S.G. Browne

A tweet by a friend about paper and ebooks inspired me to take the traditional game of Rock-Paper-Scissors and put my own spin on it, including ebooks as part of the game. Admittedly, my version is a bit skewed toward paper, but to paraphrase Lesley Gore: “It’s my blog post and I’ll do what I want to.”

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Rock beats scissors

Scissors beats paper

Paper beats ebook

Rock beats ebook

Scissors beats ebook

Hammer beats ebook

Baseball bat beats ebook

Golf club beats ebook

Tire iron beats ebook

Water beats ebook

Water beats paper but paper dries out

Fire beats paper

Fire beats ebook, too

Gravity beats ebook

Uncharged battery beats ebook

Prolonged power outage beats ebook

EMP beats ebook

DRM beats ebook

And, of course, paper beats rock

(*Note: EMP stands for Electromagnetic Pulse, while DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. If you don’t know what DRM is, you might be surprised to find out that you don’t own any of those ebooks you bought. You just bought a license for the right to read them.)

Would you like a chance to win a signed/personalized copy of my latest novel Big Egos? Would you like to help spread the word about Big Egos and give a shout out to your favorite bookstore?

You can do all three. Here’s how!

1) Go to your local brick and mortar bookstore, find Big Egos on the shelves, and take a photo of it out in the wild. (*If you don’t have a local bookstore, you can still enter the giveaway. Keep reading.)

2) Post the photo to your Twitter stream or Facebook timeline, mention Big Egos and the name of the bookstore, and mention/tag me. (On Twitter, my handle is @s_g_browne. On Facebook, tag me using my S.G. Browne Author Page. I believe you have to Like my author page before you can tag it.)

It’s important to tag/mention me using my Facebook author page and Twitter handle; otherwise, I won’t know that you entered the giveaway.

That’s all there is to it. And yes, you can enter twice: once on Facebook and once on Twitter.

Now, if you don’t have a local bookstore you can still play along. Here’s how.

1) Go to your favorite online bookstore, search for Big Egos, click on the link to the order page for the book, then copy and paste the link for the order page on to your Facebook timeline or Twitter stream and mention Big Egos and the name of the bookstore, while tagging or mentioning me as indicated above.

Boom. That’s all there is to it. Again, make sure to tag/mention me so I know you’ve entered.

The idea of the giveaway is to share the love both for Big Egos and for your favorite bookstore. Ideally that favorite bookstore is a local independent. But if you enjoy shopping at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, the Apple iBookstore, or someplace else, those count as valid entries, too.

If you don’t have a local bookstore but have a favorite independent bookstore you’ve visited, feel free to link to them. I have a few of my favorites listed on my info page for Big Egos.

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For every 10 entries, I will be giving away 1 signed/personalized copy of Big Egos.

Giveaway open to U.S. residents only. Don’t hate me.

Giveaway will be like Fight Club: It will go on as long as it has to. Or until the end of Burning Man, whichever comes first.

Any questions? Feel free to ask in the comments. Otherwise, good luck. And thanks for sharing the love!

While my signing schedule for Big Egos is somewhat limited this time around, I have signed stock copy at a handful of stores. So for those who are interested, you can purchase signed copies of Big Egos for a limited time from the following UPDATED locations:

Bay Book Company
Strawflower Village Shopping Center
80 Cabrillo Highway North, Suite F
Half Moon Bay, CA
(650) 726-3488
www.baybookcompany.com

Books Inc. – Alameda
1344 Park Street
Alameda, CA
510-522-2226
www.booksinc.net/Alameda

The Booksmith
1644 Haight Street
San Francisco, CA
415-863-8688
www.booksmith.com

Borderlands Books
866 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA
888-893-4008
www.borderlands-books.com

Mysterious Galaxy – San Diego
7051 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., Suite #302
San Diego, CA
858-268-4747
www.mystgalaxy.com

In addition, you can call Borderlands Books in San Francisco and order a signed and inscribed copy of Big Egos or one of my other novels and they will call me to come down to sign and personalize your book, then ship it to you.

Tuesday, August 6 – San Francisco, CA
7:30pm – 8:30pm
The Booksmith
1644 Haight Street
San Francisco, CA

Friday, August 9 – Alameda, CA
7:00pm – 8:00pm
Books Inc.
1344 Park St.
Alameda, CA

Thursday, August 15 – Pleasanton, CA
*NEW DAY!*
7:00pm – 8:00pm
Towne Center Books
555 Main Street
Pleasanton, CA

Saturday, August 24 – Roseville, CA
1:00pm – 3:00pm
Barnes & Noble
Creekside Town Center
1256 Galleria Boulevard
Roseville, CA

Thursday, September 12 – Petaluma, CA
*JUST ADDED!*
7:00pm – 8:00pm
Copperfield’s Books
140 Kentucky Street
Petaluma, CA

When I started writing Big Egos more than two years ago, I envisioned something along the lines of American Psycho meets Slaughterhouse-Five. At least conceptually. I’m not going to make any claims of being Bret Easton Ellis or Kurt Vonnegut, but I knew I wanted the story to be told in a non-linear framework and narrated by an unreliable protagonist who gradually loses control of his ability to separate fantasy from reality.

My initial drafts began with the ending, or one chapter removed from the ending, and each subsequent chapter that followed was a memory triggered by the end of the previous memory, eventually taking the story back to the beginning. Or, in this case, to the ending.

Fun Fact: Big Egos is the first novel I sat down to write knowing exactly how the story would end. In my previous three novels (and novella), the ending evolved from the progression of the story. But this time I knew the ending and couldn’t wait to figure out how to get there.

But once I was finished, I discovered that the non-linear format I’d chosen to tell the story didn’t provide enough clarity for the actual story, so I had to reorganize the chapters in a way that provided a present through-line of the narrative while allowing the story to jump back and forth in time as a function of the main protagonist’s triggered memories.

This involved creating a color-coded list of chapters based upon their time-frame and reorganizing them on a spreadsheet before moving around the actual chapters in the novel, which led to additional editing as the beginnings and endings of numerous chapters required minor to significant rewrites.

I did this about half a dozen times before I finally found the right mix and order. Even then, I continued to futz around with several of the chapters during the final editing and copy editing stages. As an author, you know that invariably you’re going to miss something. I can go back through Breathers, Fated, and Lucky Bastard and find things I would like to fix. But eventually you have to stop fixing and trust that you’ve told the right story in the best way at the time you told it.

With Big Egos, I wanted to get it as close to perfect as possible.

Whether I succeeded or not, that’s a matter of opinion, but I felt a great deal of satisfaction with how the novel turned out. And while I would say the same of my previous novels, for me, this one was a bit more of a challenge while at the same time being an absolute blast to write.

Of all my novels, Big Egos is without a doubt the darkest of the four. It also contains its fair share of social commentary on our society’s infatuation with celebrity and what happens to your identity when you’re constantly pretending to be someone you’re not.

So if you’re expecting a romantic comedy with a happy ending or a playful romp through a field of daffodils with a family of fluffy bunnies, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Big Egos is on sale August 6 and available for pre-order at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indiebound, and wherever books and eBooks are sold.