Two quick notes before we continue with Max’s weekly update below:

Kill Your Darlings on the Kindle is $1.00 for the next five days, if you’re willing to jump through a couple small hoops. Here’s the deal—AmazonLocal is a website that offers discount vouchers for various local and national products and services (like rival websites Groupon or LivingSocial, if you’ve heard of those). Right now, one of their promotions is a $1.00 voucher redeemable for one of 25 select Kindle novels, including Mallory novel Kill Your Darlings. There is a limit of one book per customer.

Since this is kind of a new process, here’s how to do it—don’t be daunted, as Amazon provides detailed instructions throughout, and the whole thing took me less than five minutes.

Step One: Go to AmazonLocal. You can skip the subscription step, and if asked for a city, any city will have this deal listed for the duration.

Step Two: Order the voucher (you will be prompted to sign in with your Amazon account) and wait for your voucher code e-mail. The e-mail will also lead you through the rest of the process, which is…

Step Three: Go to the promotion page, enter your code by midnight Pacific time on February 7, and purchase one of the 25 books. There are plenty of good ones on there, including several of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, but since you can only get one, I of course recommend Kill Your Darlings as the only proper choice.

Our good friend Bill Plympton (you may know him as I first did, through his brilliant and totally fried animations on MTV, or his Academy-Award nominated short Your Face) is running a Kickstarter funding campaign for his next animated feature, and there’s only three days left to help fund his project and its gorgeous new coloring style. Backer rewards include digital and physical copies of the completed feature, signed original drawings, and more. The video gives a better pitch than I ever could, so watch the video, and check out his Kickstarter page!

Your regularly scheduled update continues below….

Tags: Kill Your Darlings, Mallory, Sales