"Comandante Eternal" For Kindle

Over last weekend, the indefatigable Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit and The Blogfaddah) ran a number of posts related in part to the growth of electronic publishing for fiction writers. In particular, Glenn interviewed author Sarah Hoyt for PJTV, and Hoyt later expanded on her e-publishing experience on her own blog and at Classical Values. You can also click here for an archive of Hoyt's posts at CV, the more recent of which are mostly dedicated to writing and e-publishing.

It all made for interesting reading, and got me to asking myself, "Self, what have you got to lose? Why don't you give this a try?" So a few minutes later, I was on Amazon's upload site for Kindle books, checking out how it all works.

The Amazon e-publishing site is straightforward: if you have a regular old Amazon customer account, you can publish. That's a bit of a simplification; you need to have something to publish, and you really need to convert that something to HTML format before uploading (which can be a bit tricky in terms of page formatting), but it's not unbearably convoluted. My biggest complaint is that any change to a book's sales page (say, if you want to raise or drop the price) entails a 24-hour wait while the changes are "published" to Amazon's massive database. That's annoying, especially when you think you're done and have pushed the "publish" button, but then notice one little thing you forgot to tweak.

But at any rate, I've now got a Kindle "book"--actually a 33-page short story--titled "Comandante Eternal" up for sale at the low, low price of 99 cents. I'm still trying to get some artwork nailed down and posted on the ad (inevitably, that will add another 24 hours or "publishing"), but as far as I can tell "Comandante" is available for the Kindle right now. You don't have to have a physical Kindle device to read it; Amazon has free PC/Mac Kindle reader software, and free Kindle apps are available for smartphones as well.

So what's "Comandante Eternal"? Little thing I put together a couple of years ago, involving a certain bearded, dying island dictator and his rather nasty plan to gain eternal life. There's just one catch: if it works, he'll only be able to, er, dictate at night.

Hope you enjoy it.