Luke Smitherd's Blog, page 7

The Stone Man Reviews

In the US, The Stone Man has 994 reviews on Amazon. If there's anyone out there who has read the book and not reviewed it yet, post your review and get us over 1,000 US reviews. That will be HUGE! Thank you.

Giveaway for In the Darkness, That's Where I'll Know You

We just started a giveaway for 5 autographed paperback copies of "In the Darkness, That's Where I'll Know You". It runs until May 6, so enter now, and Good Luck.


https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/sh...

New Podcast

Very excited about this. Coming soon: a new podcast hosted by myself and Matt Shaw, with weekly special guest Kit Power. If you like all the bollocks that goes on here, it's even better when poured directly into your ears. ARE YOU SURE? WITH SMITHERD AND SHAW not only promises to be a lot of fun, but to make your daily decisions even easier. More to come on that ...like the page at the link below to get involved, as you guys will very much be part of the show.

https://www.facebook.com/smitherdands...

Like my Facebook page at:

https://www.facebook.com/smitherdbook...

And sign up for my email list at www.lukesmitherd.com.

More information to come...Stay Tuned!

Luke

BACK ON THE BBC, AND A THANK YOU TO YOU

Here’s me being interviewed again on the wireless, courtesy of the good people at BBC Coventry and Warwickshire, during the time of my recent nomination for Audiobook of the Year. I didn’t win; surprise surprise, JK Rowling did …not that I’m bitter or anything. I just wanted to say a huge thank you to all the people that DID vote for me. I really, really appreciate it, and the nomination itself was a huge deal. Anyway, suffice to say, the voting has now closed, but here’s me frantically promoting my ass off on the BBC. See if YOU can hear the desperation in my voice.

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A Career First! Kind Of …

PS Have you seen my YouTube channel yet? Lots there now …

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Audiobook of the year voting link HERE!

Thanks guys! Remember, just vote for ONE! (You now which one …right? RIGHT!?)

http://www.audible.co.uk/email-form/a...

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I’VE BEEN SHORTLISTED FOR AUDIOBOOK OF THE YEAR 2015! VOTE VOTE VOTE!

So, here are the TWELVE audiobooks nominated for Audiobook of the Year 2015. Stephen King, JK Rowling and WAIT OH MY GOD WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT DOWN AT THE BOTTOM

For the love of God, if you’ve ever/never shared or voted or reviewed anything of mine … Click on the link below and vote (you can vote for three but fuck THAT, you vote for ONE) because this shit could change my life. And more importantly … can you share thisto FIVE PEOPLE you know who would vote too?

Can you help?

SMITHEREENS, NOW IS YOUR TIME TO SHINE. Ronson, though … I can’t see me beating Ronson. A big social media following. Ransom’s lot vs the Smithereens … you are the Spartans, Ronson is the persian army. Even though I like Ronson. ‪#‎smitherdvsronson‬

http://www.audible.co.uk/mt/aboty2015/ref=a_hp_c2b_1_hpban

 

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New book DO ANYTHING out January 1st 2016… but here’s how you can get it THIS WEEK!

My new novella, DO ANYTHING, is out on  and is available for pre-order now on Amazon HERE … but how would like to get your grubby mitts on it THIS week?

Sound good?

Ok. Before we go any further forward, click on this link HERE to pre-order and read the blurb (YOU STILL NEED TO PRE-ORDER TO GET IT EARLY!) and then come back here to find out how you get a pre-release copy. AMAZON PRE-ORDER LINK, CLICK ON THIS TEXT TO PRE-ORDER!

Ok, welcome back. Now, that might enough for you. And that’s cool, I hope you enjoy the book when it comes out. However … having to wait until January 1st … do you REALLY wanna do that …? Well, here’s how you can get it within the next 7 DAYS!

