First Chapter: Eternal Graffiti by Peter Marlton #FirstChapter #ChapterOne

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

Eternal Graffiti

Title: Eternal Graffiti Author: Peter Marlton Publisher: The Story Plant Pages: 352 Genre: Adult Literary Fiction

Blurb:

“I don’t know if this is a confession or a purge, a scream or a lullaby,” begins twenty-seven-year-old Owen Kilroy’s journal, in which he writes about the remarkable women—friends and lovers—who’ve come and gone and who have shaped his life, as well as the many varieties of heartbreak he’s experienced. Owen revisits himself as a seventeen-year-old guitar player, songwriter, and drug dealer in a small, fictional California desert town. He relives being arrested, violently, by half the town’s police force and sent to juvenile prison. He faces the pain of being disowned by his mother and having his father disappear. And he re-experiences inadvertently killing his girlfriend by providing her with drugs. After escaping from juvenile prison, ending up broke, desperate, and homeless in Venice Beach, he eventually meets Kiera, a nineteen-year-old Irish student at UCLA. She is the great love of his life, a love that he knows would cripple him if he were to lose her. Now, ten years later, Owen discovers that writing about her and all that came before isn’t enough. If he is to move on, he realizes he must go back to California and face his ghosts directly. “Marlton’s prose mixes lyricism with grit, which often results in evocative images. The author has an eye for nuance and detail, and he manages to evoke the era and the youth culture of the time.” ― Kirkus Reviews Book Information Release Date: September 6, 2022 Publisher: The Story Plant Soft Cover: ISBN: 978-1611883329; 352 pages; $16.95; eBook $7.99 Amazon: https://amzn.to/3brycU7 Barnes & Noble: https://bit.ly/3oOBns2 Indigo: https://bit.ly/3zVhXbf Indiebound: https://bit.ly/3OZeLPY Book Depository: https://bit.ly/3BIRLlo Chapters: https://bit.ly/3QfBpVt

