George Hamilton's Blog, page 2

Countdown Deal Sale: Secrets From The Dust

Secrets From The Dust eBook will be on a Countdown Deal sale on Amazon.com from 22-27 January 2014. Superbly written, beautiful, thought provoking, a fabulous read, the reviewers said. 56 reviews averaging 4.4* on Amazon.comhttp://smarturl.it/2xyd33

Book Review: Off the KUF Vol 1- an anthology

Before reading Off the KUF Vol 1 I had never read many shorts, but I’ll certainly start now. It’s a great way to get a story fix in a short space of time, and it’s also a fantastic way to discover new genres, styles, and writers. The stories range from humour, to literary, horror, contemporary and more, and I enjoyed nearly all of them, and found quite a few that raised the bar to the 5* level. I’ll definitely be seeking out other works by some of the writers and look forward to starting Vol...

Book review: Because We Are – A novel of Haiti by Ted Oswald 5*

I learned about “Because We Are”, a novel whose profits are going to help Haiti NGOs, when I read the blog post about its author Ted Oswald signing with Amazon on David Gaughran’s website, and I am so glad I found it. Many of us have followed the news of the many natural and man inflicted tragedies that have befallen Haiti in recent years: earthquakes, cholera, corrupt governments. Because We Are, a compelling story of Haiti, puts many intimate human faces to those news reports. At the heart...

The Disease – Goodreads giveaway winners

Congratulations to the 10 winners of the Goodreads paperback giveaway of The Disease. Your books have been ordered from The Book Depository and will hopefully be with you before Christmas. The winners are: Carlene Grey (NZ); Norma Babcock (US); Allan Ong (US); Malwinder Singh (IN); Cherrie Hung (HK); Nikhil Matad (IN); Justyna Helena Lasota (PL); Traci Wilcox (US); Gabby Greig (NZ); Dakota Rhiner (US);

The lady said no! Get used to it. (Includes Goodreads giveaway)

One morning earlier this year, I left out very early again, to plant information sheets about my then new eBook, The Disease, inside free newspapers at train stations (shhh, I won’t tell them if you don’t). On my way to one station, I saw a lady on a bus reading from her kindle. Perfect opportunity thought I. “I’m sorry to disturb you,” I said, “you may find this interesting.” I offered her one of the information sheets.

“No thank you,” she said, and continued to read from her kindle.

Now it wa...

Children’s Book Review: Mr Splendiferous and the Troublesome Trolls by Rosen Trevithick; illustrated by Katie W. Stewart

Dangerous children eating trolls; a genius but mad scientist; and a group of unsuspecting schoolchildren on a trip to Splendiferous Science Park, with enough weird and wonderful exhibits to exercise all the senses of any young adventurer.

A chase through the internal anatomy of the Rumbling Giant provides a science lesson while it entertains. I laughed as one child found that her only escape from a pursuing troll was … well, through the “great big, round pink bottom” of the exhibit.

Rosen Trevi...

Carnival of Hope – Goodreads giveaway winners

Congratulations to the winners of the Goodreads giveaway of Carnival of Hope. Your paperback copies have been ordered from The Book Depository and should be with you in 2-4 weeks: Jaime Ravenwood (NZ); Deepak Sharma (IN); Kirstie Horton (AU); Sarah Hambleton (AU); and Abigail Fawcett (US)

Book Review: To The Grave by Steve Robinson. 5*

Why did I feel as though I was sitting in front of a glowing log fire as I read To The Grave? Because as tragic as some of the events were, the book gave so much warmth and pleasure. Whenever I had to do something else, I was thinking about finding the time to get back to this book.

Eliza Gray, adopted at birth, hires genealogist Jefferson Tayte to find out who her real mother was. Tayte’s investigation takes him back more than sixty years to World War II Britain, and into a dangerous conspira...

Do US readers prefer a different cover to UK readers?

I ask myself this because when I recently put up my original cover for Carnival of Hope on KBoards.com, mainly visited by US readers and writers, to get opinions for the paperback cover (in order to do a Goodreads giveaway which is linked to below), the overwhelming opinion was that it was too plain and needed something else. Yet when I asked a similar question about another of my covers on the UK site Kuforum.co.uk a few months ago, the overwhelming response was that the simplicity of my cov...

Calibre’s great conversion of docx into ebooks

The good people at Calibre have come up with an easy way to convert your docx word files into ebook format using their free ebook management software, which is far more than an ebook library. They recommend that you convert it from docx to epub first (as opposed to from docx to mobi or docx to kindle), and then you can use the epub to easily convert to other formats such as mobi. I used Calibre version 0.9.39 to test the ebook converter. If you do not have word docx version, then you can use...