Every so often a light shines during these dark times we live in. Today’s bright light is courtesy of Kevin Brennon. Kevin’s latest novel, Eternity Began Tomorrow, will be available as an ebook starting September 18, 2019. I know I’ll be in line for my copy. How about you?
A little birdie (well, actually, a big birdie) told me that today is Helena Hann-Basquiat’s birthday! And what better way to celebrate her birthday than by heading over to Amazon and picking up one or all of her recent publications:
Memoirs of a Dilettante Volume One, available in both ebook and paperback. I highly recommend the paperback. The printed format is candy for the eyes. If you are a fan of Helena’s blog (and how can you not be), then you will love having the adventures of Penny dammit, Countess of Arcadia and Helena all in one beautifully designed place.
Three Cigarettes, available as an ebook and only 99 cents. By the way, I’ve read and reviewed Three Cigarettes and found it to be both thrilling and chilling. Although Three Cigarettes was written by Jessica B. Bell, Helena was the editor. More importantly, she is Jessica’s keeper and we do want to keep Jessica around.
Best Medicine, available as an ebook and only 99 cents. Again, this one was written by Jessica but edited by Helena. I don’t need to repeat myself here, do I? I haven’t yet read Best Medicine but I do have a copy so a review will be forthcoming. And I know I won’t be disappointed.
For even more fun, see that widget on my sidebar, the one that says “Honorary Dilettante Contest”? Click on that, dear Readers, and prepare to participate in a truly fun contest. I’m participating and you can see what I mean here.
For the duration of the summer, The Dragon’s Disciples will be available on Kindle for $1.99 ! Don’t have a Kindle? The paperback is only $9.99 ! Did I mention it is ever so beautiful?
BUT THAT IS NOT ALL.
Tuesday and Wednesday, The Heretic Priest (that would be The Age of Waking Death series book TWO!!) will be having an early release celebration sale to the tune of completely free on Kindle. But it is only for Tuesday and Wednesday (because random!) so be sure to grab your copy while you can. Again, no Kindle? Well, the paperback is only $7.99! Not bad for a new release!
Both books for less than $2.00, and endless amounts of intrigue, love, and sexy vampires? Yes please!!
Please help out a wonderful young writer and friend. She needs to sell 100 copies of her ebooks by July 1. They are available on Amazon for 99 cents each. Just a sip of a tall skinny vanilla latte costs more than that.
Disclaimer: I have not read fantasy since I was a kid, and then it was The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, that sort of thing. As a young adult, I read The Mists of Avalon , but I don’t know if that qualifies as fantasy. My point is I know little about the genre, so I can’t tell you if Bestiary of Blatherhorn Vale, a slim ebook (44 pages) by Charles E Yallowitz qualifies as fantasy. What I can tell you is that I love this book.
Like I know good art when I see it or good wine when I taste it, I know a good book when I read it. Bestiary of Blatherhorn Vale is a delightfully creepy compendium of strange creatures. The premise of the book is that it is a “battered field notebook” from an expedition to Blatherhorn Vale. The book reads like an epic poem with a firm beginning (“Blatherhorn Vale lies in wait”) to a neat ending (“Leaving Blatherhorn Vale to rise again”), and in-between a curious cabinet of relics.
Mr. Yallowitz’s imagination knows no bounds. Every creature is meticulously and poetically described. He brings them to life to the extent that the reader may choose to ignore the caution that “Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.”
Here’s a taste for you: My two most favorite beasts are the Yethys and the Glintra. The Yethys have “scales of gold,” “eyes of crimson,” no mouth, and “[Risk] all To gain some precious warmth.”
The Glintra are delicate, deadly creatures whose:
“Feeble tendrils
Of finest crystal
Drag along the ground
Burning
Those they touch”
Good wine and good art, indeed. Try the Bestiary of Blatherhorn Vale for yourself. It’s only one-third the cost of a tall latte and much more satisfying. Perhaps if the Bestiary becomes popular enough, Mr. Yallowitz could be persuaded to issue a printed version for distribution. This is the kind of book I would want on my shelf.
This week’s guest blog is brought to us by the delightful, funny, and hard-working Ionia Martin of Readful Things. She also is the mastermind behind The Community Storyboard where writers and readers from all walks of life can gather for some fun. Did I mention she’s hard-working? If you haven’t had the joy of checking out both of Ionia’s blogs then I suggest you take the time to do so.
Now, I asked Ionia to make a list of Do’s and Donts’ for the Indie Authors. I thank her for taking up the challenge and having fun with it. Enjoy.
So you have decided to be an indie author, huh?
