Posts Tagged ‘The Quiet Game’

2 days to go!

2 days to go!

Yes, it’s only two days away. Imagine that. When I started writing five short stories with the vague goal of turning them into a collection of short stories that I would release while Reborn City was still being critiqued, I saw the whole publication of it as far off in the future. Now it’s only two days away from hitting the digital bookstores and I cannot wait.

Unfortunately, I have some bad news I have to share with you: due to problems with the cover, The Quiet Game‘s paperback edition may be a little delayed in its release. I will try to rectify these problems before Wednesday, but if the print edition is delayed I am terribly sorry and I do hope you’ll forgive me for it.

The good news is the e-book version will be along on time, and I have no doubt it’ll be spectacular.

Whichever version you’re planning on reading, I hope you are as excited as I am and I hope you enjoy reading The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones.

3 days left!

3 days left!

Good morning Blogosphere! And as the title suggests, there’s only 3 days left till The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones, is released to the world for your reading pleasure.

You know, it’s been an exciting past couple of weeks. I’ve received lots of encouragement, and I’ve reason to believe that a good amount–two-hundred copies or more–may be sold in the first week. I can’t give you any information on what I’m basing that on, except for encouraging statements from family, friends, and acquaintances. And if I can figure out how to send a message to all my friends on Facebook, it may be a lot more than that!

I hope, at least.

I have to go online and do the final preps on CreateSpace for the release Wednesday. Until then, hope you’re as excited as I am!

Blog on you all later. In the meantime, I have work to do.

4 days to go.

4 days to go.

Cable, Internet, and phone are back people, and so am I, with my constant reminders that my collection of short stories, The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones, coming out on July 17th, 4 days from now.

Or maybe 3 days and 2 hours, but you know what, that’s not important. It’s 4 days for me anyway. It’ll be 3 when I wake up tomorrow morning!

As such, I want to thank everyone for the constant support I’ve been given. Plenty of people have given me encouragement and told me how excited they are to read the book. Or at least they’re excited to buy a copy and have me autograph it, because they can’t deal with scary stories.

Still, I like that they want to buy a copy. And I’m sure some of them–most of them–will read the book and write a review on Amazon, which may encourage more people to read it, and then lead to more sales and more reviews. I love the whole cycle, don’t you?

But like I was saying, thank you all for your support. I’m working hard to establish myself in a rapidly-changing industry, and all the likes, comments, followers, and just plain support I get from readers, friends, and family every day keeps me going and encourages me to write.

See you all in the morning. I’ll have plenty to talk about tomorrow!

5 days to go.

5 days to go.

At home, the cable, phone, and Internet is still out, no thanks to a storm on Wednesday that knocked all three out. I have a feeling that it’ll all be restored tomorrow during the Sabbath, when traditional jewish homes like my own don’t use cable, phones, or the Internet. Wouldn’t that be typical?

But enough about that. it’s five days till The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones is available, and I cannot wait! Already I’ve had several people come up to me or  email me or message me or whatever saying they cannot wait to either download the book or get it in the mail. As for me, I’m just excited that my book is coming out, that people want to read it, and all this hard work I’ve been putting in since I was ten is paying off. In five days, I can consider myself a published writer with a book on the shelves.

Or on Amazon. It’s print-on-demand, so if a lot of people and a couple of libraries order copies, I guess I can call it print-on-demand then.

Assuming the Internet’s working tomorrow, I’ll write another post for the four-day mark. Until then, I’m counting down the hours!

Coming out in 6 days. Who's pumped?

Coming out in 6 days. Who’s pumped?

I had a special post prepared for yesterday, the one-week mark before The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones came out. But there was a huge thunderstorm and I lost my cable, Internet, and phone service, which made me unable to write and post the article. And it was going to be a good one too, with a short clip from the movie The Ring. You know, “seven days”? I did manage to get that clip on Twitter and Facebook though, so that’s something.

Anyway, there’s less than a week till The Quiet Game is available for download and/or purchase. The culmination of eight months of hard work and editing, it’ll be available as a print-paperback for $5.50 and as an e-book for $1.29. Five short stories, all pretty scary (or at the very least, pretty weird). I’m really looking forward to putting it out next week and I hope everybody enjoys reading it.

If you are interested in reading The Quiet Game and would like to know more, pleas visit the Short Story Collections page for a brief look at what is offered. I garauntee it’ll be worth the read. And if you would like to celebrate with me when The Quiet Game comes out, I’ll be throwing an online party on this blog the day The Quiet Game comes out. What will be there? Plenty: digital food and drinks, funny, groovy, and scary videos, and of course a link to the guest of honor: The Quiet Game‘s Amazon page.

Until then, look forward for more countdown posts and news from yours truly!

I was reading a post on Self-Published Authors Helping Other Authors the other day and one of the authors, Ruth Nordin, suggested that if I were to have a page for my books, I should have individual pages for my books, or at least individual books for each series and each stand alone novel. I decided that was a good idea, so I went ahead and created three new pages, one for short story collections, one for the Reborn City series, and one for Snake.

I think this was a very good idea, and I’m glad I did it. The page for short story collections leaves me a chance to put in more entries if I ever put out another collection of short stories (and there’s always a possibility of that, believe me), and so does the page for Reborn City and its sequels. And as for the page for Snake, I only wrote a fuller description for the entry, but I think it’s more enticing than what I had before, distinguishes the Snake as a protagonist and lets people know what the conflict is without giving too much away. I rather like it.

If you want to read the pages, please scroll up and look at the entries next to Home and About Me. They should be there.

Coming out in two weeks. Who's excited?

Coming out in two weeks. Who’s excited?

As I prepare for a wonderful Independence Day tomorrow, I’m also preparing for something just as great in 14 days. The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones will be coming out in 2 weeks, and I am super-excited. Plenty of people have told me that they cannot wait to read it. You know what? I cannot wait for them to read it!

