The Afternet: June 2011

Thursday, 9 June 2011

A Century Approaches

Sales of The Afternet are approaching 100 copies, which would be very satisfying given the sheer difficulty of promoting an online book by an unknown author (outside his family at any rate). With the book now published on Smashwords, a whole new audience has come on stream and hopefully they will all be telling everyone they know to read it. Now up to 6 reviews on Amazon, and all of them 5 star! Must be doing something right. Through Smashwords, which currently has the book in Kindle format, iBooks and Sony e-reader should be available shortly. Spread the word, the word, the word (that's an echo)...

Read the latest review of The Afternet

Bruce Fellows reviews The Afternet in The R&W Directory:

FANTASTIC!

So, what to read on your Kindle, a noun so recent that dictionaries list it only as a verb? For something so new and fantastic, only something new and fantastic will do and you won’t find a more fantastic setting than the Pearly Gates. St Peter’s finally had enough of accepting and rejecting the applicants and slopes off for a snout and a spot of fishing in the Styx. The dead congregate and Heaven is about to get into a Hell of a mess. Peter Empringham’s first e book, The Afternet, chronicles what happens next. A massive computer (known as The Afternet), set up by the all-knowing One in anticipation of Peter’s throwing in the towel, starts operating. A blink of an eye later, in terms of eternity, and the Afternet goes down. A pair of operators is needed. God selects one: Geoffrey, a 7^th century Cumbrian turnip puller. The Devil picks the other: Marcel, a 17^th century French libertine. Unsurprisingly, they fail to un-crash the Afternet, so a couple of computer geek unfortunates are plucked untimely from this vale of tears and Geoffrey and Marcel think they’re sorted. Of course they’re not. Empringham’s tale is a bizarre conjunction of jumbled eras, outlandish people and weird deities – readers need to keep their wits about them - all told in vivid and startling language. In many places it is laugh out loud funny and a comparison with The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy springs to mind. The Afternet is a great intro to e books, kindle and Peter Empringham.