Adam Glendon Sidwell's Blog, page 5
November 19, 2012
What I’m Thankful For
When I first brought Evertaster to you, it was exclusively available as a paperback on Amazon. Now I am excited to announce that due to demand, we’ve printed a full run of books, and Evertaster will soon be available in select B&N book stores and Costcos starting 2013. Then it will spread from there.
This is due in large part to all of you who have posted on facebook about Evertaster, told your friends about Evertaster, or made gifts of the book to family. Thanks to you, the book has been a great success, and it wouldn’t be Thanksgiving if I didn’t tell you thanks. So THANKS. And THANKS AGAIN.
As part of moving into retail stores, bookstores will need to markup the price from the wholesale price. This will affect Amazon as well. So after Cyber Monday (November 26th) Evertaster will go up in price on Amazon from $9.99 to $12.95. What that means is that the 4-for-3 Amazon promotion (you buy 4 books and you ONLY have to pay for 3!) will only be available until Cyber Monday. I wanted to let you know so if you’re thinking about buying gifts, you can get them while the promotion is still going!
Doing a second printing will also mean that the book will be slightly different from the first edition. The story is still the same, but there will be changes to the formatting in the back of the book, as well as a new title page. The first edition will only be available for the next week or so. So every book bought up to this point and for the next week or so will be a limited edition!
So a big thanks to all of you as readers, and I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving!
Adam
August 7, 2012
To Tell a Story
For nearly a decade, I’ve spent my life making blockbuster films. It was a long road and many years of hard work to get there, but the lure of telling stories was too strong to resist. I had to work in the movies. A week after graduating college I packed my bags and headed off to Hollywood to work on my first feature as a Technical Director: the film I,Robot.
There I was, in Hollywood, making my dreams come true! The work was hard — I spent a year programming systems that enabled the computer generated robot co-stars in I,Robot to come to life. I’d read Isaac Asimov since I was a boy, and now this was in some small way my chance to touch his greatness, to put his vision on the screen, to get as close to his stories as I could. I,Robot was nominated for an Academy Award that year, and there, rolling across the screen with the rest of the credits appeared my name: Adam Glendon Sidwell.
I thought that nothing might ever be more satisfying than .
For a time, there wasn’t. The film industry took me to New Zealand to build characters for the Academy Award winning King Kong. It took me to George Lucas’s Industrial Light + Magic to work on zombie pirates for Pirates of the Caribbean. It took me to Los Angeles to build lightwalls and digital characters for TRON: Legacy. It allowed me to work on the upcoming Ender’s Game film. I got to build robots. I got to build zombies. I got to make monsters. If you’ve got a minute, you can even see some of my work in this demo reel:
I met directors. I met movie stars. I showed Jeff Bridges where the bathroom was. I heard Michael Bay gush over how many humvees he’d captured on film for Transformers II.
But all the while I kept hearing a voice inside my head tell me: the long lasting success of a movie comes from its story. The Dark Knight’s clash with Bane existed in comics long before it came to the screen. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was alive in readers’ minds decades before the technology to make Gollum ever existed. Movies need stories. Look at Pixar. They know that.
Story is why I got into movies in the first place. It’s also why a few months ago, I quit my job. I was working on Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming project Pacific Rim. Guillermo is a brilliant director. My fellow artists were some of the most talented people I’ve ever known. But after nearly a decade of working on other people’s stories, it was time to tell my own.
For years I’ve been writing, stealing away a few months here or there between projects in order to draft my novels. One of them especially took hold of me — Evertaster — the whimsical story of an 11-year-old boy’s dangerous quest for a legendary taste. When deals with the top publishers unexpectedly fell through, my agent Alyssa Henkin suggested we publish Evertaster on Kindle. So we did, and now it’s available on Amazon in paperback as well.
I cannot tell you what a thrill it was to see Evertaster debut on Amazon for the first time. I must have clicked every link on the product page a hundred times, inspecting each aspect of the display — it was real, and it was my story. It just got better from there! People were actually buying my work. They were actually writing 5-star reviews about my book! They were telling me they liked it, or that they’d read it in two days because they couldn’t put it down.
Suddenly, I felt even closer to Asimov than I had before. In a new way I understood why he did what he did. I understood that he needed to write because there were people waiting to read his work. My book’s journey from imagination to audience was complete.
And now new journey’s are beginning. In a few months, I’ll release CHUM, the story of a teenage boy who seeks fame and fortune on a TV show out at sea and gets mixed up with a bunch of tech-savvy pirates. I’ll also finish off the next two books in the Evertaster series. This is a new era. This is the start of my own stories.
