Showing posts with label ebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ebook. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

The Summer Cat

Hi Everyone - Is it summer yet? I hope so, because I just released my newest work of short fiction, called The Summer Cat.

http://www.amazon.com/Summer-Cat-Tales-ebook/dp/B00KRPZLVQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1402169900&sr=1-1&keywords=the+summer+cat

But wait, this one actually has horses in it! And a horseshoer. A very good horseshoer, who is also a very bad horseshoer. (But that is all I'll say about that.) Here's the official blurb:

When Spuds goes missing, Hannah's whole world comes crashing down, and an interloper who shows up only makes things worse. Can a faraway friend help find this special cat, or it is already too late?

Available world-wide as an eBook from Amazon, the price in the US is only $0.99 (and comparable elsewhere.) It's the third in my series of short fiction about people and their cats, including (so far) The Winter Kitten and The Springtime Cat. Each of these is stand-alone fiction, and they can be read in any order.

So for those of you who have read The Summer Cat (or will read it - it's a short read) I have a question. At the end of the story, should Hannah and her mom still use Joe Johns as their horseshoer?? What would you do?

Friday, November 22, 2013

Announcing: THE WINTER KITTEN

by Linda Benson

Ahh - it's cold out. 23 here this morning, and my ducks uttered a few choice words when they jumped in their pond this morning and hit ice. Yikes! But it is the season for snuggling up by the fire with a good story to read. Which is why I hope you'll allow me the liberty of announcing my new short read called
THE WINTER KITTEN.


No, this one is not a horse book (although, there are horses briefly mentioned.) But I do know that most horse lovers also are animal lovers in general, so I hope this book will appeal to you. Here's the blurb:

Brianna doesn't know how she'll make it through her first winter in Portland. It rains too much, she misses her mother and the country life they once shared, and with Christmas coming up she's having a hard time adjusting to life with only her dad. When she finds a kitten trapped in their garage, Brianna is sure things will get better. But nothing goes as planned, and Brianna wonders what she's gotten herself into.

This short story from Linda Benson, award-winning author of books about the human-animal bond, will surely warm your heart in any season.


THE WINTER KITTEN is available on Amazon for only $0.99 as a Kindle eBook, so if it sounds appealing, I hope you'll give it a try. Don't have a Kindle? You can download the Kindle app for free right from the product page of this book, and read it on your computer, tablet, phone, or other device. Cool, huh? Here's the link: http://www.amazon.com/The-Winter-Kitten-ebook/dp/B00GD4TDCI

After five novels from two different publishers, this book is a first for me - my first try at publishing on my own (with help from professionals on both editing and cover design) and my first try at publishing short fiction. And I believe there may be demand for shorter reads. With our busy lifestyles and (sadly) shorter attention spans, a complete, satisfying story that can be read in just one or two sittings might be appealing to many.

I hope some of you will pick this one up and let us know.
Is there a future for short fiction? What do you think?
Give us your opinion!

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Six Degrees of Lost - on Sale - 99 cents!

Hi Everyone - I'm having a promotion on one of my books, with the cooperation of my publisher, Musa.

From May 1-15, Six Degrees of Lost will be only .99 as an ebook.

It's a sweet story, told in two different voices, and it's about a lost dog, a first love, and a journey.

 
Olive’s mother is headed to jail and her brother to join the Army, so thirteen-year-old Olive is uprooted from sunny California and dumped in Washington State like a stray. That's exactly what she feels like surrounded by her aunt’s collection of homeless dogs, cats, and horses.

Fourteen-year-old David’s future is already carved in stone. From a military family with two brothers serving overseas, he’s been pointed towards the Air Force Academy his entire life - but a rafting trip gone awry might ruin his chances.

When a runaway dog is almost hit by a car, the search for its owner leads Olive and David, two teens from entirely different backgrounds, to an unlikely bond. Will their growing attraction to each other be enough to keep Olive from a foolhardy journey to find her mother? Will David risk his family’s plans to save her?

Six Degrees of Lost will be available at this special price on Amazon, Barnes&Noble, and some other sites, I believe.

And although horses are not the main theme of this book, it does of course, have horses in it! Here's a short excerpt:


“So what’s with all those dogs barking in the back yard?”

“They’re foster dogs. My aunt takes them in when they get too crowded at the animal shelter. Some of them aren’t adoptable, and would be put to sleep otherwise.”

“Really?” I gulp.

“We’ve also got six cats in the house, plus the horses out back. Come on, I’ll show you.” The yellow dog jumps up and down, begging for the stick. Olive flings it down the driveway. I see a small shelter out back, with sagging fences. Olive is already headed that way, taking short barefoot steps on the gravel, so I follow.

A sway-backed pinto horse with a mouth full of hay sticks his head out from the shelter and then turns and goes back to his breakfast. It looks kind of bony.

“Wow,” I say. “Skinny.”

“Yeah, that’s Paintball.” She grins. “Well, that’s what I call him. He was found wandering loose up in the National Forest. Aunt Trudy says somebody just dumped him there.”


Olive shrugs. “I know. Hard to believe, huh? I guess they couldn’t afford to feed him, but still, that’s just mean.”

A huge brown horse wanders over to the fence. “Who’s this one?” I reach between the strands of wire and pat his head. He’s just as skinny as the first one.

“My aunt says he’s ancient, and we’ll probably never get his weight back on. They found him tied to a tree in front of the animal shelter, but they don’t really have any facilities for horses there, so he came here instead. He’s sweet, huh?”

“Yeah, he seems nice.” The old horse pushes his head underneath my hand, clearly enjoying the attention.

“I call him Shakespeare. ‘Cause he looks so noble and elegant.”

Elegant? I think. That’s a stretch. “Can you ride them?”

“I don’t know. Aunt Trudy says we don’t really know that much about them. Anyway, it’s been too hot, and she’s always busy. She’s a clerk at the animal shelter thrift shop, and she takes turns working down at the shelter, besides feeding all these animals here at home.”

Olive talks so fast she makes my head swim. She barely takes a breath, and rattles on. “So besides the ones she takes in from the shelter, my aunt is always finding animals, too. She says there must be an invisible sign at the bottom of the driveway that says: Lost Animals Stop Here.”

“Is that how you found this dog?” I stroke the big lab’s ears, and he presses against me.

“He was standing in the middle of the road,” she says, “and almost got hit by a car.” She smiles. “Maybe he was reading the sign.”


Hope some of you will hop on over and pick this one up while it's on sale at this great price. It's perfect for middle-grade readers through adult, and animal lovers of all ages!
Thanks! We appreciate our readers very much!
Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

It's a Maybe: The Retired Racehorse Book

Sometimes I think that my greatest talent is coming up with awesome ideas and then sticking them on the back-burner until I have "time." (As if "time" were something I was ever going to possess, to clench in my fist, to cackle a villainous laugh over. I've got you at last, Time! Probably not.)

Stuck on my backburner I have various art projects (what to do with that charming little Sam Savitt paperback before it decays entirely? Something amazing. I'll look it up later), an entire manuscript imaginatively named The Eventing Novel (I'll completely rewrite that eventually), and, most annoyingly of all, the Retired Racehorse book.

I've been planning the Retired Racehorse book since the day I started Retired Racehorse Blog. You might know it, a little WordPress project that made me moderately Internet Famous amongst a small proportion of Thoroughbred enthusiasts and got me a lot of Facebook friends. (Hi Facebook friends! xo) I meant to just keep training Off-Track Thoroughbreds and blog about their training as I went, and eventually put it all into a lovely retraining manual, since it can be difficult to consult a blog before you go out to ride.

YOU PROMISED ME A BOOK
But it spun all out of proportion and somehow I ended up a writer in New York City. I attribute this development directly to Retired Racehorse Blog, and I still want to write the book, out of appreciation, at the very least! The blog deserves its book!

The problem, of course, is that I'm not training horses anymore, and I can't just make up fixes for problems. I don't have a set curriculum for a horse. I'm not Natalie Keller Reinert Horsemanship MasterClass, Inc. My blog posts were mentally composed as I was riding, thinking through the problems that the horse was presenting me as I tried to trace them to their roots in his early training as a racehorse.

And then yesterday I was in the basement of the Strand Bookstore, which is one of my favorite places to be (certainly it's my favorite basement) and I found a gorgeous little vintage hardcover of Ahlerich: The Making of a Dressage World Champion, by Reiner Klimke. It's basically a detailed—incredibly detailed—training diary of one of the most wonderful dressage teams we've ever seen. Just wonderful.

I didn't buy it, because it was $40 and my price limit for books is closer to $1.

But it did remind me that I had a perfectly good diary of training a retired racehorse from racetrack to amateur eventer in five months, and I really ought to pull the Retired Racehorse Book off that back-burner.

Except I still really don't have time.

And then today I saw a WordPress plug-in called Anthologize, which is supposed to make your blog into a book automagically, and I thought, this is the sign! I'll do it today! 

But then I read the instructions, and it doesn't work on WordPress.com hosted blogs. (i.e. dot wordpress dot com blogs, aka free blogs.)

So I pulled out my hair for a few minutes (it's really long and I can spare a few strands) and then took a deep breath. I'll still do the Retired Racehorse Book. Just not at this exact moment. When I have time.