Congrats to AL Kaplan

Congratulations to AL Kaplan, whose entry won this week’s Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Challenge.

The voter-selected story is recognized with a special feature here today and wins a place in our 2014 Flash Fiction Anthology, which will be published as an e-book when this year’s challenges are completed.

Without further ado, here’s the winning story:

Continue reading “Congrats to AL Kaplan”

Introduction to Tumblr

Kat CantwellGuest Post
by Kat Cantwell

My mum – Lynne Cantwell, to you lot – mentioned that IU was looking for a post on Tumblr, since it’s such a black hole to so many Indie authors, but it’s becoming a ‘thing,’ of late. (At least, it is among people in their mid-teens to early 30s.) So I was asked if I could give a bit of a crash course.

Tumblr is this interesting and sometimes confusing cross between a blog and Pinterest (I suppose is the best way to describe it). While it can certainly be used as a blog, most people don’t go that route, because it’s not hard to lose text posts in what tends to be a very image-heavy medium. Tumblr is also mostly used to share things that other people post; I rarely post anything of my own, but I’m always reposting something that other people have (re)posted. Continue reading “Introduction to Tumblr”

Smashwords and Scribd.com

You can read more about the Smashwords/Scribd agreement on the Smashwords Blog. Additional information is available on the Scribd site.

Series vs. Serials

What is the real difference between a series and a serial? Is one merely a subset of the other? Perhaps the difference is largely semantic. Or maybe the lines have blurred a bit.

I like to try to make the distinction that a series is a set of books with the same main character or characters, with each book representing a self-contained story. With a series, it doesn’t matter much whether you read the books in order. There is no over-arching story. Nothing carries from one book to the next. The characters may not even age. My favorite example of a series is the Doc Savage books. Continue reading “Series vs. Serials”