The Alternative History Based Book Sale

An After Action Review

We have the numbers. Time for an after-action review.

The sale referred 53 Kindle Free E-books and 326 Kindle Paid E-Books. As usual, there were many additional books sold outside the sale.

This post will present detailed results for the top fifteen, offer a comprehensive list of the top twenty-six sellers, and conclude with our future plans.

Sales Results

This niche sale focused on alternative history based books. The runaway most popular entry was James Young’s military alt-history, Dispatches from Valhalla. K.B. Condi’s American Revolution secret history Quest for Harmony and Travis Corcoran’s Firefly Season 2, about the cross timeline trade in bootleg cultural artifacts came in second and third respectively. We had a tie for fourth place with Joseph Knowles’, Defying Conventions, about a secret conspiracy to sabotage the Constitutional Convention, and my own A Rambling Wreck in which freshmen thwart a social justice takeover at an alternate timeline Georgia Tech.

In a tie for sixth place were Robert Kroese’s Dream of the Iron Dragon, in which crashed space travelers from the future enlist Vikings to build a spaceship and take them home, and Antonio Guadagno’s Despair of the Seer, a masterful blend of supernatural horror and alternative history set in a nightmarish version of the 1980s. Milo James Fowler scored the eighth place spot for his collection of seven short stories, Alternative Histories. In ninth place was Fritz Bauer and the Courtesan of Paris by Raymund Eich. Denton Salles’, Daemonic Mechanical Artifacts closed out the top ten.

Fenton Wood’s secret history of the young protagonists who had to hack NASA’s Galileo space probe to thwart an alien threat, Hacking Galileo, took eleventh place honors. Twelfth place was a three-way tie between Steven G. Johnson’s Operation Vampire, a Weird World War II adventure, Zachary Forbes & Joshua Forbes, Three Rivers Plague, about post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh coping with the aftermath of biological warfare, and David Herod’s Improvidence set in a post-apocalyptic West Virginia. Finally, in fifteenth place was The Compleat Martian Invasion by John Taloni.

Here’s an extended listing. Note, free books don’t show up in the stats.

The Based Book Sale has long been funded by the 4% Amazon Affiliate kickback the sale receives when readers purchase a book through one of our links. $0.04 per book isn’t much, but over thousands of books sold, it begins to add up. We've always allowed non-Amazon links (from which we make no money), if authors prefer, so as to help authors and readers escape the Amazon monopoly. Since our move to Substack last year, generous patrons have supported our mission by upgrading to paid subscriptions. This has grown to such an extent that the subscription revenue is on par with the Amazon affiliate-link revenue. Speaking of which…

This alternate revenue stream will help us better decouple the sale from Amazon and explore alternate distribution channels.

What Next For the Based Book Sale?

Here’s the schedule for the remaining 2025 sales:

• Summer Based Book Sale: Wednesday, June 18, 2025, 12:00 AM PDT through Wednesday, June 25, 2025, 12:00 AM PDT.

• 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.

Be sure you are signed up to get the call for authors a couple of weeks in advance of each of these sales.

Authors should DM @aetherczar on Twitter to be added to the Based Book discussion group.

That’s it for now. Thanks for being part of the Based Book community.

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