You may have heard about the big Gmail fail today when Google’s mail app went down for an hour and 45 minutes. It was a tech apocalypse of so-so proportions.

But it gets fun when on-demand publisher Lulu.com offered a 25% discount today only. Use the code “gmail” and you can get 25% off, up to $100 until midnight tonight. So what can you buy at Lulu.com? Well, among other things (like Wil Wheaton’s Sunken Treasure) you can buy my first novel, Downtown Dandelions.

If you’ve ever considered purchasing my barely edited, first stab at a novel, now’s your chance to get it for 25% off (that’s only $9.74). What a deal! I haven’t made much of an effort to pitch this novel, mainly because of the whole barely edited part (yes, it has typos). But today I thought, why not? Some of you might actually get a kick out of it. Some people have actually liked it. In fact, just last month a distant friend commented on Facebook: “I just read Downtown Dandelions on my vacation and really enjoyed it.” Nearly five years after it was published some people are still enjoying it, so why not pitch it again?

It’s the story of college students facing calamity and falling in love. Death and romance in one tidy package.

If you haven’t heard the back story on this novel, you can read up on it here. Essentially, I wrote it in a month as a part of the National Novel Writing Month. I spent a few weeks editing it (mostly for proofreading, it didn’t get a real edit) and slapped it together on Lulu.com so I could have an actual copy on my shelf, more for posterity than anything else.

So if you want to snag a copy at 25% off, you’ve only got a few hours left to do so. And if you’re cheap, you can also just download the free PDF.

Update: Looks like Lulu is having another sale for Labor Day weekend: 20% off up to $25 (code: WHITE) or $50 off $250 or more (code: GREEN).