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Tag Archives: Kindle

FREE Anthology Download Today!

02 Thursday May 2019

Posted by Oren Litwin in Lagrange Books, Self-Promotion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

free, Free Ebook, Free Kindle, Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, military fiction, short story anthology

We’re currently in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign for my latest fiction anthology, The Wand that Rocks the Cradle: Magical Stories of Family. If you haven’t checked out our campaign page yet, I strongly recommend it; we have an author interview and an essay from another author posted already, with more to come in the weeks ahead.

But while that’s going on, you can read my first anthology—because for the next three days only, it’s available for free!

My first anthology, The Odds Are Against Us, is a collection of military fiction published by Liberty Island Media. The fine folks at LI told me that The Odds Are Against Us is having a special promotion today through Saturday. For a limited time, the Kindle edition is FREE for download!

So tell all your friends! And all I ask is that if you like the book, please leave a reader review on Amazon to let the world know what you thought of it. As you know, reviews are an important part of a book’s success.

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Frustrations with KDP Paperback…

09 Wednesday Jan 2019

Posted by Oren Litwin in Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

kdp, Kindle, Self-publishing

UPDATE: And of course,  Amazon tech-support responded within hours of this post going up! It turns out that the problem was with their backend not working nicely with Apple’s PDF generator, Quartz. I had to re-export to PDF using Adobe’s PDF Pack service (at the low, low price of $9.99 for the month, grumble grumble), and then it worked fine. Today I learned…

———

Almost three weeks ago, Ye Olde Magick Shoppe was launched on the Kindle Store. The original plan was to offer the paperback edition along with the ebook; unfortunately, I’ve been running into some problems submitting the files to KDP, which persist until today.

For whatever reason, when I launch the Previewer tool in the title setup process, it hangs for several hours (!) and then tells me that there was an unknown error with the interior files. Amazon’s tech support, which is usually pretty responsive, has been quite slow with its responses this time.

Which is all very annoying. I know several people who prefer paperback books to electronic, and would love to get the anthology into their hands.  Many reviewers also require a hardcopy version, and won’t look at electronic files. Some indie writers stick to Kindle digital,  and given what we’re now going through I can certainly see why; but still, the lack of a paperback option is holding us back.

The PDF file I’ve been submitting is generated by Scrivener 2.  Publishers like Ingram Spark require more professional formatting, but at least in the old days of CreateSpace any old PDF would do. Does anybody know if that has changed? Amazon’s FAQs were rather vague.

Ye Olde Magick Shoppe—Free Today Only!

23 Sunday Dec 2018

Posted by Oren Litwin in Self-Promotion, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

anthology, Fantasy, free, Kindle, magic shop, promotion, publishing, sale, short stories, short story anthology, werewolves, zombies

I’m proud to announce that my anthology of fantasy short stories, Ye Olde Magick Shoppe, is now available for Amazon Kindle!

Even better, until the end of today—Sunday the 23rd—it is totally free for download. Check it out, and please review if you like what you read!

The Defense of a Free State

10 Thursday Dec 2015

Posted by Oren Litwin in Politics, Self-Promotion, Weapons, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

fiction, government, Guns, Kindle, politics, short story, writing

[Note: This is one of the short stories that can be found in my Kindle collection, The Best Congress Money Can Buy: Stories of Political Possibility. Given  recent events and the political debates that have accompanied them, I figured it would be appropriate to revisit this story. Let me know what you think!]

Beth had scarcely come home from the massage clinic where she worked when her smart phone beeped at her, with the news that Handgun Defense, Inc., was lobbying for more changes to gun-ownership laws. This time, they wanted to weaken the exemptions for pepper-spray.

“Ridiculous,” Beth snapped to her friend Donna, who had come by with a satchel of tomatoes from her garden. “Why should they force me to carry a gun if I don’t want to? What’s wrong with pepper spray?”

“It says here that they don’t think it does a good enough job against criminals,” Donna said with a sniff, reading from her own phone. “I think they just want to end up with everyone owning a gun, whether we want it or not.”

Continue reading →

Politics for Writers?

10 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by Oren Litwin in Better Fantasy, Politics, Self-Promotion, Writing

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

4-Hour Chef, Fantasy, government, Institutions, Kindle, NaNoWriMo, national novel writing month, political system, Timothy Ferris, writing

This being November, I am once again participating in National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo. Which of course has me thinking about one of my favorite topics, politics and fiction.

There’s a lot of “how-to” material for writers out there—how to write a compelling scene, create believable characters, and so on. But as far as I can tell with some random Googling, there seem to be few resources to help writers (especially fantasy and science-fiction writers) think about politics. As I’ve written about on this blog before, most writers have only a few mental models of how politics could work (fantasy medieval kingdom, evil galactic overlord, idealized democracy, and maybe one or two others); while there’s nothing wrong with any of these when handled well, the shortage of raw materials affects the kind of stories a writer can tell. As a political-science junkie, I find myself wishing for more variety.

