The Realms Faire Begins! Play games all week and win big prizes.

Idea City announces the start of the Realms Faire, a weeklong event with super-fun games and big prizes! It's the brainchild of M Pax, and is now a part of the Untethered Realms author group's repertoire. Everyone is welcome to play! Play at least two of the games and you're eligible for the big Rafflecopter prizes: a Kindle or a big, fat bundle of UR author books, including dark fantasy, sci-fi, space opera, and ghost tales.
Click these links to play. And don't forget to enter the Rafflecopter below!
Joust
Drench a Wench/Soak a Bloke
Stockade Brigade
Dueling Bards
Phasers
Masquerade Parade
Collective Performance
Castle Jumble
Dragon Hunt

Follow the Untethered Realms blog for the schedule.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Nine Short Tales of the Strange and Macabre! Featuring author Ellie Garrat.

Today I'm pleased to feature the work of Ellie Garrat, sci-fi and horror author and book blogger extraordinaire. Her new collection of strange and spectacular tales, Passing Time, is now available on Amazon and Amazon UK!
Here's the lowdown, followed by a story snippet:


Passing Time contains nine dark stories that may just give you nightmares!
A man lives to regret Passing Time. A father will do anything to save his son in Expiration Date. An author finds out her worst nightmare is back in The Devil’s Song. A woman gets more than the claim fee when she takes out vampire insurance in Luna Black. In Dining in Hell, the Death Valley Diner becomes the wrong place to stop. A serial killer wants to add another file to his collection in The Vegas Screamer. In Eating Mr. Bone, an undertaker could meet an unfortunate end. A con man meets his first ghost in Land of the Free. And will truth finally be set free in The Letter?

Excerpt from Expiration Date:
The doctor sat forward in his chair, dropped the tissue onto the desk, and used both of his hands to massage his temple.
“What part of no do you not understand?” he asked finally.
      “Dr. Winston, you possess the highest levels of success with cloning and the lowest level of clone-mutations in the state. Put simply, you are the best. And I want the best for my Clifford.”
      My father, long accustomed to my deathly appearance, patted me on the arm. This was a bad idea. It was a hot day–eighty-nine degrees and climbing–and the forty-five minute car journey to the doctor’s private practice had left me somewhat baked. When he touched my arm, a few million dried-up skin cells slewed off and fell onto the office’s pristine marble floor. 
      The doctor glanced at the floor before lifting his gaze again to me. Who could blame him? What must I have looked like? Even though, as my father put it, I came from good stock, I was a deceased third-generation clone. Nothing more than a rotting copy. 

About Ellie:
A life-long addiction to reading science fiction and horror, meant writing was the logical outlet for Ellie Garratt’s passions. She is a reader, writer, blogger, Trekkie, and would happily die to be an extra in The Walking Dead. Her short stories have been published in anthologies and online. Passing Time is her first eBook collection and contains nine previously published stories. Her science fiction collection Taking Time will be published later in the year.

Find Ellie on Goodreads, Facebook, Author page on Facebook and Twitter. But first, leave her a shout out!

ePubbing: Tips from Trade Authors & other Bold Explorers

Gone are the days where publishing one’s own stories as eBooks was a questionable career move, akin to being published with a vanity press. With the advent of kindle, iPads and apps, and with less people buying traditional hardcovers (who has the cash to shell out $24 for a book?), bookstores and the publishing world have been in an uproar. Authors and readers are quite open now to new publishing delivery systems.

It seems almost every week, I hear word of another indie or ePublisher opening up for business. Dragonfly for fantasy and sci-fi comes to mind, as does Muse it Up in Canada. I hear more and more authors' incredible success stories about self-ePubbing with createspace, often selling so many copies that a traditional publisher comes calling after the fact.

A couple of weeks ago, on an online chat, a well-regarded children’s writer, Arthur Slade, revealed that he had formed his own publishing company to reissue his out-of-print books, such as Draugr, depicted above. He even named it after his grandmom! Mind you, this author sells via the traditional system quite well.

His admission prompted a blizzard of comments from other successful writers who loved the idea of publishing their own out of print books, or self-publishing manuscripts that their editors had turned down. And this produced a flurry of questions about the actual process: did anyone know of a great book cover artist, who worked freelance? What was the best program to format one’s manuscript for uploading to smashwords or create space? And what were the best sites to publicize eBooks? The kindle boards were highly recommended as a place that really helped get this part of the job done, while joining a vibrant online community.

