Dead Silver Tenth Anniversary Sale! · 5:41pm May 22nd
“Chupacabra hunting. Murder. Vacations aren’t supposed to turn out like this.”
Sands and Storms, it really has been that long! Ten years since Dead Silver arrived on the scene! A harrowing Urban Fantasy Mystery, Dead Silver was my first full-length book release (One Drink was a novella) and did quite well for itself at the time, though it’s long been overshadowed by books like Shadow of an Empire, Axtara – Banking and Finance, and of course, Colony.
Overshadowed though it may be now, at the time Dead Silver was a very important step for me, proof that One Drink wasn’t some one-off event, never to happen again. It was proof to the public and my few (at that time) readers that not only could what they’d found in One Drink be replicated, but improved upon and expanded. That this “Max Florschutz” guy wasn’t just a tiny flame that, like so many others, would appear once and then never be seen again.
Which to many of you now might not seem like much. But at the time? It was a really big step for me, and I was facing down internet trolls who’d decided they wanted nothing more than to see my name and my—at that point—lone book vanish from the internet forever. Dead Silver was a blow to those detractors, and its success, though small, the point where they began to cease and quest for easier prey.
That and the book holds a special place in my heart for other reasons too. Dead Silver marked a lot of firsts for me. The first time I’d cold called people for research, for example. I’ll never forget the bewilderment on the other end of the phone from that New Mexican sheriff I called, and I never even got his name, but I am grateful he spent a couple of minutes on the phone with me answering my questions about jurisdiction and authority between various law keeping agencies. Or the bemused nurse at a local hospital who provided me with nursing terms for various implements for the portions of the book where several characters spent time in the hospital.
Or that delightful hour I spent reading up on heavy mining equipment so that I could make sure the equipment shown in the mine was accurate to the real thing, an hour which for months afterwards confused my Google metrics (I think they’ve mostly just given up trying to make sense of my searches these days). Simply put, I’ll never forget Dead Silver, and it’s hard to believe it’s been ten years.
Many today haven’t read it, and sales-wise it’s fallen by the wayside. A humble shaman solving a missing persons mystery in New Mexico doesn’t have the same head-grabbing energy to it the way Colony does with its interstellar espionage and artificial alien worlds, or Shadow of an Empire with its incredible hard magic system and horseback shootouts, or Axtara – Banking and Finance with its whole premise. Dead Silver is a little more grounded.
A little. It does have ancient Aztec guardian skeletons animated by blood magic, after all. Oh, which as long as I’m reminiscing, did lead to one of my favorite early reader messages, letting me know that they’d finished Dead Silver in a two session blitz, and hadn’t felt safe going out after dark for three days.
So, you know, giving readers new fears and all that.
Joking aside, Dead Silver being ten is kind of incredible. I know it’s not had much spotlight in a long time, and some of you newer readers may not even have known it was a book I wrote as a result. But … since it is the tenth anniversary of its release, why not give as many as possible the chance?
So, this week, Dead Silver is 99 cents. Yeah, you read that right. A 451-page novel is ninety-nine cents. Which puts it’s price in 1994 dollars (something I’ve held as a solid price point in the past) at forty-seven cents. That’s right, if it were 1994, you could get Dead Silver for two quarters.
Now it’s four quarters. That’s inflation over the last thirty years for you.
Now, I can already hear some of you saying “Yeah, but it’s listed as a sequel, and I never read One Drink either, so …”
Well, you don’t have that excuse either. Because One Drink is free. Yeah, you read that right? Free. Zero dollars. Zero pennies. No tax. Just grab it and go. Just, you know, don’t forget Dead Silver while you’re at it, because that’s the whole reason you’re here.
So yeah, in celebration of the tenth anniversary of Dead Silver‘s release, grab it and its predecessor, my first two books, for a total of $0.99.
For more on Dead Silver, including a retrospective, some review quotes, and even the entire first chapter, hit the jump.
Happy tenth, Dead Silver. I’ll always remember you fondly.
Funny, I was just thinking about Dead Silver a couple weeks ago. To be specific, I was thinking about Hawke finally seeing his chupacabra. Don't know why, it just came to me, and then I was thinking about other, related things, like the hospital scene that isn't in the book and the utter silliness of a ghost whisperer trying to take a relaxing vacation away from his responsibilities by visiting a cemetery. Oh, yeah, and Aztec skeleton warriors.
A pity, I already have a copy. If you ever decide to put it in print, let me know so that it can go on my physical bookshelves. I'm really into expanding my non-digital collection these days.
Really? Huh. Maybe I'm more desensitized than I thought.
I've thought about doing an omnibus of it with One Drink and Dead Silver. New covers, collected in one big paperback about the size of Shadow of an Empire.
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I suppose the important questions in that regard are "How many people would buy it?" and, directly resulting from that, "Is it worth the effort?"