Recent Goodreads during Jury Duty

Those of you who visit here regularly know I recently had jury duty. I spent most of four days sitting in a room, and while I didn’t particularly enjoy it, I took my kindle along and did get a lot of reading done. I thought today I’d run some capsule reviews of some of the items I finished or at least started during those days. I also reviewed all of these on Goodreads as well, if I could find them listed there at least. I got all but one of these from Amazon.

 

Commando: Operation Arrowhead, by Jack Badelaire:

I used to read a lot of historical fiction but have gotten away from it in recent years. When I read a book like Commando: Operation Arrowhead, by Jack Badelaire, I wonder why I slowed down in reading the genre. Commando takes place in World War II, certainly one of my favorite historical periods to read about, and probably my very favorite judging from the number of WWII books I have around the house, both fiction and nonfiction. The story is set after the Blitzkrieg has overrun France. A small British Commando team is sent in to make contact with local partisan groups and they have to deal with a brutal local Nazi commandant and his zealous troops. Although a fellow named Lynch is probably the main character, we get familiar with several major commando figures and these characters are a lot of fun. I can see lots of room for backstory to be expanded on these characters as the series continues. An afterword to the novel gives some historical backstory on the British Commando units of WWII. 

Badelaire’s work fits in nicely with the books I already have on my shelf, reminding me somewhat of the grittiness of Willi Heinrich’s WWII books, but with considerably more action. That action, which is quite graphic and which I like very much, reminds me a bit of some of the stuff we saw in the movie Inglourious Basterds, but told with the greater depth and background that a novel can achieve over a movie. Any movie reference will be somewhat misleading because this book should really be compared against other WWII adventure series, of which there used to be quite a few. I think it compares very well and really enjoyed it. I know there is a second in the series out, Operation Bedlam, and I imagine more are planned. The series is definitely off to a great start.

Hard Case II: The Lure of Hell, by Bernard Lee DeLeo

John Harding is back in new adventures with his band of merry “righteous” killers. They’re a group who take the safety of America seriously and aren’t afraid to get down in the dirt with those who would endanger her. In fact, they’ll get lower in the dirt. They often refer to themselves as psychopaths but in reality they are willing to do what it takes to protect the people and country they love. Among themselves and the decent folks around them, they know loyalty and love aplenty. 

Hard Case II, however, adds some new folks into the mix, Clint Dostiene, a somewhat reluctant agent of the “Company,” and Lynn Montoya, who enjoys killing, but only of serial killers and lowlifes. There’s the usual adrenalized action and the sometimes wry, sometimes dark humor that mark most of DeLeo’s work. I’m an action junkie so this is right down my line.

Outlaw, by Matthew Pizzolato

When I started with this book I was afraid it was going to be a bit cliche. The writing was good but the adventures befalling our hero seemed a bit pat. As the book continued, though, the twists started to happen and I really enjoyed the ending, which I did not suspect until very near the end.

The Toughest Mile, by William Meikle

This is a fantasy short story and is the first work I've read by this author. It won't be the last though. It begins with a pit fighter seeking his freedom, which is not anything new in the genre. But Meikle makes it his own and delivers a solid story with plenty of action, excitement, and some good emotional impact. The prose is also quite good, raising the level of the tale even further.

Boggy Creek: The Legend is True, by Eric S. Brown and Jennifer Minar-Jaynes

A fast, action horror read. It's about what you expect from knowing about the movie of Boggy Creek, but it delivers well. I enjoyed it.

NOTE: the following works were not available on Goodreads for me to review, but here’s what I would have said about them.

Madam Chang’s Red Dragon Saloon, by Angeline Hawkes (reviewed on Amazon)

This is an excellent tale, a long short story or a short novella. A young Chinese woman in the American West is born with a strange tattoo on her arm. Her family knows what it represents but keep that from her. Only after her family is brutally murdered and she is shown the horrors of the real world does she discover what the tattoo means. Blood and gore are the result, but there's a lot more to this tale, which could easily lead to some sequels. Highly recommended.

