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Posts Tagged ‘ebooks’

October 2023: These books will put a SPELL on you 🎃

Monday, October 16th, 2023

If the broom fits… fly it to a bookstore!

RED HOTEL, RED DECEPTION, RED CHAOS

ALL. IN. ONE.

Amazon
Barnes and Noble

JACK IS BACK

You asked, we listened.
COMING SOON IN PAPERBACK!

Click the cover to learn more!

When Men Betray is the first book of fiction from author, lecturer, and political insider Webb Hubbell. A departure from his previous book, Friends in High Places, an account of his rise and fall in Little Rock, Hubbell crafts a deft narrative of mystery and political intrigue. Set in a fictionalized version of his home town of Little Rock, Arkansas, readers will be immersed into the steamy world behind the southern BBQ and antebellum facade-a seedy underbelly of secrets and betrayals. Clever readers may recognize the colorful personalities and locales of the Arkansas political scene.

PLANNING YOUR 2024 TBR?

Don’t forget to add these to your list!

After a highly publicized fall from grace, James Henry Ferguson attempts to flee from the chaos and ends up in a community that has been neglected and ignored by everyone, rural Ham, Mississippi—a place of abject poverty, the neighborhood is commonly referred to as “Around the Way.”

When a troubling discovery is made, the entire neighborhood is rocked, and “Mr. Jimmy” is forced to confront his own past in order to help the community have a future.

Police chief William Templeton is still trying to come to terms with being a widower when a local woman’s body is found with an old gold coin in her pocket. He is stunned to learn an identical coin was discovered on his wife, Catherine. Historian and Blackbeard expert, Eva Knightly is just as perplexed by this revelation.

As the two team up, secrets are revealed and William and Eva find it hard to ignore the growing attraction between them; but in order to have a future, they’ll have to look to the past to keep Eva from being the victim of a modern day killer.

Click each cover to learn more!

Spring Cleaning MEGA SALE!

Thursday, April 6th, 2023

Happy Spring, readers! For the entire months of April AND May, we have the biggest sale happening to put the spring back in your step. Get your ebook copy of any (or all) of the following titles for only $1.99!

We love a good series… here are a few of ours that are on sale!

Click through to see the rest of our MEGA sale happening now until the end of May!

And yes, this ebook sale is happening just about EVERYWHERE! From Amazon to Barnes and Noble, we’ve got you covered.

Save on New EBooks with IPG’s 50th Anniversary Sale

Friday, May 14th, 2021

To celebrate their fifty years in business, our distribution company, Independent Publishers Group, is holding a sale on qualifying ebooks across all major retailers. Below are the Beaufort titles that will be discounted until June 30, 2021 on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and Apple Books.

46 Days by Brew Davis

46 Days chronicles the trials, successes, joys, and frustrations of Jennifer Pharr Davis’s record-winning Appalachian Trail thru-hike through the eyes of her husband, Brew Davis. Experience the trek with Jen and Brew as they battle shin splints and a stomach scare that threatens to end the attempt early, encounter wildlife at every turn, and meet the colorful cast of characters that help Jen complete her journey.

Click here to download the ebook for $0.99.

The Big Ten of Grammar by William B. Bradshaw

If you’re anything like the rest of us, you struggle with age-old grammatical issues. In this practical and easy-to-understand handbook, Dr. William B. Bradshaw identifies the ten most common errors in English grammar and helps you to recognize and correct these mistakes, enabling you to write and speak with greater clarity in your personal and professional life.

Click here to download the ebook for $0.99.

Bitterroot by Steven Faulkner

Using the letters of the 19th-century explorer Pierre Jean De Smet, Steven Faulkner and his eighteen-year-old son, Alex, follow De Smet across the High Plains to the fur trappers’ rendezvous on the Green River, then on to the Lewis and Clark Trail. By road, foot, mountain bike, and canoe, Steven and Alex experience the vast landscape and try to capture an understanding of the Wild Northwest.

Click here to download the ebook for $0.99.

Food Jobs & Food Jobs 2 by Irena Chalmers

Do you want to turn your passion for food into a career? Take a bite out of the food world with help from the experts in this first-of-its-kind What Color Is Your Parachute? for food related careers.

