Today I finalized the look of my short story covers and then published four short stories in epub format to Amazon Kindle. They should show up for sale in the next few days. I used Sigil to create my ebooks. Sigil is open source and available cross platform. I used Gimp to build my covers and that program is open source and cross platform too. The code validation system I used is a web site called Threepress.org and is open for anyone to use.
If you know XHTM and CSS, rolling your own e-books is not that difficult. If you don’t have those skills, it becomes much more challenging. But if you use the tools mentioned above and you have some basic web design knowledge, you should be able to crank out a decent e-book.
I placed a greater effort on the covers with these short stories. The design is simple and ties in well with the Starstrikers novel. Because the only thing that changes from story to story is the title, I can also crank out lots of covers with minimum effort. I will be releasing more stories over the holiday weeks. Each will be set in the same Starstrikers Universe and will have similar covers. When a reader comes across these story covers on Amazon, it will soon be obvious that they are short stories and that they are related. It’s a great way to sample my writing if you are new to my work and a great way to collect my stories if you are a fan.
Eventually, some of these stories will be released that are not available for e-books anywhere else. That is the end goal here, get all my canon out there and available for those who own Kindles or use Amazon software on their devices. I may eventually do the same on Smashwords, but for now, I am focusing on just the Kindle audience.