Summer of Indie, Last Call with Robert Stanek

Summer of Indie is coming to a close. It’s been a long run… and a lot of hours to put together, keep running, and spread the word to help make it a success.

For authors who are featured, I hope the event helped introduce your work to new readers and your fellow authors as well. Awareness of an author and his or her books is important and it can help your long-term sales and success. Getting to know fellow indie authors is just as important. It’s a big world out there. There are many authors who may have similar interests to your own and it’s good to get to know them, even if only through their work and these pages.

For readers who have visited (and will visit) these pages, I thank you. I hope you’ve enjoyed the features presented throughout Summer of Indie and I know you’ve checked out some of the many books presented because I’ve seen the results. On average about 175 people tuned in each day and overall the event has brought in about 16,000 page views so far. That kind of success makes all the hard work worth it.

For me Summer of Indie was a dream—a dream I brought to life as another way to help other authors and introduce readers to new authors, new books, and new ideas. I think the time spent was well worth it. Best of all, these pages and features will remain available and they can help introduce readers to the authors and books featured here for a long time to come.

Reading this, you may wonder what’s ahead. To that, I say stay tuned. There's much ahead including some Best Of Summer of Indie Picks, Guest Posts and I hope eventually, posts from my next book on writing: Enduring Writing (tentative title). Think of it as a follow up to my book Effective Writing, the little book read by more readers than I ever imagined possible since it was first released in audio so many years ago. It's not Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, but like that other diminutive book it has legs. I hope Enduring Writing will have legs too.

In the mean time, continue to dream and while you're dreaming dream BIG. I know I am, and I know Buster is too because so many readers have read or listened to his adventures. Who knew stories about a little bug and his friends would garner so much interest and start to become so beloved. Just goes to show you that anything's possible when you dream BIG.

Finally, whether this is your first visit to Go Indie - Read Indies or you've been following Summer of Indie from the beginning, I hope you'll pick up some of the books by the many authors featured here. Who knows, maybe you'll also pick up a few books by that Robert Stanek guy too. 

Buster sure hope's so, and he's off exploring the Solar System just in case...

Thank you for reading! Please bookmark Go Indie - Read Indies and check back in the days, weeks, and months ahead.


-- Robert Stanek

Explore the Titanic in a Way You Never Imagined - Shipbuilder

Today I'm talking with Marlene Dotterer about her book The Time Travel Journals: Shipbuilder, which my friends over at the Sony Reader Store were kind enough to feature in yesterday's Reader Store Newsletter spotlighting Titanic related books. (Thank you, Audrey and Cindy @ Sony -- you're the best!)

Talk about the Titanic is everywhere lately thanks to National Geographic's extensive feature on the ship and the disaster in the April 2012 issue of the magazine and the return of the Titanic movie to theaters in 3D.

Born in Tucson, Arizona, Marlene Dotterer lived there until the day she loaded her five children into her station wagon, and drove north-west to the San Francisco Bay Area. Since then, she has earned a degree in geology, worked in nuclear waste, run her own business as a personal chef, and now teaches natural childbirth classes. She writes, “to silence the voices,” obsessed with the possibilities of other worlds and other times.

Marlene belongs to the California Writers Club, Romance Writers of America, and the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror.

Online Marlene hangs out at her blog (http://marlenedotterer.wordpress.com/), on Twitter @marlenedotterer and on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/marlenedotterer).


[More about Marlene] Read the follow up interview with Marlene @ Robert Stanek's Around the Town Books


So what's Marlene's book about?

Imagine being there before the Titanic set sail.

Now imagine being there before she’s even built.

Sam Altair is a physicist living in Belfast, Ireland. He has spent his career researching time travel and now, in early 2006, he’s finally reached the point where he can send objects backwards through time. The only problem is, he doesn’t know where the objects go. They don’t show up in the past, and no one notices any changes to the present. Are they creating alternate time lines?

To collect more data, Sam tries a clandestine experiment in a public park, late at night. But the experiment goes horribly wrong when Casey Wilson, a student at the university, stumbles into his isolation field. Sam tries to rescue her, but instead, he and Casey are transported back to the year 1906. Stuck in the past, cut off from everyone and everything they know, Sam and Casey work together to help each other survive. Then Casey meets Thomas Andrews, the man who will shortly begin to build the most famous ship since Noah’s Ark. Should they warn him, changing the past and creating unknown consequences for the future? Or should they let him die?

The construction of White Star Line’s Olympic-class ships forms the backdrop for a passionate love affair between Tom and Casey, who must overcome the many differences inherent between an Edwardian Irish gentleman, and a member of America’s Generation Y. The fictional love affair grows alongside real lives from history: the Andrews family of Comber, Lord William Pirrie, Bruce Ismay, and the thousands of skilled men who built the remarkable ocean liners of the early twentieth century.

Sound interesting? Get the book:

Sony: Ereader

Kindle: Amazon

See a Shipbuilder movie ahead for Marlene? I do.