I can always count on Charles Yallowitz, the owner of this here excellent blog for two things. Number 1: He writes great books.
Number 2: He is always entertaining and ensures that his posts far outweigh any other responsibilities…
This is me creating a post for easier re-blogging because the last one was kind of crammed with too much personal information. So from my other services page, this is a list of what I have to offer. Please feel free to contact me via my Contact page or my email address cnfaust@outlook.com 🙂
Formatting
eBook: For $10 an hour I will format your eBook for Amazon KDP (or various other eBook distributors, including Lulu and Nook). This usually takes me between 2 – 4 straight hours depending on what kind of shape the book is in when I get it. Work hours can be considerably less.
Print: For $12 an hour I will format your book for Amazon Createspace (or various other print distributors, including Lulu). This usually takes me between 4 – 6 hours depending on the shape the book is in when I get it…
I’m not really a gadget geek. Really, I like to keep things simple. I like the simplicity of picking up a book and leafing through its pages. Still, several years ago, I became smitten by e-book readers.
I don’t remember how the love affair began. It was the early 2000s and discussions about ebooks and ebook readers were slowly making their way into the mainstream. Somewhere, somehow I got wind of a Gemstar eBook reader that I could purchase online for roughly $99 (or $149 for a color version). I opted for the black and white version, wanting to keep things simple. And thus the affair began.
My Gemstar is a solid 22 ounces, about the size of a paperback, with a grip on the left side that makes it easy to hold with one hand. It has a touch screen, a stylus specifically for navigating the “Bookshelf” and two buttons on the left side for paging through books. It has about 8 MB of memory and I also use a smart media disk of 128 MB. On my Gemstar, I have contemporary books such as Newjack by Ted Conover, classics such as Les Miserables by Hugo, and lesser-known works such as The Amateur by Richard Harding Davis. I must have purchased the Gemstar around 2003 because I also have a few articles from the New York Review of Books saved there from that year.
Alas, within a few short years, support for the Gemstar evaporated entirely: no technical support, no online bookstores dedicated to the Gemstar. The flame had gone out of the affair.
And, yet there was still a spark. A few years later, on a camping trip, my husband and I huddled together in our small tent, on a dark windy night. I pulled out my Gemstar and read parts of Newjack to him until he was ready for sleep. I often said then and I’ll say it again now that the portability of an ebook reader is its greatest advantage. I had a long list of books for my husband to choose from that night, and I could not have backpacked all those books into camp. While the Gemstar was my first love, it may also be my last. I have since bought a 3rd-Gen Kindle (right before Amazon came out with the Fire and substantially dropped the price … damn you, Amazon!) But I missed the expanded memory that I had with my Gemstar, the touch screen, the ability to add books and articles of various formats. I liked the Kindle at first but now it’s primarily an overpriced word game player.
Then I got an iPad 2 which I bought with some hard-earned second job money and found (oh, crap!) that I could have just put the Kindle app on my iPad and been done with it. I love the touch screen and would read books or catch up with news on the iPad during my lunch hour. But still, I wasn’t satisfied. I was itching for something simpler, something more ebook dedicated, something I could read in bed without the lights on, without an LCD burning my eyes out. I have read review after review after review comparing the Kindle with the Nook with the Kobo with the iPad. Although we have a Barnes & Noble in town, I was hesitate to buy a Nook. B&N may not be as big as Amazon, but, bleeding heart liberal that I am, I wanted something more “indie.”
In April I purchased a Kobo Glo. I had found good reviews of the device, it’s capacity for storage, various ebook formats, and its “night light.” Unfortunately I had to buy it online since the one independent bookstore in my town didn’t carry it. Here’s where the blues comes in: I can’t get the wireless to work, no matter what we do (reset, factory reset, unsecure our network, secure our network). The device doesn’t always recognize the memory card, and the touch screen can be a little quirky. I’m using Calibre to download and add books outside the Kobo BookStore, but that can be a little squirrelly too. And even though I thought I had thoroughly vetted the Kobo, I’ve since learned from Calibre that “The Kobo has very buggy firmware” (from their manual).
Sigh. When my Kobo works, it’s wonderful, and I have enjoyed using it to read at night. Nobody is disturbed by the gentle light around the edges of the screen, and my eyes don’t get fried. Yet, today it took several attempts to transfer a bundle of new books from Calibre to my Kobo. Admittedly, I may have not been syncing correctly. All these gadgets seem so sensitive to how they are handled. Even some of the apps on my iPad are having hiccups following the latest system update.
My Gemstar and I never had such problems. To remind myself of how advanced technology was, I’m recharging my Gemstar and recharging our affair.