems. If this flies I've got binders full of this stuff to type and Kindle.

Modern Problems http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00295RCHS
The box came via the Post Office on a Thursday morning... It contained a sealed envelope and a dozen big ringed binders filled with neat handwriting. The envelope was addressed to me and marked "Personal and Confidential." It contained the following:

Dear Rick,

I suppose this is a surprise to you, but, for the life (or now death) of me, I couldn't find anyone else in the world to take it. You are the only person who ever paid me to write anything, my only editor or publisher. I suppose that you can throw it out, I know how hard it is to publish things. However, I had the idea that you might one day revive The Blue Review and, since for almost four years I was a contributor, I would hate not to be a part of that. The binders contain the miscellaneous writings of Dorian Taylor, the name by which you knew me. It is quite an improbable name and actually the name of the hero of the novel Top Forty, which you will find in the third binder. I am not going to give you my real name, because I have always rather despised it and, if by some miracle my writings find their way into the public eye, I would prefer they be under the pseudonym I created for that purpose.

In Yard Sale, the novella in the first binder, I wrote the following:
" The artist who paints alone in a garret cannot exist alone. In order to secure what he needs to paint, canvas, brushes and the like, he has to know a merchant who sells these things. Having painted, he must then sell his painting... One must be both able and willing to join a group in order to enter society. Van Gogh, arguably the greatest painter of all time, at least the most expensive, was never able to do this... It was left, therefore, to a group of people to discover his paintings, and sell them, after the impediment of his physical presence was removed from the scene... The curious feature of this is that the best artists are often anti-social. This leaves any thoughtful person to imagine that the best of art goes out with the rest of the trash just before the estate sale. More than likely, this is the case."

I decided to change this formula a bit and send my artistic production to the only person who ever seemed to like it. You are, of course, invested with all it's rights etc. The only favors I would ask is that you dedicate any book to Valerie, with the poem I have included as the first page in the first binder, and that you credit my writing to Dorian Taylor.

From 1997 to 2001, I edited a literary ezine called The Blue Review and Dorian Taylor had been one of my most popular contributors. I hadn't heard from him (or her) since I stopped publishing the ezine and I honestly know nothing about him (or her). ..Whoever Dorian Taylor is, or possibly was as the letter seemed to indicate that he (or she) is no longer with us, he (or she) was a very inventive, interesting and enjoyable writer.

Editing The Blue Review, I attempted to focus on experimental writing... My most popular writers were Dorian Taylor and Harrison. I never had the slightest idea who lurked behind these pseudonyms, and now I rather regret the fact that I did not find more about my contributors than I did.

Taylor's literary legacy... consists of several binders of fiction, a binder of philosophical writing, and two binders of poetry. There are clues, or red herrings, scattered throughout the works... While I cannot be sure, much of the writing is from a male perspective, so I conclude, at least in my own mind that he was a man, and have therefore decided to bestow the male pronoun on him... The dedication poem "To Valerie- Last Seen June, 1965" would seem to indicate that he graduated high school then which would mean he was born in 1946 or 47.

... The true measure of a writer of any kind as that he is undated, and unknown except for those rearrangements of the dictionary he cares to leave behind him... Perhaps, in reading, you will find a fuller understanding of the artist and the art.

Top 40 http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00295RD36 
From 1997 to 2001, I edited a literary ezine called The Blue Review and Dorian Taylor had been one of my most popular contributors. I hadn't heard from him (or her) since I stopped publishing the ezine and I honestly know nothing about him (or her). ..Whoever Dorian Taylor is, or possibly was as the letter seemed to indicate that he (or she) is no longer with us, he (or she) was a very inventive, interesting and enjoyable writer. This is the second volume of the Works of Dorian Taylor. 
This is the note on it
Author's Note:
Rick,
Since I was never a successful author, I decided to become one, this is my biography. We discussed my love for nouveau roman, and this is within that genre. Perhaps the greatest influence on my generation was rock and roll music. So I wrote my biography based in a musical countdown which tells not only my story, but the tells it through the lens of the music that shaped it. I even won an Academy Award.

