What Went Wrong: Release Day

A new speculative fiction anthology is out today from Lit Select. It's called What Went Wrong, and is available at Smashwords in all kinds of formats for epub and Kindle. It is supposed to be up on Amazon itself soon. The stories run the gamut from SF to horror. I have a story in it called "Electric Love 'N Blue," which is primarily SF. The underlying concept of the collection is: "well-laid plans that go awry." This kind of broad concept led to a lot of variety in the tales, which I think is a pretty cool thing.

Here's the first paragraph of mine:

"Mistakes. Always mistakes, Ray Grant thought as he reviewed the Hollister file one more time with his Cerebral Symbot. If people were more like this Symbot, more like machines. If they just did what they were supposed to."

Of course, you know no one ever does what they are supposed to. Well, hardly ever. And in my story, even the ones who try to do so don't necessarily succeed. 

Below are the authors:
Jan Flynn,
Bryan Nickelberry,
Holly Riordan,
Matthew Harrison,
N.O.A. Rawle,
Dan Szczesny,
Ben Howels,
Gregory Norris,
Larry Lefkowitz,
Jonathan Shipley,
Edward Ahern,
Eric J. Guignard,
Charles Gramlich,
TS Alan,
T.R. North

There are some other blogs around announcing this today as well, and doing a far more creative job than I have. Here's Jan M. Flynn, with samples and an interview with her, and the humorous (or is it) take of N.O.A. Rawles. Also see Gloria Weber.

Hope you get a chance to check them out.

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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