Kindle, My Mad Crush, and General Insanity

It shouldn't be too long now, but soon As The World Dies: The First Days will be available for the Kindle. We were not going to go this route at first, but after several conversations with Indie Authors and hearing about the good response to this format, we went ahead and dove in. It was a total bitch to format, but thanks to April Hamilton's wonderful pdf on the subject, we sorted out the issues. We loaded it up last night and hopefully it will be available for any Kindle owners out there shortly.

Update: The Kindle version of the book is now for sale! Yay!!!

Back in April, I wrote about my mad crush on Morris Rosenthal. He wrote a very good book about self-publishing and has a very informative blog as well. I make sure to read it every week and it always gives me a lot to think about. Yesterday, he gave me a little shout out on his blog, which I thought was very cute. Of course, I just write about vampires, I'm not one myself (thank God! I'm Italian! I need my garlic!), but it was pretty damn funny. It actually made my day. Yeah, yeah, I'm easy to amuse. I'm low maintenance that way.

I have to say that both April Hamilton and Morris Rosenthal had a huge impact on me when I decided to go Independent and I am grateful for the advice they doll out on a regular basis to writers who want to see their words in print, but have battered themselves bloody against the gatekeepers of the publishing industry.

Today I was speaking with a colleague from one of our Dallas office and he was very intrigued with the news of my decision to be an Independent Author. He spoke of how he knows many musicians who spent years and years sending out demo tapes to recording companies. Now, they don't give a damn about the recording companies and are doing it on their own terms thanks to the new media. The Internet opened a gateway to a new form of success and many musicans have grabbed onto it.

Authors have been a little slower to adapt to the new media. My colleague even said, during our conversation, that many of the writers he knows have given up on their dreams of publication. "They gave up. They got too beaten down."

I was recently talking to Andrea Dean Van Scoyoc, a very successful Independent Author, via Myspace. We had spoken years ago when I was supposed to be polished by a small publishing house. Kody Boye had brought her up in a conversation and I remembered her almost instantly. I touched base with her again about her Twisted Dreams magazine and one of the things she said to me was that she was back to being an Independent Author after working with publishing houses the last two years. It was a reminder, once more, that the path I have chosen is a good one and it's up to me to make it work.

Meanwhile, promotion and the Kindle formatting nightmare has consumed a lot of my recent time, but I am making progress on the rewrite of As The World Dies: Fighting to Survive. The tangled mess is untangling slowly, but surely. It does feel good to be writing new scenes with my old familiar characters. Jenni had me giggling out loud the other night. Calhoun amuses me to no end.

In fact, I have come to realize Calhoun really does know where the zombies came from. He's just so batshit crazy, the way he describes things muddles it all up. But he knows far more than anyone around him realizes and that is much more to him than meets the eye.

Anyway, progress is progress...