We’re going to do the unthinkable.

We’re going to . . . make our ebooks only available through the Amazon Kindle for the 90 days Select period. Mainly just to see how it goes.

Why, you may ask?

I’m glad you asked, I may say.

1. It’s a huge market. With the number of kindles out there, you get a lot of eyes. We’ve always been there, but Prime gives you a little more leverage for making your own freebies. Now, whether or not there is going to be just an expanded class of people that ONLY download books for free… well, people are like that, aren’t they? There’s always going to be the groupon-style addicts who, rather than supporting something with their money, struggle to find the next free item.

2. Quite frankly, I had issues with BN.com and how they cataloged our three PULP! books. I mentioned them on the facebook page, about how they essentially group them as different editions of each other, rather than as three distinct books. So, I am considering going to them after the 90 days are up. In fact, I likely will.

3. I’m retooling our PULP! books, and rather than submit them multiple places, I’m going to do a test case on Amazon. Inputting more links and metadata information to the books, like links to the author websites, blogs and twitter accounts.

4. It’s only 90 days. I look at it like any distribution agreement you’d have to enter into with a brick and mortar wholesaler. Importantly, though, we still are able to sell our print books through any retailer, online or off.

Overall, I want a readership to connect more fully with our authors, so the authors can become more recognizable in the long term. It’s mutually beneficial for all parties involved. They’re able to build more of a readership that they can take and hold onto. Quite frankly, it’s up to them on whether or not they want to keep the readers with us, or move on. It’s their decision, and the readers are part of their payment. If Twit Publishing can accomplish this goal by leveraging more free giveaways, then we will.

Fuck no!

We’re releasing shit for free! That’s right!

Free!

Our first one is mine: “A Knight Templar in Lincoln County.”

Originally released under the Pseudonym Fyodor Gutierrez in the first PULP! book, “A Knight Templar” follows a Templar named Jacob Smith as he fights greedy cattle barons, Billy the Kid, and demons in Lincoln County, New Mexico Territory circa 1872. Think Young Guns with less Emilio Estevez, Kiefer Sutherland, bad 80s rock, and more demons and awesome.

Yep: More awesome.

You can also find it on kindle, as a variety of ebooks here, and on wattpad here.

Edit: 3:22 PM 1/16/12 I completely forgot to mention that the Kindle Edition is not, in fact, free. For some reason it’s stuck at .99 cents. If you would like a kindle edition for free, go to the smashwords link and download from there. Seriously, you’re not going to hurt my feelings any.

We’re using my short story as a sort of test case, a way to see what works and doesn’t work when releasing these.

Next, look for Chris O’Grady’s Wilder Short Stories. Much like the Jacob Smith Short Stories, Wilder’s stories are all self-contained, but use the same character. Unlike Jacob Smith, though, these can be read in any particular order. There’s no direct causal relation between the events of one and another.

With a “Knight Templar” we’re releasing them individually and at roughly set intervals. With Chris O’Grady’s, we’ll be releasing them one after the other with about a week’s separation. Those should start popping up the first week of February.

Here’s one of the covers:

Originally released as part of PULP! Winter/Spring 2011. Feels like ages, not just one year.

So that’s our little exciting news! Our goal is to get  as many people reading our catalog as possible. At this point, I don’t really give two jerks about whether or not anyone buys any of it (sorry authors). I want a readership. I want the name Twit Publishing to stand for something.

First of all, Twit’s offices (our little, old apartment) gets colder than a polar bear’s tits starting right around now. Last year we had the gas heater running full blast with a space heater blowing full on in the living room, and still only managed to get the temp to 55 degrees. Luckily, last winter was unseasonably cold, so we’re not likely to have a repeat.

Second of all, this is the time for re-examining the year that’s just passed. You go and poke through its remains with a stick, turning over both the good and icky parts, and try to see what was worth learning. It’s like a messy, primal vivisection of your previous mistakes and accomplishments. Or, at least the way you remember them.

(as a side note, isn’t it kind of interesting that people have stopped writing journals, instead turning to blogs? But blogs aren’t like diaries. You can’t put your real deep down, dark desires or true feelings about your boss, your family, job, love life on a blog. Because, well, this shit’s public. I mean, I can’t go back and look at Twit’s blogs and examine my year. These are all focused on the company, not on me personally. And, on top of that, I still can’t examine what’s really going on in the company. We keep stuff under wraps, the same way anyone else does. Am I right, or amiright?)

