Coupon!

You can get The Gates of Nottingham on Smashwords for $.99 with coupon code EN97F until February 26. Read it, like it, recomend it! Or, you know, read it, hate it, and keep quiet. *grin*

Book Suggestions?

I've got this Kindle with nothing on it. I need suggestions as to how to fill it. I know most of you have published or will publish soon and I've bought a few of your books, but some of you I had a hard time finding. So, if you have a novel out on ebook (or even print), let me know what it is and I will buy it. Then we can chat about that too. Have you read and enjoyed any books like this lately?

*Cozy mysteries (where the heroines aren't too "cutely" neurotic and man-hating)
*Historical Fiction (literary, action, romantic, heck, I even count Michael Crichton's Timeline)
*Love Stories (by which I mean a book with an actual attempt at a plot and not just sex every 10 pages)
*Thrillers (although, I go a little light. by which I mean, I don't want to read super graphic descriptions of rape or child abuse)

Thanks!

New Layout and New Kindle

*I’ve got a new look! If you’re reading this, you’ve most likely already noticed. I decided that I hated the old look. I often like something, settle on it, then come to hate it. For example, my current purse was a K-Mart $2.49 special that I thought I loved. It is hideously ugly in a special 1970’s way. I’ll keep it until it falls apart because I hate buying purses and it is convenient. The moral of the story is that I am often aesthetically blind. So, tell me what you think. Any suggestions? I would like to continue to tweak things, but I do like this template much better.

*I just got a Kindle Touch for my birthday. Yes, I used to decry the loss of paper books for future generations and the state literature would come to with the advent of ebooks, but… I’m over it. The Kindle is awesome. Who doesn’t want a device that can hold 3,000 books and all of their music? This will at least solve the problem of the paperbacks over-flowing my room. I think my favorite part is that I can get all of the classics for free. I love classic novels. I started in on Austen and Dickens in the fifth grade. I used to read Persuasion whenever I got sick, until my sister accidentally destroyed my copy. I also want to read all of The Scarlet Pimpernel books. I’ve read five I think, but I’m pretty sure they are all free on blio. Points to people who can find the Scarlet Pimpernel references I always put in my novels. They are easy to miss.

Getting used to the Kindle does take time. It’s a little awkward to hold at first, and there is a delay in getting to the next page. I’m still adjusting, but I have so much I want to download to it. I’m excited that this gives me a better way to support indie authors than trying to scrape together fourteen dollar for a paperback and knowing they will get something like 2% out of that.

To those of you who hopped on the Kindle wagon before me: should I get a cover and wall charger? I can’t decide if I need them or not.  

Published

It’s been a little hectic in my writer’s brain lately. I had a massive crisis of confidence which put me on hold for a while. Then there was Christmas and I got two different colds. So, nothing much has been happening. However, as a result of my massive freak-out, I did re-write the ending of The Gates of Nottingham. This cut 20 pages from the book, which is good because it was too long anyway.

Long story short, last night I uploaded to Smashwords. I made up my mind that I’m at a fish or cut bait place right now. Either I should quit talking about publishing and decide that I’m a horrible writer or I should just do it and see what happens. I need to trust my own opinions, and my opinion is that this is a good book. Is it absolutely the best book ever? No. I worked very hard on it though, and it is better than probably 80% of the professionally published slush I read on a daily basis. Of course everyone will have different tastes. Some people will love it and some people will hate it. Some people will be in between. I need to get it out there for my own sake, though.

I would do things differently now, but I think that, in a way, our writing is a time capsule. I was in a different place in my life when I wrote The Gates of Nottingham. My feelings were different and so was my writing style. I am a hyper-critical person and if I don’t just say enough is enough, this will never happen for me.

So it’s out there now. It is available on Smashwords here and has already had 10 samples downloaded since last night which is exciting. It is still sitting in the vetting process, so it isn’t available through any of Smashword’s distributers yet, but in a month’s time it ought to be available from Sony, Apple, Barnes and Noble, etc. I just finished uploading to Kindle and that should take 2-3 days before I get the green light. Then it will be available on Amazon.

At the moment, I am struggling to figure out what to do for a PDF for the CreateSpace version. I really don’t want to buy Adobe, but I’m not finding a way out of it.