I just found out about Smashwords.com, a pretty incredible place if you want your book to be translated into all the e-book formats. Plus the owner, Mark Coker, is an upright guy who gives you everything you need to publish your book for free and have it marketed in almost every e-book format available! There is a great community there, too, and you can download samples of e-books being published at Smashwords, up to 50% of the book in some cases. Also lots of e-books can be downloaded for free.

Formatting for Smashwords.com is another matter: not as miserable as I imagined with my book and a journey through hell with Bruce’s (The Deadenders). For some reason when he writes on Word he has to use every formatting tool available and the rule at Smashwords is, keep it simple. Mark Coker has even written a guide you can download for free about marketing your e-book, and it’s the best of its kind I’ve read.

The Deadenders is now in trade paperback form, although you have to go to the Kindle site to link to it on Amazon. Hopefully my links will show up at the bottom of this blog.

My darling daughter Robin and her darling husband Ross downloaded both our e-books, each on a different i-Phone, which I thought was amazingly sweet!

I am still formatting Bruce’s Smashwords.com version of The Deadenders, since I am the publisher. My company name is Web Press and the colophon is a rather predatory looking spider. This, I hope, does not reflect on me personally…

This is my lucky day! The Kindle version of LIE LIKE A WOMAN is now on sale as well as the trade paperback, with a Look Inside! option. Not only that, but Bruce’s Kindle version of THE DEADENDERS is for sale as well, although it has not shown up on his author’s site yet.

He’s already got me working on the cover for SHIMMER, his next horror novel, and thanks to Smashwords.com I’ve learned a few things about formatting e-books that unfortunately I didn’t know when I was formatting mine. I may go for another version of the format, although I downloaded a sample of my book on my Kindle Reader and it is perfectly readable. But maybe not just plain perfect, which we are all aiming for.

Bruce already has two ready-to-go books in the hopper, not to mention his collection of horror and science fiction stories that was originally printed by Blackthorne Publishing and which we will be bringing out in trade paperback and Kindle form within the next six months. We are storming the gates at Amazon, by golly! The Joneses are here to stay!

Hey you guys. I uploaded my book, LIE LIKE A WOMAN, to Kindle last night using my own easy-to-read format, since I checked the formats of other Kindle books and could not find a consensus on any one style. No doubt it’s unconventional.

Bruce’s book, THE DEADENDERS, was supposed to show up on Kindle this week, but instead only got published to the UK site. I have re-uploaded a version our friend and fellow writer Charles Austen (WARM SUN ON NEKKID BOTTOMS) formatted for Bruce in a much more professional style because he’s a genius and I’m not.

I have also republished the trade paperback of LIE LIKE A WOMAN with a different cover and a more pleasing interior. It should be available again in a week or two. Now I’m obligated to bring the married protagonists, Bree and Richard Matthews, back in a sequel entitled DIE LIKE A MAN, with all the regulars and a new cast of villains. I have to admit working with Bree and Richard is kind of like spending time with old friends, and I don’t really write them: they write themselves. Not bad work if you can get it.

Bruce too has started another novel and I got to read the first couple of chapters this morning. That’s one of the perks of being married to another writer, and it’s a terrific one! I’m an avid reader from way back, when my mother taught me on a moth-eaten encyclopedia at the age of three, and reading is my one true addiction. I always knew I would marry a writer, long before I knew I would be one.

My good friend Colleen Ross (a brilliant artist) has been encouraging me to paint in oils, to ‘get messy’, as she puts it, and suffice to say that it is a challenge I’m more than willing to accept. Working for years in comic books exposed me to some of the finest artists out there, and I’m even intimidated by my husband’s artistic talent, but the older I get, the more I realize that it’s not about how good you are, but how good you can become. Striving is something I came to late in life; things were always too easy for me, and I never tried anything I didn’t think was going to be easy. Now I’m taking on the hard stuff, the stuff I’m not always best at. It’s vastly rewarding. I don’t have to be a star. I just have to try…

This is a repeat of yesterday’s post. I promise not to do this again…

Incredibly,  Bruce (my husband) and I just cracked the publishing barrier today after twenty-five years in the business using agents, publishers and editors as the purveyors of our work. We did it in much the same way we published TWISTED TALES, ALIEN WORLDS, and SOMERSET HOLMES years ago–by writing it all ourselves, doing our own editing, hiring artists or doing the art ourselves, doing our own paste up (except now you do your paste up, not on your drawing board, but on a graphics program using a templet–in our case, GIMP, the best free art program on the Internet). Go to BRUCE JONES author’s page on Amazon.com if you’d like to see some examples of some of the work we’ve turned out, mostly through approved commercial channels, over the last two decades…

I gotta say, it was a thrill! Bruce’s new horror novel, THE DEADENDERS, his ninth novel and I think his best, should be out shortly in trade paperback and Kindle format, and I can’t wait!  He has a legion of fans who love his horror work and he hasn’t written a horror novel in years.

My own book, LIE LIKE A WOMAN, was the experimental book, and consequently I’m tempted to pull it and redo the cover, etc., but it’s a good story and should stand on its own. The sequel, DIE LIKE A MAN, should be ready by the end of the year, for all the Bree and Richard Matthews followers.

In the meantime, I’m painting in oils again, which takes a lot less time than writing a book, and is a lot more relaxing…

Incredibly,  Bruce (my husband) and I just cracked the publishing barrier today after twenty-five years in the business using agents, publishers and editors as the purveyors of our work. We did it in much the same way we published TWISTED TALES, ALIEN WORLDS, and SOMERSET HOLMES years ago–by writing it all ourselves, doing our own editing, hiring artists or doing the art ourselves, doing our own paste up (except now you do your paste up, not on your drawing board, but on a graphics program using a templet–in our case, GIMP, the best free art program on the Internet). Go to BRUCE JONES author’s page on Amazon.com if you’d like to see some examples of some of the work we’ve turned out, mostly through approved commercial channels, over the last two decades…

I gotta say, it was a thrill! Bruce’s new horror novel, THE DEADENDERS, his ninth novel and I think his best, should be out shortly in trade paperback and Kindle format, and I can’t wait!  He has a legion of fans who love his horror work and he hasn’t written a horror novel in years.

My own book, LIE LIKE A WOMAN, was the experimental book, and consequently I’m tempted to pull it and redo the cover, etc., but it’s a good story and should stand on its own. The sequel, DIE LIKE A MAN, should be ready by the end of the year, for all the Bree and Richard Matthews followers.

In the meantime, I’m painting in oils again, which takes a lot less time than writing a book, and is a lot more relaxing…