Chapter One

On the Monday after the long Thanksgiving weekend in 1970, I came home for the last time to the little rented house my mother and I lived in. Two bedrooms, one bath, tiny living room, washer and dryer on the covered back porch. A typical low-rent box in Rockville Flats, California, an all but forgotten, end-of-the-road, jerkwater town on the southwest ass-cheek of the Mojave Desert. It’s bordered in all directions by a barren landscape probably not so different from the one Christ wandered into as a would-be savior. I remember walking into the house excited and a little afraid (which I never would have admitted at the time). My best friend Shooky and I were running away to Venice Beach early the next morning. It was something we’d been planning for months. Steven Gregory, our high school principal (at his core a simpleton, a gray suit with a head on it), told us earlier that day that because we were such fuck-ups we’d have to repeat our senior year. That sped up our departure date by months. No way were we going to stick around for that. I found my mother sprawled out on the couch, unconscious. She worked the counter at Winchell’s, selling donuts and coffee to truck drivers all night long on the graveyard shift. She must’ve traded with somebody to be home at that hour. I could smell the bourbon from ten feet away. I was probably as high as she was drunk. Shooky and I had been getting stoned for the last few hours. The hash had taken me to a magical place — an otherwise inaccessible neighborhood in my mind, one that was free of existential angst, uncontaminated by any form of law enforcement, where Rockville Flats’ fossilized, infertile hills were uncharacteristically alive with the sound of music. But there she was, my one and only mother, bringing me down again. She lay there in her white blouse, her nametag slightly askew (Janet), her black polyester slacks, and her fat little brown shoes rounding out an ensemble of hopelessness. Her whiskey-soaked brain was surely submerged somewhere on the edge of eternity, her I’ve-smoked-for-twenty-years-and-I-ain’t-quitting-now-and-you-can’t-make-me lungs sounding, as usual, like the tired engine of a battered old train desperate to make one last trip to Clarksville. I had grown so accustomed to seeing her in that condition that it hardly fazed me. I felt nothing. No, that’s not true. I felt pity, which is worse than feeling nothing. So it was another one of those days when everything in and around and about the house was redundant and stale, bereft of soul, devoid of hope. I wish now I had a happier memory of that last day with her, maybe just a tiny moment, maybe just her asking me to pass her the TV Guide so she could do her crossword puzzle and me saying OK, but then everything would have had to be so different. I was out of control back then and embraced it fully — the perpetually stoned-out peace-and-love poster-boy hippie kid who, underneath it all, was consumed with rage and hurt and resentment. Why that was will, I hope, become clear. No wonder my mom was a drunk. I stood and watched her wheezing, and chose not to think about the “good ol’ days” when she and I got along. This time I was leaving. There was no point. I grabbed a box of Cocoa Puffs, a carton of milk, a mixing bowl and a spoon, and took them into my room. I ate my chocolate breakfast food like I thought a gladiator would eat chocolate breakfast food, and felt like a Roman emperor when I was done. I picked up the beautiful Gibson Hummingbird guitar I’d bought with drug money and practiced a few songs I’d written. I put the first stack of records on my little stereo, cleared off my “homework” table, set up my scale, took out the block of hash and the two pounds of weed I’d scored in Anaheim the day before and started to work. I had to weigh and cut as many grams of the hash as I could by the time Shooky came by to pick me up at five the next morning. Whatever I didn’t finish I’d do in Venice. I didn’t mind staying up. I loved the work; it took me out of myself. I bagged the thirty-two ounces of Michoacán first and set them aside to be ready for packing. Two or three hours after starting in on the hash I realized that the last record had ended, and I heard nothing in the house except the mousy squeak of the dope scale. It must have been around midnight or later. Something was wrong. No wheezing. I walked out into the dark little hallway and looked into my mom’s room. It smelled of stale cigarettes and dirty laundry. Piles of clothes were everywhere. Her bed was a sad, concave, spoon-like thing supporting a sheet-sculpture of the Alps. The bathroom was right across from my room. She wasn’t in there either. It was only three or four steps to the living room, which was still and dark, except for the slow sweep of a car’s headlights moving across the walls and the cottage-cheese ceiling. I flipped on a light. Mom had not moved since I’d gotten home. She always screamed at me if I ever woke her, so I tiptoed up to the couch and leaned over to look at her face, which was turned inward toward the wall. I lifted her eyelids and saw a frightful mackerel stare. I put my head to her chest and couldn’t hear a heartbeat. That was as close to her as I’d been since my father Harry left when I was eight. She’d clung to me for a short while after that. Yelling her name, shaking her, slapping her, nothing had any effect. The fear I felt flipped my otherwise pleasant and mellow hash high for a loop. I wasn’t sure what to do. I headed into the kitchen to get a pan full of water to throw on her, but then somehow I realized that the idea came out of anger rather than from an effort to try and save her (this had happened more than once before), so I decided I’d better call 9-1-1. It seemed like the ambulance was there before I hung up the phone. The medics went to work. From my stoned-out perspective it looked like they were performing open-heart surgery. My mother moaned and threw up on the weird brown suburban shag carpet. Two cops parked outside and came sauntering in. I paid no attention to them. I was fixated on the unfolding drama. Mom passed out again. “Fuck!” one of the ambulance guys said quietly. They made their magic orange gurney spring to life. They flopped her onto it and then shot out the door as if she were a time bomb that might blow up the whole block. I noticed then that one of the two cops was Officer Beatrice Walls, whose new blond bowl cut surprised me for its radical unattractiveness. We knew each other from a previous idiotic skirmish. Most of the cops in Rockville Flats knew me. I hated all of them. About a year before, Walls busted me for shoplifting. I’d stolen a Penthouse and dropped it accidentally on the way out of the store. I was the catch of the year for the store rent-a-cop, but a routine bust for Walls. This all happened while I was cutting school. The judge dismissed the charge if I agreed to do twenty hours of community service. So I spent a little time digging around in a county irrigation ditch for a couple of weekends. Big deal. The school suspended me for five days for truancy. Suspending a kid for cutting school is like punishing a masochist. I was thrilled. I could feel Walls’ eyes on me. She whispered something to her partner, an Officer Duke, a tall, tanned rookie trying very hard to look menacing. He nodded. She