And, finally, this is the time for resolutions.

What a crappy word, right? Resolutions. Doesn’t even feel right in the mouth. Say it out loud with me. Resolutions.

But, like I said, this is the time for them. So here’s mine:

1. Release three more kick-ass anthologies. Two PULPS! And one Dieselpunk.

2. Release our first novel and a couple novellas.

3. Release a bunch of free short stories.

4. Grow the fan base.

5. Blog more.

6. Guest blog somewhere. Wouldn’t it be nice to check your regular blog and see a post from yours truly?

7. Tweet more, even though I hate it.

8. Sleep less. Seriously, I like naps. A lot. I need to stop napping so much and, I dunno, sleep at night instead.

9. Finish my own novella. A couple, actually.

10. Start a diary. A real one, where I catalog day-to-day activities: “Wrote for an hour, argued with Chris about word choice in my short story for five hours, ate some green beans while crying softly for fifteen minutes. Napped.”

So, that’s it for me. Just a measly ten.

How about you guys? Do you have any? Or are you content to live your life exactly the way you have in the past?

Cause, if so, that’s lame. Real lame.

P.S. Did I mention all our stories are 99 cents now through most popular ereaders? I’ll post the links as soon as all the price changes have kicked in (in the meantime, here’s the kindle!)

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,600 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 27 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

We’re going down to ninety-nine cents because, honestly, we can. With ebooks, the marginal cost of product is zip. Zero. Nada.

Witness the awesomeness that is Twit Publishing Presents: PULP! in all its $.99 cents glory!

Thrill as you’re able to buy all three and get 38 freaking stories (or 200,000 words) for less than your next meal!

But, seriously, I adjusted the prices upward as a “why the hell not?” kind of thing.

Well.

A few days ago, Chris and I were sitting on the porch having a beer and smoking a cigarette, talking about the  release of future books and a few other projects that are forthcoming (details will be posted here, of course), and he said, “You know we wrote in the forward that we’d never price our ebooks very high, right?”

I’d completely forgotten. Completely. Forgotten.

So the prices changed back, at least on the Kindle.

There’s no real rhyme or reason a lot of the following:

• Pricing
• Length of books/stories
• Publishers

These are just some random notes inspired by a bunch of different blogs. Like this one, this one, this guy here, and (strangely enough) this one.

OK, so the first one is the blog for a man named Seth Godin. Here’s a really great video by Mr. Godin on Ted.com. As a side note, if you’ve never watched anything from Ted, do what I did while I was single: get really hammered on a lonely Saturday night and watch about 30 in one night. You’ll have almost a gazillion ways to not be interesting to cute girls the next day (and an awful hangover).

Seth Godin is heading up the project behind the second link. It’s funded by Amazon to find news ways of publishing in the digital age: cheap hardback books, low margin, books moving faster to print. Amazon wants to use the kindle to reposition the book, electronic or otherwise, as the major cultural cornerstone it deserves to be. Or, well, people think it deserves to be. I mean, if the market-place of ideas drive the book out of the cultural sphere in favor of a better form of personal expression, books wouldn’t really deserve that spot anymore. Now would they?

The third one is about 6 maybe future trends in ebooks. Lots of ebooks not being finished reading (which kind of speaks to how shitty future books will be… am I right, or am I right? right?), smaller payments, lots of bloggers writing books, no publishers or editors (which likely means more errors and poor grammar. Now I just sound like I’m sniping), and books that are written quickly and sent to market almost as quickly. Also, lots of books will be shorter. I think we’re going to start seeing 50K as the high end of number of words per book.

Look out! We’re in novella country!

The final one is about Dutch TV hosts slicing meat off their bodies, frying up the flesh, and eating it while looking into each others eyes.

Seriously. Cannibalism is legal in the Netherlands. What an awesome place, right?

But, the reason why I bring this up is the nature of media and entertainment in our culture. I mean. Wow. Just wow.

(thanks to Ryan Sheffield for the last article.)

Sort of. It’s not really a present. It’s more like a sale. A pretty decent sale, but a sale nonetheless.

If you follow the links below and enter the coupon code provided, you’ll get a whopping 30% discount on each book! We’re doing this for both the electronic and print versions of our three anthologies. So, if you’ve purchased one of our anthologies before and enjoyed it, pick up the other two!

This expires January 1st!

