Create Your Own Kindle EBook, Step by Step, With Pictures
Important Note: As of November 2012 Amazon appears to be rejecting some ebooks created using Calibre. More on this subject can be found here. Today I am starting a series on how to publish your own ebook. I have had a fair amount of interest in my posts on this subject over the past few months and I wanted to give some substance to my claim that self-publishing an ebook is not much harder than pushing Save on your word-processor. Important Note 2 : If you own a Mac and a copy of Scrivener you may want to consider reading Read more…
Sky Pirates Released
I can remember the exact moment when I got the idea for Sky Pirates. I was reading one of Edgar Rice Burroughs Martian books, The Gods Of Mars. I came across his descriptions of the savage green men and, of course, I thought of orcs. For some reason, from then on the idea of Burroughs Green Men and orcs became conjoined in my mind. My brain was filled with the idea of orcish hordes rampaging across the desiccated landscapes of a dying world not unlike Barsoom. Thuvia, Maid of Mars is one of the very first SF novels I can remember Read more…
The Hundredth Post
Back in the 80s my brother sold insurance. He occasionally attended sales conferences and sometimes came back with motivational books. One day, bored, with nothing better to do, I read one. It started a life-long habit of reading books about selling and the life of a salesman. In case you are wondering what possible relevance any of those could have to the life of a writer, let me just point out that writers and salesmen have more in common than you might think. Both writers and salesmen need to be self-starters. There is usually no one else around to motivate Read more…
The E-Book Experiment: 6 Month Report
When I started my e-book experiment I decided I would wait six months before passing any judgements. That would be a long enough period to collect some data and see how the whole thing worked for me. You hear all sorts of contradictory reports about e-publishing but I’ve always liked to collect empirical evidence for myself, rather than listen to who shouts loudest on the internet. I decided I was just going to release the backlist I had and work on projects that interested me in the gaps between my work for Black Library. Well, six months have passed so Read more…
The Inquiry Agent Released
I always wanted to write a tough-guy, first person detective story in the style of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammet but it’s a very American form and I never felt confident that I could carry off the setting. Somehow Scotland never seemed quite to fit my vision as a setting for this sort of story. Other people, such as Ian Rankine, have managed it but I never could make it work for me; too close to home for the way I write, I suppose. It was one of those ideas I put on the back-burner while I went my merry Read more…
Good News
My son William Karel King was born yesterday at 5:44 am. I am not planning on doing much work today as a consequence. I will be doing the happy dance and visiting the lad and his lovely mother Radka in the maternity hospital. In the meantime, if you feel the urge to read something new and King-ian, I shall just mention that my short horror story Carp is free until 12 p.m. Pacific Time Tuesday on Amazon, Amazon UK and all the other Amazons as far as I know. This story is set in Prague and combines Lovecraftian horror, Xmas, Read more…
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