What resources there are seem to view politics from the perspective of world-building, as an afterthought of things like culture and language. For example, Holly Lisle’s Create a Culture Clinic (which is otherwise a fantastic aid to fleshing out the richness of invented societies, and I highly recommend it) devotes less than ten pages to politics—and those are mostly asking checklist questions like “Who is in charge? How do they punish criminals? What rights are there?”

Missing is any discussion about what an author’s choices would mean for the story. Or, even more useful, what kinds of stories you could best tell in a given political system. Or, best of all, how the tensions within a given political system could give rise to powerful new stories. If I were a beginning author, I would want to start there—and once the plot is in place, then I would decide on the details that all the world-building resources deal with.

So it seems to me that there is a great need for a writer’s guide to politics in invented societies, and how to choose among political systems to help generate the strongest plots. But to write a guide like that, you would need to be an expert in politics who can cut through all the details and isolate the fundamental building blocks—the handful of key questions that are the key to rapid understanding. (As you can probably tell, I’ve been reading a lot of Timothy Ferris lately…)

As it happens, I am an expert in politics. And better, I’m an expert in Comparative Politics, which is the most interesting subfield within political science, if I may say so myself. And I’ve been thinking about doing something like this for a long time.

What I’m envisioning is a relatively short e-book that would describe each archetypical political system before distilling it down to a single chart of features, showing the most important actors in the system, the key points of stress, and the story themes that this system is perfect for dealing with. For example, a communist dictatorship would be a good setting to address themes of the individual versus the state, or property and communal need, or privacy in the face of constant surveillance. A monarchy would be good for looking at questions of loyalty, honor, the role of divine right, and so on.

There’s a lot more, of course, but the key here is that in a very few pages, you could learn how to build exactly the political system you need to form the backdrop to the story you want to tell—or you could discover new kinds of stories that never would have occurred to you otherwise.

If this is something that you’d want to see, be sure to fave this post, and I’ll get right to work.

Say, Who’s Up for A Kickstarter Project?

14 Wednesday Aug 2013

Posted by Oren Litwin in Self-Promotion, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

chanuka, children's book, dragon, Fairy tale, Hannukka, Holiday, Jewish holiday, Kickstarter, Kindle, new book

Grumpy dragon is grumpy...

UPDATE August 19: The project is live! Check it out here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/292895205/hannuka-story-the-princess-the-dragon-and-the-bake

ORIGINAL POST:

I’m gearing up to launch a Kickstarter project for my new book, The Princess, the Dragon, and the Baker: A Chanuka Fairy Tale. (You can actually check it out as a Kindle book here if you have a compatible Kindle reader; it’s enrolled in Amazon Select, so you could borrow it for free if you like.)

The whole Kickstarter thing really is amazing. As I wrote in my first book, the ability to commit to a project without worrying if you’re going to be that one sucker who paid in when no one else did has revolutionary possibilities. I’ve been itching to do a Kickstarter project even before I knew what the project would even be about—that’s how cool I think the whole idea is.

Check out the preview of my project (EDIT: we’re live now, no more preview!) and let me know what you think! (I’m particularly interested if the “Cameo” reward sounds like something people would be interested in. If you have any thoughts on that, I’d love to hear them.)

When Do Societies Face Unrest?

02 Thursday May 2013

Posted by Oren Litwin in Better Fantasy, Economics, History, Politics, Revolution, Self-Promotion, War, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

cliodynamics, economy, excessive population growth, Kindle, new book, Peter Turchin, political upheaval, politics, rebellion, revolution, Social unrest, societal violence, war, writing

I have just read a recent journal article by the brilliant scholar Peter Turchin, in which he elaborates on his theory of the dynamics of social instability over time and tests it on the United States from 1780 to 2010. Put briefly, his theory holds that one can expect a society to suffer greater social violence (such as riots or lynchings, as opposed to routine crime) in a relatively predictable cycle. The larger “secular” cycle occurs every 150 years; a smaller cycle of violence occurs roughly every 50 years, superimposed on the secular cycle. Thus in the United States, we had peaks of societal violence near the years 1870, 1920, and 1970, with the Civil War being the peak of the secular cycle. Turchin forecasts that the next secular peak should hit sometime around the year 2020. Turchin’s previous work has detected the same sorts of cycles in societies from ancient China to revolutionary France.

Of course, detecting a pattern does not tell you what has caused it. Turchin’s theory for when violence intensifies depends on two major factors. Both of these factors might derive from excessive population growth; in the early version of Turchin’s work, he was focusing on agrarian societies in which population growth leads directly to food shortages. But now that he is considering Industrial societies, Turchin is focusing more on the immediate causes laid out below.

First, whether from excessive population growth or technological disruption or whatever, there emerges a labor glut. The average wage drops in response, leading to diminished standards of living. Thus you see larger segments of the populace who are in a precarious situation, with the potential for violent outbreaks such as labor struggles, or ethnic competition with minorities, or political upheaval.

