Short Stories Formatted For Your Reader

[Peadar Ó Guilín]

Other authors should feel free to join in here...

I have always made some of my previously published short-stories available for free download on my website. But that started before I had an ebook reader of my own... Now that I have been properly introduced to the dark pleasures of electronic reading, I realise that an A4-formatted pdf makes for a disappointing experience.

With that in mind, and with huge gratitude to =X= for his BookCreator tool, I have started formatting everything on my site. I will update this post in a few weeks when all the work has been completed. But for now, we have:

Where Beauty Lies in Wait
First published in Black Gate magazine, this SF/adventure story received some pretty great reviews, although reaction did divide a little down gender lines. While women liked it, men were a little "unsettled" or "creeped out".

This story is now available in a variety of formats on Feedbooks. If I may quote Baldrick, "Get it here."

Hair
Hair was first published in the short-lived but wonderful feralfiction -- one of the earliest e-zines to pay professional rates. This story would fit into the "weird tales" category of fiction: supernatural elements, but not gory.

Formats (so far): Sony -- Kindle/Mobi

The Bag
Yet another "weird tales" type story. It was first published in a horror anthology called Reckless Abandon. It received an honourable mention in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2002.

Formats (so far): Sony -- Kindle/Mobi

Twig
This is a second world fantasy story and was my first professional sale. It appeared in a long defunct magazine called "Adventures in Swords and Sorcery".

Formats (so far): Sony -- Kindle/Mobi

Fairy Fort
This dark tale got some great reviews when it was originally published in the Roc anthology, A Walk on the Darkside. Fairy Fort is a mixture of 19th century Irish folklore, farming practices and horror.

Formats (so far): Sony -- Kindle/Mobi

The Inferior (Sample Chapters)
My first Science Fiction novel has received some brilliant reviews. So far, it has only been published in English and Italian, but Japanese, Russian, French and German versions are also on their way.

Formats (so far): Sony -- Kindle/Mobi -- Epub

[Richard Herley]

Peadar, why not leave the formatting to the experts and upload your text to Feedbooks? manybooks.net may also accept your work. Then you can concentrate on the writing.

You may be interested in this interview I did the other day with Adrian Graham -- it covers the question of ebook formatting by authors.

[mtravellerh]

Thanks for those, Peadar.

As I love SF, they are surely worth a read.

I think you should use a cover of some sort, though, and introduce some pagebreaks.

[Slite]

Oh, thanks a lot Peadar, just read your sample from The Inferior... Another title added to my to-read list.... I just have to accept that i will NEVER catch up with it

[Peadar Ó Guilín]

Originally Posted by Richard Herley

Peadar, why not leave the formatting to the experts and upload your text to Feedbooks? manybooks.net may also accept your work. Then you can concentrate on the writing.

You have a point, but some time in the future I may want to sell the rights to a collection. As a result, I might want the ability to yank them at a moment's notice. There will still be copies in circulation, of course. But I'm fine with that.

Thanks to mtravellerh and slite for the kind words. I like the idea of a cover. I'll see what I can come up with. I also appreciate feedback on flaws in my formatting. I'm still learning.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by Peadar Ó Guilín

You have a point, but some time in the future I may want to sell the rights to a collection. As a result, I might want the ability to yank them at a moment's notice. There will still be copies in circulation, of course. But I'm fine with that.

Thanks to mtravellerh and slite for the kind words. I like the idea of a cover. I'll see what I can come up with. I also appreciate feedback on flaws in my formatting. I'm still learning.

Well, on Feedbooks if you upload them yourself, you have complete control over these stories. You can edit them or remove them anytime you want: http://www.feedbooks.com/help/self-publishing

[igorsk]

Feedbooks does not offer LRF. And manybooks uses automated converters which often produce not very good results.

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by igorsk

Feedbooks does not offer LRF. And manybooks uses automated converters which often produce not very good results.

True but LRF is only useful for the PRS devices and we create ePub and custom PDF files for these devices.

