Over Two Thousand Books Sold So Far!

What are the Top Based Books of Summer?

The 2025 Summer Based Book Sale has just a couple of days left, and has already moved 1303 Kindle Free E-books and 1415 Kindle Paid E-Books for a total of 2718 referrals - more including the listed authors who sell outside Amazon.

What are the Top Based Books readers are buying this summer? Read on to learn about the remarkable range of both old and newly emerging classics that appeal to today’s based readers.

The Current Summer Sale Top Five

With just a couple of days to go, classics that dominated the top of the listings. Rafael Sabatini’s genre-defining Captain Blood holds a narrow lead. Sabatini’s tale of a doctor wrongly accused of treason and sold into slavery, only to escape and embark on a career of piracy was inspired by the real-life career of Henry Morgon. “The deeds of Captain Blood were misunderstood, forgotten, or deliberately confused with those of less honorable men like Morgan,” insisted Sabatini, “and this confusion of identities or misreporting of history is what the book sets out to correct.” Sabatini positions his account as the truer version, rescued from obscurity and confusion, in part by referring to “certain chronicles” and unpublished records.

Tied for second place are science fiction grandmaster John C. Wright and H. Rider Haggard. Wright’s newly reissued The Iron Chamber of Memory is “[a]n eerie, suspenseful, romantic fantasy in the mood of C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams.”

“I never had an idea more beautiful or haunting than The Iron Chamber of Memory. It is a fairy tale for adults, a theological meditation, a time travel story, a ghost story, and a story about love and honor and remembering what you should not forget.”

Wright story, One Bright Star to Guide Them, arguably the book that broke the Hugo Awards, is also on sale. To grasp the full measure of the corruption and depravity behind today’s Hugo Awards, just read One Bright Star to Guide Them, and then learn how both it and its author were deliberately “No Awarded.”

H. Rider Haggard defined the genre of lost-world fiction with stories that blend Victorian sensibilities, ancient secrets, and thrilling adventures. Allan Quartermain, hero of King Solomon's Mines, was a direct inspiration for Indiana Jones. Which character is better? Read and find out!

M.S. Olney’s The Sundered Crown Saga (1-3): (Books 1-3+ The Nightblade prequel novel) is in fourth place. This epic fantasy boxset - a complete trilogy - is a tale of magic, monsters and epic battles. Olney is also doing his part to boost fellow indie authors with his Epic Indie website, and his own periodic sales. Be sure to bookmark his site and get on his mailing list. Time is running out to join his own Epic Indie Summer Sale. Submit your book through his contact form, here.

Rounding out the top five is Yuval Kordoc’s Orders of Magnitude, a gripping new novella that explores the resilience of the human—and holy—spirit in the darkness of the void.

Roy M. Griffis’s The Cthulhu, Amalgamated Memoirs

We’ll deviate from a strictly linear following of the rankings to highlight Roy M. Griffis’s The Cthulhu, Amalgamated Memoirs. The first book in the series, The Thing From HR is in sixth place. “Picture The Office meets Cthulhu, meets Scooby Doo,” declares Blaine Pardoe.

Book 2 The Auditors of Doom is in thirteenth place, Book 3 The Breakroom of a Thousand Nightmares is in fifteenth place, and Book 4 The Supply Closet of Eternal Terror is in twelfth place so far in the 2025 Summer Based Book Sale. Can a Bad Thing be a Good Guy? Find out in this “…wild and funny romp with horror and humor.”

The Next Five Top Based Books

In seventh place is Robert Kroese’s Mercury Falls, “The Apocalypse is nigh in this whimsical, riotous debut. Christine Temetri, a freelancer for a popular religious news magazine, is tired of endless assignments covering cults incorrectly prophesizing the End of Days. When she talks her boss into giving her a better assignment, she doesn’t anticipate it will actually lead her back to a cult leader: the charismatic Galileo Mercury, who turns out not to be a cult leader at all, but a bona fide angel.”

The current leader in the 2025 overall Based Book rankings, Ryan M. Patrick, made the top ten in eighth place with The Martian Incident: A Science Fiction Thriller. “When a mysterious aerial drone is shot down on Mars near the American colony of Columbia, NASA accident investigator John Cameron joins a joint DOD team to recover it. But, as a sandstorm moves in to blanket the area, the Americans are attacked by an overwhelming enemy force of EU soldiers in a surprise attack.”

