Harmland in Print

I originally did the ebook version of Harmland: dark tales, back in 2012. It was over 21,000 words but I didn’t feel—at the time—that was long enough for a print version. However, David Cranmer, over at Beat to a Pulp has shown what can be done with some really nice packaging at shorter lengths using a smaller size paperback format. I finally decided to go for it and Harmland is now available as a print book on Amazon for $6.99.

I used CreateSpace for the book and was a bit frustrated because they had changed everything since the last time I put up a book. I found the previous time very easy but this one was a pain. Still, Harlmand is up now, and while I’m not overly thrilled with the cover and cover fonts, I still think it’s pretty cool. I hope you’ll check it out.

This is a collection of noir and horror stories. Some of the contents are: "Whiskey, Guns, and Sin," "The Finest Cut," "The Grey Inside," "The Toad," and a modern Cthulhu Mythos tale called "The Vivarium."

Next up will be a print version of Killing Trail, my western collection. Coming soon.

Harvest of War, A Little Experiment

Sales of all my own Amazon titles had been decidedly low and flat for some time so I thought I'd try to shake things up with a free promotion. I made my fantasy story, "Harvest of War," free for three days, July 15-17. It's still too early to tell much probably but here's a quick synopsis of the results so far.

I gave away 87 free copies. I also gave away one PDF copy that someone on Goodreads requested from me. I had made this story free back when it was first published in 2012 and it moved a 'lot' more copies, but 87 is respectable I suppose. And maybe quite a few folks already had it. I promoted it on facebook and Goodreads. It reached its highest ranking at about 11 hours in on the giveaway, but about four hours after I started promoting it. Here are the numbers:

At 11:45: #2,745 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)

#4 in Kindle Store > Kindle Short Reads > 45 minutes (22-32 pages) > Science Fiction & Fantasy

#13 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Anthologies & Short Stories

As of today, June 19, I've gotten one additional sale on the title, but it came at the end of the free promotion period and, quite likely, the person thought it was still free and clicked buy before seeing the .99 cent price had returned. Sorry about that. There have been no additional sales on any of my other titles so far, but many who downloaded "Harvest" have probably not read it yet. It did look like the numbers on Swords of Talera dipped so someone may have picked that up, though whether it had anything to do with the promotion I don't know. 

I was/am also hoping for some reviews on the story and the first one came in this morning from Prashant over at Chess, Comics, Crosswords. It's a very good one and I'm really happy Prashant enjoyed the tale. At the heart of why I write is to tell stories that I love and that others love too. It's gratifying when you hear that it has worked, and particularly gratifying to make that connection with someone in another part of the world. Thanks very much to Prashant for his great review!

At some point in a couple of weeks, I'll have another post on this to see if any new developments have occurred. In the meantime, happy reading. 

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Micro Weird Has Landed

As I hoped, I was able to put the finishing touches on my collection called Micro Weird: Tiny Tales of the Strange over spring break. It is now available for both Nook and Kindle, at 99 cents. There are fifteen stories and a postscript about flash fiction. It’s over 10,000 words total but only about 8,000 of that is fiction. There’s also a section telling “about” the stories, which is something I like to do and something I like to read from other authors.

You all know I like variety in my writing. Well, this is the most varied collection I’ve yet put together. There’s some stuff in here that would be considered horror, albeit mild, some SF stuff, some humor, a children’s story, and a number of pieces that are really unclassifiable. I suspect there’s some things that will surprise even those who have read most of my previous work. Most of the pieces in Micro Weird were written in the last couple of years, but a few stories go back decades, including one (revised) that dates from the early 1980s. Only three of the tales have been previously published, and only one in anything some of you may have seen.

Despite the variety in the stories, there are two things that hold the collection together. First, all the stories are short, with the longest being about 1200 words. Most are quite a bit shorter. These days, these lengths are identified as either flash fiction or micro-fiction. Second, all the pieces strive for a twist ending.

The cover photo was taken by Lana outside Meteor Crater a couple of years back. We saw what looked like a giant picture hanging on the wall, and a man leaning “through” the picture smoking a cigarette. The “picture” was actually a rectangular opening in the brick wall. It was rather surreal to see, though. Lana did the blacking out of the figure so he’d be in silhouette, and I did the lettering. I used her “Gimp” program to manipulate things and it seemed far superior to Paint so I’m going to download a free copy of it for myself.

I hope you enjoy Micro Weird. I had a lot of fun writing these tales. If you want, you can pick ‘em up at:

Barnes and Noble.

As always, thanks for reading!

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Self Publishing Report:

Well, “Harvest of War” was free for five days and there were 466 downloads in that time. Seems like a respectable number, but I’ve never done this before so I’m not sure how it ranks. I picked up some very nice five star reviews on Amazon, as well as mentions around the blogosphere, including Ty Johnston’s kind comments, here. Thanks, Ty.

In order to make it free, I signed up with Amazon select, which means it can be offered only at Amazon for 90 days, about 82 more days, I guess. After that I’ll put it up on Nook too. It’s way too early to see if this had any effect on the sales of any of my other books. The Talera trilogy is also fantasy and folks who liked “Harvest” might like those books. Closest to it in mood, though, are the stories in Bitter Steel.

This makes three items I’ve self-published for ebook:
1. Killing Trail, Summer 2010 – Has been a relatively steady seller each month, although in small numbers.

