Jennifer Thomson's Blog, page 20

Book 1 and 2 in the Die Hard for Girls series out now

Now 99cents and 99p

I had such an amazing response to offering Hell To Pay free for 2 days, that I've decided to offer the eBook for 99 cents in the UK and Canada and 99 pence in the UK.

To make sure nobody misses out, the offer will be for 3 days.



What's Hell to Pay about then? 
Hell to Pay the first book in the Nancy Kerr and Tommy McIntyre crime mystery series is available for FREE today and tomorrow on Kindle. Why not check it out?

Nancy Kerr refuses to be a victim - even when she walks in on her parents’ killers and is raped and left for dead. Fourteen months later, she wakes up in a psychiatric hospital with no knowledge of how she got there.
Slowly her memory starts to return.
Released from the institution, she has just one thing on her mind – two men brought hell to her family home.
Now they’re in for some hell of their own.

Here's the links, guys -
Amazon.co.uk 
Amazon.com
Amazon.can

If you don't fancy the book, why not share this link with friends? I'd appreciate it.

DIE HARD FOR GIRLS BOOK 2 is out now 

Here's the blurb -Huddled in a doorway, in a blonde wig and my best Pretty Woman outfit, I'm already soaked to the skin. Any minute now, a car will pull up and the occupant will ask me how much I charge for sex.
As downward spirals go, this is bad. But I'm not here because I'm reduced to turning tricks for a living. I'm here to catch a killer... 
Throwaways - that's the word they're using for the Glasgow sex workers who've gone missing. But two people do care and Nancy Kerr and Tommy McIntyre won't stop until they discover the truth; even if it gets them killed. 
Out now for £1.99 in the UK on AmazonUKAmazon.comAmazon.ca

Hell to Pay is 99 cents & 99p Nov 21st to Nov 24th

Now 99cents and 99p

I had such an amazing response to offering Hell To Pay free for 2 days, that I've decided to offer the eBook for 99 cents in the UK and Canada and 99 pence in the UK.

To make sure nobody misses out, the offer will be for 3 days.



What's Hell to Pay about then? 
Hell to Pay the first book in the Nancy Kerr and Tommy McIntyre crime mystery series is available for FREE today and tomorrow on Kindle. Why not check it out?

Nancy Kerr refuses to be a victim - even when she walks in on her parents’ killers and is raped and left for dead. Fourteen months later, she wakes up in a psychiatric hospital with no knowledge of how she got there. 
Slowly her memory starts to return.
Released from the institution, she has just one thing on her mind – two men brought hell to her family home. 
Now they’re in for some hell of their own.

Here's the links, guys -
Amazon.co.uk 
Amazon.com
Amazon.can

If you don't fancy the book, why not share this link with friends? I'd appreciate it.

Get Hell To Pay FREE Wednesday and Thursday

Free book. Yeah, you read that right.

Hell to Pay the first book in the Nancy Kerr and Tommy McIntyre crime mystery series is available for FREE today and tomorrow on Kindle. Why not check it out?

Nancy Kerr refuses to be a victim - even when she walks in on her parents’ killers and is raped and left for dead. Fourteen months later, she wakes up in a psychiatric hospital with no knowledge of how she got there. 
Slowly her memory starts to return.
Released from the institution, she has just one thing on her mind – two men brought hell to her family home. 
Now they’re in for some hell of their own.

Here's the links, guys -
Amazon.co.uk 
Amazon.com
Amazon.can

If you don't fancy the book, why not share this link with friends? I'd appreciate it.

(Freebie starts 8am UK timetime and ends 8pm on Thursday - or midnight to midnight in the US and Canada).

Out now - Living Cruelty Free - Live a more Compassionate Life

Living Cruelty Free offers tips and advice on how we can be kinder to animals and each other, and live a kinder life.

It’s an essential guide for anyone who wants to become a more ethical shopper: to avoid buying the cruellest things on the planet, like fur, Foie gras, and clothes made using slave labour.

There are also tips on how to go free range, become vegetarian, or just reduce your meat intake, and to make sure the cosmetics you buy are not tested on animals.

When I became a vegetarian 28 years ago, I wish this information had been available to me.

The book's available at 
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.ca

The book has a companion blog.

Why should you read Hell To Pay?

Why should you read Hell To Pay?

1. In real life women don't usually get revenge on their attackers, Nancy Kerr does.
2. If you like strong women, you'll like Nancy Kerr.
3. There's a handsome strapping sidekick called Tommy McIntyre.

Hell to Pay is now available on Amazon. 

You can read an extract from Hell To Pay on the excellent Wattpad site by clicking here.

Is it time to say goodbye to your publisher?

Sometimes it's time to say goodbyeAs I write this, I'm scared, very scared. After a thoroughly demoralising time with one of my publishers that made me ill, I decided to get the rights to my two books with them back. Moving from having a publisher to doing everything yourself and self-publishing, is very scary indeed.

