Tagged: Ten Little Astronauts

Ten Little Astronauts One-Year Anniversary

Ten Little Astronauts was released one year ago today! I’ve got a post about that over on the publisher’s website, and don’t want to repeat too much of that over here, but I think it’s worth just saying – once again – thanks to everybody who helped get the book to where it is today. The book has had a great response and is incredibly close to 100 ratings over on Goodreads: it could well be the first of my works to reach that milestone!

Up until now I’ve tried to post updates about book events and whatnot on Unbound directly as well as over here, but the further Ten Little Astronauts‘ initial launch fades into the past, the more important it becomes to have some other way of reaching people. With that in mind, I’m going to do my best to put out regular newsletters from 2020 onwards.

If you haven’t already heard about them (and it’s not something I’ve ever put a huge amount of effort into promoting), my newsletters are a summary of everything I’ve done in the previous month, sent out (ideally) once a month. You can also subscribe to notifications whenever I release a new work, though in practice I don’t tend to send those out as it usually coincides with a regular newsletter: there’s not a lot of sense sending two emails. I’ve neglected to send one the last few months, but if anybody is reading this and thinking “Hey, I would like to keep up with this sort of thing (but don’t want to have to sift through loads of social media notifications)!” then please do sign up: having a few more people on the list would do wonders keeping me motivated to send them out!

Ten Little Astronauts in Unbound Sci-Fi Bundle

Unbound has opened up a special Christmas Shop of books and bundles that would make good festive gifts, and Ten Little Astronauts is among them! This bundle would be perfect for anybody you know who loves sci-fi so much they’d definitely get through more than one book before New Year.

This is currently the second most ordered bundle, which I realise isn’t saying much as the shop has only just opened and most have yet to see any orders at all, but still seems like a pretty promising start. Most books have an RRP of around £10, so four for £25.99 is a bit of a bargain. Also, if you order before the 17th of December (from within the UK) the bundle should arrive in time for Christmas.

Even if you’re not shopping for sci-fi, do check out the full selection of books and bundles: there’s quite a range on offer!

Interview on Adventure Games Podcast

A while ago I did an interview with Seoirse Dunbar of the Adventure Games Podcast, and you can now listen to it here!

If you haven’t already been following my interactive fiction, this should be a really good introduction to it. Even if you have, there’s still some new stuff including plans for a sequel to Blacklight 1995. It also touches upon Ten Little Astronauts pretty heavily, so there’s something for everyone!

The podcast can also be found on iTunes, Spotify and PodBean, among other platforms.

Three Bits of Ten Little Astronauts News

If you live in Winchester, you might have noticed something on the High Street recently…

That’s right! Ten Little Astronauts is front and centre in Waterstones’ shop window, advertising An Evening With Damon Wakes on June 10th. This is quite a milestone for me, but it’s not the only news! Continue reading

An Evening With Damon Wakes – June 10th

I’ll be at Waterstones in Winchester (the High Street one) 6pm on June 10th to talk about Ten Little Astronauts.

If you missed the launch last month, this is the perfect opportunity to stop by and celebrate the publication of the book! Tickets are just £2.00 and refreshments will be served.

Do feel free to come along even if you did make it to the launch too! This event is organised as a sort of interview, so it’s likely to be a little different to the last one.

Ten Little Astronauts BookBub Promotion

If you get your books from Apple, now’s your chance to grab Ten Little Astronauts for just 99p!

This is down to a BookBub deal that, surprisingly, has also seen the novella reach its highest ever sales ranking on Amazon, despite it not actually being on offer over there as far as I can tell. It’s also seen a sudden influx of ratings on Goodreads, so if you’ve read it but not left a review (on Amazon, Goodreads, anywhere else) then this would be a great time to do that.

Ten Little Astronauts is getting a lot of attention at the moment – a few words from you would do wonders to help people decide whether it’s something they want to read!

Ten Little Astronauts Launch Party Video

here’s the video from the Ten Little Astronauts launch party, very kindly recorded by Alex Carter (Lexica Films). It all went smoothly in the end, and it was great to see so many people who supported the book while it was crowdfunding, as well as so many who’d only discovered it since!

I had quite a lot of help getting this together, primarily from Crispin and the staff at P & G Wells, but also from Lynda Robertson and (again) Alex Carter who were kind enough to lend a hand on the evening. A huge thanks to everyone who helped make this happen, even if it was just by being there!

I Can Pirate Every Book You Write

Here’s how (and why I won’t).

Not so long ago the whole literary community rallied together to try and take down a particularly brazen (or possibly just particularly dim) book pirate, and while that was truly heartwarming to see, I also got the impression that many of the people involved felt as though the problem would go away if they simply tackled that one site. Just to blow that idea out of the water, I’m going to tell you how I personally – me, the guy who has to copy and paste the £ symbol because he can’t work out how to type it – can pirate any book out there.

1) I can Google  it.

If anybody, anywhere in the world has made your book available on a pirate site, there’s a good chance I can find it. It’s just that simple.

You can hunt around yourself and send out DMCA takedowns to anywhere hosting your book, but the more popular it is the more likely it’s being offered somewhere for free, and I only need to find one copy before you do. Also, good luck getting anything taken off The Pirate Bay: they’ve been running since 2003 despite the best efforts of entire governments.

2) I can ask for it.

Yeah, I see you doing this. Obviously I’m no Suzanne Collins, and by January 7th my book had been out less than a month: chances are nobody had made a pirate copy available at that point. Maybe they still haven’t. Who knows? Continue reading

Ten Little Astronauts Launch Party – April 25th

The launch party for Ten Little Astronauts is coming this month! It’s 6:30 – 9:00pm at P&G Wells on April 25th. It’s a lovely independent bookshop a literal stone’s throw from Jane Austen’s House (though probably not the house you’re thinking of).

I’m hoping to get an idea of the numbers before the event (and a guest list, in case there are more people interested than will fit into the shop), so send an RSVP to the email address in the image above if you want to be sure of a space. I’ve also set up a Facebook event, if you’re one of those people who needs Mark Zuckerberg to send you a reminder before you’ll turn up to anything.

If you’re reading this but have somehow never heard of Ten Little Astronauts at all so far, it’s a hard sci-fi murder mystery inspired by Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. It’s got a promotional video filmed on board Britain’s last surviving WWII submarine, a cover by the same designer behind Barack Obama’s paperback memoir, and has gone down well with just about everybody who’s taken the time to review it.

So do come along! It’s set to be a fantastic evening.

Ten Little Astronauts Review by Michael J. Ritchie

Another brilliant review of Ten Little Astronauts, this one by Michael J. Ritchie. Here’s a sample:

Trapped in interstellar space, trillions of miles from home and with no chance of rescue, the ten astronauts must deal with the fact that one among them is a murderer. With no way of being sure who it is, they agree that they can’t go back to sleep until they’ve worked it out. But then more of them die, and as the bodies pile up, so does the tension. They just have to hope that the little grey cells work just as well in space…

As a premise, it works wonderfully. The original novel is of course one of the finest examples of mystery writing in history, with ten people isolated on an island and killed off one by one. The “closed circle” plot is common in the murder mystery genre, and here it’s dialled up to eleven, with the characters entirely isolated from everything and everyone else. Although occasionally erratically paced, the tension ramps up perfectly and you begin to question your own thoughts, because as soon as you think you’ve worked out what’s going on, the rug is pulled from under you and things prove to not be as they seem. A stellar retelling.

Find the rest on Fell From Fiction: “Ten Little Astronauts” by Damon L. Wakes (2018)