The Once and Future Poet is free at Amazon

My newest release is available, and it's free at Amazon today and tomorrow.

The Once and Future Poet: A Writer's Retrospective on Growing Up covers the poetry I wrote between ages eight and thirty-three--twenty-five years worth! Each poem is followed by an essay discussing what was going on in my life or what inspired the poem or current thoughts on the poem's themes. If you liked my last two posts, Poetry and Death and Poetry and Mirrors, those are right out of The Once and Future Poet.

It was interesting for me to go back through all those poems and those years and see what themes I kept coming back to, and which ones still show up in my writing even today, and also the way my writing style has evolved.

I decided to put this one into KDP Select for three months, which means it's only available on Amazon. I did this because my sales at Amazon have pretty much died out, although they are steady (or growing) in other markets. I want to see if putting one book in Select will increase the visibility of my other works with Amazon's algorithms.

But my non-Kindle readers, don't fret! If you buy a copy at Amazon and email a copy of the receipt to mercy.loomis at gmail.com, I will send you an EPUB or PDF version for free! Yes, even if all you do is go to Amazon today or tomorrow and "buy" the free copy.

In fact, I will extend that offer to all of my writings: if you email me a receipt and tell me what format you want, I will email it you. Because you already bought it--why should you have to pay for it again?

How Do You E-Read?

I was not a big fan of ereaders in the beginning. I love print books, like so many other bibliophiles. I hate reading books on my computer, regardless of whether it's on the laptop or the desktop or the giant TV.

I hadn't really planned on getting a dedicated ereader, but I knew if I did get one, I wanted a Nook. I wanted e-ink, and I wanted EPUB. This was because many of the books I wanted to read were ones I found from Project Gutenberg or Google Books, and most of those were available as EPUB, but not as PRC or MOBI.

The Husband bought me a Nook when I was getting ready to start self-pubbing, so I could make sure my files worked and stuff. I very quickly grew to love it. The e-ink was everything I thought it would be, and a Ziploc baggie helped allay my fears about bathtub reading. Plus I could put so many books on it! All those books! With me, whenever I wanted! Joy!

Unfortunately, my Nook doesn't display PDFs for crap. All my contributor copies were in PDF. I was very sad.

However, we already had an iPod Touch. The iPod displays PDFs just fine. Yeay!

Except the screen is, of course, very small. Page-turning is kinda a pain--for some reason, I usually have to swipe twice. Although, and I have no idea why, reading on the iPod's screen doesn't bother me like reading on the computer screens. Maybe because I can control how close to my face I hold the iPod.

My Nook and my iPod are old, technology-wise. So I have no idea what the newest models are like. I've never tried reading on a Kindle or a color tablet of any flavor.

What is your favorite way to read ebooks? What devices do you love/hate? Are you picking up a Kindle Fire or a Nook tablet?

Don't forget to stop back on Friday for free books and Blog Tour de Troops!

Image: Maggie Smith / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Empusa Uploaded at Smashwords

And will be available at the other outlets soon, but right now you can get your fix at Smashwords for $0.99! Everyone's favorite people-eating demon is ready to seduce you...for a price.

Empusa is one of my favorite characters, and it's nice to get to share her with a wider audience. This was one of the first erotic short stories I wrote, and it is THE first menage story and the first time I wrote men having sex with each other. M/M wasn't something I expected to be writing when I dove into erotica in 2009, but damn, it's fun!

Check back tomorrow morning, when I plan to upload The Power That Dreams Have, which is the sequel to Empusa.

Finally! Ebooks are Available!

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Novel Updates

The novel is off to the copy editor, yeay!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm trying really hard not to start a new project, because I still have a ton of work to do. I'm working on the cover for Scent and Shadow when I'm at home, and after work I'm formatting short stories on my laptop in preparation for ebook conversion.

Of course, I still have to do covers for all those stories. I haven't even started looking at fonts yet. Fortunately I've taken some artsy classes before, including one on typesetting. (This jack-of-all-trades thing comes in such handy!) I've got an idea of what I want my fonts to look like, so hopefully I won't go completely ga-ga when I start going through the font sites.

That could be wishful thinking though. I've spent hours already just looking at stock photos...

So anyway, I'm trying to get the art part done first, and then I'll add the text once I figure out what fonts I want. For formatting I'm going clean and basic, nothing fancy, so it'll work the best on the most ereaders. I've seen a number of ebooks where they tried to get funky with the font size or the spacing and it ended up all wrong. My story should be what the readers are focusing on - I think most people only notice the formatting when there's something wrong with it. Then it becomes distracting. But when it's fine, only formatting or font buffs notice, I assume (I could be wrong).

All in all, I hope to have a whole bunch of stuff available next month. Some old, some new, and some of it free to download! Including this year's brand-new free Halloween story. Muahahahaha!

100 Words About: ebooks

I'm a big fan of epubbing in a lot of ways. I adore Project Gutenberg and Google Books, because I can find all sorts of wonderful hard-to-find books online for free. I love the fact that ebooks tend to be cheaper and can reach a wider audience. And, of course, there are a lot more open epub markets right now than print ones.

At the same time, when I read I want a print book. If I can get a book in print, I usually will (unlike audio stuff, which I will buy in MP3 format if at all possible). My favorite place to read is in the bathtub, and sorry, I'm just not taking the netbook in with me.

Image: Maggie Smith / FreeDigitalPhotos.net