Getting Published: Notice a Trend

Well, after a few hurdles I got the blogging essay collection uploaded to Kindle Direct (I wanted to try IngramSpark as a comparison but wasn't in the mood at the moment)...

Notice a Trend: 17 Years of Prime Blogging is now for sale!

All because I had award-winning blog articles from the Florida Writers Association's Royal Palm Awards - see the gold sticker! - and needed a print book to put the award stickers.

The hurdles involved as always: 

1) hiring someone to make the book cover. I went to Fiverr again and found cover designer Olinart who suggested a different approach that looked cleaner and fit the theme of the book better.

2) hiring someone to format the book for publication, because in spite of my years of writing and my background in journalism I still can't get the damn margins and book gutters (that space between printed pages where the bindery keeps it all together) figured out to a 6" x 9" alignment. PLUS getting the footnotes squeezed into the PDF was a headache, and this book on blogging - where the links to articles backing up your arguments normally go - won't go anywhere without proper citing.

Formatting to publication for fiction works seems pretty straightforward as a lot of designers offer to do that. Formatting non-fiction was a harder get, so I ended up going to a site called Reedsy where I sent out requests and got one back from Michael Vito T. who got the margins done, spaced pages to make it fit, and tweaked the fonts.

It still costs out of pocket to get these things done, but it's a far better - and more budget-friendly - method than dealing with Print-On-Demand services.

The eBook on Kindle is ready to go. The print paperback will take another three days for market. I'll amend this article when I'm sure the ISBN numbers are set.

Maybe with a fiction book I will attempt to publish via IngramSpark that way and test how that goes.

P.S. Funny Locations is doing well and I hope to find more short story fans! 

New Release: Funny Locations

Apologies for my distractions, but trying to get this uploaded to Amazon Publishing for both paperback and ebook release:

I hope you can see the UFO.
Book cover by M. A. Rehman
a cover artist available on Fiverr

I'll have the official publication date announced once it's confirmed, but the Kindle release is usually within a day.

Update: It's officially published! Amazon has the paperback and the Kindle ebook available for market!

This is a collection of stories ranging from revised / repaired versions released earlier in Last of the Grapefruit Wars (2004) alongside stories I've written and tried submitting in the years since. I have a personal favorite "Road Trip To Vegas" as the opening story - and the inspiration for the cover - all coming from the stories I consider "humor" and based on a diverse map of locales - from Las Vegas to Florida to Florida and Florida and also the Pacific Northwest and a little more Florida and Hong Kong and New Jersey and maybe a spot in Florida and New York City - to justify the book title. /grin

It doesn't include a particular ghost story which does have a road trip theme, because I'm still hoping to find another publication to see interest in it.

So this is how my year works out, people. Hopefully the readership out there will like the stories I tell.

NaNoWriMo Planning 2019 And Other News

I've submitted working with NaNo this year to be the Municipal Liaison for the Lakeland region, as the lady who did it last year is moving away.

This may be relatively stressful due to ongoing concerns with work - we are still woefully understaffed at my library - but hopefully things can change between now and November.

I may try a run at the July Camp NaNo. I'm still recovering from falling apart during the April attempt. :(

In the meantime, I've been notified the latest volume of Strangely Funny VI release NOW in print, while encouraging my seven followers to spread the word that the Kindle ebook version is available right now! (P.S. PLEASE leave good reviews when you download).

Also wik, I am submitting some shorts here and there, looking through a site called Submission Grinder to see what places are accepting and if anything I've got can generate interest... Updates on that front as responses bounce back.

NOW AS eBOOK! Strangely Funny V Now Available on Kindle!

For those of you with ereaders - well okay, Kindle only - Amazon.com now has the 2018 edition of the sixth volume of a five volume set (don't ask) of Strangely Funny!

Somewhere in the madness of hitchhiking ghosts, devil deals, and double-parked cars there's a tale of coffee zombies titled "The Pumpkin Spice Must Flow" and I hope you enjoy it.

Granted, it's not in a print copy I can autograph for ye, but the physical books should be coming soon!

Please buy a copy if you're a Kindle user, and please let all your Kindle-owning friends know about it and the previous volumes (and I have stories in two of the earlier volumes as well)! You should find a lot of the stories hilarious!

NEW Published: A Serious Tank on a Clockwork World

You may notice an earlier post about teaching a class on self-publishing and e-publishing in particular. Part of the class was to demonstrate how to actually upload that book and make it available.

