Can you help me please...?

Can you help me please?

I am having some issues with the promotion I'm currently running.  I complained about the problem and got a nice email from Amazon:

I've checked and see that the countdown deal for your Kindle book,"The Last Changeling" has stated, (sic).  The book is now available for $0.99 on Amazon.com and doe £0.99 on Amazon.co.uk.  To reconfirm please visit the following links:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00B90EIRQ

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B90EIRQ

If you need any further assistance, you can contact us by replying to this e-mail.  We are always here to assist you.  
Thanks for using Amazon KDP.


Pleased, I followed the link, but the Amazon.com page refused to show me the price.  Today I received this email from a good friend in New York, USA:

'I accessed Amazon from New York and when you click on your book it comes up with 'pricing not available' so I was unable to buy a copy Stateside - which is pretty shit.'

Then, a little later this afternoon, I was sent this screenshot from Dallas, Texas USA:

So, If you live anywhere outside of the UK, could you please send an email to amazon.com asking why you cannot access a price for my book?  Go to 'help' and you will be directed to sign in.  If you don't have an Amazon account, don't worry, you can skip this section.  Then click on 'Kindle' and tell them you cannot find a price for The Last Changeling by FR Maher.

The page at amazon.com is:

http://www.amazon.com/Last-Changeling-Enigma-Wars-ebook/dp/B00B90EIRQ

Thank you, I appreciate you taking the time to help me.

Is imitation the sincerest form of flattery? Or just plain theft?

So much has happened over the last few months… may I extend a belated ‘Happy New Year’ to you?   Actually, it’s not that late if you happen to be Chinese! 

I have met, (okay online), an inspiring soul called Katwise.  She makes an excellent living by making glorious upcycled clothes and lives in a heavenly rainbow coloured house in upstate New York. 

 Fabulous eh?  I admire anyone who ploughs their own path. 

It generally comes with a price though.  Some people get scared of anyone who refuses to stay with the herd; from within the warm depths of safety in numbers, they take any signs of individuality as an unspoken criticism of their own personal desire to stay safe.  They can get pretty nasty and cranky.

Then there are the fans.

These are the coolest and the best.  They are the people who ‘get’ you.  Who hear what you have to say, and are genuinely pleased when others discover you too.  I am blessed with some extraordinary fans who have given me amazing support.  

I started out with a couple of beta readers and slowly, bit by bit, book by book, the circle has widened.  Word of mouth has really helped and now interest in The Last Changeling has spread to every continent… er…except Africa…. Hey guys, what’s going on??? J

Katwise has got tens of thousands of fans – although I don’t know if many hail from Africa – I know she’s hitch hiked extensively through the continent.   

But then it got a bit dark and nasty...  some ‘fans’ started copying Kat’s work and threatening her livelihood.  She freaked a little, but then took a deep breath – and more importantly, she took the advice of a wise woman and actually embraced the copiers!  If these copy-kats were going to rip her off, the least they could do would be to make good copies of her upcycled sweater coats… so she started selling tutorials on how to make exact replicas of her clothing!

I find this extraordinary.  It is the highest – risk strategy I can imagine, yet for Kat it has worked out.  To date she has sold over 10,000 copies of her tutorial at around $6 each!

My friend Dan Baines creates magical tricks and one was ripped off and made in Asia.  Worse yet, they even copied his DVD - featuring him(!), where he pledges to help anyone who can't make the trick work.  And many couldn't.  He only became aware of the cheap copies when disappointed people started contacting him.

So, what is this building to? 

To give you a flavour of my novel The last Changeling, here’s some blurb:

Can you be sure everyone you meet is 100% human? 

Are myths and legends secret instructions for dealing with humankind’s oldest enemy?

What is lurking beneath the ancient streets of London, England?

The Last Changeling is a dark fantasy that unfolds against a backdrop of over 500 years of British history.  When Queen Elizabeth the First and her astrologer the extraordinary Dr. John Dee set up a secret organisation to combat 'metahominids', they began the longest secret war in history.

