Tales From Ocherva, Volume One is now only .99 cents on Kobo, Nook and Kindle. At least it will be soon. This is your gateway into the Star Saga universe with short stories set on the dessert moon and featuring the Devon Ardel and her Stellar Rangers. Looks like Nook was first to post the new price.
This week work on the WIP has been suspended until I can finish making the ebook of The Rising for my Newsletter subscribers. It’s nearly complete, so only a few days will be spent polishing it up. This is a special release that will only be available to the subscribers. It is not the final release of the book. That will happen later this year. So if you are a subscriber, enjoy this sneak peek at the ebook and please inform me if you find errors.
When I make an ebook I use Sigil. This time around I converted my manuscript to html using LibreOffice and then sucked that into Calibre to make the ebook. After all that, I loaded the epub into Sigil and added all the other pages required for an ebook. Experimenting with workflow is just part of the job when you do things yourself. In Sigil I ensure the epub has all the pages that my other ebooks have for consistency. For the reader, once they upload it into their reader, The Rising should match all the other books in the series. There will be a few new things in the title though, noting that it’s book 2 of the Star Saga.
Just a quick note to let you know that you can now purchase my novel Tyrmia and my anthology – Tales From Ocherva, Volume One on Kobo. Both ebooks are DRM free and epub formatted. Enjoy!
These two ebooks are also available in other formats from Smashwords. Click on the book covers in the right hand side bar to select a vendor.
Here’s a preview of the cover of my next release – STARVEYORS. This ebook will be available next month at most outlets. Once again, kudos to Byron McConnell for pulling of the trifecta of book covers!
Ed Yourdon via Compfight
If you’ve been following along on my Work In Progress meter for Starveyors you might have wondered why I’m suddenly almost finished. If you look at the end goal, you’ll see that I in fact shortened the goal to 65K words.
I did this because after having written past my outline and into uncharted territory at about 58K words, it became apparent to me that this was not going to be an 80K word story. No matter how badly I milked it. So my new goal is to just get it out to 65K or at least close enough to call it good.
I doubt any major publisher will ever want to print this novel, and most people will read it as an ebook only. So sweating over the established normal length for novels is not really helping the book any. The story I wanted to tell is or is about to be told and it looks like it will be about 65K words long. I don’t feel any pressure at all to make it 80K or 100K words long. I just feel pressure to finish it. My goal is to get this draft over with by the time I leave TN on Tuesday.
I have another novel to write and other things pressuring my writing time and this first draft needs to sit for at least a few weeks to a month. So if you’ll excuse me, I have to wrap this puppy up and put it to bed.
My kids had an ebook moment last night. We had to go out to the annual baseball parents meeting and there was a chance that the kids would have to sit and be still for an hour or so. I told them to bring a book. My oldest, 10, is doing a book report and has to finish his book by the weekend. I bought his book on the Nook and he’s not been able to use the excuse that he can’t read his book, because he left it at school. He immediately wanted to bring the Nook. I said it was okay but then of course, little brother wanted to read on the Nook too. So I said, okay, you can read on my Droid. He was happy about that. When I called up his Nook book on my phone and it went right to the page where he left off, he got a smile as wide as any kid ever had. Technology is cool sometimes, even for a jaded eight year old.
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.