Tag: ebook

Deadstick updated

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment


To celebrate a year since my first re-engagement with Smashwords and ebook publishing, I’ve updated my dieselpunk story “Deadstick”. It’s got a new cover, and is combined with my steam/diesel-punk story “How Do You Like These Heights”. Combined with that, it’s also available as a print book. And a new blurb to go with that. I’ve been working on upgrading my blurbs to be a little more punchy. How’s this?

Hank’s scorching across the California sky in a race to save his son. The afterburners are overheating and Sally Jean is tearing apart around him. At 55,000 feet.
A dieselpunk story by Sean Monaghan, author of Pan Am 617 Heavy. Includes bonus story “How Do You Like These Heights”.

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ebook $3.49

Smashwords
Kindle
Apple
Nook (looks like the old version today – hopefully they’ll update soon.
Kobo (also an old version – what’s going on?)

Print $4.99

Amazon
Createspace

First try at publishing a double-header

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment


As my self-publishing empire lags and stutters along, I’ll keep trying new things. What a learning curve. Following ideas from Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch with their publishing arm WMG Publishing I’ve published two stories – Pipe Dive and Skinny Joe together, as one package, but as two separate units one with each story as the lead title. The content of each is the same, just in reversed order. They are linked stories – both set on the same world, with the same group of researchers (though in these two stories there’s no character crossover, there are, and will be, in other stories).

As you can see, I’m also working with covers – one is self-designed, the other is a commercial/professional illustration. I’ve bumped up the font size and word layout while trying to retain the general Triple V Publishing look. I noticed on some covers (like Xuento), the author name almost vanishes. Spreading “Monaghan” across the width, then tucking “Sean” in above, nestled between the “M” and the “h” risers makes the name visible at even thumnail size. I’ve simplified the covers too – no tagline, not even the Tripe V logo (perhaps that’s a mistake, we’ll see).

I’ve worked on my blurbs too – trying to be active and succinct. I think next year I’ll look at taking Dean Wesley Smith’s course on writing pitches and blurbs. This is how they look at the moment:

Skinny Joe
A Daron story. Skinny Joe’s on a deadline. And he can’t wait to get home to see Paula. But when he triggers something in the depths of the structure, it looks like he’ll be lucky to get out alive. A short story by Sean Monaghan, author of The Tunnel and Rotations. Includes bonus story “Pipe Dive”.

Pipe Dive
A Daron story. Pieter thought divorcing Mel would have been the end of it. Now he’s trapped in an artificial cavern deep in the structure. With Mel. And there’s no way to get back. A short story by Sean Monaghan, author of The Tunnel and Rotations. Includes bonus story “Skinny Joe”.

Buy them here: Skinny Joe and Pipe Dive. Soon on Kindle, B&N and so on.

Skinny Joe was originally published in Infinite Windows, and this is the first publication of Pipe Dive. That’s a new experiment – most of the Sean Monaghan fiction I’ve self-published has been of previously published works.

The Wreck of the Emerald Sky – new novella in The Colored Lens

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

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My novella The Wreck of The Emerald Sky has just been published in The Colored Lens.

Filled with bright, imaginative speculative fiction, The Colored Lens is a quarterly, available on Kindle for $2.99.

The Wreck of the Emerald Sky is a sci-fi adventure story set in my Barris Space universe. If you’ve read my stories “Barris Debris” in Deep Space Terror or “Eltanin Hoop Anomaly Rescue” in Will It Go Faster If I Push This?, then you might be familiar with the setting.

Here are the first couple of paragraphs as a taster
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Chapter one

Derel Larsen sat bolt upright in the bed as his ear-roll chimed. He was halfway to Meriam’s room before he realized that the chime wasn’t her security alert. It was just a phone call.
“Larsen,” he said, thumbing the connect. He kept going towards Meriam’s door.
“Larsen?” a voice said. One of the controllers at flight. Jamie, Larsen thought. Nice woman, even if she did have to confirm his name right after he’d said it.
“Medical leave is over, sport,” Jamie said.

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The Tunnel – preview experiment

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

Just trying a little experiment with ways of letting my novel The Tunnel be out in the world. Issuu is a cool way of publishing documents. Magazines seem to favour it, but then I discovered that I could publish an excerpt from my novel in a relatively straightforward way. So with a click here you can read the first 18 chapters free. Yes, this is slightly stolen from James Patterson, but I’m still learning about marketing and so forth.

At the page there’s a link to buy a print version for $11.09. I don’t know what that’s about (you can buy a print version of the whole book – 100 chapters – for $14.00 from Amazon… why buy just a segment?). Still I hope you enjoy reading a few chapters of it this way.

Imaginary Maid Forgets She is Late for a Banquet – new ebook short story

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

I have a new story out through Smashwords. Imaginary Maid Forgets She is Late for a Banquet is a magicpunk, or magic realism. The story was first published in the Static Movement anthology Alternate Dimensions.

The amazing cover art is by Ateliersommerland and sourced through Dreamstime. The waif has the perfect expression to suit Bianca’s character.

My little description at Smashwords goes like this: “Bianca’s had about enough of Paulette, the school bully. But when she calls up magic to help out, both girls are in for more than they bargained for. Much more.”

