The Short Version

Some of my work is available through Amazon. It’s a short story, it’s £0.70 in electronic form. Go buy it!

The Longer Version

For some time, I have had a series of short stories sitting on my hard drive, that I was a little unsure what to do with. My original intention was to record them as a kind of episodic podcast affair. I even went to the trouble of working out my speaking average of words per minute and writing each “episode” to a word count that would, in theory, have equalled roughly 30 minutes of audio.

I never did that.

Fast forward to present day, and Amazon are accepting short works as part of their Kindle Singles store. – if you’re unsure exactly what Kindle is, or are thinking “I don’t own a Kindle, why should I care?” then skip to the bottom of this post for a brief explanation – so I am now trying a little experiment. I have three of these short stories written, as part of what I am calling the “Wrong Universe” series, and I am going to release them through the Kindle store at some kind of regular interval, as well as writing some more “episodes” to make up a series of indeterminate length (I’m thinking 7 or 10 stories), and I will see how this pans out.

I will be setting the price at the lowest price Amazon allow – currently £0.70p ($0.99) – and hoping that it will generate some interest. That being said, I encourage anyone and everyone to go buy it (obviously) and I welcome all kinds of constructive feedback, be it on this site or in the Amazon reviews section. You can get to where you need to be by clicking this link. Now for the blurb;

The First Punch

When top pilot, Shan Tempest, is offered the chance to pilot the first human craft to travel to another star, naturally, she jumps at the chance. She hadn’t counted on a crew, though.

Kindle

I think general awareness of the Kindle is quite high, but in case you have no idea what I’m talking about, the Kindle is Amazon’s eBook reader, a device designed specifically for reading electronic books. What a lot of people don’t know, however, is that you don’t need a Kindle to read Kindle books. Amazon have split Kindle into two parts. One is in charge of the Kindle device, and have the goal of selling as many of the eBook readers as possible. The other, however, is responsible for the Kindle store, and aim to sell as many eBooks as possible. This is genius, because it eliminate’s the possibility of book sales suffering because they can only be sold on the Kindle device.

What does this mean? It means you can get Kindle reader software (for free) on your computer, your phone, your tablet, etc. Better still, the software has syncing ability, which means that you can start reading a book on one device, your computer for example, and then continue reading later on your phone, and it will pick up from where you left off, without you having to flick through the book to find your place.

So, the software is free, buying eBooks on Amazon is ridiculously easy (especially with one click) and my short story is 70 pence!