The Unexplained, by Christopher Fulbright (reviewed on Amazon)

This is a collection of short horror stories. It's very well written and creepy as hell. I've read other material by Fulbright and he can write. This is a fairly short collection so it's a quick read. There is still quite a lot of variety among the stories, though. Much enjoyed.

Polysyllabic, by Mark Durfee

This is the only one I didn’t get originally from Amazon. It is a collection of poetry by the fellow we know in the blogosphere as the Walking Man. If you’ve visited his blog you know the kind of hard hitting, intense, poetry he writes about life and politics. This is more of the same, made even more powerful by the accumulated imagery that you get off the pages. Searing is a good word to describe Mark’s work.

The Adventures of Black Jack Pepper, by M. L. Madison (reviewed on Amazon)

A charming children's book. Black Jack Pepper is a six-year-old girl who decides on that name herself. She and her younger brother and father have many cute and hilarious adventures. I bet many children would love to have it read to them. Now I'm going to have a doughnut.

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Tammy, and a Story Dedication

I’ve been planning for about a month to dedicate my next published work to my niece, Tammy Kalb, who has been suffering from brain cancer for a while now. Her father, my brother Jimmy, called this morning to say she was in a coma and that the doctors say she could pass on at any minute. They’ve been saying that for a couple of days now so we’ve all been bracing ourselves.

Jimmy, who is twenty years older than me, was already married and gone by the time I was born. But in my first fifteen years or so he used to come home at least once a year with his family. Tammy was his firstborn and was only about a year and a half younger than me. We played together a lot and got along very well. We were good friends and steady companions when she visited. After Jimmy and his family moved to England for many years, I didn’t see Tammy very often. I’ll always remember our days wandering across the farm, though, and that she was the first person to ever ride on the back of my old Suzuki motorcycle.

As some of you know, I’ve been working on a collection of noir tales, and I’d intended to dedicate that to Tammy. However, a couple of days ago I found out that an anthology I had submitted a story to hadn’t panned out and so I decided to epub that piece through Razored Zen Press and dedicate it to Tammy. The young girl in the story, Ehma, isn’t that much different from the Tammy I remember hanging out with. Both were tough girls, and Tammy is a very tough woman.

The story is called “Harvest of War,” and is a little over 5,000 words long. I uploaded it to Kindle last night and was surprised to see it had already been posted as of this morning. It’s on Kindle-only for the next 90 days. It’s a heroic fantasy story involving Orcs, the first such tale I’ve ever written. I owe a major debt of thanks to Scott Oden. Without his prompting I never would have written the piece. And many people owe a debt to Tammy Kalb, for all of her caring over the years. She is, and will be, remembered.

NOTE: Harvest of War is HERE if you want to take a look.
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Kindle and Nook Collections

Some folks I know who are self-publishing on Kindle are talking about hundreds of sales for their works a month. (I don’t know any of those folks who are claiming thousands.) I have two self-published titles up on Amazon and Nook, Killing Trail and Days of Beer, and I haven’t come close to that number yet. Sales for Days of Beer have pretty well flatlined, but Killing Trail is still selling a few copies a month.

One thing the folks are saying who are publishing more is that it 1) helps to have more titles available, and 2) it helps if they are all basically in the same genre. I’m never going to be able to pull off the second one. I don’t read in any one genre and I just can’t focus my writing in one. I like stories of all kinds, and I want to write the kinds of stories I like to read. And I don’t want to use three or four different pseudonyms; I’d end up having to tell folks it was me, anyway.

However, I’ve decided that I’m going to put up at least two more ebooks from my own Razored Zen Press in 2012. One of them will not be the erotica collection I was talking about last year. I just decided I didn’t feel comfortable doing it. However, I do have two specific collections in mind that I will try to publish.

The first will be called Whiskey, Guns and Sin. It will be a noir/crime collection. The title story was previously published at Beat to a Pulp, but the ending is completely redone for this collection. The Swampy Jack story, “The Finest Cut” will also be in there. And another story, which I have an idea for but which hasn’t been written yet. I have a cover concept firmly in mind.

The second one will be a “Hauntings” collection. I have one story written for this already, called “Mouth Wet with Rain and Leaves.” There will be at least two more stories but I have to write them first. I have plenty of ideas. I don’t know what the collection title will be yet, but all the stories will deal with hauntings in some way or another. I have a cover idea for this one too, although not as firmly held.

