Kindle Nation Daily: The latest issue of our free weekly Kindle Nation email digest is now live on the web! March 30, 2010

The latest issue of our free weekly Kindle Nation email digest is now live on the web! March 30, 2010 - Volume II, Number 14

Kindle Nation

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"A Bit of a Personal Thing" - The Latest Kindle Nation Free Book Alerts - Guerilla Tactics vs. Conventional Warfare in the eBook Wars - SciFi Exclusives from F. Paul Wilson, and Over 100 Free Sci Fi Books from Baen - Using Cookbooks on Kindle ... And More

By Stephen Windwalker
March 30, 2010 - Volume II, Number 14

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Greetings from Kindle Nation

I'm rewriting my greeting a little before press time because there's something -- a bit of a personal thing -- that I want to share with you. Kindle Nation citizens who pay attention to the Free Kindle Nation Shorts program -- and I know there are thousands of you! -- may remember a very talented novelist by the name of April L. Hamilton whose hip, witty Fargo-esque fiction was featured here last year. In the past few days I've learned that April and her kids are facing a pretty rough double whammy -- some of it "man"-made, and some of it clearly out of human control -- which she chronicles in her characteristically graceful yet tough-minded manner in a post entitled "Descent" here.

There's not much to say about a post like that, or the underlying situation. When I read it I wrote April that I was proud to know her. I would never suggest that any of us should read April Hamilton's two excellent novels because of what she is going through, but there is a meaningful connection between the wonderful gift for humorous dialogue that I found in Snow Ball and Adelaide Einstein and my confidence that, as a human and an author and a mom, she is up to these fights.

It might be a mistake for me to rely too heavily on the idea that what we have here in Kindle Nation is a community. I'm sure you can tell that it is a community for me, and that I'd love for it to be a community for all of us, but I don't want to get carried away with my own magical thinking here. If it feels like a community sometimes to you, I'm glad, really glad. And if it doesn't, I'm still very happy to have you as a reader.

Regardless of how you think or feel about all of this, and very much in spite of the fact that I am sure that April would never milk her situation to sell copies of her books, I am now just going to very quietly place links here to April's Free Kindle Nation Short from last November, and to her two novels. I hope you'll give them a click, and maybe even a one-click. They are terrific reads, and, well, the timing is right.