So I took a story I'd been fiddling with for years, cleaned it up as best I could, struggled over designing my own book cover, and tried the upload.

I messed up the file size of the book cover JPG, so the class got futzed in a hurry.

In the meantime, I'd discussed the whole issue of book covers online with fellow NaNoWriMo writers, and a ton of them all told me the same thing: my cover design skills suck. So a couple of them threw out their ideas, and writer Mary Crawford came up with a cover that just looked gorgeous so I begged to buy hers off at $100 to use for the story.

That looks beautiful, with the reflective blue glass, doesn't it?

The story itself... look, I got to admit, this wasn't a SERIOUS attempt to publish as it was a way to show how others how to do it. If you wanna know, it's a tale built off the Asimov's Laws of Robotics - with revisions - and it involves a future world where a planet full of androids have to cope with an unwanted destructive military tank.

It's not much, just an excuse to throw some ideas out there. I had bits and pieces of sentences and scenes that I liked, and needed to put in something somewhere. If you do read the story and notice how uneven it is, that's why: set pieces strung together with barely enough in common to make a coherent tale.

I wouldn't say it's "Very Bad Poetry, Captain" but it's not exactly Hugo-worthy either.

Still, it's out there, on the market, with a beautiful book cover to it, and I really need to get about 100 people buying it so I can recoup my purchase of the cover from Ms. Crawford. Have at it, kids!

Oh, you need links:

Kindle download version

Nook download version

NEW: Stories For All Seasons

Just released this week!  Woot!

The local writers group - Writers 4 All Seasons - tried out a group project this year: collecting our own short stories and publishing them to a themed anthology.

Stories For All Seasons collects each tale in a chronological order - by season, by month - that provides a sense of scenery, of mood, of time and place.

My submission "Where the Snow Is Grey" is towards the end, as it's set around the Christmas holidays.  The title itself comes from a mondegreen of sorts: I misheard the first few lines of Tori Amos' "Winter" song and... well... from the title came the story idea.

It's only available as eBook as this is a small writers group and we are but humble wage-slaves unable to afford actual print publishing.  Currently it's Amazon Kindle only, but I'll see if we're getting an EPUB variation out as well.  Update 8/20: I've been told that our publishing arrangement with Kindle has it so they have exclusive rights for a few months, so we won't see an EPUB version for about six months perhaps.

For myself, this is a new publication release for which I am feeling the usual buzz of "oh yeah I made it".  I think for some from the writers' group, this is their first publication of any kind, I think they're through the roof.

Makes me wanna finish those damn novels I'm still tripping over. ;)

If any visitors here want to download the anthology, please do.  All I ask is that you leave a review on Amazon, which will help promote the book.  And if you like what the other authors wrote, please follow-up and see what else they've got on market.  Thank you!

New Story: Welcome to Christmas In Florida

I got the cover art worked out: a co-worker at the library is good at drawing and so helped me out of this jam.  Remind me to pay her commission when she gets back from her Christmas vacation.

It's a follow-up to my earlier estory "Welcome to Florida."  It happened for two reasons: 1) I wanted to do a Christmas short story about how we cope in Florida with a snow-less holiday that's supposed to have snow, and 2) a local writers' group Writers 4 All Seasons had a writing challenge of having characters react to a surprise guest visitor from their lives.  When that challenge was offered, I realized I had a conflict in that second idea I could use to tell the first idea.

So I made the surprise guest visitor a Santa Claus with a dark agenda.  Hopefully, hilarity ensues (I am pimping the story as humor - short story).

I also wanted Trans-Siberian Orchestra to show up as a caroling group so I could riff off the old holiday special tropes of having musical guest stars.  I changed the band name within the story (trying to avoid the lawsuit, eh), but you can kinda tell it's them when they show up.

Amazon.com already has it up for sale as a Kindle book for the ereaders.

Barnes & Noble (bn.com) has it up for sale as a Nook book too.  Both stores have it selling at $.99 (the lowest price an author can set: as a short story, I shouldn't be charging any higher).

If you have the inclination, own an ereader Kindle or Nook (or have a tablet/laptop with the ereader app), and like humorous stories that are wildly implausible and contain at least three grammatical errors, please do me a favor and consider downloading my tale.  If you do, please also leave a review.

Danke, and IO SATURNALIA!