The Spring 2026 Based Book Sale Top Ten... So Far!

Sale Ends Tuesday, February 17

As of this morning, the Spring 2026 Based Book Sale has referred 157 Kindle Free E-books and 924 Kindle Paid E-Books, 1081 books in all. We’re more than just a sale here at the Based Book Sale Substack. We’re a crowdsourced selection of the best Based Books available as selected by over a thousand purchase decisions made by your fellow Based Book Readers. Did they spy something you overlooked from among the many offerings in the sale? Check out the Top Ten list to see what you may have missed.

The Top Ten

At the top of the list with 57 sales, we have Warp Marine Corps: The Complete Series by C.J. Carella. After aliens attack without warning and slaughter half the human race, a new country emerges. Using alien technology and desperate ingenuity, the reborn USA carves a place for itself in a violent universe, thanks to its deadly Navy and the dreaded Warp Marine Corps. Together for the first time, here are the five novels of the Warp Marine Corps Series. I’ve read these and can endorse they are top-flight military science fiction with a remarkably well-executed scope and scale from exciting small-unit action to diplomatic skullduggery between galactic empires.

In second place with 49 sales is Sarah Hoyt with No Man’s Land: Volume 1 (Chronicles of Lost Elly). Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.

Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends— has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all.
Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction.

Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose. Check out this new release, first in her Chronicles of Lost Elly.

Fenton Wood captured the bronze medal with 28 sales for Hacking Galileo,
a story untold for over 30 years... Teenage hacker Roger O. Miller made national headlines when he was arrested for hacking into NASA computers and hijacking an interplanetary probe. He told the authorities a wild story about a rogue asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Eventually, he recanted and admitted that he fabricated the whole thing. Or did he?

For the first time, his closest confederate tells the real story of what motivated a group of brainy teenagers to create an illegal space program under the noses of the authorities. It all started with a radio experiment that led to an accidental discovery...

This is another novel I’ve read and can whole-heartedly endorse. I’ve been a Fenton Wood fan since his marvelous debut novel, Pirates of the Electromagnetic Waves (also on sale for $0.99) an amazing young-adult techno-adventure reminiscent of Bertrand R. Brinley’s classic Mad Scientists Club. Set in an alternate universe nostalgically reminiscent of mid-century America, Wood tells the story of a boy and his young friends as they struggle to build and operate a radio station.

Hacking Galileo is is a tech memoir by an insider, full of ingenious exploits and fascinating details about the aerospace technology of the 1980's. Author and publisher alike are risking Federal retaliation by publishing this book. Is it a true account, or a clever work of fiction? What is the Terrible Secret of Space, and what does it have to do with the origin of the rogue asteroid? Read it for yourself--while you still can!

And if you’re also a Fenton Wood fan, you’ll want to back the crowdfund for Dwellers in the Deep, an epic story of saturation diving, aliens, aerospace, rogue AI, open-source fusion power, and crashing the gold market!

D.W. Patterson is in fourth with 25 sales for Zero Point: A Quantum Adventure. Jack Carson had a stroke of luck; a great-uncle had left him land in Arizona. But that’s when Jack’s luck began to change, mysterious sights and sounds threatened to make his inheritance worthless as a center for the study of physics. Marta Merritt decided to help, and she didn’t think it a mystery, she thought it was an artifact of a forgotten physics theory called pilot-wave mechanics.

Patterson definitely grabbed me with “pilot-wave mechanics.” Check this one out!

Closing out the Top Five with 23 sales is Translation Error by Zaklog the Great. When Ben Douglas reconnects with an old college friend at Miskatonic University, David Ward is deep into something extraordinary: a six-hundred-year-old manuscript written in the Serpentine Script — a language that has appeared across unconnected ancient cultures and defeated every scholar who’s tried to crack it. David thinks his AI program, HASTUR, is the key. He might be right. But some doors, once opened, can’t be closed. And what’s waiting on the other side isn’t waiting patiently.

Check out Zaklog the Great’s Amazon #1 New Release in One-Hour Teen & Young Adult Short Reads.

Christian Warren Freed stands in sixth place with Zero Hour: A Military Science Fiction Campaign (Crimson Spiders Book 1). The first in an all-new military sci-fi series from author and US Army combat veteran Christian Warren Freed.

