BRB: Be Right Back by Maree Dawes.

Book launches are a key step in building sales for a book.

Friends and family go along to get a signed copy and, hopefully, they read the book, tell their friends and then it goes viral.

That’s the theory. But when the book is digital, there’s a problem. What do you sign?

Maree Dawes, a writer in Western Australia, has just launched an eBook brb: be right back with publisher Spineless Wonders.

At the launch, where sales at $9.99 were brisk, those who purchased the book where given a smart cover-like folder. This is what the author signs.

Author Maree Dawes said:

“It looks like a greeting card in cellophane. Inside are instructions to reach the website of the distributor where you enter a unique code and the book then downloads to your device.”

brb: be right back, a novel in verse, has been described as the thinking person’s Fifty Shades of Grey.

Here’s a description:

Partner away and home alone but for the sleeping children, our protagonist finds herself in the fantasy world of online chat.

She and her family moved to the country and up till now she’s been bored and disconnected from her everyday world.

Online life becomes more technicoloured than the real thing. She makes friends, learns the lingo and ponders the meaning of fidelity, humanity and living in the moment.

As Bodicea, she falls for Thistlehead, they burn up the screen with online love, but when he leaves chat things get edgy. The “in real life” of her family and the ocean creep in. Her friends have no patience with the new world she has discovered.

Will Thistlehead return, will she choose real or online life and what would you do, if you were there yourself?

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