Kindle Sales Update

As most readers of this blog are already aware, I’ve released a new e-book anthology this week. It has been up on Amazon for a week now, but only officially as of last Friday. That was the day that Amazon published the product description.  As of Tuesday morning, Tales From Ocherva, Volume One is sitting at 22,484 and is on one best seller list. Not bad for having just become available.

Meanwhile, sales for Starstrikers continue to march along at a respectable clip. We passed the one hundred books sold marker yesterday. So it looks like we might be on the fourth month of over two hundred sales on the Kindle for that novel. Currently, its on three best seller lists and ranked at 2,979.

If you are a blogger or a book reviewer and are interested in obtaining a free copy of TFO, for reviewing, please drop me an e-mail. I have an epub version ready to send out.

Tales Uploaded to Kindle

I’ve uploaded the initial version of my anthology, Tales From Ocherva to the Kindle Store. It should be live by Wednesday. The price will be $2.99. All of my books will debut as e-books, with trade paperback versions to follow by a few months. This digital before print release schedule is going to be the norm for most POD publishers. I have sold nearly a thousand e-books in the past three months and in two years of selling print books, have not managed to sell one hundred books.

The only reason to even do a print version of my books is so that I can get out and meet the public with book signings and talks. When I have thousands of loyal fans that are interested in buying hardback, collectible versions of my books, I will partner with a local press and do the pre-order thing, just like Seth Harwood and Scott Sigler. For now, this digital before POD paradigm makes the most sense for me.

So if you have a Kindle account, do check out the new anthology. It’s ten short stories of Space Western goodness all set in the same universe as Starstrikers. I’m also in the process of uploading to Smashwords. If you require your e-books in a particular format, please purchase it there for the same low price as the Kindle, $2.99.

Future plans involve uploading to Barnes & Noble.com and iPad, when they both start allowing independent authors to do so.

Building an Ebook Pt 1

I’ve been collecting about eight of my best short stories and assembling them into an ebook anthology called Tales From Ocherva Vol. 1.  At this early point in time, I have woven the short stories into a single document and I’m now in the process of cleaning up the text from the cut and paste job.  There are lots of gray colored spaces and single spaces standing in for tabs.  All of that needs to be corrected to produce a clean document.  After the text is clean, I will go through and edit each short story once again.  My word processor for this step is OpenOffice.org’s Writer.

This anthology has two previously published stories and even they need edited.  After I have edited all the stories, I will print them out and then do a copy edit.  It’s amazing how many mistakes in formatting you can find when you print to paper for copy editing.  So even though this anthology will be an ebook only offering, it will get copy edited on dead trees.  No way around it.

I hope to have this anthology out some time this summer.  I only need cover art to finish it off.  Even this is somewhat easier than making a physical book, as I don’t have to worry about the back cover or spine.  At this point, I have no idea about the cover.  Any ideas from folks who have read some of the short stories I have written about the Silicants and the Rangers of Ocherva are of course welcome.