Year-End Thank You Plus In Another Sun Second Edition
Thank you for your support this year.
Year in Review
As 2025 ends, I want to pass on this year’s milestones and thank you because your support and spreading the word about my work helped make these possible. See y’all in 2026.
Publish and promote the novel Night School including bookmarks; a Goodreads Giveaway that over 2,000 entered; a Reddit ad that reached over 1 million screens; and a highlight on the mysteries and thrillers shelf at a public library.
Produce and promote the story collection Cloudbreak including bookmarks; a Goodreads Giveaway that over 1,000 entered; and the cover selected as a participant for Book Jacket Bracket that celebrates cover design and lifts lesser-known releases into the spotlight.
Produce and promote the second edition of In Another Sun (available 23 January 2026) including bookmarks and a Goodreads Giveaway that runs from the 7th of December until the 6th of January. Enter for your chance to win one of ten free Kindle copies.
Produce A Long Road Home, a forthcoming novel in 2026. “Going out there is all that matters.” After fifteen years in middle management, Boz Trimble is phased out by his company. Now he questions the goals and comfort he accumulated over the years and seeks an identity free from complacency and a prescribed path. As the months shift from winter into spring, Boz juggles his family’s tightening finances, opportunities disappearing as quickly as they arrive, and reversals of fortunes complicating his life. But while he searches for meaningful work and struggles to redefine himself, he deepens his relationships with his wife, children, sister, and disabled brother in ways he never planned; reconnects to his father’s days of stock car racing in the South; and wrestles with newfound courage to pursue a course not laid out.
Earn a quarterfinalist spot (top 25%) the ScreenCraft Cinematic Prose competition for the second edition of Pepper’s Ghost.
Enter Pepper’s Ghost in Foreword Review INDIES Book Award.
Submit books to LibrariesShare that selects books for participating libraries across U.S. and Canada. All the novels and story collections I submitted were accepted.
Publish and promote this newsletter including nine stories. Total subscribers rose 7.3% this year.
Producing and promoting stories requires time and money. Independent authors like me are often overlooked because of trends, sales, and genre. I do not answer to a board or a corporation and have no interest in being with the “right people” and saying the “right phrases.”
But this is where you help. Your book purchases and paid Substack subscriptions tilt the challenges of business and creating stories in my favor. A unique well-told story not only illuminates experiences, similarities, differences, joys, pains, fears, and hopes about our short time here on Earth, but it also attracts an audience that, like a snowball, attracts a larger audience, resources, and opportunities—all of which lifts the audience *and* the writer.
My ideal reader is the individual who invests in American culture, united by our shared heritage, history, and homeland (nooks and crannies and warts and all); loves plot, character, theme, and imagination; and longs to be entertained like the root sense of that word (to be held by). This everyday reader may have a degree, no degree, be a farmer, work in an office, or clean the office. And they prefer the local over the global and Main Street over Wall Street.
I love shaping and sharing stories that, be they novels or short fiction, focus on ordinary Americans real and imagined and offer an alternative to what’s popular, what’s prescribed, or what’s assumed you’ll consume. I make everything you read: from writing and editing the stories; to book interiors and covers; to online content and marketing materials. I have a long-standing interest and background in science, sports, and making stuff.
Thank you for your time, supporting my work, and spreading the word.
In Another Sun Second Edition
Available 23 January 2026
“I don’t want happiness. I want meaning.”
Second edition. The American-born only child of Mexican immigrants, Vanessa Ochoa thought she knew what she wanted until she got it. But when a crisis forces her to redefine her life and start over in the place she swore she would never return to, she searches for something transcendent among the ruins of memory. The narrative weaves in and out of key moments of her youth and adult life: her decision to leave her hometown, her career ascension, and the pursuit of temporal and material desires. Exploring themes of time and fate, family and character, and perseverance against odds, Vanessa’s journey is an ode to grace and hope laid bare.
With a simultaneously urgent and unhurried voice, the novel pulses between the past and future and disappointment and possibility as Vanessa searches for a bridge between the known and the unknown while she aims for the steady surge of the Pacific. In chronicling her journey with grace and empathy, Auten also shows the American Dream, hatched in hope, can sour within a generation. A moving, heartbreaking, and thoroughly immersive story. I’ll miss Vanessa, her insistent voice and her lost chances haunting long after the last page.
—Jeff Ewing, author of The Middle Ground
In Another Sun reminds us life is experienced in fragments, shards of memories, snippets of conversations, and through what is and what could have been. Auten’s prose thoughtfully explores the powerful notion that, perhaps above all, our heart’s desire is simply to be known.
—Debbie Graber, author of Kevin Kramer Starts on Monday
220 pages
ISBN (print): 9798986092775
ISBN (ebook) 9798999476807
A book’s success can thrive on word-of-mouth and grassroots marketing. I’m asking you to help spread the word about In Another Sun. Anything below you can do can positively impact me and my work:
Order the book (print and ebook).
Recommend to family, friends, acquaintances, book clubs, libraries, bookstores, bloggers, and platforms devoted to American fiction and culture.
Share on social media and websites.
Add and rate on Amazon, Goodreads, and similar outlets.
Place a copy in Little Free Libraries.