Free Kindle Fire Giveaway Writing Contest is here

You’re not talking to a world class marketer, people. That’s why I’ve decided that straying too far from what works is a bad idea. So now that Dec. 1 is upon us, I want to get as unoriginal as I possibly can and attempt to move copies of my ridiculously cheap $3-plus-change horror novel The Congregation.

The way I plan to do that is this: give away a Kindle Fire for free. While much like the Highlander movies, there can be only one KFW (Kindle Fire Winner), nine more of you will not be going away empty-handed. 

Here’s how the Kindle Fire Giveaway Writing Contest works. 

You get my book, which will only run you $3-plus-change if you didn’t get in on the limited time free promotion (ended yesterday). You read it. You write a review (think about 100-150 words) either on your blog, website, or BN/Amazon/iBooks. Send the live link to aric dot mitchell at gmail dot com by Jan. 1, 2012. I read over all of them and choose the 10 best. Then, my blog followers, which could be you if you join, pick the final winner by Jan. 15, 2012. Said winner gets a free Kindle Fire. The other nine get an eBook of their choice, up to $9.99 in value for each prize. 

All prizes are delivered to your door by the end of January 2012. But in order for this to work, we've got to have a cutoff, so I'm gonna have to be firm on that New Year's expiration date. 

Oh yeah, and family members? Sorry, you're out of luck. Gotta be fair. That's why this promotion is only for people, who aren't offended by some bad language and a whole bunch of stomach churning violence. 

This way, I get sales and publicity. You get at least two books for the price of $3-plus-change and a little bit of your time. And some lucky person gets their very own Kindle Fire. Note: if you’d rather have another eReader at or below the Kindle Fire price, then we can do that. And who knows, maybe if you’re wanting a $11.99 to $12.99 eBook, we can work something out there, too. I’m easy to get along with :)! 

So what are you waiting for? We don’t have much time left. To purchase my book, head over to:

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Apple iBooks (look up “Aric Mitchell” without the quotes in the iTunes Store)

Reading it will only take about 4 to 6 hours of your life. Good luck, and as always, thanks for giving me your time. I promise you won’t be sorry, even if I gotta pay you off.

I don't want your money

I don't want your money. Not a single dime. Not right now anyway. But I would like your time. More importantly, I’d like to be a good steward of your time.

My debut horror novel The Congregation is out there and ready to devour. I hope it turns bestseller and moves more than a million. Even at the low $3.19 price point, I’d be a rich man.

But it’s more important to me at this juncture to know I’m delivering quality product to my readers. If you’re a fan of the scary, the gory, the grotesque, or the unknown, I’m sure you’ll love the book. If you’re not, then I’d still like to give you your Christmas present early along with a personal thank-you.

Subscribe to my blog by Dec. 1, 2011. I’ll send a coupon code you can then take to Smashwords. Use it to download my book free to the Nook, Kindle, iPad, or derivative thereof. It’s that simple.

Ultimately, I want an audience. A big one. But how’m I gonna do that without you?

One more thing: after you’re done, I’d be eternally grateful if you did two things for me. One, review it. Choose sites like BN.com and Amazon.com or write a review on your own blog. After that, tell your FB friends, Twitter followers, or, God forbid, people you actually see face-to-face.

(Technology abuse—me preacher, me choir.)

Now I've said all that, let me say this: my email address is aric dot mitchell at gmail dot com, and as long as you're not a spamming crap-face, I want you to abuse it. Send me links to your reviews. Talk shop with me about anything horror/writing/book and movie related. You WILL be hearing back from me. With close to 2,000 Twitter followers and more than 800 Facebook friends, it may be a week or two, but you’ll hear from me.

I may make my living with words, but, last I checked, my name wasn’t King or Koontz. Good writing doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and the only way I can deliver high quality horror to your eReaders book-after-book is by knowing what you like and what you don’t. So let's start a conversation.

