Category Archives: Amazon kindle

ONCE UPON A NOW – fairy tales for #children – launch #Giveaway #Kindle pic.twitter.com/7jhRxZ4PlH

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Well, today’s the day. I’ve had children, I was a child myself ( do writers ever grow up?) and I still like them. As a kid I loved to listen to stories and today I’m launching my own series of children’s books.

The Fairy tale retains its potency because it still speaks truth, hopes and dreams. I’ve approached some modern day situations exploring contemporary dilemmas and issues that confront young folk.

These chapter-book stories are aimed at young readers, in the 7-10 year age group.  The books are all illustrated in a modern anime-style by talented artist Miko Abellera from the Philippines. This young guy has a real Wow style. He gets right in there in a special way. He’s got a great career ahead of him.

Each book features unique links and scannable QR codes to take readers of both paperback and e-books to bonus material such as audio and video clips, downloadable photos and colouring pictures to enrich the reading experience.

All the books are also available in audio book format – delightful recordings by the poet Oscar Sparrow, who brings the stories to life in his own inimitable style. He also composed the words for the National Anthem of Zanubia which he sings in Alf The Workshop Dog. Well – singing may not be quite the word. I’d love to hear your opinions. 


Ideal as stocking fillers or pocket money purchases!

How could a scruffy dog in a bus depot and the call of crows, link back to another world of power and love?

The ancient Kingdom of Zanubia and a stray dog looking for scraps in an inner-city repair garage, hold the secret. 

A wicked king, a beautiful girl, a young prince and the struggle between right and wrong maintain the fable tradition.


There’s something strange in the woodshed…

A poor little girl in a faraway land dreams of riding a pink bicycle. When she meets a strange animal, her dreams come true. Her happiness turns to sadness when a tragedy occurs in the town and her father doesn’t come home.


Maybe her new magic friend can find him?

Charlie finds it tough when his parents divorce – but Auntie Kate helps him overcome his greatest fear.

When Charlie has to move from the country into the city, he needs new friends. With his small size and red hair, some people aren’t kind to him. 

He wonders if he can face another day at school.

A trip to the circus gives him the strength to see himself and others in a new way.

To set the launch off with a bang I’m hosting a giveaway on Rafflecopter – something to really get your reading tastebuds fired up – first prize is a brand new 6″ KINDLE TOUCHSCREEN! 

Nothing complicated required for entry and plenty of options to qualify for for extra goes.  If you don’t want the latest Kindle, you can opt for a CASH alternative too. Oh – and I’ll be giving away some books as prizes too, as you’d expect.   The draw is on the 17th December 2014 – so don’t hang around to enter.



Find all the full details on my new ONCE UPON A NOW CLUB website or enter the Rafflecopter draw below:


a Rafflecopter giveaway

Beg Steal or Burrow

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It’s that first insecure Wednesday. Things should be OK this month because I woke up shortly after midnight yesterday morning and before I said anything else I uttered the magic word “RABBITS”. I know that some folk say white rabbits but I believe that this weakens the spell. Of course some of you will have no idea of what I talking about. I hesitate to use the word superstition because that makes it all seem kinda – well – nuts. An old English custom of saying “rabbits” on the first day of the month was drilled into me by my mother. If at some point during the next four weeks I dropped some china or failed an exam (regular events) she would sigh and shake her head resignedly saying “It’s you own fault – you didn’t say your rabbits.” All I could do then was to cling on – expecting to fall at each hurdle until the next 1st of the month. As the broken china, failed exams, missed buses, lost boyfriends and publishers rejection slips piled up in  the hallways of my life, I guess I often forgot to say “rabbits”. 


When I had my own little bunnies I decided that I would never impose this type of insecurity on them. That was until my ex husband bought the first pair of baby shoes and put them on the table. I had to divorce him to clear the curse although for years he clung on by saying “Good morning Sir” to the magpies just to please me. Believe it or not when we split up, the removal men dropped my mirror but I told them to pack it with his stuff so that he would take the bad luck with him. 


So, having said the magic word I clicked on my Amazon KDP account to see if the new month brown bar of doom had disappeared. As you will recognise comrades, my sense of personal worth is linked to my sales figures. As the new month arrives the counters return to zero and there is just this brown nihilistic line. (Ooooh – I’ve been trying to get that intellectual word into something for years!) 1st of May – 0004 hours, a sale was made. I slept secure. By morning two books had been returned. The brown line had gone – but I am less than nothing. As I drove my bus around the town there was not a single magpie to greet to lift my gloom. A seagull dumped his entire bowel contents onto my windscreen and I shouted at it to F*** off. When I got home I had made some sales. Yes – that old mystic seagull oath never fails.


It’s all a load of tosh isn’t it. My wonderful partner works and works to help me and he has never thrown salt or said rhymes to spiders. He tells me that more effort means more success. He’s a kinda business type. I know he’s right. That’s why I’ve doubled up on my lottery tickets.

Emma thinx: You can make your own luck, but the ready meals taste the same.



Oxymorons Run Amok in Free Sales Orgy

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You know that insecure feeling when you come downstairs after the party, slithering on a wine soaked crushed samosa that obviously missed the eloquent mouth of some unknown drunk, who at the time, was the wittiest and most flattering intellectual in the world? For a moment you gaze around wondering how cobwebs could possibly suspend so many popper streamers until you remember that the spiders have had several months of freedom to weave silk ropes that could catch an anchor chain. And all because the lady is a novelist and does not do dusting. She also does not do ironing or checking of sell by dates on mundane produce. How can a pickled onion be out of date? Who did not know that 2007 was a vintage premier cru champagne year for bloody pickles? 