2. Days of Beer, December 2011 – Sold respectably the first couple of months and then has dropped to zero.

3. Harvest of War, April 2012 – remains to be seen, although I’ve sold one more copy since the free period ran out.

My experience has been that self-publishing is a useful outlet for stories and novella length material and collections. I don’t believe it replaces the need for or the pleasures of mainstream publishing, even at the small press level, and it appears to me that you have to have some kind of name, or you have to promote your ass off to make any headway with it. Certainly there are some amazing success stories. I’m not one of them.

I’ll continue to offer an occasional work this way. One of the pleasures is having complete control over every aspect, from content to cover. And it’s nice to be able to see sales results almost in “real time.”
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The Skinny

I know everyone is simply hanging on the edge of their seats for updates on Gramlich’s life so I won’t keep you in suspense any longer. Here’s what I’ve been up to.

1. Thanks so much to everyone who has visited and commented over at Novel Spaces when I’ve blogged there. I much appreciate that. You folks are the best.

2. I now have an author page on Amazon. Nothing much to see except images of my books and a short bio that everyone has seen before. But I may add stuff to it over time and will let you know. It’s mainly for the twos and threes of folks who might stumble upon my work outside of this blog and find themselves desperately interested in the Big G Man.

3. I finished a semi-secret project and information on that will be coming out soon. I had a lot of fun with it. It’s quite different than anything I’ve done before.

4. I joined Amazon Associates. It’s free, and I’ve seen a lot of blogs around now with those little clickable rectangle widgets that are linked to specific products at Amazon. I wanted some of those for my own books, and for other things I might want to support. Here’s a couple of them below. I do have a question for everyone. The book covers on my sidebar are clickable and will take you to Amazon, but should I replace those with these clickable widgets to make that clear, or does that smack of too much “hackery?”





5. Killing Trail has now gone live at Smashwords, but let me lay down the skinny before anyone decides to buy it there. First, the price is the same, $2.99. Second, Smashwords does have a version for the kindle, and over there the table of contents is clickable so you can jump directly to the stories. HOWEVER, if you buy a kindle form book from Smashwords you can only read it on Kindle PC and not on the Kindle device. ALSO, the formatting is generally better on the Amazon version. Adding the clickables has meant that the stories do not all start on separate pages. Some do, but others start right after the previous story ends. The readability level of the book is fine in Kindle form.

In addition, though, at Smashwords you can also get the story in PDF format and it came out perfectly that way, with the clickable table of contents and all the page breaks just as they should be. I was happy about that. So if you want to read it but don’t have a Kindle, this is the best way to go.

There are a number of other formats offered by Smashwords and I uploaded every one to see how it would work. Here’s the skinny on those for Killing Trail.

A: Do NOT get the book in RTF or Plain Text. It’s completely unreadable in plain text and the formatting is seriously screwed up on RTF, though I don’t know why.

B: The HTML online reading is generally good with indents and centering of titles working just fine, but the clickable table of contents won’t work in HTML and the page breaks aren’t necessarily correct between stories, meaning that a new story doesn’t always start on a new page.

C: The Javascript won’t show the images in the book, and the clickable table of contents won’t work. But the text is readable and you can change font size and color. I definitely wouldn’t consider this ideal.

D: There are also some formats for other e-readers that I don’t have, so I couldn’t test them. If anyone does get the book for one of these formats, please, please let me know how it works so I can make good on any problems. Anyway, these are:

EPUB: Open industry format, good for Stanza reader
LRF: for Sony reader.
Palm Doc, PDB: for Palm reading devices.

That’s about it for now. Thanks for listening.

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The Pleasure of a Good Review

One of the first things I saw this morning was a message from a fellow in Ireland who really seemed to enjoy Swords of Talera. His name is W. Nelson and he posted an outstanding review of the book on Amazon.uk..

Not long ago I got an email from Randy Johnson, who I know is a regular visitor of this blog, telling me how much he enjoyed Cold in the Light. Randy now owns every book I’ve written, all three of them. That’s a pretty nice feeling. And, of course, I’ve had several very good reviews of the books already on Amazon, although the one from Nelson is the first from the United Kingdom. Some of those have come from folks who check this blog, and, of course, many folks here have given me tremendous support on their own blogs with commentary, reviews, and even an interview.

It really makes my day when someone spends a few moments of their limited time to tell me that they like my work, and even to tell others. I don't know if folks who aren't writers quite understand what a pleasure it is to hear good things about one's works. For me, it really keeps me going even when I know I'm not making a ton of money from my writing.

Today is another good day.

The Weird World of Amazon

Well, when Amazon first listed Swords of Talera they had the author name slightly screwed up by putting a comma in it so that it read "Charles, Allen Gramlich." This didn't bother me too much. In fact, I was so excited about the cover that I didn't even notice until a couple of people called my attention to it. My editor had noticed it too and he contacted them about correcting it. So?

So, today I notice that Swords of Talera is by "Charles Allen." I'm a little more troubled by the fact that my last name has disappeared. I emailed them about it, although it took me 20 minutes just to figure out how to navigate through their email contact procedure. It's a little bit funny, actually, but I hope they do get it corrected. A good reason not to use three names on your book, I guess.

Btw, some folks have asked me why I wanted Charles Allen Gramlich on this one as opposed to Charles Gramlich on Cold in the Light. The main reason was as a sort of homage to previous writers of Sword & Planet fiction like Edgar "Rice" Burroughs and Alan "Burt" Akers. But also, I thought I'd use a variation of my name to differentiate my fantasy work from my more horror/thriller work.

I also got my first review at Amazon and it's a good one by Randy Johnson. Thanks, Randy. If we ever meet I'll owe you a beer, or a beverage of your choice.