Each of these collections will be shorter in total words than either Killing Trail or Days of Beer, but will contain three stories each and I’ll sell them for .99 cents. I’ll see if this will make any difference in my sales figures on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

For those of you who are saying, oh no, not more Gramlich already after Days of Beer in December and In the Language of Scorpions in January, it’s going to be at least a couple of months before “Whiskey” goes up, and quite a bit longer than that before the “Hauntings” collection is ready.

It’s a crazy new world of publishing out there. I haven’t the foggiest what is going to happen. But I'm going to have my stuff in the mix some way or another.
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Kindle Reading; Holiday Books

I've just finished reading/listening to my 51st book on my Kindle, and have started on #52, a space opera by Marion Zimmer Bradley. I first held my Kindle in my hands on February 27, 2009, so I've had about two years. I currently have 34 books loaded on it, and about 75 more kindlized works stored on my computer to be loaded as needed. Among the books already loaded: some of the Dray Prescot works that were never "printed" in English, a couple of the "Shadow" pulp novels, several SF novels from the 40s and 50s, some books by friends like M. F. Korn and Ty Johnston, collections like Discount Noir, and such classics as The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ben Hur, and War and Peace.

I bought a fair amount of my kindle books from Amazon, but over two-thirds of the books I have and have read I downloaded free from Project Gutenberg and other online ebook sites. Many of these I downloaded as text files and then kindlized them, which is ridiculously easy. I just send a text file to my kindle email account and they kindlize it within seconds and either send it back to my kindle or to my PC so I can load it later at my leisure. I have found that I can improve my listening experience on Kindle with such books if I do a little editing on the text file first to make sure there are periods after chapter titles and so on.

Although the reading experience itself on Kindle is very good because of the lack of glare and the ability to increase font size, I've found the text to speech function to be one of my favorite applications. I let my Kindle read to me as I take my long daily commute, and although the voice is definitely mechanical sounding and lacks the voice qualities of a good audio book, I find that it doesn't matter much with a lot of books, such as the Shadow and Doc Savage Pulp stories. I tend to supply the intonations in my head as I listen along.

The Kindle has not meant an end to my long love affair with printed books. In fact, I've bought more "new" books in the past three years than at any time in my life. I've also bought printed copies of some of the books I've read on the Kindle just to have them on my shelves. It has complimented my love affair with reading, not complicated it.

And I'll end this little ode to the Kindle by mentioning a couple of my own works that can be found on Amazon for the Kindle. I’m talking about Killing Trail, and Chimes, of course. “Chimes” is actually a longish short story while “Killing Trail” is a collection of my western stories. They’re both pretty cheap, and I feel comfortable recommending the author to you. :)

Btw, Killing Trail is also available on Smashwords in different ebook formats and PDF if you should perchance prefer.




However, if you prefer to do your holiday shopping for printed books, check out Erin Cole’s Holiday Catalog, which includes Cold in the Light by yours truly, as well as many other wonderful books from up and coming writers who deserve your consideration.

Happy holidays!

Listening to Talera

I've already mentioned here that I've been letting my Kindle read books to me on my long daily commute. I've been enjoying that process, and feeling less like I'm wasting my time with the driving.

I decided last week to load my Talera trilogy onto the Kindle and let it read those to me. I've finished listening to Swords of Talera so far and am about a third of the way through Wings Over Talera. Witch of Talera is up next. After that I may keep it going by listening to Robert E. Howard's Almuric, which is also a sword and planet work.

I make a habit out of reading my material out loud before I ever submit it, but listening to the 'whole' thing is actually pretty helpful. I noticed in "Swords" that I repeated the word "well" a lot, and I had not picked up on that merely by reading it. I may start doing this for manuscripts before I submit them. The Kindle voice doesn't offer inflections well so you can also get a feeling for how important it is to convey the emotion in the dialogue rather than by attaching tags such as "he shouted," etc. All in all, I think it could make a useful writing tool.

I'm also finding, happily, that I'm really enjoying listening to my own works. It's kind of weird in a way, but you know I really like these stories. I'm proud of them. I'm so glad they are out there.

