There are books on my shelf written by a man with two names. Those names are David Wolverton and David Farland.  Why he publishes under two names is irrelevant to this post. What is relevant are these facts:

  1. He’s good.
  2. He’s entertaining.
  3. He’s an excellent teacher.
  4. His son is currently in the hospital, fighting for his life.

Yeah. Heartstrings are tugging.

David’s son Ben Wolverton is 16, and was recently in a sporting accident that has resulted in severe brain trauma, more broken bones than you want to think exist, and a coma that he may never wake up from. The bills from this are expected to be huge, on the order of a million dollars.

David’s a great author, but he doesn’t have a million dollars. 

This is the point where a hundred thousand of us can stand up, pull out our wallets, and say “Will $10 help?”

You can donate directly if you want. The current goal is set at $200,000. That’s an optimistic goal — not because it’s unlikely that they’ll reach it, but because they hope he’ll wake up soon.

There’s also another way you can help. It’s called a Book Bomb.

A Book Bomb is a special kind of advertising campaign where a group of authors will gather around and promote a book to be purchased on a certain day. That “certain day” part is important, because the more sales on major sites like Amazon and Barnes & Noble and so on in one day, the more the book goes up in rankings. The higher the ranking, the more people see the book, and the more sales are generated . . . which increases the ranking, and I’m sure you can see the recursion now.

The two books that are getting Book Bombed right now are David’s latest novel, Nightengale, and the book based on his famous (no, really, famous) writing course, Million Dollar Outlines. Both are published under his Farland pen name. However, there’s a reason that I have not linked to their Amazon pages.

That’s because there’s yet another way to help out. Many authors have set up Amazon Affiliate links where Amazon will kick back a nickle or a dime of every dollar you spend to the person who owns it. Right now, several of them have redirected their links to David Wolverton/Farland’s account. For the sake of convenience, I’m linking to Howard Tayler’s blog post on this subject. Click that link, then click one of the book links in the post. Even if you don’t buy one of the books (and you really should — they’re excellent), you can go shopping for stuff you would buy anyway and wind up donating to Ben Wolverton’s medical fund without spending an extra cent. It’s like “lazy charity.”

By the way, that writing book, Million Dollar Outlines? I collect writing books. I pretty much never learn anything new about writing from them. I get them so that I can learn new ways of explaining things to authors (and, many times, explaining why some other person’s ideas about writing are idiotic).

Million Dollar Outlines is a good book. It’s an entertaining book. I literally found myself engrossed, because he wrote it rather masterfully. But more important, I have learned new things from this book and I’m not even done with it yet.

So go read both, but especially Million Dollar Outlines. If you’re reading my blog because you want to learn more about writing, it’s $7 well-spent.