Mystery and Horror - Anthologies 
An old idea of mine that has been in the works since I was an editor at Garber Communications in the early eighties. If you can do the Rivals of Sherlock Holmes why not the Colleagues of Van Helsing and the Friends of Fu?

The Colleagues of Professor Van Helsing http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0028RY3MO
An Anthology of early and seminal occult detectives from the middle to late 1800s. The sub-genre that gave birth to such modern series as the X-files. From Ghost maestro J. Sheridan Lefanu through popular mystery writers such as Algernon Blackwood, L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace, through occult wroters like Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley to the master of horror writing Arthur Machen. ***** This got a five star review since I posted this originally *****

The Friends of Fu Manchu http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00292BUC4
The beginnings of the sub-genre of villainy at the turn of the nineteenth century a compendium of bad guys from gentleman jewel thieves to serial killers all introduced before 1911.


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## Chad Winters (Oct 28, 2008)

Rick said:


> ... so you can take that as meaning Kindle readers are kind, and they suck, or kindle readers are lazy and you don't know, or Kindle readers were so awed by them that they are speechless. I think the last one is probably the reason, but for $.99 you can make up your own mind.


More likely Kindle owners know to grab a book when its on sale and add it to their huge "To Be Read" list. I hope you were joking, because that sounded a little insulting.

I have purchased books from several authors I know personally on this board (Mighty Hammer Down, La Malinche, Wysard, and Al's books who's title escapes me at the moment...) and I will get to them someday, but I have over 100 books on my TBR list. I know as an author your book is the most important thing in the world, but even if it intrigues me and I buy, it does not automatically go to the top of the TBR.

I'm just saying..... I may not be mean or lazy....I may just be busy.

P.S. 
I did get to "In Her Name" (superb by the way!) but if it hadn't been for the Book Klub....it would probably still be on the list


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Rick, 

welcome to the KindleBoards!  I've moved your post to its own thread.  Our policy here is for author-posted thread to stand alone in the Book Bazaar and to use the Bargain Books sticky thread for members to post other bargains they find.

You've given us a lot to look at here!  I'm going to work my way through the list to see what I might want to sample.

Thanks!

Betsy
Book Corner Moderator


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## Rick (May 22, 2009)

Chad,

You aren't the first to notice that, Matthew over on the Kindle Ninety-nine cents board picked that up. Here's what I said:

I appreciate it, looking forward to your opinion, when you get to it. I was born five thousand years behind in my reading, so I know the feeling. The thread is really a form of self-promotion that I would like other people to take up. You see I once owned and ran a P. R. agency. What you get through normal publicity is pretty slick and highly politicized. When I retired to do my thing I promised myself I wouldn't go that route, even though I can. Self promotion is honest, and art, if it's worth anything at all is first, honest. Note I didn't say "truthful," I said "honest." It becomes tough because P.R., publicity people not only get access they are basically about 60% of what you read in the normal media. As a writer (artist) and a publisher, I want to be honest with my audience. Again, not truthful, honest, in other words if it isn't that way I want it to be. These boards try to put a clamp on that. But what I feel is that this is a new medium, things written to Kindle have to be different. You can't play "Pipeline" well on an acoustic guitar. Add that to the lack of avenues of promo for pure Kindle and here we are.

As to you're being "lazy," you are one of the first people to read something analogous to rock and roll music in a new media. Get to reading, guy, the whole world is counting on you


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## mumsicalwhimsy (Dec 4, 2008)

California Tumbles Into the Sea and On a Morning from a Bogart Movie looked interesting to me. While they are not next on my list, I look forward to spending time with them.


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## Carolyn Kephart (Feb 23, 2009)

Chad Winters (#102) said:


> I have purchased books from several authors I know personally on this board (Mighty Hammer Down, La Malinche, *Wysard*, and Al's books who's title escapes me at the moment...) and I will get to them someday, but I have over 100 books on my TBR list.


Many thanks, Chad.

And by all means take your time getting to mine, because I'm a slow read, or should be. 

Cordially,

CK


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## cheerio (May 16, 2009)

Can't complain for $0.99


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