seemed to be his mentor. He stood by studying everything she did. “Sorry about your mom, Owen.” Walls sounded like she was teetering on the edge of sincerity. I said nothing. I was trying to appear as though I wasn’t high. We were standing by the open front door. The ambulance backed out of the driveway and screamed its way to the hospital. Walls’ squad car was parked like nobody else would ever park, diagonally, on the lawn. The obnoxious, manic, red and blue twirling lights exacerbated my disorientation. “I guess I have to go to the hospital?” I asked her. “Sure,” she said, closing the door. “But first I’d like to know what’s gone on here tonight.” She took out a flip notebook and a pen and stood there poised to write. “Nothing has ‘gone on’ here tonight.” “Your mother just got hauled away in an ambulance.” “You’re blaming me for this?” “Well, what happened?” “She doesn’t need an excuse to get shitfaced, does she? She and Romeo have been having problems. Maybe that’s what it’s about this time.” “Romeo?” “Her boyfriend.” Walls squinted. “Oh, come on!” “Hey, it’s not my fault that that’s his stupid name.” She turned to Officer Duke. “See what I mean?” Then back to me. “What kind of problems have they been having?” “They can’t agree about where to retire on the French Riviera.” “Watch it, pal.” “I am watchin’ it.” “What are your mother’s drinking habits?” What a stupid question! What an idiot! “You saw her just now. What’s the mystery? She’s a goddamn raging alcoholic. The whole police department knows that.” She scribbled all that while looking at me and not at the notebook, as if that were supposed to impress me. “Where’s the attitude comin’ from, Owen?” “East Berlin.” She snorted. “That’s just dumb. That’s it for now.” She barked at the rookie: “Let’s go.” “I gotta use the bathroom,” he said. I stared at the couch, which still retained a vague but discernible outline of my mother’s body. I was thrown off-kilter by how rotten I felt after hating her for so long. “Do you have any other family?” Walls asked. “There’s nobody else.” “What’s your dad’s name?” “Harry Kilroy.” “Where is he?” “Hey!” Officer Duke shouted. “You’d better come check this out!” She made a serious tactical mistake by not keeping an eye on me — a fuck-up that maybe could have put her back on a motorcycle, standing on the street in ninety-eight-degree heat, pointing a ray gun at passing cars. I’ll never know. All the stuff on her utility belt shook as she jogged toward my room. In my emotional hash-infused fog I’d completely forgotten that I’d left my door open — a fuck-up that was far worse than hers. I took off running, winding my way around the black and white and off into the night. But there was nowhere to run. I knew I was finished. The cool desert night air was my last taste of freedom. Walls and Duke were chasing me now, demanding that I “halt.” I asked myself, for what? To give myself up to whatever horrors were in store? Was Walls going to shoot me if I didn’t stop? Part of me hoped so. I ran so fast and so hard that she was forced to slow down — she was out of shape — and I didn’t know where the hell to go at first. I thought about going to Shooky’s but it would be a big mistake leading the cops there. I could hear sirens screaming. A few houses were already decorated for Christmas, some festooned with bright, colorful outdoor lights. I’d seen them earlier, and on that sad night they looked more cheerful than ever. Santas, elves, sleighs, candy canes, and reindeer all congregated on the front lawns. Christmas trees decorated with more lights and glittery ornaments and topped by golden stars and golden angels stood in the windows of those houses. All this made the undecorated houses look like tombs. I crossed Rockville Flats Boulevard and looked behind me and there was Duke, stopping, turning around and running at full speed toward the sound of the sirens. I couldn’t figure out what the fuck that was about. He was running away from me. Walls was getting up off the ground. I threw myself over the fence that separated the boulevard from the no-man’s-land I’d spent so many afternoons and nights getting stoned in and headed to Manderley, a special little spot where Shooky and I always hung out. I took a second to rest and breathe. It was pitch dark. I could see flashlights, lifeless eyes not blinking, coming over the fence. I shimmied down a steep pitch into a ravine. It was even darker there, a pool of octopus ink. A minute later about a dozen of those dead flashlight eyes appeared around the perimeter. A cop shouted a blistering command to a police dog. It was Duke! So he was the K-9 cop. He’d gone for the dog. I was impressed. His command cut into the night air like a bayonet. I couldn’t understand what he was yelling but there was no doubt it sounded like deep trouble. I was Lee Harvey Oswald. I decided that if those bloodthirsty bastards were going to catch me I was going to make them work for it. They were in my backyard. I ran west, toward the Pacific Ocean. I’d always wanted to live by the ocean. So what if it was more than a hundred miles away? I could hear the wind, my breath, my feet landing on the hard uneven ground, the crazy dog barking viciously. Beatrice Walls shouted, “Owen, Owen!” in the loudest fake-friendly voice she could muster. “Everything is gonna be OK if you just stop running and show us your hands!” No way out. No hope. I was the fun they were going to have that night. But I kept going. All the king’s soldiers were relentless in their blitzkrieg, but they were taking the long way around because they knew nothing about where they were or what they were doing. The flashlights moved across the ravine, the beams getting bigger, brighter. I found myself in a large open area that a science teacher once said had been a lake in ancient times. My only hope was to get across the lake and climb up to a ridge that a million years ago probably served as a platform from which cave men practiced their swan dives. From there I might stay free a little longer. I scrambled up the hillside and after a few attempts I pulled myself up onto the ridge. But the not-very-well-regulated militia was closing in. They knew more about where we were than I thought. I started running and slipped and fell into a ditch, eating the dry dirt, scraping my hands on the little bastard rocks. I crawled like a wounded diamondback under a big gooseberry bush. The cops were converging on me now, no more than thirty feet away. I heard one set of footsteps approaching, crackling on the rocky ground. Walls said, “Owen, we know you’re under there. Show us your hands and come out! Unless you prefer to be dragged out by the dog.” Another command from Duke and the dog went crazy, as if he hadn’t been fed in weeks and wanted to crack my skull with his teeth. I looked behind me and saw nothing but a cluster of flashlights and the ominous silhouettes of the Flatvillian soldiers behind them. Above me, through the branches of the bush, the spectacular panorama of useless stars. There was a sudden violent rustling sound. In what she probably thought was a career-restoring move, Beatrice Walls dived under the bush and pointed her deputy cowgirl six-gun an inch from my temple. I looked at her in shock — she knew me better than that — and then I turned to face the ground and waited to die. “Don’t be stupid,” she said.

