Adventures of an Arkansawyer, Ebook

Well, Adventures of an Arkansawyer is finally out in ebook. You can save about $5 on it if you prefer electronic format over print. This is my memoir up to the time I left Arkansas. Eventually there will be a second installment that covers post-Arkansas memories. I’m pretty sure that one will be called “Tales of An ArkansawTraveller.”

It’s clear in the book description that the first third of this book is a revised and expanded version of the Days of Beer ebook. The last two-thirds are all new and true adventures set mostly around and about the farm where I grew up. So if you already have “Days of Beer,” keep this in mind.

Among the new pieces that very few people are likely to have seen are such tales as: “Be Careful What You Ask For,” which reveals the time my grandfather tried to kill me, Snake Charmer, in which I introduced my mom to a pet grass snake at the dinner table, and “Of Cats, Kittens, and Coon Hounds,” in which a feral cat came to visit and was met with staunch resistance from our resident pack of Coon Hounds. (Remember, the vast majority of these stories, while real, are at least slightly “tongue-in-cheek.”

If anyone is interested, the Amazon link is here.

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Style Changes

Over the last few weeks I've been going through the Talera trilogy one more time for the conversion from print to ebook. Reading the three works back to back like that has been fun, sometimes surprising, and sometimes I've just had to say "Doh!"

The "Doh" has come from the fact that in both Wings Over Talera and Witch of Talera I sometimes misspelled my own invented words. In "Wings," the city of Revenor is sometimes spelled RevAnor. In "Witch" the distance measurement of "tahng" is spelled "taung." I've even got a series bible where the correct spellings are listed. Why didn't I bother to consult it? I couldn't tell you.

The surprise has been in noting certain stylistic trends that have changed in my writing over time. I went from using very little italics for emphasis in Swords of Talera to using too much in "Witch" and backing off of that for the ebook. There's also something I've always done stylistically, and that is to repeat certain words to give emphasis in sentences. I might say, for example, "he was running, just running." However, I see that I relied on that element a bit much in "Witch" and am also backing off of that for the ebook.

At one point in my life I thought of a writer's style as largely fixed. Mine certainly hasn't been, and there are deeper changes than the ones I've mentioned above. That probably calls for another post.

In the end, though, reading through the Talera trilogy has primarily been great fun for me. I have to say I like them pretty well. I'm proud of them.

But how about you and style? Has your writing style changed enough to notice over time? Or have you noticed changes in the style of some writer you love to read? I'd like to know.



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Ebook News

Well, sooner than I had thought it might happen, two of my books have been released by Borgo/Wildside as ebooks for both the Nook and the Kindle. This is Swords of Talera and Bitter Steel. The rest will eventually follow, although dates for that are unknown. A couple of folks have asked me particularly about the Nook versions so I thought I'd put up the links today.

Swords of Talera for the Nook

Bitter Steel for the Nook

Both Swords of Talera and Bitter Steel for Kindle:


Killing Trail is, of course, still available on Kindle, although not on the Nook as of yet.


Cold in the Light is also available in ebook from Google Books.
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Rip Through Time

Some breaking news. I revealed something about the secret project I worked on this past summer in a previous post. It was a serial time travel story conceived by David Cranmer and executed by several guest writers, including me. The first installment of “A Rip Through Time” is now up online at Beat to a Pulp. This opening segment is by Chris F. Holm, so I hope you’ll check it out. My piece follows Chris’s in the story sequence. I had a lot of fun with my part, and from what Chris says here he had a lot of fun as well.

In other news, I’ve been kindlizing some old pulp stories, Doc Savage and The Shadow, for listening to on my Kindle while I make my commute to school. A problem was that the Kindle’s volume output was not enough to overcome the travel noise at much above 40 MPH. I first hooked up a set of speakers to the Kindle and used a cigarette lighter plug-in to power the whole thing, but this was pretty awkward and still didn’t produce enough volume to cover all contingencies. I finally bit the bullet and went to Mobile One on Saturday and had them put in a new radio/CD player for me with an auxiliary port, which I can plug the Kindle into directly so that it plays through my radio speakers. This is working out well. My 2005 Scion didn’t come with an auxiliary port, and I was needing a new CD player anyway so I killed two birds with one stone.

And speaking of Kindle and ebooks, sales have fallen off dramatically, (shall I say, precipitously), on my western collection, Killing Trail, so if you are hungry for some shoot outs and shoot-em-ups, please give the collection a try.


And for a final note for today, The Lovely Lana is running a contest over at her blog where you can pick up one of her great photos. Check it out.
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MORE on AMAZON EBOOK

Many of you may know this stuff already but some of you probably don’t. I’ve looked more into the Amazon Digital publishing, and I’m definitely going to try it. My pic today is a rough mockup of a cover idea. Submitted covers have to be in jpeg or tiff format and I’ve found out how to change msword files to jpeg if I need to.

However, Amazon is about to change their rules for publishing ebooks in July and I will wait until those changes kick in first. Otherwise I’d have to ‘republish’ what I publish now. Since I’m going to be waiting a bit anyway, I’m going to try to do a new western story to add to the publication. Right now it has three tales in it, “Killing Trail,” “Showdown at Wild Briar,” and “Once Upon a Time with the Dead,” as well as a short essay on Louis L’Amour. I’m going to fiddle today with a story I’m calling “Busted Flat in Broken Axle” to see if I can get it going in a reasonable way. I figure to charge the lowest price I can for it once it is published, but Amazon has rules about how much or how little one can charge based on size of the file. You can’t give something away free.

