I’ve been considering this move since the Any Tomorrow Trilogy was first published.  For those of you who have been reading this blog for a while, you may remember that the decision about how to best publish my 300K-plus word novel caused quite a dilemma for me.  One book or…

The worst thing a writer can say is, “Hey, what’s on TV tonight?” The second worst thing a writer can say is, “I’ll just be on the internet for a minute…” And there it goes, the best intentions for starting a new story, editing one of those fifty trunk novels,…

I’ve offered free promotions for my books before and have always used Smashwords.com because it’s so easy to do.  The results, however, have been less than stellar and I’m wondering if Smashwords.com is one of the problems. Do you have a preference about which site you download from? It would…

Writing for me is a very intimate process.  My stories well up first as images to form a vision.  Sometimes they are intensely detailed and other times mere wisps of idea.  My challenge is to translate the still fresh vision into words that can, hopefully, accurately portray it.  This is…

Well, it’s been almost a year since I published the first volume of my Any Tomorrow Trilogy.  And I must say that the results have been remarkably unremarkable.  I made a decision to break up my 300K word novel into three parts, but my feeling is now that it just…

[To the reader: A recent visit to Indiebookspot.com suggests the nature of the site has changed pretty dramatically. The interview referenced is no longer available.] How cool is this.  Indiebookspot.com just published their interview with me .  And if you as my opinion it’s great reading.  In fact after reading…

The third and final novel of the Any Tomorrow series is in the pipeline for publication at Amazon and Smashwords.  Any Tomorrow: The Culling is available from Amazon and Smashwords now and at other distributors such as Barnes & Noble sometime in the coming weeks. While I was at it,…

It’s January.  Those of us with day jobs have returned to work, a valiant effort has been made to get the Christmas decorations packed up in some kind of order, and it’s time to publish the third book in my trilogy, Any Tomorrow: The Culling.  For those of you who…

Okay, so I’m planning to publish Any Tomorrow: The Culling, the final novel of the Any Tomorrow Trilogy, in January.  Everything is ready to go.  The problem is that a few weeks ago I started working on what I thought would be a new novel tentatively called The Last Pope…

I am pleased to announce that I have received my first check from Amazon Digital Services for sales of my two novels.  A little celebratory music please! Okay, that’s enough. Now that the music and cheering across blogosphere has subsided, the reality of the first payment sets in.  After more…

Very late last night I came dragging in after a number of delightful hours squeezed into spaces barely fit for human habitation, much less flight.  About the only good thing I can say for the experience is that Coke and peanuts are still complimentary and my car was still sitting…

It is a wet, awful day here in Central Florida.  But it is the perfect day to get caught up on my blog and the other social media I use to talk about my books and stories.  To tell the truth, I haven’t been very good at exploiting social media…

Update on Any Tomorrow: The Calling : This evening I submitted revised versions of Any Tomorrow: The Calling to Amazon and Smashwords.  There were just a couple of minor corrections, but I needed to update the product descriptions to include some reader comments anyway. Update on Any Tomorrow: The Curse…

Latest Submissions: I just submitted a short-story for the October issue of eFiction Magazine.  The title of the piece is “Christmas”, for lack of a better name and for no other reason than it takes place at Christmas.  If it gets accepted, I look forward to your opinions about the…

It’s hard to get feedback.  Relatives are prone to either sugar coat their opinions or say nothing, and most strangers won’t be bothered.  For most writers it’s difficult to establish a personal relationship, even virtual, with readers and make them comfortable enough to honestly express their opinions.  Authors of self-published…

So my eBook, Any Tomorrow: The Calling, has been out at Amazon and all the major eBook distributors for a couple of months.  How come I’m not rich yet?  Gosh, if you read the user forums at Kindle, it seems like everyone who posts is selling upwards of 900 copies…