About the Author

Peter Marlton

Peter Marlton is a pseudonym for Pete MacDonald, both as a fiction writer and as a musician and songwriter. He was born in San Francisco and has lived in Los Angeles, New York City, Seattle, and in three European countries. He’s published short stories, a novella, and essays in various literary magazines and The New York Times. His latest book is the adult literary fiction, Eternal Graffiti. You can visit his website at www.petermarlton.com or connect with him on Twitter.

Award-Winning Book Publicity Company Since 2007

VIRTUAL BOOK TOUR, BLOG TOUR & BOOK PUBLICITY ENDORSEMENTS: NICE THINGS PEOPLE SAY ABOUT PUMP UP YOUR BOOK

NEW! "Thank you Dorothy for a lovely tour! Thanks so much for the graphics and wonderful trailer!!"Avery Sterling, PRECIOUS BURDENS

"I just wanted to thank you for everything. You ARE the queen. Your are so personable and professional. Your graphics soared beyond. They are beautiful. It was a pleasure to work with you."Jude Hopkins, BABE IN THE WOODS

"THANK YOU for all of these graphics!!! That was a valuable added perk of working with you on the VBT! Thank you for all the work you put into those, and into the organization and follow-ups on the tour itself. It's been a pleasure working with you, Dorothy!"Allyson Rice, The Key to Circus-Mom Highway

"Oh, awesome!! Thank you so much! You ran such a lovely tour. Those images are great, I look forward to using them and will miss seeing the regular postings on Twitter ;-).
I really appreciate your steadfast and ongoing support. It means a lot!!"Palmer Pickering, MOON DEEDS

"Just wanted to send you a quick note to say thank you again for the amazing blog tour and to tell you that we will be adding the tour to Mark's author website in the next few days. We will of course be recommending your company to other authors we know. And when Mark's next book is out, we will use your services again." Kirsten Grenside on behalf of Mark Grenside, FALL OUT