By the way, if anyone reading this has read Witch of Talera and feels the urge to review it on Amazon, I'd appreciate it. "Swords" and "Wings" both have reviews but "Witch" doesn't. I'm not sure it makes any difference but it couldn't hurt.

Thanks to everyone for listening.





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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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Updates on the Updates

I keep learning more about the Kindle experience. I thought at first that kindle formatted stuff I downloaded from Smashwords couldn’t be read on the Kindle device, only on Kindle PC. I was wrong. If you ‘open’ a file bought from Smashwords it will open only in Kindle PC and then you can’t copy it from there to your desktop or Kindle device. However, if you ‘save’ that file to your desktop, then you can open it on Kindle PC or copy it to your Kindle device just fine.

The general consensus on the Amazon widgets seemed to be that I should use them on my sidebar instead of the covers by themselves. So, as you can see, I did just that. It was a lot easier than setting up the covers to be clickable anyway.

You might also notice that I now have a place on the sidebar, just below my first set of links, where anyone can subscribe to an RSS feed for my blog. I had to do that so I could link my blog to Goodreads and to the Amazon Author Page. It took me several hours to figure out how to do it, since I’m still using the original template I started with on Blogger a couple of Yarons ago. But, tis done now.

In writing news, a couple of anthologies have just come out with stories by yours truly included. These are:
1: Caught by Darkness, which contains a vampire story of mine called “Clowns in the Dark.”

2: Dusted, which has a short SF flash fiction by me called “Past Perfect.”

I have also been on a book buying frenzy for the last month, almost all of which have involved friends and blog buddies. I picked up Death’s Head Crossing and Westward! by James Reasoner, Adopted Behaviors by James R. Tomlinson, Plum Blossoms in Paris by Sarah Hina, Dark and Disorderly by Bernita Harris, What Remains of Heaven by C. S. Harris, Desert Justice by Paul S. Powers, Crossroad Blues by Steve Malley, Lancelot by Lee Whitney, Heroes of the Fallen by David J. West, Pallid Light by William Jones, A Storm to Remember and Revolt of the Dead by Keith Gouveia, Slick Time, New Orleans Mysteries, and A Short Guide to Writing and Selling Fiction by O’Neil De Noux, and Adventure Vol. 1, which contains stories by friends of mine, John Edward Ames, Mark Finn, and O’Neil De Noux. About half of those were Kindle purchases.

Unfortunately, my book buying budget is temporarily blown so no one else I know publish any books for a while. ;) Just kidding.
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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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KILLING TRAIL: OFFICIAL LAUNCH PARTY

WELL, IT'S DONE! Killing Trail is published via Amazon’s ebook program, and via Razored Zen Press. (I’ve always wanted to say that.)

SOMETIMES when books are published, presses throw a launch party. Well, Razored Zen is throwing a launch party right here! I’m in tight with the Press’s editor, you know. I told him I wanted a launch party or I’d never publish with them again. He caved right away, me being by far the most famous author the Press has signed so far. He still didn’t give me much throwing around money. (Cheap Son of a Gun.) That’s small presses for you.

BUT LET ME tell you a little about the book and how it got set up. First, the cover design (seen at top) is a collaboration between Lana and I, though mostly Lana. The picture is of my Uberti .357 single action revolver. The background is a weather-worn bench at the nearby Flatwoods nature preserve. Lana took the pic a while back and I decided it would make the right cover for Killing Trail. I showed Lana a mockup, which I actually published on the blog when I first started talking about doing this book. Lana found the great western style font and did the frame and color scheme.

SECOND, the price. I’d originally planned to publish this for .99 cents but Amazon has changed their program and the cheapest I could go was $2.99. So there you have it. This is the first time I’ve self-published, but I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and I like how it turned out. I’ll post later about the “process” of publishing with Amazon, which turned out to be quite easy.

THIRD, the contents. This is not a novel length work. There’s about 24,000 words of material, including four fiction stories (three long ones) and a couple of short, non-fiction essays. Since Amazon has not yet put up the “about the book material,” here it is below:

RIDE INTO DANGER!