I also need to write the “about the work” piece that is posted on Amazon with the book. I’m working on the assumption there that it’s kind of like a short back cover blurb. I’ve found it’s harder to do these for collections than it is for regular novels.

So far all I have is: “When they dumped Angie Hutton in Lane Holland’s yard she was close to death. She managed to speak only a few words, but they were enough to make Lane strap on his guns and ride out on a killing trail.”
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Ebook Consideration

OK, I’m thinking of publishing an ebook through Amazon’s Digital Text Platform. It looks like a fairly easy process, and I’ve actually set up a book, although I have no idea at the moment what it’s likely to look like after it’s published. I guess I’ll find out, because I’m pretty committed to giving this a try. Here’s why.

1. I have some western tales, two long and one short, that I’d like to make available in a collected format. But, there is not enough material to pitch as a collection to a regular publisher. It’ll be a total of about 60 pages, which seems pretty good for an ebook, if I make sure to let folks know that it’s not a full novel’s worth of material and if I price it accordingly.

2. I’ve been wanting to try something like this because I hear that some folks are doing pretty well selling Kindle ebooks that they published themselves. And I really do believe that ebooks are going to continue to grow in popularity for a good while, even though I don’t think they will ever completely replace printed books.

3. I’m also interested in doing a little publishing under what I intend to call a Razored Zen Imprint. They say every actor wants to direct. Well maybe every writer (or just this one, and David Cranmer, and Sidney Williams, and Bret Funk) wants to publish. And this seems like a good way to get my feet wet in the process.

So. What do you guys think? Any great advice? Any caveats? Anybody want to give me a few million bucks to set up Razored Zen Press?
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New Story Published

My horror story, “Chimes,” has just been released from Damnation Books. It’s an ebook, and right now it’s cheap. Damnation Books actually releases works at lower than the cover price and lets that price rise gradually until it reaches the full amount. It’s good to get in early then. If you’re interested, the link is at Chimes. I’d appreciate it if you’d check it out, at least.

I also have a question concerning the story. I’d like to get some reviews of it. What if I ran a kind of contest? Say I entered everyone who reviewed the story and informed me of that review into a drawing. The winner would get their choice of a copy of any one of my books they might want. Does this sound too much like a bribe? Or is it a creative way of encouraging and rewarding reviews?

There often seems to be a fine line between self-promotion and prostituting oneself. Every artist needs to self-promote, but I always feel uncomfortable when self-promotion crosses the line. The problem is, where exactly is that line? I’m never very sure.
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Kindle 2

Well, I broke down and bought myself a Kindle 2. It arrived Friday and I’m just about to finish reading my first book on it, Scorpio Reborn, by Kenneth Bulmer, writing under the pseudonym Alan Burt Akers. Bulmer was actually a major influence on my decision to buy a Kindle. His Dray Prescot series of Sword & Planet novels ended at #37 in the USA, but continued for a number of books more in Germany. The series was actually written in English, however, and, recently, Mushroom Books began to release the remaining volumes to English audiences. Unfortunately, they were only available as ebooks, and as much as I wanted to read them I just didn’t think I had the strength to try that task on my laptop. Then I found out there were Kindle editions of the books, and, additionally, that a lot of the classic public domain ebooks I have are, supposedly, relatively easy to "kindleize.” So I bit the bullet.

Let me say I’m glad I did. The Kindle 2 is very well balanced so it’s easy to hold. It weighs about the same as a small hardback. Not all of that is screen, of course. The screen is a little smaller than an old Ace Double Paperback, but since you can change the font size with a couple quick button presses that doesn’t pose a problem. The previous page/next page buttons are well situated for ease of use, and the menu button and small internal mouse work very well. There is a key pad at the bottom of the device, with buttons small enough so that hunting and pecking is required, but they are spaced so that you won’t hit two buttons at once unless you really have sausage fingers.

Within fifteen minutes of opening mine, and after spending only a few of those minutes looking at the manual, I was already ordering books online from Amazon’s Kindle store, and was reading. Since I have an account at Amazon, ordering books from them was very easy, and they arrived on my device in less than a minute.

As for the reading experience, it feels different from a book, although I think that feeling will dissipate as I gain experience with it. After all, I’ve been reading regular books for over 40 years. The different feeling isn’t really a barrier to enjoying an ebook this way, however. I’ve certainly enjoyed the one I’m reading first. The battery charged up pretty quickly, and I spent several hours yesterday and today reading without experiencing any problem with a low battery. I think that’s going to really make this device handy.

I worried about the difference between reading on a screen and on a page, and I have noticed one difference. During regular daylight, the Kindle screen is at least as easy if not easier to read than a paperback page. I do seem to notice a little more glare from the screen under artificial lighting, however, and I think you have to be more careful to position the Kindle under a light source than you would a regular paperback. It has not been a serious issue for me, so far.

The Kindle 2 is not a book. You can’t stick it in a back pocket and you have to be much more careful about dropping it than you would a paper book. But it also has advantages. Instead of packing 15 or 20 different books to take with me on a trip, I can just take the Kindle. It also has a read-to-you function as well, which is actually kind of nice (although I hear there are likely to be audio rights issues with that). And my fifty year old eyes sure like the ability to change font size.

All you need to hook your Kindle to your computer is a USB cable, and then you should be able to move books back and forth between the two devices, and even download music to Kindle. I haven’t done these things yet so I'll have to get back to you on those tasks. In the meantime, though, I’m off to finish my first Kindle ebook.

Happy reading to all.
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