For the next month, Smashwords is giving away ebooks from many many authors in a stay-at-home event called Authors Give Back.
If you’re like me and not into romance or covers with chiseled torsos, you might be put off by the Smashwords best sellers. But there are plenty of other types of books there. Worth a bit of digging.
All of my ebooks will be free there during this giveaway.
Discovered this cool milestone today at Smashwords, an ebook distributor in the midst of their gi-normous summer giveaway. My ebooks have 1,000 “purchases” via Smashwords.
Now, most of these purchases have been free in giveaways. And people tend to hoard ebooks, unopened, after such sales. But at least a few have read my books. They post reviews; during future sales, they acquire later volumes in series; they bookmark me as an author they want to find again.
Nowadays I don’t care much about getting customers for my books but I most definitely want readers. Through the month of July, you can download any/all of my books from my page at Smashwords, in any/all ebook formats.
10 lords a-leaping, 1,000 readers hoarding…
I’m so glad I decided to do it! Brought back the DDsE daily serial blog.
Over on the DDsE blog, we’re in book 8 of Ella’s diary. As far as I can tell, her current adventures will take us through book 9.
I’m having a great time posting Ella’s diary to the near-instant gratification of readers who come to the blog daily.
The farther I get into the DDsE series, the less I can figure out whether I am writing it or transcribing it. For the first time, I’m writing improvisationally. What happens happens. I discover what comes next as I fill the latest blank screen on my iPad.
If you become a follower of the DDsE daily serial blog, you will get each day’s diary entry emailed to you. Of course you can also click over to it whenever you please. I’ve heard from a number of folks that they’d rather wait and read a bunch of daily entries in one swoop. You can read the compiled, completed books (7 so far) on the blog.
For those who don’t want to read via browser, each book of Ella’s diary is an individual e-book novella on Smashwords. (6 individual novellas on Smashwords so far – 3 to go.) I’ve also compiled Ella’s books, 3 to a volume, and published those volumes on Amazon as e-books and paper books (2 compiled volumes so far – 1 to go).
It’s a recurring story of my life. To see the value in something, I have to stop, leave, turn away from it.
It, such as publishing the DDsE daily serial blog.
Once upon a time, I had a blog that published the daily diary entries of Ella, a 16-year-old who had just entered a horrible strange amazing phase of life. Ella filled three books with her secret, hand-written diary entries and I posted the entries on the DDsE blog.
[OK, I admit it, I’m the one who has been writing Ella’s diaries and I’ve loved doing so. Although I’ve never had mind-to-mind contact with a feral cat, nor run away with a boy who wasn’t human, nor been chased by unhuman monsters, I can so relate to Ella. I’ve been a teenager all my life.]
Ella has kept writing her diary but I stopped posting entries on the DDsE blog.
I stopped because I’d been bitten by the publishing bug and my agent said that she couldn’t shop DDsE if I was giving it away. So I compiled Ella’s first three books into a single volume and my agent began to shop DDsE to big-deal publishers who took forever to say that they loved the story but didn’t like Ella. Or vice versa.
I discovered that I’ve changed.
Long ago, publishing my novel Was It A Rat I Saw in hardcover with a big-deal publisher was very important to me. Nonetheless, I stopped writing for a couple decades and when I resumed, it wasn’t because I wanted to build or re-build a writing career. I resumed writing because I missed writing.
When I resumed, I joined the self-publishing revolution (and it really is a revolution) but I maintained lingering fantasies about some sugar-daddy publisher who would make the publishing grind easier for me.
I’ve come to realize that I write to connect: with myself; with my readers. To realize this, I had to shut down the DDsE daily serial blog then miss it.
But re-starting the blog seemed impossible. Embarrassing.
At some point, I withdrew DDsE from the big-deal-publishers shop-around and began to self-publish it. Each book of Ella’s diary became an individual novella on Smashwords. (6 individual novellas so far – 3 to go.) I compiled Ella’s books, 3 to a volume, and published those volumes on Amazon (2 compiled volumes so far – 1 to go).
I continued to miss the blog. So. Tupac the impossible embarrassing. The DDsE daily serial blog is back. From now on, every day that blog will publish a new diary entry by Ella.
However, the new entries will resume with the current diary, book 7, because the DDsE blog features Ella’s newest entries, the ones that haven’t been published elsewhere. While the blog was on hiatus, books 4-6 got published elsewhere. Sure, they are compiled on the DDsE blog, and you can read them there. But the newest entries are in book 7.
Saturday, Feb 16, the DDsE daily serial blog will resume daily posting of Ella’s newest diary entries, starting with entry 260 from book 7 of DDsE.
