Kristopher Kelly's Blog, page 16

Daily Words: On Reaching the Bottom of the Kindle Top 100 Short Story Market

Well, it has been an emotional week for me. I'm not going to lie. The image here is the highlight: my book actually reached the Top 100 in the Kindle paid short stories list. I was one spot behind Mary Higgins Clark.

And just ahead of Spank Romance Stories.

Seeing that was a real treat. But better than that was the reaction from friends and family, who called and emailed and texted to let me know how they were finding the stories. It wasn't all good; one sharp-eyed reader wanted to know how the man with no hands can caress a face. Pretty good question. I envisioned him doing so with one of the pulpy heads, but … I could've written that a little better.

Opinion is almost universal that the first story is a strange choice for the lead-off position. Fair enough. I did consider starting the collection with "Radiation," but … I wanted to start with a shorter piece. I just thought it would be more fun and set the tone better.

In other terrible news, I also found out after I published this collection that Chuck Palahniuk's new book Damned is going to feature a young girl who finds herself unexpectedly trapped in Hell. Yep. That's right. That is a near-perfect description of the plot of "Esther's Prayer," a short story I wrote originally on this site in February under the title "At Night in the Cottage." Guess I'll have to take back some of those things I said about Stephen King's Under the Dome being too similar in plot to The Simpsons movie. Also looked it up, and it looks like, even if I did publish first, he talked about his book and what it was about in 2010.

I've been scooped not only by a pro, but by one I am a fan of. Kind of a bummer.

Chuck P., if you read this, I promise not to be upset by this bump of hands in the popcorn bucket of story ideas if you aren't. I swear, I did not hear that story from you; it's based on a dream I had earlier this year. I expect when I read your book, I'll find your version vastly different than mine, anyway. You say you went Judy Blume/Breakfast Club, and I think that's pretty different from what I did. Maybe there's room for two girl-in-Hell stories in this world. Here's hoping.

A few notes on distribution: iTunes still has yet to publish the book (what gives, man?), no copies have yet sold on Barnes & Noble, and my Kindle version is unsearchable by category, which pretty much makes it unfindable. But I'm hoping these problems work themselves out eventually. I'm prepping a physical copy to be published in the coming weeks, so readers who prefer something they can hold need not be left behind.

But as far as those of you who are reading this now and have purchased it, I wanted to say a big THANK YOU! This week has been a far bigger success than I expected.

Thank you all for being awesome and reading my book!!!!

Feel free to comment away below and let me know what you liked and didn't like. I want to hear it all!

(also, if you have read it already, review it on GoodReads.com or Amazon or wherever! say whatever you like, I don't care; be honest! I love seeing reviews appear!)

Review: Jenny Finn: Doom Messiah

Jenny Finn: Doom Messiah by Mike Mignola

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A friend suggested I read this after reading some of my stories, and I can see why. The character designs are wonderfully weird, from the Prime Minister to the guy who never puts his feet on the ground to the medium with the creepy mask–not to mention Jenny herself and the excellent scene where she is found in the giant mass of fish-guts–there is some real imagination here.

The story feels rushed. I wish they had more time to explore, but even as short as this book is, it was rich enough in fun ideas to be worth the journey.

View all my reviews

Daily Words: Formating My Book for Kindle, Nook, and iTunes iBookstore

I Held My Breath as Long as I Could

What a week. Some ups and downs, doubts and terrors, euphoria and depression. But today, I woke up and said, "I'm done editing this bastard! Time to submit!"

I'd blown my self-imposed deadline by a day. Not so bad.

I'd like to say that the process for submitting to Amazon's Kindle Store and Barnes & Noble's Nook store was relatively painless. For those interested, I wrote my novel in Word, saved as an HTML file, then converted to Kindle and EPUB format using Calibre, which is far and away my favorite piece of freeware.

To create a table of contents, I used Calibre's GUI menu, having set up my Word doc to use H1 and H2 tags for the sections.

Apple's process … well, let me just say I didn't expect to spend an entire day troubleshooting this crap.

First of all, there's the problem that Apple wants you to do one thing; your account can only be linked to app development, or books, or what have you. Easy enough to work around this silly limitation — just create another Apple ID for each thing you want to do — but it is annoying.

While I thought that would be the end of my troubles, it was not. When I clicked 'Deliver' in iTunes Producer, I received some not very friendly error messages. A lot of them were of the 'ERROR ITMS-9000′ variety. It took me nearly a full day to figure out what was happening, so I'm going to share what I did to get my book to finally submit to iTunes.

Basically, iTunes is the fussiest place when it comes to accepting an epub format file. You MUST have a valid file, or it will not be accepted. Apparently, Barnes and Noble and Amazon are more forgiving.

Since I used Calibre, I was at first quite flummoxed. I didn't know what a valid epub was. The best site I found for telling me what was going wrong was http://threepress.org/document/epub-v... . They allow you to upload your book and they'll tell you a billion things wrong with it. Taking this error report, I then had to figure out how to make changes to my ebook without using Calibre. How to do that?

Right click on your book. Choose the path that says 'Tweak epub' … then choose 'Explode epub.' I know it sounds scary, but it's okay. It will open a dialog box that shows the files in the epub. Select all and open with your favorite text editor. I used TextMate. You could use notepad or Dreamweaver or whatever you like. Just open the files.

I can only speak to the issues I had, but they were:

1. Path names in 'content.opf' and 'toc.ncx': My title, I Held My Breath as Long as I Could, includes spaces. Calibre coded these as spaces. To be perfectly valid, you need to find and replace every instance where there is a link to your title with spaces to change the spaces to '%20′.

2. Bookmarks leftover from Word: These were hidden and broken and needed to be removed.

3. Some crazy crap Calibre put in the tag … strip all that stuff out. Simple body tags will do.

4. Footnotes trouble: Unnecessary "name=" attribute caused an error. I just removed the "name=" attribute from the anchor tags in my footnotes, and it passed.

And that's it! My advice is to use the site above to get some useful output, and open the files and do your best.

Good luck!

UPDATE! It's Alive!!!

You can now purchase my book from Barnes and Noble and Amazon's ebook stores. Still waiting on that iTunes iBookstore, though ….

For Barnes and Noble and all the Nook people, go here.

Amazon Kindle fans follow this spiffy one: