Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Heraclix & Pomp Now Available for Preorder and Wishlist at Amazon.com

Friends, fellow book lovers, and RPG geeks,

My novel, Heraclix & Pomp, is now available for preorder and can be added to your Wishlist at Amazon.com RIGHT HERE! If I've ever spoken a kind word to you or if you've ever read anything that I've written that you've liked (either in your heart and mind or "liked" with the click of a mouse), I'd like to ask a favor of you: Please add Heraclix & Pomp to your Amazon.com Wishlist, even if you plan on buying it at another venue. 

This is one of those critical moments to a book's success. I am not a "name" author, save to a select dedicated few who have been following my short stories and anthologies over the years. Thus, it is critical to send out a strong pulse of data indicating that there is potential interest in the book. You don't have to pre-order the book (though I'm not discouraging this at all!), but please add it to your Wishlist. Then, please add it to your "to be read" list at Booklikes, Goodreads, or your other book-lovers' website of choice. These are the best ways we can send a message to the marketplace that there is interest in Heraclix & Pomp!

Please ask all of your friends to do the same - the best advertising is word-of-mouth, and while Heraclix & Pomp will, admittedly, not appeal to everyone, I'd like the world to have a chance to give it a read and decide for themselves whether or not it is their kind of book. If you have a twitter account, please tweet the URL. If you have a facebook page, please share the news there. Reshares at Google+ and Tumblr are fantastic, as well. Feel free to supply the link at your blog, if you have one, also. And, again, please ask all of your friends and internet acquaintances to share the news! My publisher, Resurrection House/Underland Press, is now being recognized as a quality publisher by the publishing industry news outlets, but they simply don't have the marketing dollars that the big New York houses have. So I need your help in this in order to get the book out in front of more readers, as many readers as possible. I appreciate anything you can do to help get the word out.

The link is for the hardcover edition. The hardcover, e-book, and audible.com versions are all due out in September of this year. Trade paperback will follow, but I'm not sure exactly when. If these formats do well enough, there will be a mass market paperback, meaning you can brag to your friends "I know that guy," while you're waiting in line to get your groceries rung up. And who doesn't like to show up their friends at the grocery store? But the appearance of the mass market paperback is dependent on what kind of interest we can generate *right now*! Books burn through bookstores fast, and there's not a lot of time to build a brand, especially with a no-name like your's truly. 

You'll note that Amazon doesn't have the artwork up, yet, so I'm including it below for your pleasure and convenience. I'm also including the "blurb" beneath the cover art.

I will be randomly giving away a couple signed copies of the hardcover at Booklikes, as well as Goodreads, as soon as I have physical copies in hand.

For my RPG friends who ask "why would I want to read your book?" I will point out that the main characters in the book are a flesh golem and a fairy/pixie. When's the last time you read a novel about a flesh golem/pixie tandem? It is an adventure story, a historical fantasy with a side-trip through Hell. There is enough evil sorcery and there are enough demons to keep you occupied throughout.

For my friends who might not lean toward historical fantasy, note that the main philosophical questions posed in the novel are: "What happens when an immortal must learn to face mortality? What is the nature of memory and our perceptions of the past? Who are we, really, anyway? Do we really know ourselves as well as we think we do? What lengths would we go to to preserve our own life or bring back from the dead the ones we love?", and "What happens when we find out we are not the person we thought we previously were, but someone far more repulsive and terrifying?"

This novel does not neatly fit into the marketing categories of "fantasy" or "horror" or "literary" or "historical fiction," but delves into each of these genres. As Stepan Chapman once remarked, "there's something here for everyone to hate!"

In closing, I want to thank many of you for the awesome discussions we've had about books we love, books we hate, and those we disagree on. My life is richer because I've been privileged to hear and consider your opinions on fiction, gaming, books, and even life in general.I'm a better man because of your contributions, and I thank you!

best,

Forrest Aguirre
author: Heraclix & Pomp


PS: Don't be surprised to see another plea similar to this over at Goodreads.com, at Booklikes, and at my blog, forrestaguirre.blogspot.com. Oh, and I'll be tweeting about it as well, for you twitterati.



Heraclix was dead and Pomp was immortal. That was before Heraclix’s reanimation (along with the sewn-together pieces and parts of many other dead people) and Pomp’s near murder at the hands of an evil necromancer. As they travel from Vienna to Prague to Istanbul and back again (with a side-trip to Hell), they struggle to understand who and what they are: Heraclix seeks to know the life he had before his death and rebirth, and Pomp wrestles with the language and meaning of mortality. As they journey across a land rife with revolution and unrest, they discover that the evil necromancer they thought dead might not be so dead after all. In fact, he might be making a pact to ensure his own immortality .

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