Fasten your headphones and keep the lights on! A House in the Woods is now available on audiobook. Narrated by the fabulous Daniela Acitelli, who has performed two previous books for me, it’s sure to make you think twice about stopping on a lonely country road.

EXTRA! I have 50 free download codes for this gem (25 US, 25 UK), so get ready to sit back, adjust the volume, and never look at the shadows in the room the same way again.

My supernatural chiller A House in the Woods is currently featured with over 40 other titles in a frighteningly fantastic Book Funnel bundled giveaway. CLICK HERE to see them all and make your picks!

HEY! REQUEST: Every click to check out the free books increases my “share score” with Book Funnel, a real help with future promotions. So if you have a few seconds, just surf on over to the terror turf and consider yourself thanked to the utmost. – Mark

I’ll be offering all my eBooks soon on Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Apples Books, and now on my own website! The advantages for readers of buying directly from me? All books at a deep discount, and you get to choose your own file type: ePub, MOBI or PDF. So let’s get the adventure going …

Are you listening? I’m making a limited number of complimentary audiobook codes available for all 10 of my audiobooks! Just email me HERE with your request for codes. Please specify the title, and a US or UK code. You can read about each audiobook my Audible author’s page or right here on the site! So enjoy … and fasten your headphones!

Q: “What’s your secret to a less stressful life, Mark?”

A: “Consider it a sand painting. The monks spend days, weeks or more creating these stunning paintings with grains of sand. Then they wipe them away with no regret, for that is life, its beauty, its brevity, and its impermanence. Never lose sight that the wiping away is coming. Live in the painting while you can. Share the secret.”

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Thirteen years ago over Martin Luther King weekend, a man I’d been dating less than a month invited me to his house in the New Jersey woods. I’d been a city boy until then, twelve in Los Angeles and, at that time, thirteen in New York City. I had no idea how I’d like this whole country living thing, but I knew the first morning I woke up here that I loved it. We spent weekdays in Manhattan and most weekends here at the house. We made the move permanent a year and a half ago when we walked out of the NYC apartment for the last time. I love it here, I love my life, and it’s good to celebrate thirteen years of our house in the woods.

I’ve had my ebooks exclusive to Amazon Kindle for years, in 90-day enslavements. This year I’m shaking things up and doing what I want to do, in part to reinvigorate my own creative output. Having ebooks sitting on Amazon year after year, unavailable anywhere else, is like killing them. Forgetting about them. Why did I write them? And how may people with Kindle Unlimited subscriptions are downloading them while Amazon rakes in the monthly fees and I get pennies? No more.

As my books come off the exclusivity period (all by the end of February), I’ll be adding them to Barnes and Noble (Nook), Kobo, and now Apple Books. I’m not concerned about how many I sell. My hustling days are over, those desperate months hoping I get enough from the free reads on Kindle to pay for a foot massage. I want to own my ebooks, just like musicians want to own their masters. So let’s start here …

My friend, fellow author, and creative engine behind Retire Fabulous has just published a new book on one of my favorite subjects: retiring! Personally, I can’t wait. Dave will be among my guests this month on the One Thing or Another Podcast. Fasten your headphones! – Mark

About the book:

The Quest for Retirement Utopia: How to Find the Retirement Spot That’s Right for You
By Dave Hughes

It’s fun to dream about where you’ll retire. Without a job tying you down, why not relocate to a place more to your liking?

Perhaps you want to live someplace warmer, closer to the water, or where the pace of life is slower. Maybe you want to stretch your retirement dollars by living where the cost of living or taxes are lower. You might even be thinking of retiring in another country or spending your retirement in an RV or on a houseboat.

With so much to consider, choosing the place that’s right for you can become overwhelming.

A taste of murder! I’ve made a five-chapter excerpt of the upcoming Beautiful Corpse: A Marshall James Thriller available for current and new email subscribers. This is Book 2 in the series, with a release date coming this spring. Just subscribe here for a copy via Book Funnel.

About Beautiful Corpse: A Marshall James Thriller

1984, Los Angeles. It’s been over a year since Marshall James first became intimately familiar with murder. He’s six months sober now and happily living with the love of his life, LAPD Detective Mac McElroy. Despite the coming storm of AIDS and its devastating toll on the world Marshall knows, his dark days seem to be behind him. Then one night he says the wrong thing, storms out in anger and walks straight into a nightmare. Someone is setting him up to take the fall for the beautiful corpse he wakes up next to. But who would do something that evil, and that planned? Within a day he finds himself running from the police and the mob, and running toward a killer he must apprehend before the only chance left is no chance at all.