This is a long way to explain that I had a bit of a party and that I know my life is being sucked into a femaelstrom of microwaved Swedish meatballs. Apparently Edgar Allan Poe first introduced the masculine form of the word into literature. I must start to get a grip. I get up in the morning in my furry dressing gown and check my sales, my blog comments, my facebook likes, my triberr karma rating, my Amazon chart position, my twitter re-tweets and my Goodreads reviews. I am become  Electro-Fem, a Joan of Story Arc, a Romantic Grovelist at the keyboard shrine. Then I put on my woolly pully and go out driving my bus. Good job all the other motorists don’t know that the huge vehicle in their rear view is being driven by a neurotic self doubting ego maniac on a cobweb and pickled onion literary guilt trip. This life would not have happened to Jane Austen.


Oooh – I’m glad I got that lot off my chest. The party was on account of having some 3,000 folk reading my book Knockout! by Saturday. By the end of the weekend I had shifted 8,000 books. Of course, they were all free on Amazon’s grand KDP Select Adventure. My serious “mined from the sorrow of life” prize winning etc. short story Sub-Prime had shifted 328 copies. You know, I always bear in mind that I sell the Romance for 77 pence in the UK which is less than a candy bar. When it became free, there was an exponential increase in interest. And I bet you that someone who got it for nothing reviews it and says it is a soppy formula written load of sex, cops, robbers and slobbers. (Oooh, I love it!) I do hate it when people miss the point. As I hover on the publish button, Amazon have just started tweeting me as a “mover and shaker” and I’m still high in the rankings with sales increasing if anything. Does this make me feel secure? Of course not. See my thinx today. My future sense of security rests on the continued real sales.  I think there might be a few bad hair-trigger days.


 Somewhere in the fog of the party, an intellectual goatee beard type is reading the sell by date on my pickle jar and asking me what year it is. “Look”, I exclaim, “I’m an artist – how the hell should I know?”


Emma thinx: From the ground you see the mountain. From the peak you see the drop. 

Free Market Slaves

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If you look at my previous post you might have gotten the idea that I am a sex fuelled hedonist. Well, if not I’m gonna try and try until I make it there. It’s only lack of book sales that is holding me back. 


But let’s talk about the “new capitalism” which is the buzz on the economic block. I hear Euro politicoids talking about “Fairness” as if the concept had just arrived on their desks with all the kick-ass imperative of a memo from Rupert Murdoch. Before all the social class, religion, nationalism and wealth difference poisons and divides kids – they know about fairness and justice at the age of three. Just try telling a toddler he took his brother’s chocolate biscuit when he knows his sibling took it himself and framed him.


 So – how is it that something so atavistic, so recurrent and ingrained in mankind has been subverted and lost in our teeming world of worshipped and applauded greed? I heard PM Cameron today declaring that Europe was falling behind the productive capacity of China. Oh no – maybe our systems of democracy, health and safety, social care, civil rights, conditions of work and wages are holding us back? Dear me – there is the answer then. Let’s all race to the bottom. The finest time of Britain and the Empire was when slaves were bartered for gold,  children started work at the age of nine and life expectancy was 25years. At least it would get rid of a few rival novelists on Amazon.


A few months ago a case of “human slavery” was discovered in the UK. There was wailing and a general gnashing of teeth. The political class were astounded and outraged. However, it was not a surprise to some of us. If you want another story here is a link to a terrible tragedy in 2004. At a time of my life when I was  destitute I went to work as a turkey process hand. It was tough. Let me say that again – it was tough enough to break your bloody heart.  I wrote a story because fiction is far more powerful than “News” because that happens somewhere else. The girl in the story is unattractive and therefore could not work as a prostitute which is the fate of most trafficked females. That does not mean she won’t be used and raped by her “masters”.  The story is “Sub Prime” and is as true as a story can be. Ironically it is something of a best-seller although I have never wanted money from it. I have published it with an audio track, read by a dear friend.  I cannot read it myself because it makes me cry so much. 

This week-end Saturday 28th and Sunday 29th January, “Sub-Prime” is free on Amazon, along with its MP3 audiobook that will also play on the Kindle (I have also have a free romance novel on the same promo).


Click here for my FREE books on Amazon USA
Click here for my FREE books on Amazon UK




Emma Thinx: Keep the bones out of the bonus


Christmas, Kindlemas, Body Mass

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Well, the old boy did it. Oscar’s book of poetry has gone live on Amazon Kindle. It’s called ‘I threw a stone’ and he kindly asked me to write the foreword.  Not only is it an e-book, it also includes an audio album with all the poems read by Oscar. I find all this uploads/downloads stuff a bit bemusing but I managed to get the audio onto my Kindle. All this new interconnected media gives writers the chance to produce some unique kinds of work. Oscar’s book has a music intro as well. I believe that the e-book is not a competitor with the tree book. The e-book is actually a wide exciting medium in itself and can provide far more. The book trailer is here if you want to take a peek.


Apparently, this Christmas will in fact be Kindlemas. This is the year when the e-reader will be the must have item in Santa’s sack. I think  the old dead tree books will still have a place. I have shelves of them to show folks how learned I am. While books proclaim what you like folk to think you have read, the e-reader hides what you actually like to read. You can sit on the commuter train to a posh job in the City with your Kindle reading “Confessions of a Harem Handyman” and no one knows. 

I have parked up the bus for the holidays now. Soon I will be going home to France for a holiday season of ruthless dieting, cold baths and exercise. On the other hand I might get out the foie gras, un bon Bordeaux and catch up on some reading. I wonder if we Brits will be turned away at the border by the Sarko police? His eyebrows really do look like circumflex (little roof top) accents, the presence of which in French denotes that a consonant used to be present in a word.   With Britain missing from Europe the look on Sarko’s face takes body language to new heights.




Emma thinx:  Europic – a new serious vision problem.