More on Writing

Believe it or not after 20+ Oracle titles as author or co-author I was getting a little burned out as a technical writer. Of course that isn't counting the dozens of presentations, white papers and articles in addition to the books.

However, since I have been cutting back (yes I know, many have asked when the next Oracle book will be out) I am beginning to get the writing bug again. In addition, I have recently published another book with Texas Memory Systems about the use of SSD technology with Oracle, check it out on the TMS website: RamSan book.

Of course I also used to write fiction as well as technical and I have ground out a couple of short stories and polished off a couple of novels I had sitting around. While I was doing this I found my pile of rejection slips. When someone asks me how to be successful as a writer I tell them to collect enough rejection slips to use as wall paper for a regular size bathroom. Of course some would use them for a different type of bathroom paper.

As you can tell from my previous blog on the 13th, I have gotten tired of rejection and the add of insult to injury of having to wait (sometimes months) for the privilege of being rejected without the benefit of even having been read at times. I have had several times been rejected with letters that used the wrong title for the book, wrong author name and with the manuscript returned in the same box, same rubber band around it and in absolutely pristine condition. Now I didn't check for fingerprints but my guess was it sat in someones read pile for X days and they simply sent it back without a read. Until the invent of print on demand (POD) and ebooks this was the fate of most submissions to mortar and brick publishers.

So I decided to give self publishing a whorl. Looking over many POD publishers most seemed more designed for vanity (oh let me buy 10 copies for friends and relatives and I don't care if it is never marketed) than for actual get it out there publishing. Then I stumbled on CreateSpace and DTP from Amazon. I know you all know what Amazon is, well, they partnered with CreateSpace to provide POD publishing that is actually a real attempt at true publishing. Hence I decided to use both the POD and digital publishing services from Amazon.

Justr as with my foray into jewelry making where I had a bowl of sharks teeth on my desk so I decided to do something with them, I had a collection of short stories (several published in magazines and in two anthologies) and two novel length books just sitting on my hard drive so these have been sacrificed to the POD and ebook effort.

To date the three have made it online to Amazons Kindle store:

Ransom of the Phoenix an action adventure about theft of Nuclear fuel.

Seeds of Wonder a collection of short stories

Quest of the Rune Sword an epic fantasy

Anyway, I'll see how they do. The actual softcover books will be available (with any luck!) sometime next week.

Enjoy!

Mike