It’s time to face facts. I am 65 years old. Given my family history, I have perhaps ten, at the outside fifteen, years left to write. Facing this reality I have made several decisions about the Any Tomorrow series. In its latest iteration Any Tomorrow rings in at more than…

I’m working on a new intro for my eBook, Any Tomorrow: The Calling.  Would this make you want to know more about the story? Could the world end without you knowing? Could the dead surpass the living without you being aware? Could the desolation overtake the earth without you being…

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…

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…

The entire Any Tomorrow Trilogy is now available so I’m celebrating by offering Any Tomorrow: The Calling as a free download until March 1st.  If you’re not familiar with the Any Tomorrow series, here’s the lowdown on Any Tomorrow: The Calling: Fraleigh, a former imagery intelligence analyst, artfully crafts a…

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,…

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…

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…

Here it is.  The first sneak peek at the cover art for Any Tomorrow: The Curse, the second eBook in the Any Tomorrow Trilogy.  Let me know what you think! © Copyright 2011 by Kevin Fraleigh.  

[Note that the promotion referred to in this post is way past over, but you can still enjoy the Any Tomorrow Trilogy in Any Tomorrow Complete. Thanks.] What a deal!  All I ask is that you provide feedback about what you liked and didn’t like about it.  That’s it!  Just…

I’ve said before that inspiration is where you find it.  Inspiration can even be found in adventures provided for a nearly four year old.  All you have to do is keep your senses open to the world around you. Two Fridays ago, five of us, including my granddaughter, Hannah, boarded…

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…

This summer has been difficult for me as a writer because, by necessity, I have had to be other focused.  As I have mentioned in several past posts, that whole work-family-sleep thing really gets in the way.  One would think that as you get older, as your children get married…

Yay!  O happy day!  The Oxford English Dictionary on-line (OED) is back as a free service.  I don’t know why they changed to a pay subscription only model, but it is once again free and that’s all that matters. Are you as excited as I am? Maybe Not? If you’re…

When I joined the website for eFiction magazine two of the entries for the profile were favorite authors and favorite books.  I had to stop and think about this for a moment.  I wanted to answer honestly, but at the same time I wanted to sound well read, even literate….

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…

Fiction is great.  Fiction is wonderful.  I love fiction, especially an edgy mix of horror, fantasy, and psychological tension.  Nothing to my mind can beat it.  However, no matter how wild the fiction is, there will be a point of tangency between the fictional world and reality.  In order to…

Well, not reviewed quite yet. Last week I posted to a writer’s group on LinkedIn and very shortly after got a reply from Agy Wilson (Literature Correspondent; Maine at Examiner.com) to read Any Tomorrow: The Calling, review it, and post about it. After I read her offer, it took me…

Grammar and punctuation, that’s right, the subjects that caused so many sleepless nights in grammar school (elementary school).  Grammar and punctuation with all those nit-picky rules about clauses, apostrophes, colons, periods, semicolons, tenses, etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum.   No, I’m not going into all that.  Let if suffice to say that…

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…

In an earlier post I discussed the Character Worksheet I used to keep track of all the characters mentioned in my Any Tomorrow Trilogy.  The worksheet simply lists the name and a basic description of each character.  This tool is very handy to make sure names aren’t too similar or…

Today’s post is all about Smashwords.com because Any Tomorrow: The Calling has finally been accepted into the Smashwords Premium Catalog.  This means that, besides being listed on the Smashwords website, it will be distributed to a range of other sellers also.  The following schedule was provided for distribution. Channel Next…

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…

I was planning on writing a nice long article about how important organization is when writing an eBook of over 300k words, especially if the action takes place over a long timeline, several continents, and involves hundreds of major and minor characters.  Just trying to not repeat names is difficult,…

In one of my first posts I mentioned that I developed a rather detailed worksheet to keep track of my characters, locations, and specialized language references.  As I continued my editing of Any Tomorrow: The Curse and Any Tomorrow: The Culling, I thought I might update the worksheet. I have…

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…

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…

Please note that this page may contain one or more links to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate, if you click a link, follow it to Amazon, and buy the item, I get paid for providing the link. Purchasing the item through the link will cost you nothing extra, but will…

It’s an unfortunate truth that even the most well thought out plan is subject to the demands and restrictions of the real world.  A few days ago I thought that all I had left to do was to create my cover art, create a .mobi format file, and submit my…

I am glad to say that I have finally finished editing for content.  I think I’ve caught as many dropped words, extra spaces, misused words, and problems with specialized vocabulary that I reasonably expect to.  I have also begun editing for format using the Simplified Guide to Building a Kindle…

Well, we’re almost there, just a few more pages to edit and I think I’ll be ready to begin the process of Kindlizing (is that even a word?) my eBook.  I’ll start with Kindle because I imagine that by the time I have the format down for Kindle, it will…

As I work my way through this writing and editing process, I am constantly amazed by the all the changes I’ve experienced. For instance, I’ve finally decided that my novel will now be a trilogy.  It started out as a thought, then grew and grew as plots and subplots developed…

Yesterday I made the observation that the publishing industry still seems driven by the paper paradigm and I can understand why. I have friends that go on and on about how they will never give up their stocks of paper books. They like the feel of them. They like the…

Okay, so it may sound like I’m back peddling, but comments by Catana to yesterday’s post gave me reasons to reconsider my plan for a whole series of books from my original novel.  She provided links to a couple of blogs that suggested that the ideal length for a novel…

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…

Well, I think I’m finally getting the hang of this blog.  I’ve reworked the About page and added a Bio page. I’ve also added some tags that should make it easier for folks to find the blog. I’ve even had a couple of comments (okay, one was my wife), but…

There is something about getting published that has always bugged me, although electronic publishing has fixed this to a degree. Getting published costs money. Lots of little costs to be sure, but the costs add up. Consider the cost of mailing letters of inquiry and partial or whole manuscripts. Then…

Somewhere in my closet there is a notebook with dozens of yellowed, worn pages of prose and poetry I wrote in the late 60’s and early 70’s, back in a time when I still believed the pinnacle of the writer’s craft was to have his work captured on paper and…