The Last Rewrite of CotD is Done

So, for whatever reason, I started going through my paperback copy of CotD and was astonished - well, not really - to find minor "technical glitches" throughout. Most of them were missing words that didn't change the sense of a sentence, but did make the sentence not read correctly. A couple of the mistakes were changes in a description of something from one scene to the next. So, I spent a couple of weeks reading the stories very slowly, marking the mistakes with post-it notes. And, today, I went through the digital files and corrected the mistakes.

I'll put the clean files up soon - maybe tomorrow - and then I have to get back to the work of writing the new novel, which is slogging by a page or two a day, on days I have time to write. So, in the very near future, the eBook versions and paperback text should all be more-or-less "professional grade."

The lesson learned from this is not to do my edits on the computer screen, but on paper. I must get lazy looking at the screen and scrolling down, looking for errors. On paper, they just jump out at you.


And in "exciting" news, I attended my first-ever Book Release Event. One of the shorts in CotD was accepted into an anthology produced by the Main Line Writers Group, of which I am a member. (We hired outside editors to do the judging, and all submissions were anonymous, so it wasn't a pure vanity project). There were more than fifty submissions, and twenty-one were accepted.

It was a fun first to lose my cherry on an official book release party, and it was weird to sign autographs, but someday I hope to be the only author in the room, promoting my latest book. Because the groupies would all be mine.

Anyway, Unclaimed Baggage: Voices of the Main Line Writers Group is available through Createspace and will be up on Amazon soon. I'll provide a link when I get one. My story in it is "Days Go By," and I had to do a small bit of re-write before I submitted it, so this collection is, technically, the first spot where that revamped story appears. Get it for historical purposes if you're a collector!

CotD goes Free!!!!

Cities of the Dead: Stories from the Zombie Apocalypse is now free.

For the time being, that is.

Since I have no marketing budget, and since giving away free copies of the individual shorts isn't stampeding zombie lit fans my way, I've decided to give the entire enchilada away as a promotional tool. And then, when my book has hit a certain amount of downloads, return to the marketplace with a price attached.

It's been two years since I put the first story out there, and since then about 45,000 copies of either the shorts or anthology have been downloaded for free or purchased (mostly free downloads of the individual shorts, but a not-insignificant amount of sales, too). That's not bad, but there are something like 9 billion people on the planet, and I want to get to as many of them as possible, and October 2013 seems like the right time to try and get noticed.

I do want to make a living off my fiction, after all, and to do that I need to let people know I write fiction, and if giving away the milk gets enough people to notice the cow, well, then I might be in the steak business soon enough...

It's available in all eBook formats, but I'll provide a few links here:

Kindle
Nook
Smashwords