It’s been a crazy process since December 2012, when I started writing what would become the five short stories appearing in The Quiet Game. I’ve published a few short stories in some magazines and one on Amazon, I’ve learned to use Photoshop and CreateSpace, I’ve waited for copyrights to come through (sometimes very late), I’ve bugged people to get back to me on my short stories and tell me what I should change, I’ve created a book trailer and a Facebook page for the book, and now I’m counting down the days until The Quiet Game comes out.

So what do I hope will happen in two weeks? I hope that I’ll have some decent sales, a couple of good reviews and maybe one or two average or bad reviews to convince potential readers that those reviews weren’t just written by fans who want to make me happy. I hope that friends will come up to me and say, “Oh Rami I read your book” and then give me an honest response on what they thought, rather than saying “Oh I bought a copy, haven’t read it yet though” or “I’ve been meaning to get a copy but I’ve been busy/I forgot.” (I’ve gotten that response once or twice for past works).

But most of all, I’m hoping that people will read the book and tell me what they think. I think that’s every writer’s sincerest desire when their books are published.

Well, we’ll see in two weeks. Until then, I’m counting down the days and spreading the word.

I’ve been blogging here on WordPress for nearly two years (the second anniversary of Rami Ungar the Writer is actually a month and a day away, believe it or not). A lot has happened in that time. I started college, a job, and a new life. I began the publishing process for Reborn City, wrote The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones, which will be coming out in 16 days, I published several short stories and one or two articles, became a writer for Self-Published Authors Helping Other Authors, met my roommate for the apartment I’m getting in August, read all the Hannibal Lecter books, got into The Daily Show, and a few other things.

And witness to most of this is my blog. I’ve been able to record my musings, review movies, TV shows, and books, update people on my writing, and add links to the places my short stories are published. I’ve made some great friends through the blogosphere, a couple of whom have helped me with my writing my being kind enough to offer feedback on my work (by the way, both of those friends are Canadian, so I’ll give them a shout-out by wishing them a happy Canada Day!). I’ve met people who have offered me wonderful advice, given me their own thoughts, and even sometimes argued with me on this or that topic. I even had nearly two-thousand Anne Rice fans reading my review of The Wolf Gift, and I’m happy to say the majority of them reacted positively to it.

You know, my life has been enriched a lot by blogging. Sure at times I was lucky just to get a single person to read the posts I was writing. But these days I’m proud to say I have a little bit of a following going on, and I’m glad that you all keep reading my posts. Sure I lose a few followers every now and then, but most of them keep coming back (God only knows why) and it touches me deeply that you want to read what I’m writing. Thank you so much.

new TCG cover

I’m about to start on a new but related adventure: publishing and selling copies of a published collection of short stories. I have trepidation, excitement, doubts, and confidence all going through my system. But whatever happens, I have a feeling that my blog, and the people who read it, are going to be behind it every step of the way.

Oh, and speaking of publishing, remember Daisy, the short story I published on Amazon and Smashwords, not only as a promotion for The Quiet Game but also to see if anyone would read it? Well, it looks like 150 people have downloaded and read it, and I even got one review that gave it an “average” grade. Have no idea if that’s an indication of how The Quiet Game will do (I’m personally hoping it’ll do much better), but it’s still got me excited. Perhaps in the future I’ll have 150 downloads on the first day!

Have you downloaded a copy yet?

Have you downloaded a copy yet?

Off to go jog now. Once again, thanks for reading my work. I really appreciate it.

new TCG cover

More good news after the SCOTUS verdict! The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones, will be available to purchase in both print paperback and ebook format. I’m very excited about The Quiet Game getting published soon, as it’s been the culmination of nearly seven months’ worth of writing, designing, advertising, and just plain waiting for the copyright to come in.

For those of you unfamiliar with The Quiet Game, it’s a collection of short stories I’ve written that I’m putting out this July 17 for purchase. And some of these tales I’m going to be publishing are quite scary: in Addict, a man with sex addiction tries going cold turkey, only to be haunted by horrifying hallucinations; in I’m Going To Be The Next James Bond, several kids go into an abandoned hospital with a dark history, and find out the history is very much alive; an autistic child gets to experience true terror In The Lady Ogre’s Den; a senator finds that his ancestor’s sins are following him around in the form of a vengeful spirit in Samson Weiss’s Curse; and finally, there’s a game that’s more perilous and more deadly than any game ever played. The Quiet Game.

You can sign up for the Facebook page here, and join nearly 75 people to get instant news and updates, and you can check out the trailer below if you’re not sure whether or not you want to buy a copy. I hope you have a nice day and that the thought of my collection doesn’t scare you too badly.

Of course, if it does, I wouldn’t mind that. Mwha ha ha!

Ladies and gentlemen, you remember the cover I created for the e-book version of The Quiet Game:

TQG cover

I was especially proud of this cover. I created it all by myself, using just a photo taken on a cold, snowy night, Photoshop, and the advice of experienced assistants at Ohio State’s Digital Union. So when I learned how to use CreateSpace, I wanted to bring The Quiet Game to print paperback. But at the same time, I didn’t want to give up that cool cover. It’s awesome!

So I found a cover that would allow me to keep my first cover. And here it is:

new TCG cover

You like it? I wasn’t sure what color I was supposed to use for the back cover, but when I settled on Bright Orange, I saw a Halloween motif and went with it. I also put the words on the back in a black font, so that it’ll be easier to read.

And you know what this means, right? The Quiet Game will be available in both print and e-book version! And they’ll both be very affordable. So I hope you’re able to buy a copy when it comes out in…oh, how many days was it again?…27 days! Get excited people, because it’s coming out soon.