Michael Jasper's Blog, page 40

Free Fiction Friday: "The Disillusionist"

UnWrecked Press presents: Free Fiction Friday

This week's Free Fiction Friday story from UnWrecked Press is "The Disillusionist."

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!

Ah, this is one my favorite stories! It was first published in Would That It Were, August 2003, and it was an Honorable Mention story in the Year's Best Fantasy...

Making Digital Books: Writing Great Descriptions for Your Ebooks

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

This is the back cover copy, but much more concise and snappy–it's marketing material, not creative material. It's a call to action, and that action is to get the reader of the description to buy your book.

Descriptions are tough. You've just written 90,000 words of a novel, so boiling it down to just a couple sentences seems quite impossible. So many characters and plotlines to cover here.

The trick is to find the heart of the...

Making Digital Books: Creating Effective Ebook Covers

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

In all my research into self-publishing (y'know, that word still has a bit of a negative connotation in my brain, I'm sorry to say) and indie publishing (yeah, that's much cooler-sounding), I've read over and over that the following three things are the keys to grabbing readers:

A great novel or story with a strong openingAn eye-catching, compelling coverA snappy description that quickly tells the reader what the novel, story, or...

Special Guest Post at the New Graphicly Blog

[image error]The fine folks at Graphicly are focusing more and more on helping comic creators get their comics made, distributed, and marketed, which to me is a fantastic thing. They already have a great site where you can buy and read digital comics.

Now they're helping creators get their comics to you more easily.

They asked me to write a blog about my experiences with digital comics, and I shared what I learned in this entry: "Going Digital with Your Comic: A Rough Map."

[image error]Go check it out, along with the...

Free Fiction Friday: "Family, New and Old"

UnWrecked Press presents: Free Fiction Friday

This week's Free Fiction Friday story from UnWrecked Press is "Family, New and Old."

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 a prequel of sorts to my novel Family, Pack, and it also has some other characters and events not in the book, but directly related to it. Think...

Making Digital Books: Formatting Your Novel for DriveThruFiction

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

So you've got your ebooks up at Smashwords, KDP, and Pub-It, right? And you have your novels set up as PoD books with CreateSpace and its various distributors.

You may have even gotten your ebooks into the Google eBookstore (or at least gotten them to the Processing stage of getting there!).

So… are you done with the uploading?

Almost! But first I'd like to highlight a newer distributor that not a lot of folks have heard of, but I...

Making Digital Books: Formatting Your Novel for the Google ebookstore

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

So why should you use the Google ebookstore to sell your ebooks?

Google ebooks are stored in "the cloud," instead of being downloaded onto your ereader, phone, or computer. They claim to be available on any device, and the ebook will synch up on all your devices. So you can start reading on your computer at work, read a bit on your phone during lunch, and catch up on your Kindle or Nook or other ereader that night, without losing...

Making Digital Books: Formatting Your Novel for Print-on-Demand (PoD)

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

Here's a thought or two about the future of print book publishing, from a small publisher's perspective: Why print up 10,000 copies of a book, pay to store it in a warehouse and then pay more to ship it to bookstores, and pay again for returns if the book doesn't sell?

Why not make it so each book has a press run of only as many books as needed? Even if it's just one?

That's print-on-demand (PoD). A customer orders a book, a book...

Making Digital Books: Formatting Your Novel (or Story) for the Nook

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

Have you walked into an actual Barnes & Noble store lately? You may have noticed that they're devoting more and more space to their spiffy new ereader, the Nook, in its color and eInk (black and white) versions.

The Nook is newer than the Kindle, and it's a less-expensive alternative to the iPad. When it first came out in fall of 2009, the Nook had some functionality built into it — like a small touchscreen window at the bottom —...

Free Fiction Friday: "The Champ Escapes"

UnWrecked Press presents: Fiction Friday

This week's Free Fiction Friday story from UnWrecked Press is "The Champ Escapes."

You can read this story for free, for a week. When the week's up, you can grab an ebook version of it to read it on your laptop, desktop, Kindle, iPad, Nook, iPhone, or whatever device you use to read ebooks.

This story is part of my baseball/ghost/historical novel The All Nations Team, and it gives you a nice taste of the characters and the strange sense of America in the ...