29 June 2013

Pirates Ahoy - Phishing in Progress

Just as a friend’s Twitter account was hacked by what looked like Eastern European “lovelies”, I found my Native American Beneath The Shining Mountains had been pirated.

‘Heck,’ said Hubby, ‘they must think it’s good!’
I won’t dwell on my response to that, suffice to say that he’s recovering. I’ll just muse that perhaps up to now I’ve been lucky.

I determined to send a take-down notice via the site’s contact form which helpfully offered If you want to remove your books, please contact us with the form below… Except, of course, the contact form went nowhere when I hit Send – or appeared to, which is when my ‘oh shit’ antenna started twitching. And yes, a quick search of the Net, which I agree I should have done first, pulled up the suspicion from various sources that my novel was being used, with many others, as bait in a Phishing scam. After all, what site offering free ebooks needs to litter its pages with images of credit and debit cards?

While I wait to see what comes through in the way of spam, consider what the naïve site user may be facing. Whatever your financial situation $2.99/£1.99 from a reputable ebookstore really is amazingly cheap for an eight hour read.

1 June 2013

GoodReads Giveaway: 'Reading A Writer's Mind...'

As part of the launch initiative for the paperback of Reading A Writer's Mind: Exploring Short Fiction - First Thought to Finished Story, for the whole of June the title is entered into the GoodReads Giveaway.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Reading a Writer's Mind by Linda Acaster

Reading a Writer's Mind

by Linda Acaster

Giveaway ends June 30, 2013.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

12 copies are on offer and a lot of territories are covered, from USA and Canada, most of Europe, across to Australia and New Zealand - and of course its home turf of the UK. If you are member of GoodReads (if not, why not?) and want to discover how short fiction is produced, either because you're a reader who is interested or a writer wanting to hone your skills, go for it. It won't cost you a penny, or cent, or whatever - yeah, even the postage.

Here's the direct link in case the widget does not work for you:
http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/54304-reading-a-writer-s-mind