Second, there emerges “an oversupply of elites.” This can happen for a few reasons, and Turchin focuses on the economic one. The low cost of labor means that it is easier for those on the top to become far wealthier than they might have done in a more normal setting, leading to the accumulation of vast fortunes and a polarization of society. A consequence of this is that there is much more competition for the leadership positions in society, such as control of government offices. Politics becomes more nasty and partisan, leading in extreme cases to violent rivalries between elite factions struggling to secure their hold on power. Such violence is made easier by the larger number of poor, desperate people in society who can serve as a demagogue’s muscle.

In Turchin’s research, he finds that oversupply of elites has the strongest association with societal violence. This is easy to understand when one looks at places like the Philippines, in which politicians routinely employ armed militias to attack competitors (a horrifying example was the Maguindanao Massacre of 2009), or the Congo, which has been wracked with coup after coup. But even in the United States, a surplus of would-be leaders will tend to produce extreme ideologies, such as militant unionism in the 1920s, or the present upsurge in eco-terrorism.

I think many people, writers among them, mistake the relationship between cheap labor and exploitative rich. Often, a super-wealthy class emerges as a result of lots of poor people, who make it easier to be rich—that is, to benefit from the production of lots of other people. This is not to say that an exploitative class won’t try to keep everyone else poor, once it emerges. But the dynamics are complex here, and societal violence is one of the things keeping them in check.

(How might such violence be averted? Full discussion will have to wait for another post, but I find it rather interesting that the Biblical institution of Jubilee, in which land was returned to its ancestral owners and debts forgiven, follows a 50-year cycle.)

(Have I mentioned lately that my new book is available on Amazon Kindle? It’s called The Best Congress Money Can Buy: Stories of Political Possibility. You can read the first story for free here, and then buy it if you like. Enjoy!)

Thoughts after Publishing

30 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by Oren Litwin in Self-Actualization, Self-Promotion, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Amazon.com, animation, art, arts, creativity, crowdsourcing, Homestuck, illustration, Internet community, Kindle, new book, videogames, writing

Last Friday, I submitted my first book to Amazon Kindle, and it was live on the site by Saturday. Today, I submitted the hardcopy version to CreateSpace, and once they approve it I’ll have a look at the proof as soon as they can mail it out. (And by the way, the process of formatting my book was made immeasurably easier by this guide to using Scrivener software. Well worth the five bucks; I was able to do all the formatting from page margins to fancy capitalized headers in less than two hours.)

In the long process of writing my stories and prepping them for publication, I used the services of several people: a graphic artist who designed the cover, a copy editor, and two story editors. Similarly, for a children’s book that is nearing completion, I’ve been working with two artists to do the illustrations. Working with other artists has been much simpler than I was afraid it would be (aside from the nerve-racking process of choosing who to work with!). Indeed, it has me thinking that the future of creative expression is going to involve not a single writer or artist signing away his soul to a publishing company, but fluid collaborations of several different artists who work together to create their products.

I’m thinking in particular of Homestuck, the webcomic-cum-animated series that is presently taking over certain parts of the internet. The creator of Homestuck was already an experienced computer artist thanks to his previous webcomics, but in this work he kicked it up a notch, by collaborating with other artists. A whole stable of music composers provide an ever-growing custom soundtrack; other graphic artists have contributed sprites or helped with minigames. The eventual product definitely breaks new ground for what a “webcomic” is supposed to look like, in a very good way.

For myself, I’ve been noodling around with a concept for a website, that would let people contribute in a crowdsourced to creating an animated movie. If someone provides the storyboards, others could upload single animation frames, aided by the software which can keep track of it all and compile them into a true movie. Others could provide vocal tracks or foleys. I think it would be a killer concept for the large community of animation and voice-acting enthusiasts; trick is, I can’t write software, so I’d need to bring in some techies. All I have is the concept. Still, it remains exciting, and maybe when I get a few more of my projects done I’ll be able to launch the website I have in mind.

Today we have so many tools for new kinds of creative expression, and the possibility exists for even more tools as soon as someone builds them. And while much of this is driven by new software or companies like Amazon, many of the new possibilities involve collaboration between artists. The picture we have in our minds of the solitary artist laboring in his or her workshop is a badly constrained picture of what is possible. Most of the great artists had staff: Michelangelo, Rodin, to name a few. Even Alexandre Dumas wrote his book The Three Musketeers with an assembly-line process using assistants (which explains why mistakes happened, like D’Artagnan being made a Musketeer twice).

If we work with others who can complement our own strengths, we can bring many new works into the world. The prospect is terribly exciting.

Random Fiction Excerpt #1

31 Thursday May 2012

Posted by Oren Litwin in Politics, Self-Promotion, Writing

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Amazon, congress, Kindle, Money in politics, new book, politics, writing

From the current draft of a short story I’m writing:

“Thank you for seeing me on such notice, Congressman,” said the PAC representative, a tall brunette in a sharp business suit, as she swiped her FEC-registered credit card in the reader that a polite staffer had helpfully provided. “I know your time is valuable.”

[UPDATE May 1, 2013: This excerpt is from an early draft of the short story “The Best Congress Money Can Buy,” which is now published in a collection titled The Best Congress Money Can Buy: Stories of Political Possibility. You can read the first story for free here, and then buy it if you like. Enjoy!]

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