Okay, so my first eBook, Any Tomorrow: The Calling, is available from the major eBook distributors, including http://www.amazon.com/, http://www.barnesandnoble.com/, http://www.diesel-ebooks.com/, and http://www.smashwords.com/. I’ve successfully self-published through Smashwords and Amazon, creating every aspect of the publication, including the cover art. I even blog about the self-publishing experience at http://anytomorrow.com/ My dilemma…

Now that Any Tomorrow: The Calling is available at the major eBook distributors (Amazon, Diesel, Barnes and Nobel, Smashwords) and a few intrepid folks have downloaded copies of it, I thought I’d provide a place on the blog for readers to provide feedback about the book. The Review, Critique, Suggest…

Okay, so my eBook, Any Tomorrow: The Calling, is out there, published, available at Amazon, Smashwords, and Diesel, soon to be at Barnes and Noble, Apple iBookstore, Sony, and Kobo.  My eBook is out there floating around in the ether with thousands of other eBooks.  It’s out there, but how…

What I am reading ― As a geographer, I find Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer an absolute must read.  His use of process of exploration as a metaphor for the discovery process we, as writers, use is apt and dead on.  More than that it…

If you go to Amazon.com and search for books with keyword of “horror”, you’ll get 56,575 results, but only 9,202 are Kindle Editions. If you search for books with the keyword “speculative fiction”, only 745 results are returned, but only 320 are Kindle Editions. If you search for a book…

You know, sometimes the most obvious things are the easiest to miss.  Both Kindle and Smashwords provide the option to post a detailed description and keywords (tags) to help potential buyers discover your eBook.  In the rush to get the eBook text loaded, it’s easy to miss those couple of…

In the latest news from Smashwords, Any Tomorrow: The Calling has passed the automated vetting process and is now up for review by the “vetting review team”.  I suspect that passing the automated vetting had something to do with the updated file I submitted on Monday, although I was never…

Last night I submitted updated files for Any Tomorrow: The Calling to Amazon and Smashwords.  It was a surprisingly simple process for both distributors, however after almost 24 hours I am #932 in the queue for processing at Smashwords.  It takes time, but I’m okay with that.  After all it…

Writing is a hard thing.  There is nothing easy about it. I now have the first book of my trilogy, Any Tomorrow: The Calling, out on Amazon and Smashwords (inclusion in the Smashwords Premium Catalog is still pending). I have the second book in the series, Any Tomorrow: The Curse,…

As I have been waiting to see what would happen with Any Tomorrow: The Calling and have started talking it up among chat rooms and groups, I’ve also been final editing the second book in the trilogy, Any Tomorrow: The Curse.  In fact, Any Tomorrow: The Curse is almost ready for…

For those of you who haven’t submitted an eBook to Amazon (Kindle Direct Publishing) or Smashwords for distribution there are a couple of things to keep in mind regarding time.  Assuming your eBook file has been properly formatted and you have an acceptable piece of cover art, getting your eBook…

Okay, so my eBook is active on Amazon.com in the .mobi format for Kindle and available in a variety of formats from Smashwords.com.  I must say that getting the eBook into both distributors was much easier than I first thought it would be.  Using the Smashwords Style Guide was very…

Okay, maybe the exclamation point is a bit over the top, but Any Tomorrow: The Calling has been submitted to Smashwords and Kindle.  It will be listed for $2.99. It will take a few days before the eBook shows up on Smashwords and even longer before it gets distributed to…

Being an analytical sort of guy, I decided to see exactly where I stood should I decide to publish my novel as a series instead of one volume. The results didn’t really surprise me, because of the way I developed the story.  As you can see, Books 4, 5, and…

While I was watching the Kindle Video Tutorial last night,  one of the things that I wondered about was the ISBN (International Standard Book Number).  All books have them, but is it really necessary for my eBook? To find out the answer I went to www.isbn.org, one of 60 agencies…

Like many of you, my weekends aren’t for writing, just the opposite.  My weekends are full of working in the yard and catching up on all those things that tend to slide while I’m at work during the week. Spring is here, the weather is beautiful, and who wants to…