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Enough of my work is now listed on Goodreads that I decided to claim my author page--mostly to keep anyone else from claiming it, and also to try and clear out a few works from an entirely different Kit Walker. At no point in the 90s was I recording meditation tapes, as I was busy attending elementary school instead.
I don't intend to use Goodreads to track my personal reading, since I use the Storygraph for that. But I've hooked up my blog feed and opened the Ask the Author section, on the off chance the Goodreads userbase wants to ask me things. This should also speed up the process of any new work appearing on the site.
So if you're at all interested in following me on Goodreads, you can find me here. I'm told those meditation tapes will be removed shortly. We'll see.
So, you know how Sherlock Holmes is now fully in the public domain?
My new novelette, "Jay Moriarty Violates the Official Secrets Act," is a modern-day interpretation of Holmes' most famous adversary that tells the story of how he met Sebastian Moran, his loyal partner in crime.
When ex-SAS security consultant Sebastian Moran runs afoul of a rich and powerful corporate client, he's thrown into the path of a brilliant hacker named Jay Moriarty. To survive, both of them must work together to unravel the secrets of Bruce-Partington Aerospace and take down its corrupt CEO, Sir James Walter.
You can find "Jay Moriarty Violates the Official Secrets Act" most places ebooks are sold, or by clicking here.
The Devil Who Loves Me is out today! It's the second anthology by startup indie publisher GrendelPress and features my story "Move Fast and Break Things."
This collection of fourteen stories explores love in the darkest of places. From an executioner drawn in by a handsome witch, a knight set on avenging the loss of his friend, to a mercenary touched by the abyss on a rescue mission gone awry, these stories will capture your heart and imagination.
That last bit, about the mercenary touched by the abyss? That one's mine.
You can get a paperback copy of the anthology directly from GrendelPress. You can also get either the paperback or the ebook on Amazon. If you're outside the U.S., getting the paperback from Amazon looks to be the less spendy option when it comes to shipping. If you're in the U.S., though, I highly recommend buying direct from GrendelPress.
I'm very proud of "Move Fast and Break Things," and I'm excited for people to finally read it. If you're into dark romance, monsters in love, or stories about hallucinating so much you meet and/or become God, this is the anthology for you.
It’s the end of the fiscal year. Hunting season has begun.
Ultimately, it all kicked off with the invention of the “workplace transparency plan.” As ad revenue stagnated, social platforms instead offered corporate clients access to their employees’ private messages. For a small subscription fee, employers could learn who their workers were communicating with and retaliate as they saw fit.
Within months, an entire industry of talent recruiters found themselves stonewalled by a terrified workforce. With electronic communication lost to them, the recruiters — far behind on their quotas — resorted to more drastic methods.
Strive Solutions is a midsize software company on the third floor of a converted building in the old warehouse district. Its two vintage elevators are too old to support ID card readers, so a pair of security doors flanking the reception area are all that stand between potential intruders and Strive’s inner sanctum.
A few minutes past 3:00 in the afternoon, both elevators open and the mob piles out.
( Read more... )
So it looks like there's going to be a writers' strike in the United States. Among the demands brought forward by the Writer's Guild of America is the regulation of "generative AI" in screenwriting: the use of large language models like GPT, which produce text by calculating where certain words in the English language are statistically most likely to appear next to each other.
No matter what your job is, there's an AI booster out there who thinks GPT can do some part of it better than you can. Those guys are frequently wrong; for example, here's a post by Bret Devereaux examining in-depth the idea that ChatGPT can write your college essays for you. Short answer: it can produce an assemblage of text that looks like an essay, but submitting that text as your essay will not result in a good grade, because a truly successful essay requires a cognitive depth that is completely beyond large language models.
Where ChatGPT and other generative text models like it actually excel is in producing text that meets formulaic requirements in a confident, passable, vaguely novel and blandly inoffensive format.
It is, from a certain point of view, the perfect Hollywood screenwriter.
( Read more... )(a.k.a. how to sell ebooks on places that aren’t Kindle)
Let’s face it, Amazon has a history of screwing people over. Especially those people who depend on Amazon to make a living. If you sell ebooks on Kindle and you want to insulate yourself from whatever raw deal those maniacs come up with next, you should make sure your ebook is also being sold elsewhere. And by “elsewhere” I mean “everywhere.”
Please note: following this guide will make you ineligible for KDP Select. If you’re mostly dependent on revenue from KDP Select, this guide will not be helpful to you. But Amazon will ruin your life someday.
Step 1: Make an EPUB
KDP, and certain other services like it, allow you to upload a Word document and automatically convert it to an eBook. If you really want to sell your ebook everywhere, though, you’ll need an EPUB file.
EPUB is a near-universal ebook file standard. Most ebook apps and eReaders can read EPUBs, and every vendor will accept an EPUB file for upload. You can even use an EPUB instead of a Word document on KDP.
You can create an EPUB file for your ebook using Sigil, which is a free and open-source ebook editor with extensive documentation. EPUB files are formatted in XHTML, so a quick education on HTML basics from W3C would serve you well here.
Don’t forget to include a cover and table of contents within your EPUB, as well as metadata tags for your book’s title and your name. Most vendors require them.
Optional: Convert to MOBI and PDF
Newer Kindles can apparently read EPUBs. Older Kindles might not. In the event someone with a Kindle wants to buy your book from a vendor that isn’t Amazon, you can package your EPUB with a MOBI file.
You can convert your EPUB to MOBI using Calibre. Calibre can also help you convert your ebook to a PDF, although I wouldn’t recommend using a Calibre-generated PDF for any print-on-demand services.
Step 2: Upload Everywhere
Here’s a list of vendors I upload my ebooks to:
- DriveThruFiction (also does print-on-demand)
- Gumroad
- itch.io
- Ko-fi (using the Shop feature)
- Payhip
- Smashwords (will, if you meet certain formatting standards, automatically distribute your book to Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo, among others)
None of these sites have exclusivity agreements, meaning you can upload your ebook to all of them at once. Remember to check whether a vendor has submission guidelines for ebooks, and make sure yours fits those guidelines.
Once your ebook is uploaded to these other vendors, you can use Books2Read’s Universal Link feature to centralize most of your book’s URLs into one link.
And now, the next time Amazon nukes an entire department or shadowbans an entire genre, you can send your readers elsewhere to buy your books.
