“Warning: Contains explicit sex, some graphic language, and mild violence.”
It’s no surprise that — in addition to all the other wonderful benefits of the Kindle — the ereader is bringing plenty of attention the Kindle Books>Fiction>Erotica category
in the Kindle Store. This latest free title is currently #347 overall in the Kindle Store, but it will probably make the top 10 before the sun sets tonight. Two other titles, Carolyn Faulkner’s Kept and our own Rena Diane Walmsley’s literary erotica novel Girl on Fire, have recently cracked the top 100 in the Kindle Store with prices under $3.
For a while there we were concerned that religious titles were dominating the free book listings in the Kindle Store. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But apparently it’s no longer the case!
Here’s an excerpt from last week’s new release on the release of Girl on Fire:
Here She Is, a Miss America Contestant
With a Sexy Kindle Bestseller That May Make You Blush!
You may think that the latest erotic thriller to climb the bestseller list in Amazon’s Kindle ebook store has an unlikely author.
Girl on Fire, a cautionary, sexually explicit coming-of-age tale, was written right here in Massachusetts by Rena Diane Walmsley, who represented the state in the Miss America beauty pageant when she was 19.
“It would have made me blush in my contestant days, and I’m sure I would not have been alone,” says Walmsley today of her first novel. “The truth is that this novel might even have gotten me thrown out of the pageant, but more and more women are writing fiction that you might call ‘liberated,’ and the Kindle is the perfect place for an emerging novelist to break out whether she is writing in the erotica category or in some other genre.”
Indeed, the Kindle ebook reader is quickly becoming the digital equivalent of the “brown paper bag” for readers who prefer to play their reading choices close to the vest. With nearly half a million ebooks available in the Kindle Store, there are currently about 50 “erotica” titles among the top 2,000 Kindle bestsellers.
And Walmsley’s Girl on Fire is currently #3 on the Kindle’s “erotica” bestseller list, out of 11,987 titles in the category, as well as #6 on the “romantic suspense” list. Girl on Fire was released in the Kindle Store March 5, and will make its paperback debut with worldwide distribution, including Amazon.com, on March 26.
If Walmsley’s novel takes off, she would not be the first Miss America contestant from Massachusetts to make it as a novelist. Lisa Kleypas, who was Miss Massachusetts in 1985, has over two dozen novels in the Kindle Store.
Walmsley’s publisher for Girl on Fire, tiny Arlington-based Harvard Perspectives Press, provides this description for the novel in the copy that appears on the back cover of the forthcoming paperback:
Looking for love in all the right places? Not Alicia Wentworth, the enchantingly frisky teenaged heiress at the heart of Rena Diane Walmsley’s debut memoir-as-novel. Alicia escapes from her privileged, sheltered life at an elite Concord, Massachusetts boarding school and pulls a “visiting room switch” to break in to a nearby state prison so she can rendezvous with Teddy Hawk, an exquisitely chiseled 21-year-old Native American convict for whom she has fallen hard while volunteering in a creative writing class for inmates. But Alicia is left alone and vulnerable when Teddy is hauled off to solitary, and she must reach deep within herself to concoct a gritty and initially degrading scheme to blackmail the prison system into freeing them both.
This deliciously literate debut is framed by Alicia’s present-day perspective as “a respectable thirty-something Unitarian minister” in a suburb west of Boston: while she is cognizant of the scars she wears from her early experiences, she is also engaged by a sense of something sacred therein that informs her daily life years later.
Not all coming-of-age novels are alike, and not every thirty-something narrator is able to cast an unflinching eye on the choices she made and the chances she took at the cusp of adulthood. But Walmsley’s unique novel-as-memoir never blinks, and her stunning sexual description breaks new narrative ground on age-old but ever-engaging terrain. Women and men alike will be enchanted and enriched by their journeys through her ultimately cautionary web of words.
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And, for the rest of the freebies in the Kindle Store, is a reprise of yesterday’s free book alert:
- Originally posted March 15, 2010 – © Kindle Nation Daily 2010
- “Free” in the Kindle Store refers, for now, to the price for download to US-based Kindles. Amazon adds various charges for Kindles based beyond US borders. However, you can scroll down to Free Book Collections for over 1.8 million titles that can be downloaded free from the internet to Kindles anywhere in the world (use USB connection to avoid wireless charges.)
from Touchstone Pictures (Kindle Edition – Mar. 15, 2010) – Kindle Book
Available for Pre-order. This item will be released on Mar. 15, 2010.
In addition to the several dozen free promotion books listed below, Amazon has just created a new direct gateway to over 2 million other free books that you can download easily to your Kindle. Here’s what you’ll find there:
With over 420,000 titles, the Kindle Store contains the largest selection of the books people want to read including
New York Times® Best Sellers and most new releases at $9.99, unless otherwise marked. And Amazon provides thousands of the
most popular classics for free including titles like
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,
Pride and Prejudice, and
Treasure Island with more coming.
But of course, the Internet is huge and there are lots of older, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books online. We wanted to make it easier to find these collections, which today represent nearly 2 million titles. See the sites and instructions below to download free classic and other out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books and transfer via USB to your Kindle device or read on Kindle for PC.
Note that these large collections of older free books are typically created from scanned copies of physical books and can have variable quality.
Amazon Kindle Store – Thousands of the most popular classics for free
The Amazon Kindle Store lets you choose from thousands of popular classics all available for free wireless delivery in under 60 seconds with Whispernet.
- Visit Kindle Popular Classics
- Search or browse for a title just like a normal Kindle book.
Internet Archive – Over 1.8 million free titles
Internet Archive is a non-profit dedicated to offering permanent access to historical collections that exist in digital format. Provides over 1.8 million free books to read, download, and enjoy.
- Visit archive.org
- Search for a title or browse one of the sub-collections like ‘American Libraries’
- When viewing a title, click the link on the left labeled “Kindle (beta)” to download the file to your computer
- Attach your Kindle to your computer using your USB cable and drag the file to the “Documents” folder on your Kindle. You can also e-mail the file to your Kindle using Whispernet for wireless delivery (charges apply).
- Open the book from your Kindle’s home screen and enjoy.
Project Gutenberg – Over 30,000 free titles
Project Gutenberg, one of the original sources of free electronic books, is dedicated to the creation and distribution of eBooks.
- Visit gutenberg.org
- Search for a title or browse the ‘Book shelves by topic’
- When viewing a title, scroll down to the ‘Download this ebook for free’ section and click the download link for ‘Mobipocket’ or ‘Mobipocket with images’ format.
- Attach your Kindle to your computer using your USB cable and drag the file to the “Documents” folder on your Kindle. You can also e-mail the file to your Kindle using Whispernet for wireless delivery (charges apply).
- Open the book from your Kindle’s home screen and enjoy.
Have you seen another great collection of free Kindle books on the web?
Drop us a line.
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