In ninth place is Tyler Cook’s short collection, The One-Minute Mysteries of Inspector Gerard: The Ultimate Flatfoot. “Ever noticed how "Two-Minute Mysteries" always contain the most inane, unlikely solutions? So did writer and musician Tyler James Cook, who grew weary of solutions like, ‘He couldn't have stolen it, because he can't put his left hand in his right pocket.’ Balderdash! In the spirit of those mysteries, Cook created Inspector Gerard, a grizzled, film noir detective from Aurora, Illinois. Gerard sees the clues no one else sees--including the reader.”

Rounding out the top ten, we have a tie. In Mark Sowers’s Enders & Associates, a former FBI investigator with uncanny insight inherits a mysterious silver mine in Arizona and uncovers a hidden family legacy linked to decades of strange deaths and disappearances in a remote desert town. “Another captivating engagement with an intriguing exploration of contrasting elements of human nature. From the cold Alaska woods to the searing Arizona desert, and from the wonder of love to the horror of evil, Mark Sowers transports readers throughout the full spectrum of life on this well paced tale full of hope and despair in full measures.”

Also in tenth place is Hans G. Schantz’s The Wise of Heart, a courtroom drama of biological science versus transgenderism that brings the Scopes Monkey Trial up to date for the twenty first century. “Reader, I want to grab you by the lapels, pull you close, and tell you in an urgent heartfelt whisper that a physicist, of all things, has written one of the best social parodies of the current horrible era.”

The Rest of the Top 25 Summer Based Books

Robert Kroese’s The Brand of the Warlock is first in the swords & sorcery, Counterfeit Sorcerer series and fourteenth, so far, in the Summer Sale rankings. “His name is Konrad, and he has a secret.... Once an ordinary soldier, his life was forever changed by a fateful meeting with a dying sorcerer. Now he is all that stands between civilization and the creeping evil of the shadow world.”

The Complete Father Brown Mysteries by G. K. Chesterton is a perennial sale favorite, encompassing two dozen short stories and novellas featuring G. K. Chesterton's legendary detective, Father Brown. This Chesterton collection ranks sixteenth.

Six go into the woods and three come out in J.P. Choquette’s Shadow in the Woods (Monsters in the Green Mountains) which is in seventeenth place. “What is real and what is folklore? Are monsters like Bigfoot still alive in the deepest areas of Vermont's Green Mountains, or just characters in stories told around the campfire? Folk legends come to life in this heart-rate-accelerating suspense thriller novel by J.P. Choquette.”

Smart and Sexy: The evolutionary origins and biological underpinnings of cognitive differences between the sexes by Roderick Kaine is in eighteenth place. “Intelligence differences between men and women, which are both real and substantially meaningful, are due primarily to hormonal influences on brain development and pseudo-dominance of the X chromosome working in combination. This book provides the evidence for this assertion, explores why we evolved this way, and discusses the various real-world consequences of this biological fact.”

In nineteenth place, Roy M. Griffis appears yet again with Holding the Line: Book One of The Long Watch. “Holding the Line by Roy Griffis was just what I was looking for in a new read. It follows a young man in his first year at a military school navigating the awkwardness of meeting others from different backgrounds while trying to form a cohesive group. Throw in some strange and spooky happenings at the old school, a new love interest and some nightmarish sci-fi like creatures, that may or may not be real, and it will keep you turning the pages to find out. I'm eagerly awaiting the sequel!”

The Pulp Mindset: A NewPub Survival Guide by J.D. Cowan, (L. Jagi Lamplighter, editor) completes the top twenty. “A new frontier has opened where anything goes! We live in a pulp landscape now, a place where the past and present comes together to create a better future. In this book you will learn just what this NewPub world is, how to adapt to it, and change the way you think about everything.”

All Men Dream of Earthwomen and Other Aeons by John C. Wright ranks twenty first. “Behold future wars and children's power armor, see the planetkiller seeking immortal vengeance against planetkillers, learn whom the choosers of the slain will choose for love, or when the dolphins will inherit the earth, or why all men dream of earthwomen. Enjoy these haunting tales of futures near and far by Science Fiction master John C. Wright.”