Click here to download the Food Jobs ebook for $0.99, and click here to download Food Jobs 2 for $0.99.

Four Boots One Journey by Jeff Alt

Jeff Alt takes you vicariously along the John Muir Trail, on an entertaining adventure, with his new wife, Beth. Jeff convinces Beth, a woman who prefers hotels, hot showers and warm beds to chuck her domesticated ways and hike over 218-miles which leads to lots of humorous moments. Together, they traverse three national parks, including the highest mountain in the contiguous United States, Mt. Whitney.

Click here to download the ebook for $0.99.

Get Your Kids Hiking by Jeff Alt

Hiking is a great way to relax, connect with nature, and enjoy time with your family. Bringing your kids along can be rewarding for you and for them, but it can also add new challenges and concerns to your trip. Get Your Kids Hiking is loaded with everything you need to know to hit the trail with kids; from gear to simple proven techniques that will make your hike safe and fun. Written with both the novice and the seasoned hiker in mind, Jeff Alt provides all the information you need to take your child out on the trail.

Click here to download the ebook for $0.99.

Live From Mongolia by Patricia Sexton

Thirty years old and a rising star at a Wall Street investment bank, Patricia wanted nothing more than to work as a foreign correspondent. So, that’s just what she did, moving to Mongolia after landing an internship at the country’s national TV station. Live from Mongolia follows Patricia’s unlikely journey from Wall Street to Ulan Bator.

Click here to download the ebook for $0.99.

Unlikely Pilgrim by Al Regnery

Two middle-aged men, fast friends, make eleven foreign trips—pilgrimages you might call them —to parts of the world rich in the history of Christianity. The trips combine adventure, strenuous physical activity, exhilaration, discovery, and friendship. Told in a lighthearted and often amusing style, An Unlikely Pilgrim provides a vivid and colorful picture of parts of the world often out of the range of American tourists, but deep in both ancient and current geopolitical, historical, and cultural wealth.

Click here to download the ebook for $1.99.

A Walk for Sunshine by Jeff Alt

Jeff Alt takes you along every step of his 2,160-mile Appalachian Trail adventure filled with humorous, frightening, and inspirational stories including bears, bugs, blisters, captivating characters, skunk bed mates, and hilarious food cravings. Alt’s adventure inspired an annual fundraiser which has raised over $500,000 for Sunshine, the home where his brother lives.

Click here to download the ebook for $0.99.

Waterwalk by Steven Faulkner

Steven Faulkner and his 16-year-old son Justin are paddling and portaging their way along the 1000-mile, 1673, Mississippi discovery route of French explorers Marquette and Joliet. Waterwalk is a triple journey: a journey into the heart of this continent 300 years ago—as depicted in Marquette’s own journal, a modern exploration of the quiet waterways that weave their way through busy, rush-around America, and a voyage through the heart of a father-son relationship.

Click here to download the ebook for $0.99.

Granted, it is on my bookshelf…

Wednesday, June 26th, 2013

First, the info dump: Last week, Amazon Publishing had its very first million-copy-selling author. The imprint is AmazonCrossing, the author is Oliver Pötzch, and the figures are the combined print, audio, and eBook sales of his Hangman’s Daughter series. Pötzch’s books were originally published in his native German and subsequently acquired and translated by Amazon for digital distribution.

Now, the question: What does this mean? Smarter people than I can investigate the business ramifications of this. But my research to make heads or tails of this development has brought me up against a lot less examination and a lot more feelings. Amazon seems to be a lynchpin. It’s at the center of the push and pull between print and digital; and the loudest voices are emotional ones.

I’ve written about this before: I love a good brick-and-mortar bookstore, and I love holding a physical book in my hands. (And perhaps, selfishly, I love showing off my small library to people as well.) But what I love more is people reading. And right now, we can see teens buying more books more quickly than ever, and it’s all thanks to them embracing eBooks and discovering reading material through social networking. We’re going to get a generation of literate readers because good books are more accessible and kids are talking about them.