Meta hominid is ancient Greek for 'other man' - a name for a race of creatures that we commonly identify with child abduction, tales of lost time and unexplained disappearances.  We call them 'aliens', but a couple of hundred years ago, people called them 'fairies'.

When 21^st century government budget cuts compromise the centuries old cover-up, a shambling, unlikely hero, known only as D, becomes our last and only hope against the rising of this dark and persistent enemy.  Yet they are not the only enemy ranged against him, for D has to unmask a traitor and combat the meddling of a reckless amateur, hell-bent on breaking open ancient secrets.

Will D save the child or the city; the country, or the planet?

Just remember, whatever happens, parts of this story are true.

So, that’s my book, but, later on in 2014 an occult publisher will be releasing a novel with the exact same title as mine, by an author with so far, only one published book that has nothing to do with the paranormal. It’s strange for a ‘straight’ author to dive into the occult, but it seems this is what she has done.  

She is writing a book about fairies – but her book appears to have far more in common with mine than that.  I introduce D9, a secret government organisation.  Their first case appears to be the basis for the story of her book.  They say ‘Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,’ but what about plain, old-fashioned plagiarism?

Thus I find I am David, the publishers, if not Goliath, are certainly bigger than my publisher The Art Clinic, but we are on the case. 

Yet is there more to this than meets the eye?  My typical reader is alternative and intelligent.  They enjoy the chilling frisson of darker themes, and are acquainted with the films of Guillermo Del Torro.  

My readers are far more likely to read ‘The Da Vinci Code’ than ‘Twilight.’ 

The other book is definitely aimed at the ‘I’m in love with a spangly vampire’ brigade.  Something my readers would view with scorn - and the worrying thought is that any link to this other camp would definitely deter new readers for my book.  The other one doesn't just 'not fit the profile', it is the polar opposite to it.

It does make me wonder.... is this another bid to bury my book? 

When I put it on a Kindle promotion last November, the Amazon.com product page for The Last Changeling refused to load.  I blogged about it at the time.  Just yesterday I started another promotion… and yet again at the very beginning of the promotion, The Last Changeling on Amazon.com refused to load. 

I would like to be as laid back as Katwise about this ‘Sincerest form of flattery’, but even she has stated in her tutorials that she expects to be credited for her intellectual property.  She has good ideas and she makes a living out of them.  Any one should be safe from opportunists trying to steal their livelihood, and yes, that includes me too.

I will keep you posted, in the meantime, any help or advice, or any words of support you may like to leave would be hugely appreciated.  Thank you.

www.thelastchangeling.co.uk

Updates are available from www.thelastchangeling.co.uk and https://www.facebook.com/LastChangeling

Help! My book has been banned!

Do you think the internet can save ordinary people by exposing the wrongs done to them?

I do.

On the very day Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the internet castigated the spooks for cracking online encryption and making the world a far less safe place to exist in, I am relying on his invention to make a clarion call to rally assistance.

I never thought I would need help in this manner, but I am going public with some deep concerns I have.  I don’t feel safe and I need as many people as possible to know my story.  If everyone knows I am being bullied, maybe it will stop, or at least, stop escalating...

First things first.

If you have been trying to get your copy of The Last Changeling from Amazon.com, you will probably have been disappointed.  I have received notifications from followers of The Last Changeling in Amsterdam, Dallas, Singapore and Los Angeles saying that The Last Changeling definitely isn't available from Amazon.com.

The guy in Dallas said it kept saying that the price wasn't available, now that's subtly different from the kind of thing I have been experiencing, (the page churns and continually refreshes without ever settling), which I find a bit odd.  Surely a genuine glitch would be the same wherever you encountered it, not apparently ‘tailored’ for different scenarios?

I complained to Amazon and I got a strange reply explaining the page was working correctly.  That's it - a flat 'We're right, you're wrong.' What is going on?