Now would be a good time to catch up on books 1-6 and to begin following the DDsE blog.
Note that I usually keep my blogs separate so if you follow this blog – awesome! thank you! – you won’t get any DDsE posts. You have to click over to the DDsE daily serial blog to follow Ella’s diary.
Thousands of free and reduced-price ebooks now on Smashwords in the end-of year sale.
The free loot includes all of my novels.
I’ve got a new series of books called DDsE and you can start reading for free; download an e-version* from Smashwords**.
DDsE is a teen/YA (young adult) paranormal horror romance that will ultimately be 9 short volumes. Books 1 and 2 are now on-line. Books 3-5 will be available within weeks; the remaining 4 are coming within the next year.***
What’s DDsE about? Here’s a blurb:
Being sixteen is Tupac Eminem. Ella has no one to talk to except her new diary, which she has to hide from Ma and Pa Warden, the foster parents she’s stuck with since her family got flattened in a car accident. Now that she lives with the wardens, she has to switch to a new school, where people act like her tragedy is contagious. Her new suburb is just as boring as the last, and offers no hope of secret passageways or magic. But life is not all bad. There’s an interesting boy at the new school – although his family turns out to be impossibly dangerous. And there’s a feral cat, living in the suburb’s only open space, a pitiful excuse for woods. Sometimes the cat invades Ella’s mind. She tells her diary, ‘I’ve gone a special kind of crazy, a split personality. And my other personality is a cat, not a person.’
* Eventually, I’ll compile the short volumes and make them available as paperbacks, too.
** Soon, DDsE will also be downloadable at the Apple iStore, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Noisetrade. Eventually, it will come to Amazon, too.
*** Some of you may say, “Wait, I thought you were sending DDsE to publishers, is that effort kaput?” Still in progress. Three have declined. The first two liked the story but didn’t like the narrator. The third one loved the narrator but didn’t like the story. (I forgot how maddening this process can be.) Other verdicts are still out but apparently I don’t have enough patience (nor, perhaps, enough decades) to grind through the submission process.
Cover art by Lars Huston.
Until the end of October, 2013, get a free e-copy of WAS IT A RAT I SAW, my psychological thriller involving split brain research, animal rights, and a love quadrangle.
I’ve recently distributed some copies for readers’ reviews and I am thrilled to report that so far the ratings have been great!
Here’s how to get your free copy:
* Go to RAT’s page on Smashwords,
* Click the blue “Add to Cart” button.
* Proceed to checkout, but instead of paying, use coupon code KX86E.
* Let me know (via a comment on this page) if you encounter problems.
After you read it, please write a review! (Readers’ reviews are incredibly important to indie authors.)
Cover art by Lars Huston.
At last (yee haw!) I have finished retyping Was It A Rat I Saw, my psychological thriller involving split brain research, animal rights, and a love quadrangle. It is now available in serial on this blog and as an ebook in various formats at Smashwords. FREE FOR THE NEXT WEEK!
For the first few hours of its e-publication, I used a cover that I made all by myself. I liked it when full size, but as a thumbnail image on Smashwords, it was murky and uninviting. Previously, my son has made my e-book covers, and I love his artwork. But I felt like I was railroading him into making the covers, so this time I resolved to do it myself. Fortunately, as he watched me struggle with a new and alien version of Illustrator, he offered to take over.
Here’s my original effort:
My version of the cover. Looked like mush at thumbnail size.
And then there’s the artist’s cover from the Bantam-Doubleday-Dell edition. She put a lot of effort into capturing the book’s details, which I much appreciated:
Jacket from the original hardcover edition.
So. I want people to read my books, and that means they need to know the books exist. Understanding this, I can’t believe how difficult it is for me to broadcast the news. It shouldn’t be such a big deal! Let’s be kindly and say that self-promotion is not one of my strengths.
As always, then, it is with some discomfort that I announce: I’ve now got an Author’s Interview over on Smashwords, which lets more people know that my books exist. Every time somebody visits my interview page, my interview moves closer to the front of the Interview queue, which results in more people discovering my books. So please do click on my interview page link.
BTW, I can add to the interview, apparently forever, so let me know what other questions I might answer there.
Also BTW, the Smashwords interviews are cool. Readers with a free Smashwords account can also post interviews. Tell the authors what you want!
Sheepish again.
Two sheepish posts in one week! Wonder what the record is – bet I could beat it. In fact, currently I’m in a loop: I now feel sheepish about so often feeling sheepish.
Required Writing 