Now I'm responsible for everything from cover design to editing and the thing that scares me most is getting it wrong. But, my publisher's actions left me with no choice. 

You see, I had high hopes for these books. They were the first two in a series I'd created called Die Hard for Girls. They were my babies, lovingly crafted. I'd already written the third.

Judging by the readers reports by the publisher, they shared my enthusiasm. Sadly, that didn't translate into any real effort on their part. In fact, the publisher started to charge for services that they shouldn't have. Things like converting your book into an eBook and even, at one point, putting it into print. 

I won't go into all that. It's a long and boring story - hey, even I'm bored with it. But, what I will say is that I spent hours and hours trying to get my book the marketing they promised me and getting basic things like categories fixed and my author name spelled correctly.

Example - Throwaways, my crime thriller about Glasgow sex workers being kidnapped, was listed as true life and erotica. My, was my mum surprised about that:)

Now, it's down to me to do things right. It's daunting, but invigorating at the same time. Having two covers designed was particularly exciting. 

I prefer the cover I commissioned for Hell To Pay to the original. What do you think? 


OLD COVER



NEW COVER

And, here's Throwaways...


OLD COVER



NEW COVER

For now, I'm trying to find my way, but I'll keep you up to date on my self-publishing adventure and would love to hear about yours. 

Both books are out now in eBook, but there's limited paperbacks from the publisher available. 

Dead Bastards by Jenny Thomson (An extract)

Dead Bastards (An Extract)
We couldn’t handle Archie staring back at us with accusing eyes, and he stank, so I covered him up with a duvet. A pink one with polka dots, which is the only spare one we have.Scott spotted what he called the girly duvet and screwed up his face. “He’s my mate. We need to show him some respect.”I’m irritated his pal has bled all over the new rug, yet I’m the one getting all the aggro for using a pink duvet.Instead of coming up with an alternative to cover up his friend, Scott stood there with a stern expression on his face and shook his head. “It’s just no right.” Then his eyes grew wide and staring as he gawped at the duvet. “I think it moved.”I snorted and shook my head. “How can it have moved? He’s deid. His stomach’s on our carpet.”Just because Scott didn’t consider the duvet manly enough for his pal, didn’t give him the right to try to freak me out. But I looked down anyway.At first, I didn’t see any movement, but I carried on watching. Then Archie’s feet started moving, making a tapping motion as if dancing in time to music. Before I’d seen it for myself, I thought that what happened to all those others on TV was not the same as what happened to Archie, because making that connection would open a whole Pandora’s Box of trouble.Denial is after all a way of shielding myself from the truth. But eventually realisation dawns, especially when Archie started doing a tap dance on my living room floor. “Fuck, he’s no deid.”While he’s doing this I realised there’s one last thing we can do for him: cave in his head.Scott gives me his teacher-doesn’t-approve stare. “Wish you wouldn’t swear, Emma. It makes you ugly.”As if my swearing was our biggest problem right now.I wanted to give him an earful for chastising me like I was one of his pupils, but I’m too busy watching as dead Archie takes a hacking breath and tries to get up.I don’t say anything. I couldn’t breathe. I simply held out my finger and pointed as if auditioning for the National Lottery’s It Could Be You ad. But this was one lottery I sure as hell didn’t want to win.


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Archie flung the duvet asunder. His ash-grey face was set in a grimace that reminded me of a Mayan death mask. He looked like hell, which was no surprise considering his innards were spread out all over our carpet. But it’s his eyes that were the real giveaway that Archie wasn’t Archie anymore. He had the bluest eyes I’d ever seen, but now those eyes were gone, replaced by dead orbs, as black as coal. They lacked that spark of humanity and self-awareness, whatever it is that makes us human.Something clicked in that brain of his. He stared at us like a starving dog eyeing someone's dinner. His mouth dropped open and rancid black sludge spilt out. Then he howled.I thought I was going to puke.He grabbed for my arm, his blackened teeth as sharp as knives snapping at me. I managed to sidestep his reach.A scream shrieked out of my throat before I could stop it.
HOW TO KILL A ZOMBIE
The thing about being confronted by zombies is that we all think we’ll know what to do. We’ve all seen the movies, watched the TV shows. To kill a zombie you need to splatter the brains all over the shop with a gun. But the reality is different for those of us living in Scotland where we don’t have guns in our wardrobes or locked in a box, because we don’t keep guns, period. That makes killing the zombies damn difficult.My boyfriend is useless as a handyman, so there’s no toolkit in our third floor tenement flat. We have no hammers, chisels, or drills to destroy the brain of the zombie who used to be my boyfriend’s best pal.Okay, this so-called pal drives me mental, like the time he got Scott, who’s not a big drinker, steamboats one night and dragged him along to a lap dancing bar where he ended up slipping crisp twenties into Monique or Cindi’s g-string. (I know this because he kindly recorded footage on Scott’s mobile phone.) I’m still pissed about that, but I don’t hate him to the extent that I want to cave his head in. So when the thing that used to be Archie, struggles to its feet and lumbers towards us, arms outstretched, as if pretending to be rent-a-ghost, I snatch the first thing I can get my mitts on, an iron I’d forgotten to turn off, and I scud him across the head with it.There’s an almighty hiss as it scorches his flesh, accompanied by the smell of burnt barbecue. The iron trundles onto the floor where it lies, scorching the carpet. I can’t believe what I’ve just done, and my hand goes limp.Archie’s makes a throaty noise and lurches towards me. That's when Scott gets busy, bludgeoning his best mate over the head with an ugly, heavy lamp his parents had bought us as a housewarming present.Globs of sticky brain matter splatter the wall as though someone dumped mince in a blender without the lid on and switched it to turbo, but Scott still keeps whacking dead Archie, because dead Archie keeps coming at me.My back's to the wall. Will he not die, again?

