Before I go giving away free stuff, I have good reason to be doing so. Finally, I unleash upon the world my first ebook collection. It is a collection of short stories going back right to when I started writing short stories regularly and putting my work on Elfwood – so some of these are 15 years old or more. They have been given significant editing and in some cases, new events have been inserted. In one or two cases, I have restored older material that never made it to Elfwood because I felt it was too long. There were some cases where I felt that the work suffered for having cut it down to that extent. Stories are as long as they need to be! The resulting work feels more complete. Continue reading
self publishing
The Satisfaction of Finishing
This afternoon, I brought to a close a process some fourteen years in the making – all centred around one story. No, not my novel. One of my earliest short stories was set during Nazi Germany. I called it Herrenvolk and it was about a British spy in Berlin who is chased and apprehended by the Gestapo. He has stolen a book from somewhere and the Gestapo are desperate to recover it. Our protagonist is saved by a mysterious woman who informs the Gestapo Officer that he is the friend of her son – something which surprises the spy as much as it surprises the Gestapo. Continue reading
Daily Post: Three Years Hence
I’ve not really bothered with most of the Daily Posts since I really got into this blog a couple of years ago but I have kept an eye on the prompts and this one put a smile on my face. I’m going to play it partly for laughs and partly as a “Goals for the next three years” as I am now closing on my third anniversary. Anyway, here’s me in 2016. Continue reading
Good Reads Updates
Just a quick post to point out that I have now added The Weight of Reason to “Good Reads”. The link is here. So those of you who have been kind enough to buy and review can also add your reviews there.
Also, I now have a dedicated author page. No idea what I am going to do with it but at the moment there is a very feeble biography and the feed from this blog and not much else. If you want to add/follow me, please feel free to do so!
Link here. You can see what I am currently reading, my recent reviews and a list of my connections.
“The Weight of Reason” now available on KDP
Yes, at long last I have bitten the bullet, given it one final edit for typos and to tweak the text and finally listed it for sale on Amazon.
You can now buy The Weight of Reason on your local Amazon website. Unfortunately, it is available only on Kindle at the moment due to the exclusivity terms and conditions of being in the Kindle Select programme. This gives extra benefits such as royalties from the lending programme, promotion on the Kindle store and higher royalty rates from Amazon Brazil and Amazon India. Continue reading
Update on “The Weight of Reason”
So I have my cover, I’ve decided to go with the dusty orange font as I think that worked better than the terracotta (I was worried about whether it would show up particularly well on the older monochrome Kindle models). I also have my blurb, thank you for everybody who offered their comments. I’ve gone with the Dan Brown style conspiracy thriller angle. Continue reading
I think I have my cover
So I’ve spent the weekend fiddling around with some more potential covers and I think I’ve found my secondary font… Agency FB (for author name and subtitle “a novelette”).
Here’s a selection of covers I’ve been playing around with. I like the dusky orange colour, I think it fits quite well but just for curiosity I produced a similar one in a terracotta as well as yellow (though part of me still wants to go for a silvery white). I’m not so keen on the yellow and much prefer the other two. I also think the title is a little obtrusive at the larger size. I will definitely choose a variation of one of these covers now so any last minute advice would be appreciated. Continue reading
The Urge to Blurb
Enjoying the sunshine yesterday afternoon (one of the perks of being self-employed), I thought about what the advertising blurb would be for The Weight of Reason. Blurb, for those of you who do not know, is the short description that goes on the back of a book explaining what it is about. It is also the description that goes on the Amazon website. Typically around one hundred words, it is the point at which a reader will decide to buy or not to buy. We may not judge a book by its cover, but we do judge it by its blurb. Continue reading
More Covers – The Final Selection
So I have been spending a little more time on some covers, taking on board advice I’ve received on Facebook and to this blog – thanks everyone. This is the selection I have come up with and will now most likely choose a cover from the below selection. Feedback, as ever, would be much appreciated.
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- Upper East Side
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- Aftershok – contrast plain font
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- Aftershok
You might notice that I’ve included a new font, the very 1930s noir font Upper East Side. The theme of the story is quite noir so I thought I would try it. I think it works quite well but still leaning slightly toward Aftershok. What do you think?
I’ll be writing blurbs this afternoon too so I may seek your approval on several options.
Self-Publishing Dilemmas: Frolics with Fonts
So the general consensus was that the still water image was the best option for The Weight of Reason and having spent some time today fiddling around with fonts and colour schemes on each of those images, I am inclined to agree. Seeing that a lot of the standard MS fonts weren’t really suitable, I found a website called Font Squirrel and downloaded four or five that I thought might work. Here then, are five example covers. Each one has the name of the font. Continue reading