From the author of The Mystical Adventures of Stavros Papadakis comes a comic novel about family, faith, and second chances. Making a Better World by Michael Lacoy is in twenty second place. “A mix of satire and romance, family drama and social commentary, the novel touches on a number of today’s hot-button issues: internet cancel culture, woke capital, the crisis in the Catholic Church, the treatment of the elderly, and the raising of children. Witty and big-hearted, Making a Better World takes a playful look at the way we live now.”

Nick McPherson’s Chosen: The New Order (The Grim King Saga Book 1) ranks twenty third. “Worlds collide as three boys find themselves sought after for abilities they didn't know they had, abilities that may yet quell the darkness that is awakening across the realm of Endland. That is, of course, if they can survive the interdimensional portal to get there.”

In twenty fourth is professional curmudgeon Francis W. Porretto with The Death Cults: The Drive For Human Extinction. “Western Civilization is under siege by an array of forces whose details vary but whose central thrust is opposed to human life: its origination. its perpetuation, and its expansion. All of them reject the premise that human life is sacred. These are the Death Cults. Know them for what they are, and for what they mean to do.”

Better known for his libertarian science fiction Spooner Federation Saga and Realm of Essences, Porretto, who blogs at Liberty’s Torch, also has his Onteora County Romance, Doors, in the sale.

Fenton Wood’s Yankee Republic

A special shout out to Fenton Woods who offered Pirates of the Electromagnetic Waves for free in the sale (the price has reverted now to $0.99). We don’t have visibility on free downloads, but the author reports about a hundred readers took advantage of this offer. “A young radio engineer travels across an alt-history America, encountering primeval gods, mythical beasts, and tall tales come to life, in a quest to build a radio transmitter that can reach the stars.” The first three volumes of the five-volume Yankee Republic series are only $0.99, including The Tower of the Bear (Yankee Republic Book 3) which competed the top twenty five.

Why are the Based Book Rankings Important?

Ranking books by actual purchases rather than votes provides a more reliable measure of genuine interest, as it reflects real economic commitment and is harder to manipulate than free or anonymous voting systems. Sales data captures broader market trends, incentivizes quality through consumer willingness to pay, and offers traceable metrics that indicate lasting relevance. Amazon inherently limits voters to one purchase and therefore one vote per book. While not completely immune to manipulation (e.g., bulk buying), purchase-based rankings generally offer a higher signal-to-noise ratio than popularity contests driven by casual opinions or coordinated campaigns.

The most recent Hugo Awards for which data is available had 3436 ballots cast. The Summer Based Book Sale has already registered 2718 books referred with more to come in the closing two days of the sale. Further compare to the Based Book Sale rankings for 2024 which incorporate the input of over 5000 purchases. The 2025 rankings are on track to be even more hotly contests with total sales on track to exceed 10,000 purchases. That’s on par with the total number of votes for the Dragon Awards. The Based Book Rankings are rapidly becoming a culturally significant indicator of the best books available today.

How do the Rankings Work?

The numbers are generated from Amazon Affiliate links on the sale pages (from which the Based Book Sale get a 4% royalty), and they do not include purchases outside the sale. Authors typically report sales 50% to 100% higher than the numbers reported here. Also, you have to be present to win. Books not in the sale are not eligible for Top Based Book honors. And books that appear in multiple sales have an edge over those that only appear in one sale. The Based Book Rankings is a crowd-sourced list of some of the best Based Books available, crowd-selected from a list of over three hundred.

About the Based Book Sale

Four times a year, indie and small press authors band together for a special sale. For one week, they all price some of their best books at only $0.99 or free, and they mutually promote the sale to their readers, fans, mailing lists, and social media followers. Upcoming sales for 2025:

• BasedCon Based Book Sale: Wednesday, September 3, 2025, 12:00 AM PDT through Wednesday, September 10, 2025, 12:00 AM PDT.

• Black Friday/Cyber Monday Based Book Sale: Wednesday, November 26, 2025, 12:00 AM PST through Wednesday, December 3, 2025, 12:00 AM PST.

Also, many authors have a title or two permanently priced at $0.99 or free, so the Based Book Sale Substack offers an “Everyday Based Book Bargains” Sale. Authors, signup here.

The 2025 Summer Based Book Sale runs today through the end of the day Tuesday June 24 and features over three hundred based books for $0.99 or less.

Thanks for making the Based Book Sale a success and for demonstrating that distributed, crowd-sourced marketing can bypass ideological gatekeeping.

Let’s work together to keep making 2025 a great year for Based Books!

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