Dead Bastards is available on Kindle and in Paperback Amazon.co.ukAmazon.comAmazon.caAmazon.de  

David Cameron gets eaten by zombies - Dead Bastards now out in paperback

By popular demand, zombie novel Dead Bastards is now out in paperback with an alternative ending and some bonus material. And a brand new cover.

You can check it out at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

Thanks so much to everyone who has already bought the book as an ebook and who asked me to bring out a paperback version.

Let's defeat the zombie hordes together:)

An open letter to Alex Salmond

Dear Mr Salmond,
As I write this, I'm heartbroken as you no doubt are. As a coal miner's granddaughter, I saw at first hand how the Tories ripped the heart of Scotland. Our country has never recovered from the scars they inflicted upon it and Labour have betrayed working class people like myself by not undoing any of the damage the Tories inflicted upon our country.

I firmly believe that the vote would have been yes for independence, if I hadn't been for the fear the Better Together campaign engendered, together with Westminster.

I think we both know that.

However, that's not the reason I write to you. The reason I do is that I want to thank you for your commendable campaign that concentrated on the positives and never stooped to bullying or bluster. You and your team can be very proud of the way you conducted yourselves and made the whole country invigorated by politics.

Most people in my age group of 20-40 voted yes and it us who will hold the balance of power in the future. I firmly believe we can rise and will rise to be a nation again.

The police beating up a cool miner during the Thatcher era.

A sneak peek from Don't Come For Me

PrologueYou're in the bathroom late at night when you hear a noise coming from outside the door, and there's this tiny part of you, the product of centuries of genetic programming designed to make you fight or flee, that thinks there's someone inside your house. Somebody waiting for you outside that door.Panic sucks the air out of your lungs.Your dread of what's outside that door places an icy hand on your shoulder.All kinds of scary thoughts are going through your mind. Different permutations of what's outside the door.Has someone broken in and they're going through your stuff?Is someone there determined to do you harm as they have in the past?There's this tiny voice inside your head telling you not to be so silly. You're imagining things. After what happened before that's understandable, but you can't let fear rule your life. Be the boss of you.When you open that door, you'll feel ridiculous when you see that nobody's there.There is no bogeyman waiting.You open the bathroom door, confidently to prove you don't care; that you've mastered your irrational fear. Not tentatively like you want to, so you can turn on your heels and slam the door shut. Just an inch so you can get a peek at what's out there.In a few seconds, you're going to be laughing about this. To feel a fool.With your heart beating in your ears, the door swings open and right away, you see that you were right to be worried.Both chairs are upturned in the living room and the TVs been pulled out of its brackets. Your boyfriend's nowhere to be seen.You go into the kitchen and there's a knife on the floor and a pool of blood. You're trying to take all this in as your heart thumps against your breastbone on stereo.That's when the police turn up, threatening to break down the door if you don't open up.Surveying the scene you know that they're gonna think you killed him...My name is Nancy Kerr and I'm not a murderer. Since my parents were murdered I've come close a few times, but I've never done the deed.I did tattoo the world RAPIST across the stomach of one of my parents' killers. But to me that was justified, righteous revenge because when I walked in on those monsters who’d killed my parents, they raped me and left me bleeding to death on the kitchen floor of my childhood home. What happened caused me to have a breakdown and I ended up in a psychiatric hospital where I was in the land of the zombies for fourteen months. I have no memory of most of what happened there.But, hey, that's another story.Accused of my boyfriend Tommy's murder, I need to prove my innocence. It won't be easy. Confronted by the same scene as the police, I would think I was guilty too. And, Tommy's still missing, presumed dead and murdered by me.The clock's ticking. 
DON'T COME FOR ME IS COMING SOON...