[Peadar Ó Guilín]

Originally Posted by Hadrien

Well, on Feedbooks if you upload them yourself, you have complete control over these stories. You can edit them or remove them anytime you want: http://www.feedbooks.com/help/self-publishing

That sounds pretty good, Hadrien. I'll pop over and have a look

[=X=]

Originally Posted by Hadrien

True but LRF is only useful for the PRS devices and we create ePub and custom PDF files for these devices.

If you asked me what I prefer I would pick LRF over ePUB/PDF any day.

=X=

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by =X=

If you asked me what I prefer I would pick LRF over ePUB/PDF any day.

=X=

Which is super easy to produce with an ePub file.
You only prefer LRF though because reading systems are more mature for LRF than for ePub.

And I wouldn't pick LRF in my case: I need hyphenation to get a real book-like experience and not a screen-like experience. Unfortunately, there's no hyphenation on any reflowable format on the Sony Reader.

[=X=]

Originally Posted by Hadrien

Which is super easy to produce with an ePub file.
You only prefer LRF though because reading systems are more mature for LRF than for ePub.

Absolutely, the potential for ePUB is great, but that does not solve today's needs. Right now SONY is the only device that supports ePUB and it is okay compared to it's support for LRF. You just can't make books on the future promise. You have to supply a format that works for your customers.

ePUB is easy to convert, but the formatting is not preserved.


As producers of eBook, it is easy generating ePUB and LRF and other formats almost simultaneously, why deny a consumer the choice and give them a sub standard solution, when as producers one can produce equivalent products with little effort.

Originally Posted by Hadrien

And I wouldn't pick LRF in my case: I need hyphenation to get a real book-like experience and not a screen-like experience. Unfortunately, there's no hyphenation on any reflowable format on the Sony Reader.

Hmm I can't speak for earlier sony models but my 505 definitely supports hyphenation as a matter of fact view Peadar's LRF book and you will see some on his second page.

=X=

[Hadrien]

Originally Posted by =X=

Absolutely, the potential for ePUB is great, but that does not solve today's needs. Right now SONY is the only device that supports ePUB and it is okay compared to it's support for LRF. You just can't make books on the future promise. You have to supply a format that works for your customers.

ePUB is easy to convert, but the formatting is not preserved.

Wrong, Stanza use ePUB too, and I know for a fact that we distribute dozens of thousands of books to the iPhone every day in this format.

With Stanza on the iPhone, the PRS-505 and PRS-700 there's already more users who can read ePub than LRF.

Originally Posted by =X=

As producers of eBook, it is easy generating ePUB and LRF and other formats almost simultaneously, why deny a consumer the choice and give them a sub standard solution, when as producers one can produce equivalent products with little effort.

Hmm I can't speak for earlier sony models but my 505 definitely supports hyphenation as a matter of fact view Peadar's LRF book and you will see some on his second page.

It is easy converting simple content, but producing nice looking books is a lot more difficult. For example I'm still working on making sure that footnotes are correctly displayed in every format: in PDF I can display them in the footer, in Mobipocket they're just hyperlinks, while in ePub you need to use non-linear flows.
I'm not interested in building a mass-conversion facility like Manybooks, and don't think either that supporting every legacy format on the planet is a good strategy. For me, direct conversions are clearly the sub-standard solution.
Major publishers rely on XML workflows for a very good reason, and I intend to provide something similar for any author minus the complexity.

LRF on the Sony Reader doesn't support hyphenation: I have both a 500 and a 505. I'm not a fan of pseudo-italics either in LRF, I prefer real italics.
In my view, LRF is already a legacy format: none of the e-book retailers in Europe use LRF, they're all 100% ePub based. The situation in the US is quite different because of the lack of support on the 500 and the fact that Sony has already a back catalog in LRF.

[Peadar Ó Guilín]

I have finally gotten around to adding some new stories formatted for the Sony (.lrf) or Mobi/Kindle readers (.prc). All are stories that have been previously published.

Please see the first post in the thread for links to the files.

[crc]

The link to "The Bag" is pointing to "Hair" (Sony format)