“You’re a hopeless romantic,” said Faber. “It would be funny if it were not serious. It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the ‘parlor families’ today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisors, but are not. No,no it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type or receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. Of course you couldn’t know this, of course you still can’t understand what i mean when i say all this. You are intuitively right, that’s what counts.”

—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

When it comes to reading, it’s not the mode of delivery, it’s the content.

—Michael

Your New BEAU: The Great Reading Race

Tuesday, April 10th, 2012

I never thought I’d ask this, but is reading more really better?

Before I get ahead of myself, I have been scanning some stats from this study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project on e-reading, highlighting this key point: people with Kindles and Nooks et al. read an average of 24 books a year, whereas print readers consume an average of 15 books in a year. And, well, as an exclusively print reader, I feel a little slighted. What are they trying to say about me? That I am not as voracious a reader? That I am slow? How dare they insinuate based on their “statistics” and “averages.” And just what 24 books are these e-reading people devouring in a year? Probably only a few books of comparable substance and 21 romance novels. Yeah.

What they’re really saying, it seems: print slows the average reader down.

Which brings me to my quantity v. quality question. What’s wrong with my 15 book average? Things move so fast in this digital age; everyone wants what they want to appear before them in a fraction of a second, and the faster you can move the more you can get done, more than the other guy, and you always want to stay ahead of the other guy. Maybe print readers don’t run through as many books, but maybe we get more out of the books we read.

And maybe not. Let’s not stereotype. There are plenty of thoughtful e-readers out there and thoughtless print-readers. My point is, I guess, what’s with the numbers comparison? Just how many books I complete in a year should not be a contest; it should not earn you some merit badge. Reading shouldn’t be a race. As much as Joel Stein thinks adults are wasting precious time reading YA books when they could be catching up on “3,000 years of fiction written for adults,” I would here like to grant the world permission to read what it likes, at whatever pace suits it, and get out of it what it will.

And, of course, the requisite advertisement, promoting the love of print: Watch a Book Being Born. Think back to a time when creating the written word for circulation required significant labor (hand-typesetting, hand-sewing, and even, before the printing press, hand-copying). Think about the time it took to just create a printed book. And consider giving that book as much time in your hands as it spent in the hands of its maker.

Slow down. It’s not a race.

BEAUstie Boy – Gary Shapiro, You Changed My Life

Thursday, January 19th, 2012

It’s me, the other intern, and the only boy Beaufort has seen for many many internship moons.  It only took a few hours for the past interns, yet seven weeks to the day later here I am also tossing my hat into the blogosphere.  I can blame it on all the amazing project opportunities that have gotten thrown my way but in reality we all know that I have continually failed to come up with a compelling topic and a crafty moniker (which we definitely now know that I have still failed to do
Beaustie Boy? Really?)  Just when I thought, “Aha, I’m ready to write my blog about Pulitzer Book predictions and book lists!” Word Press blacked out before I could say “The Marriage Plot.”

One of the daily tasks that I have been performing for the past month and change is to track marketing updates for most of our authors.  One name that floods into my inbox morning after morning is Gary Shapiro, CEO of CEA (hehe).  For weeks now I have been perusing and filing away news articles Gary has written about SOPA and PIPA, which at first simply had my Spanish speaking mind thinking of soups and pipes.  After about 50 more articles over the course of a month I figured I should know what I was reading about and, evidently, what everyone else was talking about.

The Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act have elicited some strong responses from Senators and Congressmen to bloggers and your everyday Google searcher.  On Wednesday, major websites like Wikipedia and Word Press shut their digital doors.  Google even prompted visitors with a petition to send to Congress.  The day of darkness forced everyone to imagine a world without Internet (or a trip down memory lane to the pre-Apple days).  While most are against intellectual property theft and multimedia piracy, both acts just do not provide enough protection against false accusations with potential for abuse of the legislation to become out of control.  In one of his most recent articles for Fox, Gary even declares victory for the American people, whose collective voice was too resounding to ignore.  Essentially, we all told Congress to put that in their PIPA and smoke it.

