Blind functionality and Smashwords

So I finally got all the bells and whistles worked out on my phone.  I have a old blue tooth headset that actually worked with my shiny new phone and the voice dialing actually works quite well.  I found an app on the Google Play website called Zoom Messenger that allows me text to speech along with the ability to zoom the text to as a high a font size as I like.  I inadvertently saw ran across an app that would allow you to work your phone like a magnifying glass which I could find infinitely useful for reading menus and such.  The problem I ran into was that none of them worked for my phone.  Luckily I ran across the Swiss Army Knife app which had all kinds of goodies that included a very functional magnifying glass.  The moral of the story is that you can make just about any Android app blind friendly if your bloodyminded enough to doggedly pursue it.

So after finding out that Kindle wouldn't publish my short story for free I went slightly insane with rage.  I brushed up on my Google-fu trying to find a way to make it free and I came up with Smashwords.com.  I have "My Turn-ons Include Napalm" on there now and am awaiting approval for premium publishing which will atuomatically throw me out on a bunch of marketplaces like Apple and Barnes and Noble.  Hopefully they won't find too many mistakes that require weeks of editing and other nonsense.  I read the book on publishing on Smashwords (literally) and hopefully I have things well in hand.

Once my short story is published on all these other sites I will then be able to tell Amazon about the price difference and then hope and pray they see fit to price match.  This has been my burden over the past couple weeks and hopefully it doesn't turn into a epic tale.

I'm still waiting for Ed to send me back some notes on Chapter 6 of Prey book 2.  I'm working on another project in the mean time.  Ed gets a little distracted by shiny objects from time to time (Mass Effect 3) and it's not like I've actually paid him for his work, so I really don't have a good reason to do much whining.  I still have plenty of work to do with marketing and working on first person narative style for some upcoming projects.

If you have recently read "My Turn-ons Include Napalm" or "Prey for Vengeance" please feel free to send me some feedback or leave me a review on Amazon.  I'd love to hear what you have to say about it.

New Cover for "My Turn-ons Include Naplam"

Well I ran into an issue.

I needed a cover for my short story but I didn't want anything too terribly involved and I was afraid that my normal cover artist Steve Griffing might find it demeaning.  So I turned to my long time pal Phillip Johnston to load up his graphic artist skills to give me a simple but effective cover.  After an hour on Skype and plenty of consultation Phillip really made the image pop.  I can't thank him enough for this and it has the added bonus of not dragging Steve off the cover for the second book.  Steve has been working diligently on the second cover and I am excited to see the final product.  Probably the biggest issue is that I still have yet to come up with a decent title for the second book.  The second novel's cover is quite a bit more elaborate than the first so I hope everyone likes it as much as I do.

I've been killing myself on another project involving the Massive Multiplayer Online Gaming Industry that has been a lot of fun and I have the added bonus of being able to bend the ear of RW Harper when I have questions.  He's answered my questions with ruthless efficiency and the project so far has gone quite well.  I'm planning to release them as a series of shorts to be released as an anthology, but free online.  I'm using the exercise to  hone my skills in the first person narrative.  Hopefully I'll have more stuff to share with you guys soon.  Until then let me know what you think of my short story and if you were able to grab my book for free, please give me some feedback and tell me if you liked the book.