Wanderings on Kindle

After five months of paperback-only life, “Wanderings on Darker Shores – a collection of strange tales and poems” is now also available as a Kindle ebook.

Strange how this feels bittersweet…

Setting up the paperback has been such an intense and satisfying job! I’ve found a lot of good advice on the Internet and I will probably share it here in a nutshell in a future post. From working on the cover with talented artist Steve Santiago and trying to follow editor Mark Durfee’s wonderful advice, to choosing fonts, and flourishes, and page set-up, and struggling with my own perfectionism, this has been an amazing journey.

Compared to it, setting the book up for Kindle —although still involving a bit of research— has proven almost anticlimactic, if I may say so.

The “real” book —and yes, I know I’m blowing my own horn— is so nice to hold in your hands that it’s certainly a pity that all of that is lost on Kindle. But that’s the way of the world now and we have to go with it…

So here they are, both of them, under the same cover…

Taking the Plunge

After years of watching my friends from the blogs and from elsewhere courageously and tenaciously putting their work out for the world to read, I've decided to finally do it too.

So, I'm preparing a collection of tales - most of them have appeared on this blog but there are also a few new longer ones. I hope to have them published in October.

As you can see, I'm working with the printed book template.

I love my Kindle. It’s with me everywhere I go. It’s my treasure box. A treasure box that is starting to become chaotic. That is starting to resemble a little black hole.

I’m not patient enough to be super-organized. I have close to 400 books on the Kindle itself and probably at least 200 others in the ‘cloud’. However, I have many times more printed books. I know exactly what printed books I have and where they are, on which shelf, in which room. The Kindle ones not so much.

I know e-books are the future. Or at least a very big part of the future. For writers they are convenient. Easy to get them out. Better royalties. Maybe other advantages that I'm not aware of. For readers too they are convenient, especially these days when everything is about instant gratification. I want a book. Click and I have it. No need to wait for Amazon to send it or to go to the bookstore.

But then, what happens to all these e-books? How do they endure through time?

I'll prepare the Kindle version later but, for now, I would really like to give this book a chance to live on paper, at least for a little while.