This is truly an exciting time! Authors can pick and choose. They can have some of their books published with traditional publishers, and others, including more experimental work, or their out of print titles, can sell as eBooks. The author can take control over his or her book cover formatting, interior illustrations, even pricing. As Arthur Slade puts it: “One basic reason is that Amazon pays 70% of the cover price and that I can also publish my books in other countries without much effort. I'm a bit of a techie, so the process of turning books into eBooks wasn't too painful. I can get a book ready for Amazon in about two hours now. You can go through smashwords. That means you only have to do the book once and they send it to Amazon, B&N and iBooks. They take a small percentage. And, most importantly to me, I maintain control of my book over the long term!”

There are others joining in the conversation. Take a look at Joe Konrath’s blog post Ebooks Ain’t a Bubble and eisforbook, where a bunch of authors are posting about getting their books ready as eBooks, or Rob Sider’s site, 52 novels, where he helps convert your Word files to a kindle-friendly eBook text!

The stigma is gone, and the fearless tread on open, untrammeled ground. Please let us know about any really cool ePublishers, book cover artists, and blogs that cover this. Also, fill us in on any tips for DIY newbies. Check out Arthur Slade’s great blog on this topic while you’re at it! http://arthurslade.blogspot.com/ and his website, where you can buy one of his newly released eBooks Draugr and Dust: http://arthurslade.com/frontpage/

Kindle’s Sweet Compulsions

There’s been much discussion on blogs about the kindle—whether it will destroy the print market, whether one should feel guilty for purchasing a kindle. Should you confess to owning one or keep it your dirty little secret? And then, there’s the curiosity over which eBooks people choose to buy on it.

I got my first kindle last year—a big DX—because I thought it’d be easier to read on it without reading glasses. For the holidays this year, I got my second--the newest, slimmest one around. Now I’m selling my kindle DX—well, my brand new sealed DX that amazon graced me with after the battery fizzled on the first one. Any bids? I promise to undersell all of those hawkers on eBay.

The first thing I read on the old DX was a colleague’s manuscript. It was perfect. I could read at night, lying down, without flipping through almost 400 pages of unwieldy manuscript. A little awkward too, as the kindle didn’t show page numbers then. The next thing I used it for, was to download lots and lots of free excerpts from the Amazon Breakthrough Contest (ABNA). This was big, big fun. They were free, they were quite varied, and not all good, but a few were brilliant—a total smorgasbord. The ones I liked, I could review, without having to read someone’s entire mss. This experience primed me for my next activity, and the one I still do most of all: sample novels as if I’m wine-tasting, or channel surfing.

First of all, one can download a short sample free from Amazon to test out a novel in order to see if you want to buy the eBook. Secondly, you can get trial freebies with newspapers, as I did with the Shanghai Daily.
What’s so great about this you ask? It begs adventure, experimentation, in a way that going into a traditional bookstore does not. Remember how you dreaded taking a chance on a CD before they had listening stations, or iTune sampling? Back then, you never wanted to take a chance on buying a dud CD. Too much money shelled out, too disappointing.

On any given day, I have at least 65 things on my kindle, and with the touch of a button, I can download another eBook or two, or three, within seconds! It’s positively addictive. I can easily see how eBooks, despite the fact that they are about half the price of their print equivalent, could outsell print. Mass sales vs. handselling. Right now, I have 3 adult novels on it, 1 sci-fi, 5 YAs, 1 middle-grade, 1 nonfiction, and 6 ABNA excerpts. That’s not including the 42 ABNA excerpts on my archive! I have everything from Rayo Casablanca’s hilarious novel, 6 Sick Hipsters, about twenty-somethings in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to Melissa Marr’s YA paranormal, Wicked Lovely, to Tamim Ansary’s nonfiction, Destiny Disrupted, about growing up in Afghanistan.

I don’t normally read romance. But I read recently, in the New York Times, that romance eBooks are the hottest market online. Reason being, no one has to see the maudlin, steamy cover in the subway and stifle a snicker. It will be fascinating to see which other eMarkets heat up next. And being an illustrator as well as a writer, I can’t wait for the day that kindle goes color. The nook just doesn’t cut it. Okay, amazon, where’s my residual? Just kidding. I do believe illustration will remain alive and well, even on eBooks.

What’s you eBook experience? Kindle protester, virgin, newbie, its biggest supporter? Do you sample like me, or always read through each entire eBook? What’s your weirdest eBook purchase so far? Your guilty little eSecret?