So, if you want to purchase from Amazon.com, please note, The Last Changeling is currently only available from Amazon.co.uk .  You can follow or cut and paste this link:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Last-Changeling-Enigma-Wars-ebook/dp/B00B90EIRQ/

I will advise you as soon as I can as to when / if the US sanction is lifted.  For now I can only view this as a sinister turn of events occasioned by the startling truths hidden within my book. 

So this is how it is, and it’s not a great place to be.  There is an echo on my phone – friends have been complaining about it for around six weeks now.  I never thought much about it.  

A man from a certain security organisation made a point of giving me his card a couple of months ago.  I mentioned this to someone who laughed and said ‘Americans always give out their cards...’  but I haven’t encountered this oh so fervent behaviour before, and this guy really wanted me to know who I was dealing with...  still I didn’t join up the dots.  Then another apparent anomaly – I live in the wilds of Wales and 19 bats suddenly died here, like they’d been hit by a sudden burst of something.  

Then I began to wonder if this was all part of some of the names I have named in The Last Changeling.  Today I was followed down a lonely mountain pass.

 Earlier this week, traffic to this blog from the USA went up a startling 1,100% in one day. 

So who is reading this? 

Are you my friend? if so, please share what's happened here and shout it loud.

Or are you a man in black?  If so, be aware, you only think you are the good guys.  

I, and millions more like me, agree with Tim Berners Lee.

Interest and Intrigue...

I am continually amazed and humbled at how many people take the time out to read this occasional blog.  Hello to all of you, and thank you for being here.  That's you in the Ukraine, plus my German, Russian, American, Canadian and New Zealand readers.  Hello also to you also, kind readers, in Brazil, the UK, Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark and India.

It's really nice that 'The last Changeling', - the novel that is, not this blog - has been shortlisted for an award.  Of course I would be immensely thrilled to get it, although out of an awfully large number of semi-finalists, it's unlikely... but... and I don't want to sound ungrateful to the lovely people at Authors Database as I am delighted to be considered in the first place... but... I do find it a little strange that the award is for the cover, not the content!
If you want to have a nosey at the competition, and even go so far as to 'like' my cover, please follow this link... http://www.authorsdb.com/book-cover-awards/occult-supernatural

Kindle are doing a fantastic promotion at the moment; The Last Changeling is on offer at a whopping 67% discount!  But just for the next couple of days!  So be quick if you want a discounted copy.  However, if you miss the deal you will still be able to get 33% off until the end of this week.  It's certainly attracted a lot of interest.  For the uninitiated, anything under 100,000th. place is deemed not too shabby and, at time of writing, The Last Changeling is sitting in 2,638th place!

http://www.amazon.com/The-Last-Changeling-Enigma-Wars-ebook/dp/B00B90EIRQ

Incidentally... there has been some interest in The last Changeling coming from, shall I say, 'officialdom', which makes me wonder if I have put something in the novel that I shouldn't have?  Parts of the story are absolutely true, and it does deal with espionage and the occult, so nothing would surprise me.

Here's the latest version of the 'back cover blurb', I really hope you like it -any comments would be most welcome... thanks for reading!

All of history is secrets and lies.
The present is just a cover story...

Metahominids: Mêta'hôm'i'nîdz: (pl.) n.
Ancient Greek:  meta = other, hominids = men
From Dr. John Dee's* 'Inventory of Magickal Correspondences 1583
(*Dee was astrologer and code-breaker to Queen Elizabeth I)

Can you be sure everyone you meet is 100% human?
What if old legends and fairy stories were revealed to be encoded survival guides?

Parts of this story are true.

When a Government cost-cutting exercise goes too far, it accidentally compromises a centuries old cover up.  D, the enigmatic Head of Department, finds himself forced to fight for his life against the rising of a dark and persistent enemy, a traitor within, and a reckless amateur, hell-bent on breaking open ancient secrets.

