Read an Ebook Week - Free books!

Tweet It's Read an Ebook Week over on Smashwords, so I've made my two self-published titles FREE between now and March 9. Simply enter the code "RW100" at the checkout to get the titles for free - they normally cost 99c. Remember, this offer finishes on Saturday. You can choose between The First Tale, and Checkmate & Other Stories.

The First Tale
A vaguely steampunk adventure, set in the fictional city of Vertigo. The Resistance is pitted against the shadowy Weimar Corporation that runs the City. Their stalemate is broken by the death of a suspected infiltrator, setting Resistance Commander Liss Hunt and her bewildered companion Philip Wiseman on a journey into the depths of both organisations to discover the truth behind who - or what - is really running the City. Featuring automatons, mad scientists, chases, a gun-toting heroine and even the Living Dead, The First Tale is a short novella that proves people are not always what they seem.

It's had one 5* review on Amazon, where you can still buy it for $1.17 if you want to purchase instead of downloading for free on Smashwords.

Checkmate & Other Stories
This collection features fifteen previously published stories, published across the space of two years, spanning fantasy, horror, sci-fi and speculative fiction. Among other things, Bleed Them Dry puts a new spin on vampires as corporate moguls, talking corpses tell their side in The Dead Do Listen and and a devilish game of chess goes apocalyptically wrong in Checkmate. You can read a sample of The Dead Do Listen as a Friday Flash, here.

It's had two 5* reviews on Amazon, where you can still buy it for $1.17 if you want to purchase instead of downloading for free on Smashwords.

I hope you check them out, and if you do...I hope you enjoy them!

Freebies

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I'm taking part in Read an Ebook Week over on Smashwords so until March 12th, you can get my steampunk novella, The First Tale, for free! That's right - instead of the usual 99c, it now costs nothing. Just add the coupon 'RE100' at the checkout. Smashwords offer all kinds of formats, from EPUB to mobi and PDF.

I'm quite pleased about the timing of this as I have plans for forthcoming Tales from Vertigo City mini serials - so get to know everyone before the new adventures start!

My short story collection, Checkmate & Other Stories, is still free on Smashwords, though if you want to show your support, you can get both The First Tale and Checkmate for 99c for the Kindle from Amazon.

My Halloween Gift To You

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It's Halloween, so it seemed as good a time as any to release my second e-book. Checkmate & Other Stories collects together the fifteen stories I had published online between July 2008 and June 2010. They cover a range of styles and genres, from fantasy to horror, but mostly sit in the speculative fiction camp.

Some of them are no longer available online as the sites that published them have either been taken down, or the site archives don't stretch far back enough, but I thought I'd collect them together to save people trawling through my publishing credits to read my published work.

The front cover is my own photographic work, although the short story inside, The Mirror Phase, features an illustration by the very talented Jimmy Misanthrope.

Checkmate & Other Stories is available for FREE from Smashwords, in all the various different formats that you'd expect. Don't forget that The First Tale is also still available, for the princely sum of 99c. Of course, if you really enjoy either work and want to donate something to show your appreciation, you can do so by clicking the button in the sidebar! All proceeds go towards funding my PhD.

Enjoy, and have a wonderful Halloween!

The Impending End of The First Tale part 1

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Commander Liss Hunt, Vertigo
City Resistance

On Saturday 20th February, 2010, I posted the first instalment of my very first web serial, The First Tale. I had no idea where it was going to go, or that a name I chose entirely off the top of my head was going to give birth to a concept of nine independent serials, linked only by their setting. My fictional Vertigo City will appear in a different incarnation in each tale, with the first version being a strange steampunk mix of Victorian London and a slightly 'fantasy' sprawling mass.

The serial will end on Tuesday, with the publication of the thirtieth instalment, and while I'm quite sad about it, I'm also excited about the prospect of starting The Second Tale, which is more of a noirish, 40s sort of affair about a jaded superhero. Anyway, about twenty instalments into The First Tale, I decided I wanted to collect the instalments together, give them a polish, and release them as an e-book - I wrote a post about it back in July. The original plan was to release a text-only version via Smashwords, and a fancy version including graphic elements via Scribd. This plan has now changed.

You see, Jamie Debree posted a link on Twitter to Lynn Viehl's Paperback Writer blog, and the content of Lynn's post got me thinking. Having read about their shoddy interpretation of their own guidelines, I don't really want to use Scribd now, and many other sites become incredibly confusing if you want to sell a PDF e-book that ISN'T for the Kindle. I was also worried that having two different versions of the same e-book for sale with different retailers might get confusing. So, I have come up with a solution.

Instead of having the choice between a regular e-book and a PDF with graphic bits, I'm now just going to have the one Smashwords version. However, there will be a link within the book to a page on my website, and from there you will be able to download a free PDF of the graphic sections that would have originally been included in the version intended for Scribd! (With me so far?) This includes a newspaper article on the Meat Beast, a society magazine piece on the Living Dead of Vertigo City, a Weimar profile on Liss, a hand-drawn map of the city, and a few other bits and pieces, all packaged up as Caleb's scrapbook. You don't need to see this stuff, but I'm hoping it'll give a greater insight into backstory for The First Tale, and hopefully it'll add a little to your enjoyment of the serial.

Are you all excited yet?!

Smashwords vs Scribd

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One of many things that I love about the blogosphere is that it promotes discussion, and information sharing. People with experience and knowledge can pass it on to others, who can then in turn pass it on again.

Some people already know that the first phase of my web serial, Tales from Vertigo City, is almost over. Within a few weeks, The First Tale will be finished - and you'll all know what happens! Well my plan from there, aside moving onto The Second Tale, is to tidy the serial up, and make it available as an e-book. Some people don't have the time to sit in front of their computer to read the serial in dribs and drabs, but I still want them to be able to read it. I know that as e-readers become more popular, I'd like for more people to be able to read, and hopefully enjoy, The First Tale.

This is where the plan becomes a tiny bit more epic, because I'm not exactly known for making things easy on myself. I know that e-books that are available across many formats are text-only affairs, and that's fine. I want to put The First Tale out as a text-only version, so people can read it wherever they happen to be with their e-reader. Inspirational self-published author J. A. Konrath advocates Smashwords for selling e-books for iPad, Sony, Kobo (Borders), and Barnes & Noble, and up-and-coming writer Emma Newman used Smashwords for the release of her collection of short dark fiction, From Dark Places. She talks here about the minefield of pricing.

Thing is, there is a lot of supplementary material I want to include, things which I hope will expand or explain a few points about this particular incarnation of Vertigo City. With a background in graphic design combined with a passion for comic books, I'd like those things to take a more visual format, which precludes their inclusion in an e-book in the traditional sense of the word. Smashwords is therefore useless to my purpose, and as printing hard copies would end up being too expensive, I’ve now been considering Scribd. 

As far as I can tell, both services have their advantages and disadvantages, and this is where things get interesting, as my Net friend Benjamin Solah is having the exact same dilemma! He has both a project to be released as a text-only e-book, and a magazine he wants to keep in graphic format. It's all very exciting, and you can check his post on the subject here. It's at this point that we're both going to throw open the floor to anyone who either has experience of services like Smashwords or Scribd, or anyone who has any advice they'd like to share regarding e-books.

Come on, get involved!

Image by AJ Leon.