ebook

Using the Kindle to Edit

Posted on

When the manuscript for my novel A Reason to Live was ready to move from critique groups to professional editing, I was lucky enough to land the wonderful Alison Dasho (nee Janssen), a former editor for Bleak House Books and Tyrus Books [visit her at http://www.alisonedits.com/].

She’s in Wisconsin, I’m in Virginia; obviously, this was going to be a digital relationship. But there are a million ways to exchange documents online. How best to get my 90,000 words to you? I asked. Just send the Word document, she said, I’ll put it on my Kindle.

[Read more…]

Fantasy short story Assassin is free on Amazon

Posted on

My short story Assassin is free on Amazon today and tomorrow (3/24 – 3/24). Please avail yourself of the offer and grab it at http://www.amazon.com/Assassin-ebook/dp/B007JJSMTQ/.

Synopsis
For almost twenty years, war has raged between the mountain kingdom of Thrace and the sea-faring land of Andal, exhausting both nations. Prince Lowan, the educated and debonair second son of the King of Thrace, has arrived to make peace with his father’s enemies. But the price Andal requires for peace is high–too high–and Lowan knows there are many ways to influence a nation at war.

Assassin is an original fantasy short story of 4,200 words, or about 17 paperback pages. It includes a Story Notes section, outlining the background and thought process behind the writing as well as an excerpt from Matthew Iden’s fantasy short story Sword of Kings.

Click for larger image.

If you are kind enough to download it, please consider telling your friends by clicking on the “Share this item” button on Amazon (example on right). It would be a huge help!

I’ve included an excerpt after the break.

Kindleboards: The Best Resource Around

Posted on

For many indie authors (and Kindle aficionados), this post will fall into the “water is wet” category of late-breaking news, but I’ve found it’s foolish to make assumptions about what others know and don’t, especially when it comes to the rapidly-changing face of digital publishing and the internet.

The Best Resource Out There
Kindleboards (www.kindleboards.com) is a site that has to be at the top of every digital self-publisher’s bookmarks list. It is a supremely helpful site that, in digital publishing terms, has been around since the Stone Age (about 3 years) providing a forum space for budding digital authors, Kindle book lovers, and geek and gadget people in general.

The forum section boasts around 55,000 registered users and several thousand are online at any one time. A subset of those are writers (detailed below), but many more thousands are readers interested in one thing: digital books.

[Read more…]

Feeling Free

Posted on

If I had any doubts about the power of promotion, they were laid to rest this past weekend.

My crime fiction short story collection Three Shorts has been free since about the first week of February. In a month, it had been downloaded a respectable–if unspectacular–500 times. I had heard of other indie authors garnering thousands of downloads, but I’m a relatively unknown new-comer and I was more than happy to see hundreds of downloads fueled by little more than a change in price…I didn’t do any specific promotion beyond Twitter, Facebook, and a blog post.

[Read more…]