June 2022 update

Moving Forward, formally known as Tristan, is ready to be published. I’m putting some finishing touches on my online presence before releasing the story.

I have been on Twitter for a while and just joined Instagram. Facebook is a bit of a challenge. I’m not a huge fan of their user interface and find it somewhat ancient and clunky. I have thought about Tik Tok and Twitch, but I’m not narcissistic enough to make videos about myself.

Twitter is my social presence of choice.

I have opened an account to sell books on Kobo. I’ve looked into opening an account on Apple, Google, and Nook. The process is not particularly difficult, but it is time consuming. I’m champing at the bit to release Moving Forward, so I may wait until it is published before opening the Goo. It is a smaller market than Kindle, but I like the idea of letting people read my stories on the platform of their choice.

Kind of dumb, but I have bought books on every platform except Google. The majority of my books are on Nook, but I have quite a few Kobo eBooks and a few Apple and Kindle eBooks.

Which kind of brings me to DRM. (Digital Rights Management)

DRM ties your purchase to the platform on which you bought it. If you buy a book on Kindle you can’t side load it into a Kobo eReader. Not a big deal for me because I have an iPad and every major publishing platform seems to have an Apple app. I have a little folder with Apple, Kobo, Kindle, and Nook apps in it. Press the app and I have access to all my purchases no matter where I bought them.

One of my biggest choices when I previously published was whether to put put DRM was whether to put DRM protections on my stories. Part of me was Golem. I was muttering ‘My precious, My precious’ as my finger hovered over the DRM button. I had a huge fear that someone was going to steal my story, and I had to protect it.

So I pressed DRM and immediately regretted it.

Why?

I’m just old school. If you buy a book, you should be able to read it no matter where you are. Barnes and Noble shouldn’t be able to say you bought it here so you can’t read it in a Hatchards. You’re stuck in our store forever.

I republished Zombie Girl as a non-DRM protected story. That little change was part of the ramp up to publishing Moving Forward. I didn’t want the first book to be DRM and the rest of the series non-DRM. It just seemed unbalanced.

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Beyond Moving Forward, I have two more zombie stories in the works.

The first story is almost done. It’s about a dog’s first hand view of the world after the dead begin to walk. It follows Tyson through the first few days of his hell on earth.

The second new story is going to be called Humanity Lost. I have written two zombie stories, three if you count the almost finished dog story, but none of them are particularly gruesome. Humanity Lost is about people acting selfish in a time of need.

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I don’t get anything from this. But since I am a book Geek, I thought I would give a link to Kobo eReaders.

The two main reasons I have never bought a Kobo are:

• You can’t just walk into a store and handle one of them in America. From what I understand, Kobo is big in Canada, Europe, and other parts of the world, but Kindle has the American market sewn up.
• Price. The larger ones are not cheap.

Yeah! I finished a blogpost.