Kindle Free Pick of the Week: Protector

Currently the #1 free book in the Kindle Store.

Laurel Dewey has crafted a memorable tale full of mystery and emotion in this debut novel.

Denver Homicide Detective Jane Perry is a hard-nosed, no-nonsense cop who is on the verge of a breakdown. She was physically abused by her father years ago, and the emotional turmoil from that abuse keeps rearing its ugly head. It has driven Jane to the bottle, and she has separated herself from everyone who tries to get close to her. When her latest case ends in the death of an innocent child, Jane doesn't know how much more she can take.

Suddenly Jane finds herself in the middle of another case where a young girl's life is in danger. Emily Lawrence's parents have been brutally murdered, and Emily is the only witness to the crime. As Jane and Emily draw closer together, they discover that they share an uncanny psychic connection that neither can explain.

As Jane takes on the role of Emily's personal protector, she begins to discover the ugly truth behind the murder of Emily's parents. Jane must now put her life on the line as Emily's protector while she finds a way to bring justice to the killer who wants Emily dead.

Laurel Dewey spins a fantastic suspense yarn, but this story is driven by the relationship of Jane and Emily. Jane finds hope and redemption through her connection to Emily, and Emily's character is captivating as she slowly chips away the wall that Jane has built around her emotions.

This is a story that will tug at your heartstrings, and Dewey reminds us of the importance of family and relationships.

Armchair Interviews says: This is an outstanding beginning to what is sure to be a successful writing career for Laurel Dewey.

Get it now, while it's free.

Kindle Free Pick of the Week: Imaginary Jesus

Here's something a little different to start out your week.

In this quirky tale the publisher describes as not-quite-true, former missionary and comic book store clerk Mikalatos disguises his critique of Christian life in an action-based quest to find the real Jesus. It's A Christmas Carol meets Oz, but instead of ghosts and tin men, it's a talking donkey, a motorcycle rider, and Mikalatos himself. The cast of characters drags the reader through the streets of Seattle and ancient Judea to introduce a host of fake Jesuses: Magic 8 Ball Jesus, Harley Jesus, even Liberal Social Services Jesus. They're constructs of the human mind. People invent a Jesus for one specific reason and then discard him when they don't need him anymore, says one of the Jesuses (the one with an expensive suit). Peter teaches Mikalatos that he must quiet falsehoods and mold a deeper relationship with the living, historical Jesus. Mixing questions of suffering and free will with a nexus of weirdness, Mikalatos throws Christian fiction into the world of Comic-Con and Star Wars. His silly quest is startling, contemporary, meaningful, and occasionally exhausting when the reader is puzzled.

This book will keep your attention and it's the type of read you can go to over and over again.  Get it while it's free.

Amazon Announces Amazon Simple Email Services

Amazon Web Services LLC, an Amazon.com company, today announced Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES), a highly scalable and cost-effective bulk and transactional email-sending service for businesses and developers. Amazon SES eliminates the complexity and expense of building an in-house email solution or licensing, installing, and operating a third-party email service. The service integrates with other AWS services, making it easy to send emails from applications being hosted on services such as Amazon EC2. With Amazon SES there is no long-term commitment, minimum spend or negotiation required - businesses can utilize a free usage tier, and after that, enjoy low fees for the number of emails sent plus data transfer. To get started using Amazon SES, visit http://aws.amazon.com.

Building large-scale email solutions to send marketing and transactional messages is often a complex and costly challenge for businesses. To increase the percentage of emails that are successfully delivered, businesses must deal with hassles such as email server management, network configuration, and meeting rigorous Internet Service Provider (ISP) standards for email content. Additionally, many third-party email solutions require contract and price negotiations, as well as significant up-front costs.

Amazon SES eliminates these challenges and enables businesses to benefit from the years of experience and sophisticated email infrastructure Amazon.com has built to serve its own large-scale customer base. Through a simple API call, businesses can now access a high-quality, scalable email infrastructure to efficiently and inexpensively communicate to their customers. For high email deliverability, Amazon SES uses content filtering technologies to scan a business's outgoing email messages to help ensure that the content meets ISP standards. The email message is then either queued for sending or routed back to the sender for corrective action. To help businesses further improve the quality of email communications with their customers, Amazon SES provides a built-in feedback loop, which includes notifications of bounce backs, failed and successful delivery attempts, and spam complaints.

