The good folks over at Bizarrocast have given the audio treatment to my short story, “The Night Light,” taken from my collection I Held My Breath as Long as I Could.
If you find yourself with a few minutes to spare, stop on by and have a listen. It’s also available on iTunes.
A very big thanks to Chris Boyle and Bizarrocast! This is the first for-pay sale of a story I’ve ever made.
Acceptance. It feels nice.
Short answer: the promotional period is great, but the borrowing aspect is not great for a book with a low price point.
Here’s the longer answer …
From today, Dec. 15, through Saturday, Dec. 17, the Kindle/Kindle Fire ebook version of I Held My Breath as Long as I Could will be available on Amzaon for free.
Tell your friends. Tell your neighbors. Tell anyone with an Amazon ebook reader.
I’m willing to bet there’s at least one story in there for everyone.
Don’t miss out!
Maybe you’re one of the people who wondered why I Held My Breath as Long as I Could started off with one of the worst stories. Maybe you want to know more about why someone would self-publish. Maybe you’re just bored and have nothing better to do. Whatever the case, the following is an interview examining and explaining the thoughts behind the stories included in an admittedly strange collection.
**** SPOILERS FOLLOW ****
Featured!
Oh, my. This … is cool. I am sitting there, right beside Stephen King, Robert McCammon, and William Peter Blatty. I mean, really?! Are you serious? How cool is that?
Holding a physical copy of my book in my hands was one dream. Being on the shelf next to these guys … that’s another HUGE win. And in time for Halloween, too! Unbelievable!
Thanks to everyone out there who bought and rated my collection!
So happy right now.
It took them 9 days in my case. And that was AFTER I jumped through the hoops of creating a new Apple ID, buying my own block of ISBNs (which I’ll be lucky if I ever use up), and struggled through a day of format wars with their fussy epub validation process. But now I have a book on the iBookstore … which will have a rating just as soon as I meet the minimum number of required ratings to have them actually display a rating.
I’d still be unrated on Barnes and Noble and Amazon if I were waiting to get over five reviews.
Sometime soon, the physical paperback version should be available on Amazon (and elsewhere? that part is murky to me; I signed up for an many channels as I could on CreateSpace.com, so who knows where this thing is available now). For now, it’s available through the link on the sidebar on CreateSpace’s estore. This is a better place to buy it from in terms of getting money directly to me; Amazon’s store lops another 3 bucks off my take.
Should be getting my own box of books soon. Looking forward to it. I’ve dreamed of opening a box of my own books for so long … if only it meant I was actually validated. Still waiting for the first review from someone I don’t know …
Well, it has been an emotional week for me. I’m not going to lie. The image here is the highlight: my book actually reached the Top 100 in the Kindle paid short stories list. I was one spot behind Mary Higgins Clark.
And just ahead of Spank Romance Stories.
Seeing that was a real treat. But better than that was the reaction from friends and family, who called and emailed and texted to let me know how they were finding the stories. It wasn’t all good; one sharp-eyed reader wanted to know how the man with no hands can caress a face. Pretty good question. I envisioned him doing so with one of the pulpy heads, but … I could’ve written that a little better.
Opinion is almost universal that the first story is a strange choice for the lead-off position. Fair enough. I did consider starting the collection with “Radiation,” but … I wanted to start with a shorter piece. I just thought it would be more fun and set the tone better.
In other terrible news, I also found out after I published this collection that Chuck Palahniuk’s new book Damned is going to feature a young girl who finds herself unexpectedly trapped in Hell. Yep. That’s right. That is a near-perfect description of the plot of “Esther’s Prayer,” a short story I wrote originally on this site in February under the title “At Night in the Cottage.” Guess I’ll have to take back some of those things I said about Stephen King’s Under the Dome being too similar in plot to The Simpsons movie. Also looked it up, and it looks like, even if I did publish first, he talked about his book and what it was about in 2010.
I’ve been scooped not only by a pro, but by one I am a fan of. Kind of a bummer.
Chuck P., if you read this, I promise not to be upset by this bump of hands in the popcorn bucket of story ideas if you aren’t. I swear, I did not hear that story from you; it’s based on a dream I had earlier this year. I expect when I read your book, I’ll find your version vastly different than mine, anyway. You say you went Judy Blume/Breakfast Club, and I think that’s pretty different from what I did. Maybe there’s room for two girl-in-Hell stories in this world. Here’s hoping.
A few notes on distribution: iTunes still has yet to publish the book (what gives, man?), no copies have yet sold on Barnes & Noble, and my Kindle version is unsearchable by category, which pretty much makes it unfindable. But I’m hoping these problems work themselves out eventually. I’m prepping a physical copy to be published in the coming weeks, so readers who prefer something they can hold need not be left behind.
But as far as those of you who are reading this now and have purchased it, I wanted to say a big THANK YOU! This week has been a far bigger success than I expected.
Thank you all for being awesome and reading my book!!!!
Feel free to comment away below and let me know what you liked and didn’t like. I want to hear it all!
(also, if you have read it already, review it on GoodReads.com or Amazon or wherever! say whatever you like, I don’t care; be honest! I love seeing reviews appear!)
Cover Art, I Held My Breath as Long as I Could
In the last month, I’ve kept busy and missed precious few days. I’ve written a completely fresh draft of a story called “Radiation,” which I originally wrote in high school (it’s the story that earned me my favorite rejection letter ever, the letter which said, “This story is almost strange enough to like — unfortunately, it makes no sense at all!!!”). I love the revision. Also been working on revisions to some of the stories here, to mixed results. I have these ideas of what I want to do, but sometimes it just doesn’t work the way I think it should. I’ve got one more month until my deadline for new content expires and I go to strict line-editing, but I’ve already gotten the feeling that these are the stories I’m going with, and that I’m going to need all the time I can get to make this heap of sentences work.
There’s so much to do. There are so many words. The idea that people routinely write long novels blows my mind a bit right now.
Tonight, I’m going to read one of the pieces at Black & White here in Manhattan. Hope the audience likes it. I feel a bit nervous, as always, but it’s been too long since my last reading. I’ve been too much in the lab, and I have to make an effort to get out more.