Killing Trail is a collection of western short stories by Charles Allen Gramlich, the author of the Talera Trilogy and Cold in the Light. It contains:


Killing Trail: When they dumped Angela Cody on Lane Holland’s ranch she was scant moments from death. She managed to speak only a few words, but those were enough to make Lane strap on his guns and ride out on a killing trail.

Showdown at Wild Briar: Accused of a murder he didn’t commit, Josh Allen Boone has ridden a long way from his Wild Briar Ranch. But now he’s coming home, and the real killers are waiting for him with a rope. (Never before published.)

Powder Burn: They said Davy Bonner’s luck had run out and they ambushed him along a dark road. But luck or no, Davy wasn’t going down without a fight. (Written specifically for this collection.)

Once Upon a Time with the Dead: For the gray raiders, death was an old friend.

The work also includes two nonfiction essays, one about Louis L’Amour and another about the real Wild West.


FOURTH, the GIVEAWAYS. Those who comment on this Launch Party Blog will have their names entered in a random drawing. The first name drawn will get their choice of two prizes. 1: A signed copy of any one of my books. 2: A framed image of the Killing Trail cover signed by both me and Lana. The second name drawn will get the prize that the first person doesn’t choose.

I’m pretty happy about being a self-published author on this day. I worked very hard on the stories in this collection and I’m proud of them. I hope some of you will enjoy them too. Thanks for visiting, and I’ll be dropping in frequently throughout the day to respond to comments and to answer any questions.

FOR THOSE WHO DON'T OWN A KINDLE: If you don't have a Kindle, by the way, there is free app for the PC at Amazon. I've copied the link below. I downloaded it to my PC and it works just like the Kindle itself. You have to have an account at Amazon, which you probably already have if you've ever bought books from them. I'm glad I downloaded it myself.

Free Kindle App for PC Here


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Around the Web

Stewart Sternberg did a review of Cold in the Light over at Elder Signs Press Blog. Although he didn’t just say positive things about the book, the positives certainly outweighed the negatives and I believe he enjoyed the novel quite a lot. I’ve linked to the review here, but I’ve also quoted a couple of my “favorite” pieces from the review below.

“At its heart, Gramlich’s story is an old fashioned science fiction tale from the fifties or early sixties—and that’s not a bad thing. His writing at times reminded me of Heinlein, with its muscular prose and solid pacing. Gramlich though infuses modern, edgy sensibility and carefully sets the stage for jarring action sequences with a strong cinematic quality to them.”

“In one outstanding chapter, where the heroes are preparing for a last stand in an old sawmill, it is easy to call to mind the work of director John McTiernan (Predator) or Ridley Scott (Alien).”

Thanks, Stewart, for reading and reviewing. I appreciate your honesty.

Also, Natasha Fondren is running a great series on how to format books for Amazon Kindle. Since I’m planning to publish my western collection through Amazon in July, this is spot on information and great timing for me. Check it out. I’m certainly following it with care. Much appreciated, Natasha.

Rich over at Meridian Bridge is also still running his My Personal West series of posts. I'm finding these fascinating. I did one for the series and more have gone up since, or are going up soon. The West has been on my mind a lot lately.
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SLA Author's Night, and Writing

I was invited to the Southern Library Associations Author's Night for SF/Fantasy last night and it was a lot of fun. Another local writer, M. F. Korn, and I went. There was a question and answer session, which I enjoyed, and later we sold and signed books and talked with librarians, who are a writer's natural allies in this world. I sold quite a few copies, especialy of Swords of Talera, and was happy about that. I was a little surprised at the number of librarians who asked if our materials were on Kindle. I'd say about a third of them wanted to know about the ebook markets for out books, which in my case is virtually nonexistent except for Swords of Talera, which is available on ebook from Barnes and Noble. That was one of the questions from the audience for us in the more formal part of the night, as well.

In other news, I did a guest post on the real west over at Richard Prosch's Meridian Bridge. Thanks, Rich.

I'm working on two stories at present. One is a western tale for my planned Kindle ebook, which I'll try to publish in July. That story is working under the title "Powder Burn." The other story is for a secret project that I'm not currently at liberty to speak of. How's that for a tease? ;)
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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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