"Thank you for all the great, creative, work you have done on behalf of my book. You are
a special lady, as a kind hearted woman and a professional."
Maria Andrade, DEFIANCE AND REDEMPTION

"Everyone did an excellent job. The blog pages were beautiful, and the trailer was so clever and funny. Thanks for sending these lovely "souvenirs" from my tour. I will be able to use all of these posts on Twitter. I enjoyed this so much and look forward to my next tour!"
Irene Woodbury, HONEYMOON ROULETTE

" I am delighted with the results of my recent tour with Pump Up Your Book. Dorothy is meticulous and professional, presents beautifully laid out pages, maintains constant contact with the client, and gives more than expected value for money. In a nutshell: you get what you pay for and more on top! I will certainly be using Dorothy’s services for my other Regency romance books.”
Arabella Sheraton, THE LORD BLACKWOOD REGENCY ROMANCE SERIES

"Thank you so much for The Shadow of Atlantis tour. I've really enjoyed all the posts and seeing my book being promoted. I will definitely come back to you with another of my titles!"
Wendy Leighton-Porter, THE SHADOW OF ATLANTIS

"Thank you so much for the great job on the book tour! Pump Up Your Book was a driving force in the launch of THE PILATE SCROLL!"
M.B. Lewis, THE PILATE SCROLL

"Thank you ever so much - it was a fun tour. I will continue singing your praises to my fellow authors. And grateful for the images, I will put them to continued use."
Kathleen Shaputis, HIS KILT DROPPED HERE

"I appreciate you and your hard work. Thank you for creating these awesome images for my book and allowing me to use them. I am very thankful to have them!"
Joni Ankerson, TO KILL OR BE KILLED

"Thank you for an Amazing Virtual Book Tour for Son of a Soldier! I really appreciate all the work you put into it!"
Aiken Brown, SON OF A SOLDIER

"Thanks so much for getting ANNA INCOGNITO out there and reviewed and shared with so many people. It was great to see it on so many twitter feeds!"
Laura Preble, ANNA INCOGNITO

"Thank you so much for such a fantastic tour! You did an amazing job getting it together so quickly, and I couldn’t have been happier!"
Lena Gregory, GRAVE CONSEQUENCES

"Thank you so much Dorothy! I appreciate your hard work. Love the graphics!"
Jennifer Chase, FLOWERS ON HER GRAVE

"This has been one of the best things I’ve done as an author. Not only am I getting the word out about my books but I’m learning about my own work and my readers along the way. I love it!"
Elysia Strife, A PROMISE IN ASH

"Today my blog tour ended, with another great review which made me end the tour with a big smile! What a fun way to end this incredible 4-week tour. I will surely miss it. I want to thank you for arranging it so well and for being there for me whenever I needed. Thank you!!!"

Miri Leshem-Pelly, SCRIBBLE & AUTHOR

"I think you did an excellent job last time, thank you!"
Shami Stovall, KNIGHTMARE ARCANIST

"Just wanted to thank you for the book tour. :) You did a great job. :)"
Suzanne M. Hurley, THE TEDDY BEAR EYE CLUB

"I just wanted to thank you for a wonderful virtual tour in August for Brimstone and Water. I was very happy with the amount of attention given to the book and to me. I am mentioning it to friends on line that haven't gone to the site yet to be sure and take a look. Thanks for all your work."
Sharon House, BRIMSTONE AND WATER

"Thank you for running my book promotion for BlackJack. I am so pleased with the reviews that came in and appreciated all you did. My sales have improved from being around 800,000 down to the 200,000 on Amazon and hopefully dropping still. I will definitely be contacting you for a promotion again."
Christine Donovan, BLACKJACK

"You’ve been a joy to work with, and I’d do another tour with you in a heartbeat. Overall, it was an excellent experience and a good value. I’ll be sure to look you up when it’s time to release my next book."
Michael Allan Scott, GREY DAZE

"Just wanted to thank you for putting together a great tour for You Won't Remember This. I think the author was pleasantly surprised and overall very pleased."
Bacon Press Books