“Zero Hour launches readers into a gritty, high-stakes military sci-fi campaign where the elite Crimson Spiders must defy impossible odds to save a crumbling Imperium—perfect for fans of explosive action, war-forged camaraderie, and battlefield heroism drawn from real combat experience.” – NewInBooks

The Everything Machine an epic hard science space colonization adventure by by Jeff Duntemann is tied for seventh place with twenty sales. An Amazon Reviewer says:

First, the fun. An alien machine that makes a unique item from each unique 256-beat rhythm. Artifacts that do all manner of things, some quite unexpectedly. Conflict. Good versus evil. Action! It's a rollicking good read. Never a dull moment.

But it's more than fun. Jeff has created a world that has seemingly unlimited opportunity for all, and yet there is a small group of powerful people who try to control access to the resources and technology so that only a few can benefit. The story is the fight of those who would make those resources and technologies accessible to everybody. It's also the story of the eternal struggle between change and changelessness, socially and technologically.

Something I've always enjoyed about Jeff's stories is that they're people-focused. Sure, really cool 19th-century technology, a smattering of future technology, lots of weird alien artifacts, and even some kind of alien intelligence mixed in. But those are supporting characters or background to the stories of the people involved. Jeff's characters feel real, and the situations they find themselves are believable, given the world in which they exist.

Our other seventh place Based Book is Prophecy of the Black Sun: A Steampunk Fantasy Adventure by James A. Buck.

“An exciting, Victorian era-style steampunk fantasy featuring sorcery and the supernatural, scientists and their machines, inter-dimensional travel, spies and secret policemen, treachery and intrigue, bizarre creatures, and soldiers marching into battle in the age of gunpowder.”

Prophecy of the Black Sun is the first volume in the series Tales of Jurasia. Check out this new release.

Yuval Kordov secured ninth place with nineteen sales for The Hand of God (Dark Legacies Book 1). The world ended—twice. Only Esther, the Eternal One, saw it all happen. As head of the powerful Revenant Sisterhood, she shepherds humanity from Cathedral, the Last City. Except Cathedral isn’t the last city, and her sisterhood’s power is far from holy. It’s the year 2500, give or take. The passage of time has become as blurry as the gray wastes that cover most of North America. No moon or stars light the night, and demonic hordes smash against the last outposts of civilization. Two reborn nations vie for humanity’s future. In the west, Cathedral unleashes its God-engines—ancient walking war machines—in a final bid to cleanse the earth. In the east, the struggling city-state of Bastion turns to the last living AI for salvation. Between them, a tribe of technological scavengers unwittingly holds the balance of power. Hell is on the horizon. Who will survive?

For fans of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos, Iain Banks’ Culture novels, Dune, and other classic metaphysical science fiction. This compelling new trilogy explores questions of family, faith, and the human condition on the backdrop of a dark post-apocalyptic future.

Christian Warren Freed makes his second appearance, this time closing out the Top Ten with eighteen sales for The Lazarus Men: A science fiction noir thriller (The Lazarus Men Agenda Book 1).

“A gripping blend of sci-fi noir and pulse-pounding adventure, The Lazarus Men hurls an ordinary man into an extraordinary galactic chase where alien secrets, ruthless operatives, and a forgotten treasure collide—perfect for fans of Total Recall and The Maltese Falcon.” – NewInBooks.com

Extended Sale Results

A reminder on how the numbers work. Sale numbers are generated from Amazon Affiliate links on the sale page (from which the Based Book Sale gets a 4% royalty), and they do not include purchases outside the sale, or if a buyer is using a link hijacker in their browser to substitute a different referral code for my own. Authors typically report sales 50% to 100% higher.

Of course, you have to be present to win a spot in the list. Books not in the sale are not eligible to be in the list and compete for Top Based Book honors. And books that appear in multiple sales have an edge over those that only appear in one sale. Based Book Rankings are a crowd-sourced list of some of the best Based Books available, crowd-selected from a list of hundreds.

And notice how closely packed the rankings are. A half dozen purchases can boost a book from tenth to fifth in the rankings. Your purchase decisions matter when it comes time for other Based Book Readers to take a chance on a new Based Author.

The race for Top Based Book of 2026 has begun, and here are the extended rankings. First, a complete list of the top fifty Based Books.

And the next fifty…

Check out the entire sale, here.

It’s been a rough year with the double whammy of influenza followed by pneumonia, but thanks to antibiotics, my inhaler, other medicines, and a whole lot of bedrest, I’m feeling much better. I appreciate the prayers and well wishes.

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

Hans

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