personal news

I’ve just released Book Two of The Chaos Chronicles for free download. That’ll be Strange Attractors, now on your cyber newsstand in html, Mobi, PDF, RTF, yadda, yadda, and yadda. With yadda formats soon to come. Seriously, with the help of the good ebook lovers of Mobileread.com, it’ll be in about eight different formats within a few days, more than likely. Most of them are up now.

This, if you’re just joining us, is part of the great windup to Sunborn coming out as a Tor hardcover at the end of October. I can also report here that all signs are Go for Sunborn to also appear as a Tor ebook at around the same time, or soon thereafter. (This represents a change in my arrangement with Tor, a change I agreed to with the understanding that it would appear in a timely fashion, and in a DRM-free form.)

So, I’m psyched.

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.” —Carl Sagan

My Neptune Crossing free downloads are up over two thousand now, and over on Mobileread.com, there’s been lively discussion and lots of encouragement and support from the people who truly love ebooks. In fact, on the first day, someone came forward and offered to do a conversion to the Sony reader format. In the process, he caught some errors for me, and he just sent me the file. As soon as I can find the software to view it and vet it, I’ll be putting that up, too.

Meanwhile, I’ve just uploaded a PDF(2) file, which will work on a handheld screen—meaning that the text will reflow to fit the smaller screen. That was a project of many hours, using an old version of Framemaker I have on my computer. (Framemaker has to be about the least intuitive program I have ever used in my life.) So if you really want a PDF on your PDA, go for it! (I still recommend Mobipocket or eReader, though.)

I added a Paypal tip jar to my download page, and yesterday my first donation came in, from Bob of Bloomington. That was interesting also because he learned of my downloads on the Amazon Kindle forum, which I didn’t even know existed. And my work was completely new to him. That was followed by my first international donation, from Joerg of Germany. Many thanks! (Another came in, as I was typing this.) I am extremely gratified that people are responding so generously. Go readers! You rock!

So does my family, who as a special birthday present sat as a tag team and typed in boring copy edits for Strange Attractors. Family, you rock!

So do you blog readers, as a matter of fact.

“Love the writing, love the writing, love the writing … the rest will follow.” —my wise friend Jane Yolen

I couldn’t resist checking the web logs for the last two days to see if people were downloading Neptune Crossing. Sure’n, they are. Seems word’s spreading faster than I’d hoped: I got an email from a reader telling me he’d seen a notice about it at Teleread—a very nice write-up by Chris Meadows. And he’d learned about it on Baen’s Bar, where someone had posted a note. I tried to post a note about it on Tor.com, but couldn’t get past some stupid Fatal Error every time I tried to submit. Despite that, the viral distribution seems to be off to a good start! Keep it up, please!

Oh—and this summary of a kerfuffle on Tor.com is pretty interesting, mainly because of what it says about human nature. Seems some people are pretty peeved with Tor for giving them free ebooks when they didn’t have the sequels ready yet for ebook distribution. (I’d better watch it.)

Meanwhile, I was pretty surprised to see the breakdown of downloads by format. I have fallen in deep like with the MobiPocket format, and the eReader format seems very good, too. On the other hand, I’ve never much liked PDF, which is slower and less clear on a handheld device, and I’m still working on the problem of getting a clean file that also allows the text to reflow to a smaller screen. (Making progress. I have a file that looks good, but is huge.)

So as of midnight tonight, here’s what the comparative stats looked like for the last couple of days, the inaugural days of the download page:

Palm/eReader – 19 downloads
RTF – 26
Mobi – 40
HTML – 62
PDF – 381

What?! Hey, I’m happy for people to take it in any form they want. But if you haven’t tried downloading a free Mobi Reader or eReader, give it a try. They’re good.

“Dude! Writing’s hard, dude!” —Anonymous

I finished it today! You can now go to my web site http://www.starrigger.net and download a free ebook of Neptune Crossing, in any of several digital formats! I’ve got html, MobiPocket (Kindle and Pocket PC and others), and eReader (Palm and Pocket PC) formats up now, and expect to add PDF in a day or so. I may add Microsoft Reader and Sony ebook formats, but I don’t know how much demand there is for them. Maybe I’ll come back to that after I get the next books up.

It’s been a real bear. First getting all the copy-edits typed in (my daughter helped with that). Then fixing the formatting; the original files were in WordStar for DOS, and the conversion to Word left some problems. Oy—the formatting. A nightmare. But I finally managed it. I have the Mobi and eReader versions on my own PDA right now, and they look good.

I’m finding that I enjoy reading on my PDA, more and more. I have about 50 books on there right now, and I can read it in bed in the dark without waking my wife. (With the font set at largest, I can just read without my glasses!) I’m rereading some old favorites from when I was a kid—some Tom Corbett and Andre Norton. But I’ve also got a bunch of classics, ranging from The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire to The Call of the Wild to the Bible, for when I want something different. I’m a convert to ebooks!

Anyway, come and download Neptune Crossing, and tell your friends! Free books!! Help me out and pass the word!

“You’ll never make much money writing books like that. But the very best people will come to your funeral.” —said to Edgar Pangborn, as told by D.G. Compton