Broken... Charity

Since Broken will be out this weekend (I'll be hitting the 'publish' button before I go to bed tonight) ... It's a good time to announce the charity that will be receiving 10% of the royalties I earn on the book. http://www.seashepherd.org/operation-requiem

So, you may or may not have heard of Sea Shepherd. They used to have a show on Animal Planet(I think) called Whale Wars... I don't have cable, so I've never actually seen it. They do a lot of other work in the marine conservation area, and one that is important to me is that practice of shark finning.

If you aren't familiar with it, the quick and dirty version is that there are people out there who think shark fin soup is awesome (and has aphrodisiac or medicinal properties), and so they pay good money for fisherman to catch sharks, cut off their fin, and throw what they don't want back in the water. The sharks then go on to suffer a slow, painful death.

It's pretty ugly, and it's something I want to help raise awareness for.

I hope they don't mind I took their image to help promote them here :)

Betrayal (The Divine Book Two) - This One's for the Bears

As you may or may not be aware, I currently donate 10% of all of the royalties I receive from Balance (The Divine Book One) to the Humane Society of the United States (over $700 through this July). I don't do it as an incentive for people to buy my book, but because it's something I believe in, and I want to give back what I can. I'll be choosing charities for every book I publish, until I can't manage the list anymore, at which point I'll just send more to the ones I've already chosen. In any case, for Betrayal I've selected two charities, both of them involved with animal welfare, and more specifically for the cause of helping wild bears.  Why two? Because I promised my wife I would donate to the WSPA (warning, bear baiting is graphic), and because we also want to support Animals Asia, who are working to end the practice of bear bile farming. I will likely use the same charities for Book Three, to get them both up to 10%, but I didn't want to wait to start giving to both.

If you have a minute and a love of bears (or just hate to see any living thing suffer), please visit the sites and consider donating as well.

Betrayal will be available on Amazon in July.