Michael Jasper's Blog, page 41

Design Essays (That I Forgot to Link to Here 'Til Now)

The good folks over at the FlamesRising blog, which is a sister blog to the excellent DriveThruComics site that distributes our digital comic and my novels, asked me to write two"design essays" for them recently. I have a great time doing them, one for my Contagious Magic series of books, and one for the finale of In Maps & Legends.

I just realized today that I didn't link to them here, and thought I'd remedy that ASAP.

The first one is called "A Brief History of Magic," and it gives a nice...

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

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

You can't talk about making digital books without the Kindle coming up in the conversation. When the first Kindle came out a few years ago, it was obvious it was a game-changer.

Up until that point, ereaders were just a curiosity, and few people used them.

And then Amazon launched the Kindle, and made it a snap to download ebooks from their huge digital inventory (for a small fee, of course!). Soon they had their self-publishing site ...

The Collected Edition of IN MAPS & LEGENDS is now available

I'm happy to announce the release of the Collected Edition of our digital comic IN MAPS & LEGENDS! Consider this the digital version of the trade paperback of all nine issues.

Here's the official synopsis:

Kaitlin Grayson is an artist who finds herself compelled to carve a map that covers all four walls of her window-less spare room. One cold night, a disheveled man named Bartamus bursts into her apartment, claiming that only she can save his dying world.

For Kait, things like this happen in...

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

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

So here we go with our adventure in making digital books.

Please note — I'm posting these entries a little bit out of order, chronologically. I probably should've started with copy-editing your book, finding a cover, and writing a great description.

And then jump into choosing a digital distributor to help you sell your ebooks. And talk about (ugh) marketing.

But I wanted writers who were ready to dive into the process to be able to...

Making Digital Books: Introduction

Making Digital Books: Add your ebook to the top of the stack! (Image © Phspy | Dreamstime.com)

If you've been following this website of mine at all this year, you've probably noticed a flurry of ebook activity here. From digital comics to digital novels and stories, I've been kinda busy.

With good reason, I might add. Ebook readers have become much less expensive and more user-friendly. Nowadays, readers find themselves happy to buy a $4 or $5 file to load onto their new ereader instead of...

Free Fiction Monday: "Tiny Disaster"

UnWrecked Press presents: Free Fiction Friday

This week's Free Fiction Friday story from UnWrecked Press is "Tiny Disaster." (I know it's a Monday, but I wanted to get this story out there in time for State Fair season!)

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 a finalist for the 2004 Brenda L. Smart Award for Short ...

Free Fiction Friday: "In the Process of Disappearing"

UnWrecked Press presents: Free Fiction Friday

This week's Free Fiction Friday story from UnWrecked Press is "In the Process of Disappearing ."

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 to the events in issue 1 of IN MAPS & LEGENDS. I'm publishing it for the first time right here, now that our first 9-issue...

IN MAPS & LEGENDS 9 (of 9!) is now Live!

This is it — the final issue of the first storyline of our digital comic IN MAPS & LEGENDS! It's hard to believe, but we've been doing this comic for a little over a year now, and you get to see how it all ends at last.

In this issue, Kait faces down the trio of impossible creatures who have world domination on their agenda, taking her and her friends to the brink of death and back again, and the mystery of the maps are explained, in his own enigmatic way, by the haggard stranger known only...

Guest Post: Susan Wingate: "Spending Time Writing, Spending Time Alone"

SPENDING TIME WRITING, SPENDING TIME ALONE

by Susan Wingate (author of award-winning novels DROWNING and BOBBY'S DINER)

In Fantasy: Writing alone = Heaven

In Reality: Writing alone = Heaven

In Fantasy: Being alone = Heaven

In Reality: Being alone = Loneliness

For years I've told people how much I love being alone. And, if you want to know the truth of it, most of the time that's the way I feel if we consider other people — those others "out there," outside my home — friends, family members not i...

New Ebook Bundle: Halloween Six-Pack

Now that October is here, I thought I'd announce my last ebook bundle of the year, just in time for the best fall holiday ever.

Halloween Six-Pack:

"Black Angels"
"One Night in Rosecroft"
"The Disillusionist"
"Painting Haiti"
"Never, Incorporated"
"A Tale of Two Shits"

eBook available from: Amazon, Smashwords, and Barnes & Noble.

Also, here are some other bundles I've put together this past year:

Triplets: Brief Tales of the Future, Futility, and Family: Three short-shorts about a pair of...