If you're reading this, you get a free Sci-Fi comedy anthology, by my friends and I.
Yes, really.
It’s not clickbait. I put a book together in 2023 and it is now free (for a limited time). And if you don’t feel like reading this short article about why I made the weird choice of making this older book free, here’s a button you can press to go right to reading it.
Note: Amazon should be free -soon- but as they operate outside all other retailers, and indeed outside of space and time, they take a while to price match. The book is free everywhere else.
A horrible business decision.
Back in 2015 I wanted to make a multi-author Sci-Fi anthology. But, despite being immersed in a Creative Writing undergraduate degree, I didn’t actually know that many people who were up for it. Rather than giving up, I expanded the scope to include poetry and photography, and suddenly all the world’s writers noticed me, and sent in work. That book came and went, a primordial glimmer of the ideas I was going to one day cultivate into this thing right here.
Since then I started a career in comedy, of various types, but I never forgot that Sci-Fi book idea.
So it seemed right to mix the two together.
Halfplanet Press’s first venture into multi-author anthologies, therefore, was THE COSMIC COMEDY COLLECTION.
The Cosmic Comedy Collection (originally called the Cosmic Cock’s Cosmic Comedy book, before Amazon told me the word Cock wasn’t okay on a book) is a small anthology of five bespoke, human-written science fiction comedies by five authors. I think we’ve all won awards of some description in writing and comedy now, so I probably need to brag about that and redo the cover to make room for the brag.
I am in the book, but I can assure you my story is edited also, as I had both John and Aaron look at it before publication.
How it works is there are five stories, each in an entirely different tone of comedy writing, and you read them with your brain. This does mean it is an odd book, but aren’t all of my books?
The paperback sold out at the last convention I went to, which was nice.
And now I am making the eBook free, because, well, to be honest the economy is not doing so well and I can tell because people have been messaging me to ask what my cheapest funny book is.
The answer is now, this one.
If you do get it, please do leave a review of your favourite story on the book’s page on whatever retailer you feel like writing to. If you point out your favourite story, I can show it to the author who wrote it, and it will drag them out of whatever stupor they happen to find themselves in at the time.
If you do write a review (which would be very helpful for the success of future books), you can also email a screenshot of the review to fanmail@realphillipcarter.com and I will give you a gift.
Note: I have no idea what the gift is yet, because I don’t know if anyone will do it. But if someone does, I will think of something. If you have any ideas, why not email them to me alongside your review?
A new Cosmic Comedy Collection will come out eventually, so the popularity of this one is very important to future books. Thank you for your continued support of weird, original fiction.
BONUS FEATURES:
I made this book before we had the capacity to hire an artist, so I did the chapter art myself. I don’t mind it. Works for comedy.
Two of my co-authors are on Substack, also.
NeuralLit (AJ PAGAN)
Strange New Worlds (JOHN COON)