Because all along, I wanted to be a storyteller. I’m a kid at heart. That’s what got me into the film business. When I hear reviews of Evertaster like “One of the most original, well-crafted and imaginative MG stories I’ve come across in a long time.” – (From WordSpelunking Book Review) or when I hear from a reader that her kids are quoting my book, or when I meet a kid at a signing who asks me how I make the characters so real, well, that’s thousands of times better than seeing my name in the credits of any blockbuster movie, no matter how big. In fact, that’s the greatest, most satisfying story of all.
July 26, 2012
Goodreads Book Giveaway
Hi Everybody! Come on over to Goodreads and enter to win Evertaster! Have you already read it? Oh. Even better. Come on over and write a short review and tell everyone what you thought!
Cheerio!
Adam
Goodreads Book Giveaway
Evertaster
by Adam Glendon Sidwell
Giveaway ends October 22, 2012.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
July 3, 2012
iPod Shuffle Giveaway — thank you for putting Evertaster on the Bestseller List!
As a big thanks to all of you Evertaster readers out there, and to celebrate summer reading time, Felicity Casa has agreed to give away an iPod Shuffle! Now you can listen to Moonlight Sonata or Highway to the Danger Zone in style while you’re on a faraway arctic island or exploring slithery jungles in search of the legendary taste. And what’s cool is that you have multiple chances to win. The more options below you sign up for, the more chances you get to win!
Win me please!
a Rafflecopter giveaway
June 28, 2012
Evertaster Book Trailer
This is it! Finally here!
June 26, 2012
Will It Blend?
In this video, Author Adam Glendon Sidwell uses the Blendtec, the world’s most technologically advanced blender to blend a copy of his book Evertaster. What happens next is shocking! http://amzn.to/NgaAx0
June 16, 2012
How an Unknown Indy Novelist Became An Amazon Bestseller in a Single Day
My name is Adam Glendon Sidwell, and yesterday I was liberated. On Wednesday, no one knew who i was. I had never published a book before. Only two dozen people in the world had read my work. But by the end of Thursday, somehow my young adult novel Evertaster had risen as high as #51 on the overall Bestseller List on Amazon, surpassing the Amazon rankings of many of the current NYT bestsellers.
It rose to #16 overall in Children’s Books, and within its category rose to #1 in Children’s Mystery, settling in nicely right next to John Grisham’s latest novel and the 3rd Percy Jackson Book, which happens to be a NYT Bestseller as well.
Evertaster: #1 in Best Sellers in Children's Mystery, Detective & Spy
And the funny thing is, there was no one to do my marketing but me.
I tried to publish through the Big Guys for years. I even got an amazing agent interested in my work. There were many wonderful editors at the various houses who championed the story. They fell in love with my characters. They fought for them. But when it came down to the final decision from the Bosses it was always the same. You should write something more like Percy Jackson or John Grisham, they said. “We don’t know how to sell your book.”
That’s when I thought: Well I do.
Of course it was naivety, to think I could go up against The Publishing Giants. But I had to try. I believed in the story I was telling. I believed in that little boy named Guster. I believed in his perilous journey. And I felt like whatever it took, however many sleepless nights I might endure, I was going to tell that story because it was fun and I really believed it would make people laugh.
So I planned and I schemed and I worked for months leading up to the launch day. I knew I only had one chance to do it right. Friends from all phases of my life came out of nowhere to help. Friends I hadn’t been able to see for years. They posted all over Facebook, they tweeted, they blogged, they emailed. My brother Jarom and his wife Katie and my wife Michelle worked like it was a telethon, contacting and inviting and reaching out to everyone that came within ten thousand miles. We sent out over 5,000 emails, tweeted to over 16,000 people, and amassed upwards of 2,250 facebook fans. There were phone calls and personal contacts. Sometimes I wonder if I hit that Bestseller List solely based on the fact that everyone in my entire hometown absolutely loves my dad and probably bought a book just because I was his son.
But then there were all the books bought–and this is the magical part–by all those people I didn’t even know and didn’t know me. Perhaps my favorite part of the day was when Evertaster broke into the top 100 and I ran out the front door of my parents’ house screaming into the cul de sac. The neighbor came out, shouting and asking if I needed help. “I just became an Amazon Bestseller!” I cried. I explained what was happening and she immediately went inside and bought two books.
My agent at Trident Media Group was amazed. She’d never seen any debut book from any publisher ever fly so high in the rankings. She’d never seen the kind of marketing that my friends pulled off. Now we’re calling ourselves Future House Publishing.
There’s a feeling of freedom that comes when you hit the Bestseller List. It comes because maybe, just maybe, it might mean that someday I’ll be able to write for a living. That’s liberating.
I hope you’ll forgive my bragging in this post. And I hope if you’re one of those friends who helped me you’ll smile, because you made it happen. I’m not sure what’s going to happen today or tomorrow for Evertaster, but I know this: for at least one day my book became a bestselling novel.
How an Unknown Debut Novelist Became An Amazon Bestseller in a Single Day
My name is Adam Glendon Sidwell, and yesterday I was liberated. On Wednesday, no one knew who i was. I had never published a book before. Only two dozen people in the world had read my work. But by the end of Thursday, somehow my young adult novel Evertaster had risen as high as #51 on the overall Bestseller List on Amazon, surpassing the Amazon rankings of many of the current NYT bestsellers.
It rose to #16 overall in Children’s Books, and within its category rose to #1 in Children’s Mystery, settling in nicely right next to John Grisham’s latest novel and the 3rd Percy Jackson Book, which happens to be a NYT Bestseller as well.
Evertaster: #1 in Best Sellers in Children's Mystery, Detective & Spy
And the funny thing is, there was no one to do my marketing but me.
I tried to publish through the Big Guys for years. I even got an amazing agent interested in my work. There were many wonderful editors at the various houses who championed the story. They fell in love with my characters. They fought for them. But when it came down to the final decision from the Bosses it was always the same. You should write something more like Percy Jackson or John Grisham, they said. “We don’t know how to sell your book.”
That’s when I thought: Well I do.
Of course it was naivety, to think I could go up against The Publishing Giants. But I had to try. I believed in the story I was telling. I believed in that little boy named Guster. I believed in his perilous journey. And I felt like whatever it took, however many sleepless nights I might endure, I was going to tell that story because it was fun and I really believed it would make people laugh.
So I planned and I schemed and I worked for months leading up to the launch day. I knew I only had one chance to do it right. Friends from all phases of my life came out of nowhere to help. Friends I hadn’t been able to see for years. They posted all over Facebook, they tweeted, they blogged, they emailed. My brother Jarom and his wife Katie and my wife Michelle worked like it was a telethon, contacting and inviting and reaching out to everyone that came within ten thousand miles. We sent out over 5,000 emails, tweeted to over 16,000 people, and amassed upwards of 2,250 facebook fans. There were phone calls and personal contacts. Sometimes I wonder if I hit that Bestseller List solely based on the fact that everyone in my entire hometown absolutely loves my dad and probably bought a book just because I was his son.
But then there were all the books bought–and this is the magical part–by all those people I didn’t even know and didn’t know me. Perhaps my favorite part of the day was when Evertaster broke into the top 100 and I ran out the front door of my parents’ house screaming into the cul de sac. The neighbor came out, shouting and asking if I needed help. “I just became an Amazon Bestseller!” I cried. I explained what was happening and she immediately went inside and bought two books.
My agent at Trident Media Group was amazed. She’d never seen any debut book from any publisher ever fly so high in the rankings. She’d never seen the kind of marketing that my friends pulled off. Now we’re calling ourselves Future House Publishing.
There’s a feeling of freedom that comes when you hit the Bestseller List. It comes because maybe, just maybe, it might mean that someday I’ll be able to write for a living. That’s liberating.
I hope you’ll forgive my bragging in this post. And I hope if you’re one of those friends who helped me you’ll smile, because you made it happen. I’m not sure what’s going to happen today or tomorrow for Evertaster, but I know this: for at least one day my book became a bestselling novel.
June 14, 2012
EVERTASTER Now Available on Amazon.com!
It’s finally here! Today, June 14, marks the much-anticipated release of Adam Glendon Sidwell’s mouthwatering new novel EVERTASTER, and fans everywhere are rushing to Amazon.com to buy EVERTASTER for the exclusive Launch Day price of only $9.99!
After today, the paperback price will be $11.99, so act fast and click here to order EVERTASTER now.
Make sure to invite your friends to share in this one-day-only discount!
June 4, 2012
Pages of Evertaster revealed one by one…
[image error]
Visit Evertaster’s Facebook page and share page 1 of the book. 100 shares and we get to see page 2! Let’s see how far we can get?