If you’re just dying to give me money, The Congregation is now available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble directly. That’s where I’d like you to direct your friends. You can also get it on the iPad by using the Kindle or BN apps. Should be available on iBooks in another two weeks, but why wait?

And Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah. Awesome time of year, friends!

What do you write and where did it begin?

When I was a little boy, all bright-eyed and full of wonder about what the future would hold for me, I never would have thought that 20 years later I’d end up in virtually the same place. I foresaw a Mars landing in my future. A metamorphosis into some kind of intergalactic hero a la Buck Rogers. I’d do that after I rescued a few damsels in distress and put away some bad guys while wearing trademark yellow Dick Tracy coat and hat. Perhaps I’d even swing across the rooftops of a place not unlike Gotham City and do harmless battle, invincible to any effects the Joker could throw my way, because I was a kid, and that’s what we were. Invincible.

My list of fantasies were my reality, and life was a long enough time to experience them for real. Unfortunately, life can do a lot to knock those dreams out of you. But in my case, an unfaithful ex-wife, several missed opportunities, and other unexpected losses along the way have not been enough to take away one dream from the 10-year old boy that still resides somewhere in my psyche. When I’m not busy writing things that keep the lights on, usually for other people, and usually stuff that’s a lot more of a job to me than I would care for it to be, I let the child out to play, and he writes some pretty dastardly, horrific things, some of which you will see when my debut horror novel THE CONGREGATION lands with Kindle, iBooks, and Barnes and Noble in October.

Every scrap of torn flesh, each drop of spurting blood, can trace its roots back to a single comic book that my father allowed me to have one summer day about 20 years ago. I’d heard of the old movie TALES FROM THE CRYPT. I’d also heard that HBO would be doing a TV show of the same name. I was excited about the possibilities, but it wasn’t until I saw an old Gladstone Comics reprint on the newsstand of my local Waldenbooks that it would come to me this was, in fact, the original source material. TFTC was a comic book before it was anything else, and here I was holding a beautifully rendered full color reprint on cheap newsprint and standard four-color cover. The Jack Davis werewolf drawing, the corpse stretched across a tombstone under moonlight, was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. I couldn’t wait to get home and tear through every last page of it.

And that’s what I did. Along the way, I read about a group of poor Hungarian immigrants accused of lycanthropy by a bigoted sheriff. (I actually learned “lycanthropy” was the technical term for werewolf from this book.) The tragic twist of fate that closed the story left me stunned and excited to move on to the next story. “Midnight Mess,” the Vault-Keeper’s offering, was a cozy little small town vampire story with another glorious twist ending that all but took my mind off the fact that there was more than just the Crypt-Keeper in this book. The next tale was one of a cheating spouse looking for a way out and finding that murder was the only way to do it. In the end, just desserts were served. Such was also the case in “This Wraps it Up,” a fast-paced and exciting mummy story.

Beyond these stories, there was a reprint of CRIME SUSPENSTORIES in the back 32 pages. It was filled with more of the same kind of lurid tales, each with a twist at the end I didn’t see coming. When I finished those 32 pages, I went right back to the front of the book and tore through them all again, focusing on advertisements for other books and old Crypt-Keeper’s hilarious verbiage in the letter column.

My whole life I’ve been drawn to horror movies, but this one day is when the dream to become a horror author was born. It’s something I’ll do for the rest of my life, whether I make a dime from it or not. It’s a passion and it was born to me on that hot summer day in our dearly departed bookstore. A lot has changed for me, and a lot has changed for publishing, in the last 20 years. I feel the biggest changes are yet to come, and I’m hopeful of where they’ll take us all on this journey into the future. But the one thing that hasn’t changed is that little tinge of excitement that I still get whenever I break open that old comic book and relive those stories that awakened my creative spirit and showed me how truly fun the world could be through blood colored glasses.

What is your passion, writers? What do you love to write about, and where did it begin for you? I’d love to hear the stories behind the stories. Feel free to share them below.