"Dorothy, thanks so much for another great VBT!!! The Twitter-Party was a new feature this time that I particularly enjoyed. I will continue to recommend PUYB to my writer-friends, because you are simply the best!!!"
T.M. Wallace, WINTERGARDEN

"Thank you for a great blog tour for my “Depression and Your Child.”
I’m in the middle of my third book and will definitely call on you again when it’s time to market it."
Deborah Serani, DEPRESSION AND YOUR CHILD

"Your hard work and professionalism hasn't gone unnoticed. When I release my next novel(s), I will definitely use your service. I have already recommended you to several authors."
Ashley Fontainne, GROWL

"Thanks for a very good experience with Pump Up Your Book. Fighter Pilot's Daughter has sold out of the first printing (still available as POD on Rowman & Littlefield's site, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.). My editor at R & L says there's a very good chance the book will come out in paperback in the summer. He asked me "Did you hire a publicist or something?" I told him about you, and he was impressed."
Mary Lawlor, FIGHTER PILOT'S DAUGHTER

"You are amazing Dorothy and I love what you do to get the spirit of our books out to the world. Thank you!"
Lee Papa, TEMPLE OF ALL KNOWING

"I can't believe the response this book is getting! I am so very thrilled that she liked it!!! You are THE BEST, Dorothy, for hooking up this amazing tour with all these stunning reviews! This was the book I was going to keep under my bed forever and ever and now WOW. I can't believe this is happening. It's like a dream come true!"
Madeline Wynn, DAUGHTER OF THE FALLEN

"Just wanted to say I'm appreciating your tweets so much. This is really helping my book sales, and I'm telling writer friends about you."
Mary Lawlor, FIGHTER PILOT'S DAUGHTER

"Thank you SO much!!!! I had a blast on the tour and appreciate all the time the bloggers and reviewers spent promoting Ash to Steele:)"
Karen-Anne Stewart, ASH TO STEELE

"When it comes to looking for a virtual book tour coordinator, Dorothy Thompson of Pump Up Your Book Tours is simply the best. I have tried several virtual book tour coordinators and have even set up a book tour on my own, but none of them were as successful as my tours with Pump Up Your Book Tour, which has the combination of expertise and experience needed to get the author the results they need. On this latest tour, TWELVE TO MURDER made it up to number three on Amazon! Thank you, Dorothy!"
Lauren Carr, Best-Selling Mystery Author of Mac Faraday, and Lovers in Crime, Mysteries

"Thank you again for all of your help and support for my recent book tour. You were so supportive and responsive, and I enjoyed working with you. It was a great tour and I really enjoyed it, especially when my book hit the top 100 in the two subcategories! That was awesome! Thanks for "pumping up my book!""
Monique Roy, ACROSS GREAT DIVIDES

"Thank you for another amazing tour, Dorothy!! I loved the sites I had an opportunity to visit and the people I met along the way. I even made a few new friends and found wonderful supporters that I'll never forget - I promise! The exposure you gave my book was absolutely unbelievable, and I can't think of a better way to welcome and expose an author's new creation to the literary world. Happy New Year to all your readers and may your success continue to grow. "
Kaylin McFarren, BURIED THREADS

"Thank you for a great virtual book tour. I thought it went really well and it was great to have a wave of PR that flowed through the two month period of my book release. I'm working on my next book - and will definitely reach out to you when it comes time to market! You were a delight to work with and really made me feel looked after. As I've mentioned before, I just don't know how you do it all."
--Deborah Serani, DEPRESSION AND YOUR CHILD

"I just wanted to let you know how wonderful I felt my book blast went for Be Careful What You Wish For in the month of August. So many emails and contacts that I would never have gotten. The publicity was just phenomenal!"
--R.K. Avery, BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

"Just wanted to touch base with you and extend a huge thank you for the wonderful and successful book blast you arranged for Love Vindicated for me. I was very happy with your services and will be passing your name and brand along to some writer friends with a stellar recommendation. Again thanks and I look forward to working with you again in the future."
--Lila Munro, LOVE VINDICATED

"Thank you so much for all your hard work in putting together the virtual book tour for The Sixth Power. I appreciate it so much."
--Carol Nicolas, THE SIXTH POWER

