Full Dark, No Stars – I won, apparently!

I’ll have a post with October’s numbers soon – I actually gathered all the numbers together on the 1st, but have been working on the Untrue Tales… Book Four audiobook / writing Untrue Tales… Book Five / for NaNoWriMo so hard that I haven’t made the time to put together that post. (It’ll say eBook downloads were way up, podiobook downloads continue to go down.) But I just came home to discover I’d received a package while I was at the Starbucks all day writing (about 7k words written on Book Five, today, yay!), which I hadn’t been expecting.

Apparently, I won a copy of Stephen King’s new book, Full Dark, No Stars, from Simon & Schuster / Scribner. I signed up for email alerts on their “FREE Stuff” list, and while I’m not interested in a lot of the books they put up there (they publish a lot of different kinds of books, which I think is a good thing), I do enter a fair number of contests between that list and others I find around the web. Free to enter, just fill in my info and click? No problem. Will do. Never know what I’m going to receive in the mail or from UPS/FedEx.

In this case, filling out the form and clicking resulted in winning First Prize: a Stephen King tote bag (oops, photographed the wrong side) and a signed copy of Full Dark, No Stars. Signed, I say:

Awesome. With a little digging, I found a list of the prizes in their RSS feed (the page for the contest now just says “the contest is over”), which makes it look like this might have been just the right prize for me:

Grand Prize (1): One signed copy of Full Dark, No Stars, a signed, limited edition copy of Under the Dome, and select Stephen King/Scribner backlist titles in a Stephen King tote bag.
First Prize (1): One signed copy of Full Dark, No Stars and a Stephen King tote bag.
Second Prize (25): One copy of Full Dark, No Stars and a Stephen King tote bag.

…depending on what the select backlist titles were, of course. I do have most of the ones I’m interested in owning (hrm… though I could use a matching set of the Dark Tower series…), you may already have seen my thoughts on Under the Dome, and having a signed copy of the new book is so much more special than merely getting a free copy. I literally exclaimed in joy when I opened the package and saw what I’d won.

And that was before I’d realized it was signed.

That exciting moment came when, while writing this post, I wondered what the “First” in “First Prize” might be referring to, and jumped up to go check the book for a signature. And it was. yay!

Do you feel my signature in a book is as cool as I feel Stephen King’s is in this book? *shrug* I love the cover, and I look forward to reading it. Maybe I’ll do another book review post. I haven’t been keeping up with King’s short fiction. It’ll be interesting to see where this one goes. Thanks again, Simon & Schuster!