Today I’m starting the official Luke Smitherd’s Premature Release Review Group. Now, there’s a little bit of an honour system involved here, as you’ll see, but let me explain how it works:

You sign up for the group at the REVIEW GROUP SIGN UP LINK. You’ll get sent the book three weeks early, pre-release, IN RETURN FOR A PROMISE THAT YOU LEAVE A STAR RATING ON AMAZON THE DAY THE BOOK COMES OUT. Now you may be thinking ‘Hang on Luke … I could just sign up to the group to get a free copy and then not actually pay for it?’ Weeeeeeeelll … no. Your review on Amazon will say if it’s a ‘Verified Purchase’ or not, so I’ll basically know if you’ve lied to get send a free copy. This would be stealing my work, because on this occasion I am NOT offering this book for free, and as a result you’ll be blacklisted from all future mails and pre-release offers. I don’t think any of you would actually be enough of a scumbag to do that, but obviously I have to be clear … So:

1. You pre-order the book using the link above.

2. You click on this link: REVIEW GROUP SIGN UP to sign up for the group, obviously. What that means is I, personally, will send you a copy of DO ANYTHING by the end of this week.

3. You’ll get a reminder email on release day to get your star rating up ON RELEASE DAY. That’s the whole point of this, to get the book launched in the best possible way, so reviews after release day kind of defeat the point …

This means hopefully that it creates a win/win system; you guys get the book early, and I get reviews from day one. What do you think? Let me know.

Luke

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The Stone Man and Maths

Received a fantastic email from a reader recently, one making a few points about how Andy’s dismissal of TSM as an ineffective alien invasion would actually be very, very wrong if things had gone a different way … here it is in its entirety. MAJOR SPOILER ALERTS if you haven’t read the book!

“Luke,

First off, I just basically inhaled The Stone Man and The Black Room on

my kindle over a few days. TSM was recommended to me after I read The

Martian by the Amazon AI and the reviews persuaded me and your devil’s

trick of including a bit of the next book at the end worked. I’ll rate

and review on Amazon, of course, but what really struck me reading them

back-to-back was the development of the writing between the two. TBR was

a much richer book, I felt, with themes threading through it and I felt

genuine empathy with the characters. Both were absolutely gripping and I

couldn’t put them down – thanks for the immense pleasure I got from both

of them.

However, I couldn’t help but pick up on something in TSM which I am

certain has been raised before (unless I was reading too fast and

misunderstood; entirely possible given how excited I was). As I

understand it, the Stone Men intend to take their target, extract the

body part, split it into two and create two new stone men. The

characters seemed pretty casual about this not being an invasion since

the population would grow and this would always be a relatively small

harvest compared with the population. I feel like the characters were

wrong about this because of exponential growth.

First visit: 1 stone man creates 2 more (we now have three)

Second visit: 3 stone men create 2 more each (OK, one failed, but let’s

just go with the ideal model) – we now have six new stone men, making a

total of 9

Third visit: Each of the 9 stone men make two more, so that’s 27

Fourth visit: 27 x 3 = 81

So you can see from the pattern that the number of stone men (in the

ideal scenario as far as they are concerned) trebles each visit. This

needs a little table:

Visit Total Stone Men After

1 3

2 3×3=9

3 3x3x3=27

4 3x3x3x3=81

5 3x3x3x3x3=243

…

n 3^n (three to the power n)

The problem with exponential growth is that it is fucking fast. It

starts off looking OK, but then it cuntifies. So at the end of visit 10

there will be 3x3x3x3x3x3x3x3x3x3 = 59 049 Stone Men. This is still

pretty small compared to the population of the UK, but how about after

15 visits?

3^15 = 14.3 million. That’s a big chunk.

18 visits? – 387 million. We’ve run out of British people. 20 visits

wipes out half the world’s population.

Anyway, I’m a maths teacher and I go back to work tomorrow. My holiday

has obviously been too long so I feel the need to explain maths to

whoever, including an author who probably heard this all already or

thought of it himself. So apologies if this wasted good writing time.

Anyway, I bloody loved the books. Keep it up.”

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Audiobooks – read by me – out NOW!

To celebrate the release of my first self-narrated audiobook, THE BLACK ROOM, PART ONE (Part Two is also up, and three and four and The Man On Table Ten are being processed as we speak) here’s the sound of me getting angrier and angrier as I keep screwing up! Apologies for all the swearing. Check the books out on Audible.com!

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