Forrest Aguirre, in the Leaves

Friends and fellow book lovers, my novel, Heraclix & Pomp, is now available for preorder and can be added to your Wishlist at Amazon.com! If I've ever spoken a kind word to you, 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 few who have been following my short stories and anthologies over the years. Thus, it is critical to send out a 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, either), but please add it to your wishlist. Then, please add it to your "to be read" list at Booklikes or your other book-lovers' website of choice. Please ask 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 an account at "that other site," please add it to your to-be-read list there. If you have a facebook page, please share the news there. And ask your friends 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 in front of more readers. 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. I'll post that one more time in another blog entry, as a reminder of how utterly cool the cover is.

I will be randomly giving away a couple signed copies of the hardcover here at Booklikes, as well as that other site, as soon as I have physical copies in hand. I wish I could give all of the great reviewers here at Booklikes a free copy, but then I'd be in the hole for a whole lot of money, because there are so many great reviewers here. 

In closing, I want to thank you all for the wonderful reviews you've written in the past and some of the awesome discussions I've had with many of you about books we both love, books we both hate, and those we disagree on. Being here is an enriching part of my life as a reader.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, on Google+, and at my blog, forrestaguirre.blogspot.com.