Twit Publishing Presents: PULP! Summer/Fall 2010

Print: $7.99 $5.59!

Buy Print     MT5Z6BLP

By a cruel twit of fate, I can’t set up a discount code for this book’s ebook, but can for the others. Does that make sense to anyone else? Certainly doesn’t to me. But there’s other ones listed below!

Twit Publishing Presents: PULP! Winter/Spring 2011

Print: $12.00 $8.40!

Ebook: $1.99 $1.39!

Buy Print    DZAAX3KT

Buy Ebook  JA69G

Twit Publishing Presents: PULP! Summer/Fall 201

Print: $12.00 $8.40!

Ebook: $1.99 $1.39!

Buy Print   AAQ4UDAM

Buy Ebook  PU47V

Have a great holiday, everyone!

Our proofing works this way:

1. We receive a proof copy. Chris and I ooh and aah over it for about fifteen minutes.

2. Chris begins the proofing, red pen in hand. He goes through, line-by-line checking for errors. He makes the changes in bright red ink. He checks for widows and orphans.

3. After Chris is finished, I get the book. I go through and try to catch any errors he may have missed. I also check for formatting errors, making sure everything looks the way it should. I check for widows and orphans too.

4. I enter the changes, marking any additional changes that I make to the book in red ink..

5. After it’s completed, Chris and I both go through the new digital copy line-by-line again to ensure all the changes were made. This is normally done with one us calling out page numbers and what changes should have been while the other scrolls through the digital copy.

6. We send it back off, hoping that we didn’t miss anything. We’ve averaged only one error between two books (that we can find, at least). Which is pretty fucking good by most standards.

As an aside, if you have ever caught an error in one of our books, please email me at craig at twitpublishing.com.

I’ll start compiling them for correction in a second edition at some point down the line.

Also, here’s a copy of the cover for our newest book, a crime noir novel. More details will be coming in the next couple weeks.

If you’ve read Twit Publishing Presents: PULP! Winter/Spring 2011, then you probably remember Chris O’Grady’s story “Double Take”, starring the criminal Wilder. Well, that’s Wilder on the cover, there.

Like I said, more details coming, including synopsis and release date.

For now, though, it’s back to work!

But, it’s kind of interesting. We’ve basically been releasing semiannual literary magazines that aren’t advertisement supported. These aren’t periodicals, they’re full length books. But, for the price, the reader gets a whopping 60,000+ words of short story goodness.

And I like the way we’ve chosen to do this. I hate advertisers. If I can avoid working with someone who is able to control my content by withdrawing funding, I will. Hopefully we never have to work with advertisers.

I think that, honestly, with the advent of ebooks, we’ll start to see an increase in the sales of our anthology formats (available here and here, in case you’re wondering. They’re a steal at $1.99 and $2.99). They’re stories that are fun to read, quick, and then you can put it away while still getting a feeling of closure. Perfect for lunch breaks, waiting in doctor’s offices, sitting on trains, etc. Perfect for 21st century life, basically.

Did I mention we got a swell review of the second book recently?

The upside of our anthologies also are that they contain so many different genres. What other anthology gives you westerns, sci/fi, and detective ficiton side-by-side? Or horror and fantasy?

Also, for me, what’s really been cool is that we’re giving new writers a venue. We’re also able to provide feedback and direction in their writing, and help them with crafting longer works. We’re kicking it old school that way.

So that’s why I blog and do twitter and facebook and all that other crap. We’re really doing it to promote the anthologies. Anthologies and literary magazines are weird, in that we don’t necessarily have steady authors. Sure, we may have recurring authors, but that’s not the same. All we’ve got is a really great editor that has the sole creative license of selecting the stories he wants in the anthology. We don’t get the benefit of the cult of personality that authors do.

We just get a strong format, presentation, and hustle.

Yeah. Sort of.

Movements spring up and fall out of favor before you even hear about them.

The internet was supposed to connect us, right? Remember that? But, it seems to just serve to remind us that the world is a very giant place, and we’re all very tiny individuals.

That said, here are two movements I’ve been reading about:

Dieselpunk

New Pulp

I’m really curious to see if either of these groups even know about each other. You’d think they’d go kind of hand-in-hand.

But, as with all subcultures, there’s a little insularity. There’s a desire to not work with people who aren’t 100% like-minded. I guess we’ll see if that’s the case here, or not. Whether it is, or not, I think Twit Publishing is signing up for both camps.