And though you can read the first 20% free anyway, I do like to put the opening paragraphs here for a teaser too:

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Bianca sulked. She’d pushed herself into a corner of the kitchen, crouched and squeezed herself right under one of the benches.
“Bianca,” Paulette called. “Come out.” She paused, giggled a little. “Come out, come out.”
“Wherever you are,” Bianca whispered.
“I’ll teach you, you little snipe. I will teach you a lesson you’ll never forget.”
Bianca looked around the corners of the tiny dark space. She needed magic.
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Book in hand, typos… in hand

~ Sean Monaghan ~ 2 Comments

The proof copy of the paperback edition of The Tunnel arrived today. It’s very cool, I’ve got to say, to hold the physical result in my hands (as you can see from that goofy grin). The idea of a proof copy, I guess, is that final check before it gets properly published. I knew there would be some tinkering with the cover to do, but what I didn’t expect was to open it up and spot a typo immediately. This is after three proofreads (one by me, and one by someone else [who’s not to blame at all!] and another by me). It’s just a silly thing too – an “at” when it should be “as” – which makes that sentence (“And as Morgan was leaving…”) make no sense at all. Guess I’m going to have to proof the whole thing again. I might have to do that backwards. At least I know that the ebook version is correct (checked it just now – I guess I got the paperback proof printed before that final proofread. Silly).

The Tunnel – The Hidden Dome Volume 1: new cover and updated text

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

My novel The Tunnel, available at Smashwords and other ebook retailers, has a new cover (subtly nicer, I think, richer colours, better layout) and (very importantly) updated text. It’s been proofread (yet again) and more typos have been corrected, plus a few clunky sentences. I seem to have this habit of dropping the last letter from a couple of words (“her” for “here” and “the” for “they”) and missing it in initial proofreads. So now it looks better and reads better.

The little pic here is how the old cover looked, for comparison’s sake.

300,000 words progress

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

At first I was going to give an update when I hit 75,000 words for the year. That’s a quarter of my goal. But that milestone passed a couple of weeks back. As of today I’m at a shade under 95,000, so will probably be a third of the way to my goal early next week.

It might sound like I’m getting a little ahead of myself here, but I was making allowance for doing tutoring this year. I might not have made quite enough allowance. Tutoring is going to be one big giant tyrannosaur with teeth like stalagtites (and stalagmites). The paper’s structure has changed radically this year. Instead of the regular 4 assignments, with a three week turnaround, the paper now has nine assignment dates. Now those are smaller, certainly, some of them are much smaller, but there is much more regular on-going contact. That’s got to be good for the students and developing their writing, but for me it means that the blocks of time between the deadline dates are smaller and less free. I’m sure that it will be good for me: challenging and stimulating, rather than just cruising into it, but at the same time I’ll have to redraw the way I hit my own writing goals.

Speaking of goals, my first new novel for 2012 is up and available. The Tunnel is available immediately from Triple V Publishing as an ebook through Smashwords – here. It’s a sci-fi adventure story. I’ll blog about it more when it’s made it through to Kindle and B&N and so on, and when the print version is out.

Four recent publications

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

As the writing races on like a horse on a track, I’m still managing to find a little time to format and publish some short stories and collections as ebooks.

First up are two short stories – “To A Pile of Ashes” and “Stone Goddess”. Ashes was first drafted years ago while I was working on my thesis. Over the years it had numerous revisions and eventually found a home at Infinite Windows. Goddess first came out a couple of years back, first in Lame Goat Press’s Horror Through the Ages, then in The Best of Lame Goat Press, and was also podcast by Barry J. Northern at Cast Macabre. Ashes is fairly straightforward adventure sci-fi, while goddess is a Mars story but sci-fi with a slight horror edge.

Then there’s also the second of my flashpacks – short collections of flash fiction stories. This new one, following Lizard Brain and other stories (which I neglected to publicise), is Zombie-Eyed Girl and other stories: five stories with at least a hint of zombie to them. One story – “Unbuild the Bridge” – is new for this collection, with the other four having appeared elsewhere over the last few years.

Finally there’s another Michael Shone story – “Katie Stumbled”. This is an odd hybrid of a story, a little sci-fi, a little somethingpunk, and all adventure. It was originally published in the Static Movement anthology Bounty Hunter. I used the pen name since I already had a story (“A Visit to the Theatre”)under my real name in the volume.

These will show up at ebook retailers if you search for Sean Monaghan, or just find them at my Smashwords page – here.

Habitat – Young adult novel available on Kindle and elsewhere

~ Sean Monaghan ~ Leave a comment

My young adult/middle grade (as you will) novel Habitat is now available through Triple V Publishing – on Kindle and other ebook sites. $2.99 download, and I’m working on a POD version which should be out soon.

“Seve Brigham’s dream opportunity – a cadetship to work on the huge orbiting Habitat – is about to turn bad. Very bad. The station is an unfinished mess: behind schedule and under-staffed. Then there’s the alien voice in Seve’s head. And thieves are trying to steal the whole station. Seve needs to look sharp and think fast.”

Habitat is a backlist title. Originally published on BookHabit – one of the first ebook sites. BookHabit sold it’s inventory to SmashWords, but at the time I was busy with other things (and disappointed with the lack of sales – zero – and the complicated set of hoops to jump through to format it for SmashWords), so it fell into limbo.

Of late I’ve been learning about formatting – seriously not that big of a deal – and about indie publishing. With my newly edited novel Rotations (more on that soon) just released from Lucky Bat Books, now seemed like a good time to bring Habitat back to light.