Metahominids are our oldest enemy.  Throughout history there have been people who knew about these creatures and their ways - Dr. John Dee, Queen Elizabeth I, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, Sir Winston Churchill...
Within their traditional haunts of hill-fort, woodland and barrow, metahominids are dangerous enough - but now, like urban foxes, they are abandoning the countryside to infest our city spaces and prey upon us.  Our unwillingness to 'see' and believe in these 'other men' leaves us hugely vulnerable.  They steal infants and leave Changelings in their places.  Should any parent suddenly realize their child is a stranger, no professional would ever believe it was anything other than that parent's aberrant state of mind.  
Metahominids infiltrate our places of entertainment with addictive music and dance unwary clubbers to death.  They move among us, destroying lives as they have always done, protected by the modern world's inability to see what is really there.

Will D save the child or the venerable City of London?
His country or the planet?
Just remember, whatever happens, parts of this story are true.
' 

The Strange Case of Sherlock's Creator and the Missing Man.

Something quite extraordinary lies beneath the murky grey green waters of a Surrey lake: a gem of Victorian architecture - a strange memorial to an unconventional man.  If you take a moment to Google ‘ballroom beneath the lake’, you will uncover images such as this:

More properly entitled ‘The Billiard Room’, it was the invention of a singularly visionary and contradictory character, Whitaker Wright.  Yet nowadays, the property is in private hands and closed to the public, and Wright has effectively been airbrushed from history.

In particular, he has vanished from the known life of his next-door- neighbour, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  Yet I find it hard to believe that these two fascinating individuals could not have been at the very least acquainted - and it is more than possible they could have been close friends.   

Lea Park was acquired by Wright in 1890, and Conan Doyle arrived in the neighbourhood  less than a handful of years later, after a friend recommended the beneficial Hindhead air for Doyle’s ailing wife Louise.

 

By 1897, Doyle’s self designed home ‘Undershaw’ was built.

Lying less than three miles from Undershaw, the billiard room beneath the lake was the venue for many séances.  Mediums were invited to attend and commune with the water spirits from the lake above.  That a man so keenly interested in mediumship as Conan Doyle, and so well connected in psychic circles should be unaware such activities taking place within walking distance of his home is unlikely.

 

The fact that Wright’s life was blighted by a scandal that culminated in his suicide, would more than adequately explain his absence from Conan Doyle’s diaries, yet perhaps he is secretly celebrated in no less a place than the very address of Sherlock Holmes.

Born into an ecclesiastical family, Wright made his fortune mining silver in Canada and the Americas before returning to England.  He purchased and transformed Lea Park, utilizing his expertise as an engineer, embellishing it with lakes and hidden tunnels, and crowning his achievement with the marvelously domed room beneath the lake.  Then his eyes turned to greater things, and he started tunnelling beneath London to create what was then called The Baker Street and Waterloo Railway.  

Wright was an exceptional engineer, but a poor financier.  When he began stripping money from one concern to bankroll another, Wright was caught out.  Convicted of fraud, he took cyanide to avoid bitter disgrace - and a seven year jail sentence.

HG Wells was so taken with Wright’s story that he created a very similar character, named him George Ponderevo, and let him narrate a novel, published five years after Wright’s death, called Tono-Bungay.  Another coincidence is that Wells is also strongly connected with Baker Street.  He lived in Chiltern Court, a block of apartments virtually on top of Baker Street railway station.

Contemporaries painted Wright as an out and out fraudster, citing his excesses as vulgar, but all of this came after his fall; beforehand he was seen as a public benefactor affording gainful employment to armies of people who created his grand scale works. 

That Conan Doyle should have remained silent when his neighbour was taken to court and ultimately took poison - all done whilst Doyle was still living less than three miles from the hapless Wright’s estate - speaks of a shocking lack of interest, or does it?  

A downright villain or hopelessly mired, either way, Wright is a fascinating character, and it stretches credibility too much to suggest Conan Doyle was disinterested enough in Wright’s fate to make no comment in public or, as far as I can tell, in private.  

Conan Doyle's silence is tantalising.

Sometime later, Doyle’s interest in mediumship ended his friendship with the rather more sceptical Harry Houdini.  Before all of this, might not Doyle’s passionate defence of seances have found a strong bond with fellow enthusiast Wright?  Perhaps even Wright’s suicide was an escape... into another life he was certain he could have after death?  It might be too much to assume Conan Doyle attempted to commune with Wright ‘beyond the grave’, but surely the thought, and maybe even the temptation, must have crossed his mind?

