Even though it’s available for free, I listed it for a price, $4.99. I did this because:

People have an aversion to free content. The idea is that if the work was better, the content would not be free. In a real marketplace, I don’t want my work viewed negatively because it’s free.

Net-savvy folks can still get it for free elsewhere, so I don’t feel bad.

As an experiment. I’ve seen data from other people, but I want to see it for myself.

I wanna pay off my goddamn student loans faster. Ever little bit helps.

So, if you downloaded Disappearances from here, feedbooks, or my site and you liked it and you’ve got five bucks to help me get rid of my student debt faster, please buy my book. If you liked it, but don’t wanna pay for it, that’s okay, too. You can buy my next book, s.k., which is gonna be awesome.

Disappearances tells the story of a young man mentally disconnected. Early one morning he’s awoken from a restless sleep by a plane crash outside his apartment window. Rushing down to the scene, the young man is unable to find anyone – no people, no rescue workers, no survivors. He is alone. Everyone he loves, everyone else on the planet as far as he knows, has disappeared.

Frank’s task is to listen to the young man’s story, help him discover the secrets behind the disappearance of everyone he loves, and most importantly, to reconnect the young man with the rest of the human race. But before the young man can do that, he needs to learn the most important lessons about himself, his father, and how to move forward with his life.

In preparation to launch a new title, there is an endless list of preparations after the story is finished – extensive editing and cover design are first among those. I’ve listed people I’d like to thank in the Author’s Note after the novel, but there is one more person I’ve recently added that I’d like to personally thank here: Levi Montgomery.

Levi Montgomery, aside from being a self-published author and blogger, is also a photographer. I originally approached Levi in hopes of finding a fitting cover photo for Disappearances. He told me that he was interested in helping me, but would first have to read the novel before he knew if he had a suitable photograph. Thus, I sent him my novel and held my breath.

Barely a few days later, Levi responded to me. He’d already read my book in that short time, and although he regretted he did not have a fitting photograph for my book, he sent me a list of every single typo and error he found in the novel. In short, Levi provided another edit of my novel for me. He asked for nothing.

I’m completely blown away by the amount of work Levi put into editing my novel and I can’t thank him enough. Once Disappearances is released, if you like the work and want to contribute to those who made it happen, you can support Levi through purchasing his work, which he sells on his site. If you’d like to support me, you can help me spread my book around the net. But please buy a one of his novels from him, too.

So now I’m in the final editing stages of the work, trying to tease out extra awesomeness from Levi’s suggestions. I’ve also created the cover for book, though I’m still tweaking it. Instead of going with a photograph, as I originally intended, I decided to go with this design:

(clicking thumbnails opens larger images – warning: big files!)

I feel like it conveys the sense of the book in a way that a photograph could not.

Please check back soon – Disappearances will be a big release for me, my biggest so far, and I can’t wait to serve it up, all hot, awesome, and willing.

Thank you for reading.