Feb 19
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Feb 19, 2011
kosmo - See all 777 of my articles
I am making Mountains, Meadows, and Chasms available to the public. The book contains more than 70 of my short stories – more than 80,000 words. Most of them have appear on The Soap Boxers, but the book also contains the full versions of The Cell Window, Key Relationships, and Tip of the Iceberg. This is the largest collection I have released to date.
I’m setting the price at just $3.49 – that’s 5 cents per story. I hope you get a nickel’s worth of enjoyment out of my stories.
Mountains, Meadows, and Chasms is available in two formats – in PDF format from the Hyrax Publications store and in Kindle format at Amazon.
You can also check out my author page at Amazon
I also chatted with the guys at the Card Corner Radio show last night about the sports card book. You can listen to it here – I jump in around the 10 minute mark.
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PDF Version |
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Kindle Version |
http://www.thesoapboxers.com/kindle-and-pdf-version-of-mountains-meadows-and-chasms/
Feb 21, 2011 @ 08:43:27
Hey Kosmo. I bought this on Saturday, and have added it to my queue (I’m in the middle of a couple of other books right now). I think I saw a question of yours somewhere about formatting. I only have had time to check out the first couple of pages, but it looks great.
Total Comments by Evan @40Tech.com: 171
Feb 21, 2011 @ 09:43:53
Thanks for the sale! Be sure to lend it to all your friends. As an author, I realize that the lend function is my friend. If the person receiving a copy can finish it quickly, great. If the time period ends and they haven’t finished, they’ll need to buy it. I’ll take that gamble.
The “sample” version is pretty large, as well. I think it’s around 15K words. That seems like a pretty fair test drive – you should know whather you like my writing or not by that point.
The thing that I was most concerned about was the blank line at the beginning of each story. I don’t think this is a deal-breaker, though.
I learned a few things over the weekend and am making some tweaks, notably:
1) Cover image included in the actual book (and hopefully a slightly better image). My graphic design skills aren’t good, but I think I can include a mountain photo in the cover shot. I need to find some of my digital photos from Colorado several years back.
2) A working (clickable) table of contents (unfortunately, this isn’t something I can test in the preview tool and will just have to go on faith).
3) Removal of the aforementioned blank line at the beginning of each story
Honestly, none of these will greatly enhance the book – just trying to smooth the rough edges. I’m not sure if you can update to the revised version for free or not. I would hope so.
Feb 21, 2011 @ 10:21:43
What tools did you use to put this together, from a technology perspective? I’d love to see a post like that, and covering the Amazon process, etc. (here or *hint hint* at 40Tech so more folks could learn of the book). I’ve just recently discovered Scrivener for OS X (and just now in beta for Windows), which I believe has a feature to automatically compile a novel for different formats, including Kindle.
Total Comments by Evan @40Tech.com: 171
Feb 21, 2011 @ 10:44:58
I think I’m going to disappoint you a bit :)
The current edition was uploaded in word.
Once you have uploaded something, you can download the HTML that Amazon generates (less crap than the MS Word HTML). This is in ZIP format, and you have to re-zip (and include images and such) to re-upload.
I’m editing this HTML in the Smultron text editor. Just editing the raw HTML. I found this tutorial to explain some of the Kindle-specific stuff. It’s not the prettiest web page in the word, but lays out things pretty clearly
http://shala.addr.com/kindle/
Watch out for the curly quotes, dashes, and apostrophes when you preview. Youn may need to use find/replace on the dashes and apstrophes and use & q u o t ; for the quptes (remove the extra spaces – I inserted them to avoid having WordPress turn them into a quote sybol)