Michael Jasper's Blog, page 39

Free Fiction Friday: "Home Court Advantage"

UnWrecked Press presents: Free Fiction Friday

This week's Free Fiction Friday story from UnWrecked Press is "Home Court Advantage."

As always, I'll soon put this week's story into ebook format for your laptop, desktop, Kindle, iPad, Nook, iPhone, or whatever device you use to read ebooks. But for now, you can read it right here for free!

Parts of this story are based on actual events, but I'm not saying which parts. Enjoy!

Home Court Advantage

The zebra shirt was too big for me, stretched out by t...

Ebook Bundles: Grab Some Digital Stories, Cheap

Just in time for your early holiday shopping (Happy pre-Thanksgiving and pre-Black Friday, y'all!), I thought I'd list all my various short-story bundles in one blog entry. I know, you can thank me later…

Also, before I forget, I've updated my UnWrecked Press online store to allow you to buy PDFs of my novels, the comic I wrote with artist Niki Smith, and more, directly from me. Go on over and give it a try. (Unfortunately, I haven't had time to put these bundles online as PDFs, so you'll...

Free Fiction Friday: "Death in the City"

UnWrecked Press presents: Free Fiction Friday

This week's Free Fiction Friday story from UnWrecked Press is "Death in the City."

As always, I'll soon put this week's story into ebook format for your laptop, desktop, Kindle, iPad, Nook, iPhone, or whatever device you use to read ebooks. But for now, you can read it right here for free!

This story is my homage to Sherwood Anderson's story "Death in the Woods."

Death in the City

I.

The story is fueled by cans—empty, sticky, abandoned cans.

He was an...

Free Fiction Friday: "Breathing Trouble"

UnWrecked Press presents: Free Fiction Friday

This week's Free Fiction Friday story from UnWrecked Press is "Breathing Trouble."

As always, I'll soon put this week's story into ebook format for your laptop, desktop, Kindle, iPad, Nook, iPhone, or whatever device you use to read ebooks. But for now, you can read it right here for free!

This was one of the first stories I wrote after moving from Nebraska to North Carolina, and it's my way of making sense out of both worlds… It was first published ...

New Ebook: Making Digital Books

I'm pleased to announce a new how-to ebook entitled Making Digital Books: Formatting and Selling Your Novels and Stories as Ebooks.

This ebook includes, in one nice, tidy package, all of the various blog entries I've been posting here, along with any updates I made along the way, along with some other extras.

You can buy and download a PDF version right here, using PayPal.

The ebook is also available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and DriveThruFiction.

Here's more information about the...

Free Fiction Friday: "The Brotherhood of Trees"

UnWrecked Press presents: Free Fiction Friday

This week's Free Fiction Friday story from UnWrecked Press is "The Brotherhood of Trees."

As always, I'll soon put this week's story into ebook format for your laptop, desktop, Kindle, iPad, Nook, iPhone, or whatever device you use to read ebooks. But for now, you can read it right here for free!

This story was first published at Aeon Speculative Fiction, February 2006. It was names and Honorable Mention story in  The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror,

Making Digital Books: Adding the Fancy Stuff to Your Ebook

Making Digital Books: Add your ebook to the top of the stack!

All right, are you ready for this one?

We could discuss all those awesome formatting tricks you could do with your small library of ebooks to make them even better.

Stuff like highly detailed Tables of Contents (not the simple ToC you may need for an ebook story for Smashwords). Or full-color, graphics-intensive layouts. Crazy fonts. Headers and footers. Drop caps for the first letter of the first word of a new chapter. Fancy stuff!

We...

Making Digital Books: Marketing Your Ebook

Making Digital Books: Add your ebook to the top of the stack!

I saved the marketing topic for later, because it's my least favorite aspect of the whole process.

I already touched on the three main areas to focus on with your ebooks in the previous entries about covers and descriptions:

A great novel or story
An eye-catching, compelling cover
A snappy description

Beyond those three things, you just have to put your ebook out there for the world to find.

It's that last bit where things get a bit t...

November Novel Launch: The All Nations Team

In my work the past year and a half with learning digital books and creating ebooks, one aspect of the process that I haven't focused on enough has been the books themselves. I want to remedy that now, with a series of Novel Launches.

Each month, I'm going to "officially" launch a novel from UnWrecked Press with a special, low, month-long price on the ebook and trade paperback version. I'll also try to share interesting tidbits about each novel and what I was trying to accomplish while I was w...

Making Digital Books: Devising a Distribution Strategy for Your Ebooks

Making Digital Books: Add your ebook to the top of the stack!

Let's take a step back from all the formatting, the cover-making, and the description-writing for a second. Let's make sure you've got a good strategy in place for distributing your ebooks.

Places like Amazon's Kindle Store, the Nookbook Store, and Smashwords aren't publishers, of course. You are the publisher.

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, the Google ebookstore, DriveThruComics, the iBookstore, and all the various other...