Greetings, It has been a while since I sent out a newsletter, but I did promise that I wouldn't overload your mailboxes :) The marketing gurus suggest that it's a mistake to wait so long between messages—that readers will forget you. I'm definitely not an expert at the marketing side of the publishing industry so perhaps that's true, but I hope that's not the case. Personally, I don't like receiving endless newsletters, so I hope it is okay that I am only writing when I have news to share.

Thessaloniki Book Festival

The Thessaloniki Book Fair took place May 4-7, in Greece. It's one of several large international events for publishers. This year, the planners wanted to highlight American contemporary literature with the American pavilion as a guest of honour. Publishers Weekly was asked to submit 30 recommendations to be included as part of the display. Long story short, my novel was among them. So I packaged up a copy and sent it to New York where it joined other Editor Picks to continue the journey to Greece. Who would have guessed that something I wrote would be seen by publishers so far from home. Maybe I'll get lucky and a European publisher will offer me a translation deal. Regardless, it's kind of cool to imagine someone in Greece picking up my book and flipping through the pages.

Your free copy of Grasping at Gravity

When I began writing this novella, I wanted to use it as a way to explore the universe of my new series before tackling the broader story. It worked well in that sense, giving me a lot of ideas about things I needed to flesh out and potential storylines. What I didn't anticipate was the difficulty in explaining the details of this new universe in such a condensed format. I think in the future I would do things the other way around and write a novella as a side story after completion of a series. Still, it was a fun exercise and everything is now live and available in ebook, paperback and hardcover versions. 

I am currently offering the novella as an ebook giveaway to people who sign up for the newsletter. If you enjoy it please consider leaving a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads.

Update

The first full-length novel for the States of Inversion series is now 3/4 complete. Things are coming along nicely and I'm hoping to get a good deal of writing done this week while I'm on vacation at the cottage. When I'm done, advance readers who enjoyed the novella will have an opportunity to provide feedback for this next work as well. The full length novel allows me to go into much greater detail about the politics, technologies and strife of a world divided by a catastrophic gravitational shift that affects 1/3 of the population.

That's about all I have to share at the moment. As always, if you have any questions. You can email me at kallensamuelswrites@gmail.com