"Customers have consistently asked us for the ability to send large quantities of high-quality email from Amazon EC2. Amazon SES makes it very easy for businesses to send email from applications running on Amazon EC2 and other AWS services," said Adam Selipsky, Vice President, Amazon Web Services. "With Amazon SES, businesses no longer have to worry about the details of building and maintaining their own email-sending solution or negotiating and paying for expensive outside email services. Instead, they can focus on improving customer communication and reducing costs."

Amazon is able to pass on the efficiencies of its scale to customers, and pricing for Amazon SES is only $0.10 per thousand email messages sent. Additionally, a customer can send 2,000 email messages for free each day when these emails originate from Amazon EC2 or AWS Elastic Beanstalk (data transfer fees may still apply if a customer exceeds their AWS free monthly bandwidth allowance).

Neustar, Inc is a managed services provider that enables seamless connectivity across networks, technologies and applications for carriers and enterprises. "Amazon SES has been invaluable to our business by letting us no longer worry about email deliverability - just as Amazon SQS lets us do so for our own queuing, Amazon S3 lets us do so with file storage, and Amazon RDS for databases," said Patrick Lightbody, Director of Product Management at Neustar, Inc. "For our self-service SaaS business, the email signup process must be flawless. Any delay in delivery can have significant impact on our signup rates, which require email verification, and Amazon SES has already improved those signup rates by about 10%."

"Reliable email deliverability has become more of a challenge as spam volumes have increased and ISP's have rightly become more aggressive in their efforts to shield end users from unsolicited messages," said George Cook, Vice President of Technical Architecture, 42 Entertainment, a digital entertainment and content development agency that develops alternate reality games. "Amazon SES gives us a simple way to send high-quality email directly from Amazon EC2 for in-game messaging. By providing feedback and insight into the quality of the email we're sending, we can further improve our communication with customers."

EyeJot is an easy-to-use video mail platform that can be used by both consumers and businesses to send video messages. "EyeJot is excited to be working with Amazon SES and we plan to use the new service for all our transactional email sending. Since email is an integral part of just about every business, including our own, it's nice to know there's a resource that product developers can employ that simplifies the task of sending email," said David Geller, CEO and Founder, EyeJot. "Amazon's well-documented API allows developers to send email without having to configure and manage SMTP servers. Amazon SES is easy to set up and use, and will enable us to more effectively deliver our video mail notification messages to our customers."



Amazon Allows Kindle Owners to Share Books

In the last couple weeks, Amazon made good on two announcements made some months ago. One is you can now share Kindle titles with other Kindle owners.

The lending feature has been on the want list of Kindle owners for some time. If you are a Kindle customer you can now be able to share titles you have purchased with any other Kindle user - including those using the free Kindle apps.

While a title is on loan the lender has no access to it and this seems fair, but you can only loan a title once and only for 14 days - which seems far too short. There are also other restrictions,  lending can only be initiated by customers in the U.S and recipients in some countries won't be allowed access to some titles.  Currently, sharing can only be administered via the Amazon website.

In addition, the facility is controlled by the publisher who can opt to enable or disable sharing. As you can guess most publishers see no advantage in letting users share a book with another user and so lose a potential sale. As a result you have to look quite hard to find a Kindle book that you can use to even just test the facility!

Here's hoping more and more books become sharing enabled. I can understand if newly released titles won't be able to be shared, but after a period of one year, most books should be able to be shared.

iPad Holiday Gift Ideas: Jed and Roy McCoy, A Christmas Story

Looking for something to keep the kids occupied before the big day?  Well, kids love the iPad, and kids love Christmas, so this is the perfect purchase.

A neat story and eye catching illustrations. 

'Peace on Earth!---now there's a good idea.' 'Peace in our family!'---you must be joking. Shepherds Jed and Roy McCoy have been fighting for years; so what will happen when an angel arrives announcing the birth of a baby who brings peace on earth? Read this Christmas story for the whole family, based on Luke 2:8-20, and find out!

Buy it here and it will be delivered to your iPad via the Kindle app.  Merry Christmas!