Day: February 4, 2015

Which “Half Dead” Flash Fiction Story Gets Your Vote?

Vote5It’s that time again…time to choose your favorite flash fiction story of the week! The judges have made their choices – their picks for the top entries are included below. Confused? Check out our rule change for 2015. The judges have spoken, and now it’s your turn. It’s super easy – choose your favorite and cast your vote below for this week’s Flash Fiction champion.

Remember, the winning entries will all be included in the next edition of the IU Flash Fiction Anthology.

Check out this week’s entries here. Make your decision, then use those share buttons at the bottom of the post to spread the word.

Voting polls close Thursday at 5 PM Pacific time.

Which "Half Dead" story gets your vote this week?

  • Andrew Lewis (34%, 17 Votes)
  • Leland Dirks (20%, 10 Votes)
  • J.M. Smoot (20%, 10 Votes)
  • A. L. Kaplan (14%, 7 Votes)
  • Jon Jefferson (6%, 3 Votes)
  • Polar Mane (4%, 2 Votes)
  • Travis Keys (2%, 1 Votes)

Total Voters: 50

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NOTE: Entrants whose submissions are not relevant to the prompts and/or exceed the 250 word limit are eliminated from the poll. ONE VOTE PER PERSON, please. Duplicate votes will be deleted. The results displayed above are unofficial until verified by administration.

Book Brief: Playing Charlie Cool

Playing Charlie CoolPlaying Charlie Cool
by Laurie Boris
Categories: Literary Fiction
Word count: 75,000

Television producer Charlie Trager knows he’s lucky to have a successful career and good friends and family who support him. The man he loves, however, is not so lucky. Joshua Goldberg suffers the spite of an ex-wife gunning to keep him from their two children…and maybe Charlie. Determined not to let Joshua go, Charlie crafts a scheme that could remove the obstacles to their relationship…or destroy their love forever.

Playing Charlie Cool is available from Amazon.com and Amazon UK. Continue reading “Book Brief: Playing Charlie Cool”

February Smashwords Fest

smashwords heartAh Smashwords. They are so kind to authors. We revealed in our last installment of Author Tips and Tricks that readers don’t even need an account there to download free books. How cool is that? Not sure how they can or will compete with Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited. So how about we show Smashwords some love with a Smashwords Book Page Like-fest!

This is how it works: If you are an author with a book listed on Smashwords.com, in the comments below, write a SHORT one sentence blurb about ONE of your books, then paste in the link to that book below it. (If you post more than one book, to be fair to everyone else, we will delete all except for the top link, so please behave and post only ONE book – NOT your author page – there is no way to like those!) Make sure you show some love to the links in the comments above yours, and check back throughout the day to catch up.  If you’re a publisher, editor, or reader, please check out these book pages – you may see something you like! (BTW, liking a book on Smashwords WILL show up in your FB feed. If you don’t want it there, you’ll need to go into Facebook and manually remove it from your wall.)

[Don’t forget, if you right-click the links, you can choose to have them open in a separate tab so you don’t have to worry about navigating back and forth to pages.]

This should be fun and should generate a lot of likes for everyone’s books. Let’s get things moving – and here’s a book to get you started:  http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/23869

PLEASE do not post erotica titles. IU is a safe-for-work site.

To those with concerns about the ethical implications of “liking” a book you have not read, we regard  likes as more analogous to a “high five” than a rating or review. We do not support the idea of rating or reviewing a book you have never read. If you’re concerned that people will think you are endorsing someone else’s book, you can always just write something like “hey, my friend’s book is on Smashwords.”