"Thank you SO MUCH for such a great blog tour!"
--Sandra D. Bricker, ALWAYS THE BAKER, FINALLY THE BRIDE

"Wow - you are absolutely fantastic. Can't believe how lucky I was to find you :)"
--Jo Sparkes, THE BIRR ELIXIR

"I just wanted to let you know that tonight Steven Manchester's Twelve Months became The Story Plant's first #1 Kindle bestseller. This couldn't have happened without you. Barb's cover is an absolute showstopper, Sue's copyediting boosted the overall work, Jackie's proofreading kept all of us honest, and Tracee Gleichner's blog tour started what has become an avalanche of great reviews."
-- Lou Aronica, STORY PLANT

"Blog tours have been the most effective promotion I’ve done. Dorothy Thompson and her company Pump Up Your Book are the greatest. I’ve spent money with other promotion companies that advertised packages then didn’t deliver the service they advertised, inflated their audience and reach and point blank falsely represented themselves. Dorothy has been a Godsend, and by far, her services are the best promotional endeavors I’ve invested in thus far."
-- Alicia Singleton, DARK SIDE OF VALOR

"I didn't realize that there is a place on amazon that you can see your stats for foreign sales; mine are really good and I believe it is your tweeting service. I think I might have found the key to successful self-publishing when I found Pump Up Your Books."
-- Suzanne Jenkins, PAM OF BABYLON SERIES

"Dorothy Thompson helped promote my book, Gringos in Paradise: Our Honduras Odyssey. Taking part in it was so much easier (and less expensive) than the travel schedule I was hving to keep doing on my own. She set up everything, coached me through my part, and I found my book and I promoted it all over the Internet. It definitely increased my book sales."
-- Malana Ashlie, GRINGOS IN PARADISE

"Dorothy was not only a lot of fun to work with but she helped me get the word out about my book. I would recommend her to both debut and experienced authors."
---Deborah Woehr, PROSPERITY: A GHOST STORY

“Dorothy is a firecracker promoter. She is skilled at finding the most visible placements in promoting your book with unmatched enthusiasm.She is creatively talented and a wonderful person to have on your team.”
--Kathy Holmes Eckardt, REAL WOMEN WEAR RED

“I invested in a three month virtual book tour with Pump Up Your Books promotions for my noir thriller, Moonlight Falls. Not only did the marketing campaign work wonders for spreading the word about the new novel, in the very last month, on the very last day of the tour, Moonlight Falls became an Amazon Kindle bestseller!”
–Vincent Zandri, MOONLIGHT FALLS and THE REMAINS

“I’m so pleased every day when I look at Google Alerts and see our titles all around the blogosphere, so thanks for that!”
–-World Ahead Media

“This has been a wonderful experience. Dorothy Thompson and her whole team are very committed to each author, take each author’s tour very seriously, and work towards maximum exposure in the right places. This is the best book promotion expenditure I’ve made in terms of return on investment. I highly recommend Pump Up Your Book Promotion.”
--Phyllis Zimbler Miller, MRS: LIEUTENANT

"I used Pump Up Your Book promotions a few months ago for my novel, Nephilim. My publisher is a great person, but when it comes to promotions, she encourages authors to do that on their own. Enter Dorothy Thompson at Pump Up Your Book. I had 8 reviews of the book and was featured as a guest author every day of the week at various websites during the month that I used her company. Amazing! She secured everything for me which was really nice and I didn't have to do anything but write a few blogs or answer interview questions. I would use Pump Up Your Book again in a heart beat!"
--Mary Ann Loesch, NEPHILIM

Visit here to find out what others have to say!

Follow Us!

Click on image to see who’s touring in December!

Book Mockup Graphics for $49!

Click on image to find out more!

PUYB Book Trailer of the Week

Princess Sophie and the Christmas Elixir

Question of the Day

How do you make sales happen for you?

A lot of hard work! I sponsor a lot of on line parties, festivals and contests. Book sales don’t magically happen, believe me. An author has to work hard to earn her readers. And then she has to work hard to keep them by giving them something they’ll enjoy reading. I try hard to make my books worth a reader’s time.

-- Sheila Roberts, Author of Winter at the Beach