Now that most of us are breathing a collective sigh of relief, we undoubtedly have spent some since this bill hit the floor thinking about how the Internet has become a crutch for contemporary society.  Increase of social networking has also increased our desire for anonymity and arguably decreased our interpersonal social networking.  I’m not saying we should regress to the days of carrier pigeons – but remember when we didn’t text?  Remember I invited you to my birthday over the phone instead of a Facebook event?  Now thanks to the Internet, I no longer have to trek down to Tompkins Square Park to check out my books from the library I can just get them online and have them delivered to my Kindle in seconds! Cool, but sad.  The Internet has proven how malleable we are by consistently changing the way we communicate with each other and by the toll it is has taken on many businesses, not just publishing.

For now, the Internet still remains as powerful as the public chooses to make it.  We have avoided possibly catastrophic consequences by preventing SOPA and PIPA.  Instead of wiping our brows and muttering thanks to the Congress gods before moving on to the next best thing, we should start remembering how we survived without the Internet in ye olde days.  I know I still go to the library, still buy physical books, and still call you to invite you to my birthday party.

George may have been a few decades off, but maybe it’s a matter of time until Big Brother really is watching you.

Just a thought, albeit a creepy one.

le BEAU mot: Currently Reading, Books about Books

Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010

Readers are a unique species. They are a strange mixture of recluse and social butterfly. At times, they spend hours in seeming solitude, accompanied only by a sheaf of glued together pages. But simply ask about the reader’s latest literary adventure and you will unlock a torrent of thoughts and ideas that is often difficult, if not impossible, to stop. Beware gathering a group of this curious species together and introduce the topic of say, contemporary literature, or (heaven forbid) ebooks. The ensuing flood of conversation will be almost overwhelming.

At some point, some reader somewhere had the brilliant idea to set down all of these thoughts (or as many could fit into a 100,000 word manuscript) down onto paper for other readers to, well, read. And thus was born a new art form: the book about books. Reading these books is often like going to your favorite “secret” spot and discovering the remnants of dozens of people just like you who love this spot as well: initials carved into trees, tiny treasures buried in the ground, pictures tumbling in the wind. It can be disturbing—a sanctuary invaded—or it can be an epiphany: you are not alone.

These books often remind me that reading is not just a solitary activity. Each book you read ties you to a dozen, one hundred, a thousand, a million people who have all read the same words. These books celebrate the love of reading, through personal accounts of readers, recommendations for new books (that currency of the reading community), or new tidbits of information you never knew about classic or famous books.

A book that does the latter in rare form is Once Again to Zelda, which tells the stories behind the dedications for many well known books including The Brothers Karamazov, Valley of the Dolls, Atlas Shrugged, The Bell Jar, and The Great Gatsby to name a few. Most people probably don’t give much thought to a dedication, often skipping over it entirely to get to the “good parts”. But as the book’s author, Marlene Wagman-Geller tells us, the dedication may be the most revealing part. And in her book, she plays “dedication detective” to uncover the personal stories behind what is often the most enigmatic page of a book.

In the category of book recommendations, every year brings out a new tome purporting to tell you exactly what books you should read to be cultured, become a writer, be as smart as a professor, and a dozen other claims. But perhaps the most prolific is the Book Lust series by librarian Nancy Pearl. The original book was organize in a fun, somewhat haphazard way partially by genre and partly by categories such as First Novels, countries, and authors named Alice. The series has expanded to include a journal, Book Crush for kids and teens, and Book Lust to Go for travel reading.

But perhaps my favorite recent release in the books about books category is Bound to Last, a collection edited by Sean Manning. The book is partially in answer to the ever-present ebook debate; celebrating the physical act of reading as much as the mental. The collection contains stories from thirty authors writing about their “most cherished book”. For Anthony Swofford, it was the copy of Albert Camus’ The Stranger that traveled with him during his tour of duty in the Persian Gulf, which led to his bestselling memoir, Jarhead. For Joyce Maynard, it was her father’s bible that he read every day. And for Shahriar Mandanipour, it was the copy of Das Kapital that was a crime to possess. Each of these books as a physical object have meaning to their owners beyond the words printed on the page; they are totems of memory.

These books and others are important reminders that books will never “die” as long as there are writers willing to put their words on paper and publishers willing to bring those words to stores. Because whether they enjoy print or digital, readers are not an endangered species.