Yet Conan Doyle is as complex and confusing a character as Wright.  The genius who created Sherlock Holmes was also taken in table turning charlatans and even by two devious little girls and a handful of paper fairies – but having lost a son in The Great War, maybe he wanted to be?

 

Here I have to hold my hand up and admit I too have cast Wright as the villain in The Last Changeling, my novel that weaves fantasy with history.  In it, I have him draw a pistol on Conan Doyle, after they have become bitter enemies. 

Enemies or friends, I would like to think their fascinating lives overlapped rather more than history would have it.   

Long Time No Blog... I've been away with the Fairies...

My boss said I shouldn't do it....
But I did....
I took one enormous gamble and went for it.... and that's why I've been so long in coming back to this blog.

It started innocently enough.  My partner and I went for a drive in the Shropshire countryside and ended up at one of our very favourite spots, the tiny but picture-book perfect Whittington Castle.  We sat by the lake and drowsed in the sunshine.  The castle was advertising an event for the following weekend, a Fairy Festival.  Within half an hour I had booked myself a place to promote The Last Changeling, a novel I had always thought of as being seriously anti-fairy.  I call the malign beings in my story 'metahominids', (after all 'fairy' is such an 'airy fairy' nomenclature for what I have written of as seriously nasty beings, surely?).

The festival was a huge success and my book was eagerly taken up by just the kind of people I thought would have hated it - wing wearing fans of 'the fey.'  I was taken aback to see that so many people like their fairies kick-ass rather than disneyfied, and it taught me a huge lesson.  By being very precious in promoting the book as a novel for adults, I had avoided using the term 'fairies', and thus I had all but hidden my book from a potential legion of fans.

'D'oh!' as the great philosopher Homer, (Simpson), would say.

Well.... long story short, I caught the festival bug and decided to hold an event of my own in Llangollen.  A very pretty town in North Wales that features a lot in The Last Changeling.  My partner and I approached the Royal International Pavilion's very helpful staff, and asked when we could book this enormous site.

This is where the International Eisteddfod takes place every year.  If you haven't heard of it, think of it like an Olympics for singing and poetry.  People from across the planet rock up to the tiny town and compete to out-sing and out-recite one another.  One of my personal highlights from this years' event was the parade.  It got held up as it snaked through the town, and a delegation of very beautiful Chinese girls, all dressed in embroidered pink silks started singing a familiar song in Chinese.  It was only when they got to the chorus 'Music. music. music', (which they sang in English), that I realised they were singing an old ragtime hit, 'Put another nickel in to the nickelodeon...!' Amazing!

But I digress... the Pavilion staff came up with a possible date for our festival, the 10th and 11th of August. This gave us around seven weeks to organise the event.  Just us two.  With no money.  That is when my boss told me not to do it.

Yet the words of a very successful man, Richard Branson, came back to me.  His philosophy is simple, 'Screw it!  Let's do it!'
So we did.... we planned and cut wood, we created wonderful things, we painted and begged and borrowed.
And we didn't sleep, and we worked ourselves to a standstill.
And we came up with amazing ideas that could be created on a shoestring
We had a wonderful website built for free: llangollenfaeryfesti.wix.com/llangollenfaeryfesti

Against all the odds, the two day festival The Legendary Llangollen Faery Festival took place over the weekend of the 10th and 11th of August 2013, with a Grand Faery Ball where the grownups donned fairy finery and danced to the most amazing music on the evening of the 10th.
And bands came and played and sold their CD's to cover their costs and we had workshops and stalls and great food and the papers gave us amazing coverage and it was on the radio and everyone, but everyone had the greatest time - as did we - and everyone, but everyone has booked their stalls for what they demand will be an annual event and so we have to do it all over again next year... Phew!

It was the busiest, buzziest time I've had in a long time... and all because I've written a book about fairies!