Who or what is Cheekyseagull?

Maybe the question should be where does the name come from? A comment from a fellow Commonwealther to this blog said the name piqued her curiosity and she re tweeted the post of the 9th February - Just to let you know, so there's a small piece on the home page at cheekyseagull  a touch less of the book plugging, but not entirely free - unlike Iceline which is now free on all the distribution channels on the left hand column. There will be more to come, the piece on the home page is just a part of it...

Good News

February kicks in, tomorrow is Candlemas, or Groundhog Day, depending on your inclination. A key day in how much winter is still outstanding. Shadow or not,  more cold or an early spring, that's tomorrow's care.  To mark the day Iceline has gone to free at smashwords. Click on the link to stay with the action.

Another week and another freebie Friday

The last Friday of the month, and that means Freebie Friday at Indies Unlimited and the last few days of the smashwords summer/winter promotion, free ebooks and discounts until the 31st July. Check out great writing by first time and seasoned authors.

The Grange Novels are included in the promotion, grab yourself a copy of Iceline, normally $2.99, free with code SW100. Control Escape, normally $2.99, also free with SW100 .

The latest in the series, still undergoing final checks and editing, remains a free download, What You Ask For, Nanowrimo entry and winner 2012. It crossed the 50000 word target in twenty nine days, and set the bench mark for this years personal Nanowrimo challenge.  In the meantime, I've proofreading to do, obvious bloopers to spot and change -if you find any in the raw draft of What You Ask For, drop me a line  here or at cheekyseagull.co.uk .

Ideas drift through the grey matter all the time, and some of them make it on to a scrap of paper, but that jotting may bear no relationship to the work in progress advancing across the page, that's the fun of it, never sure what twist of the imagination will throw the story off in a completely new direction. Don't miss the next exciting episode.... I'd better get on with writing it?

Still giving it away!

Free eBooks | Freebie Friday | Indies Unlimited | Indies Unlimited

Freebie Friday and the Smashwords summer/winter promotion, have a look at great new writing through Indies Unlimited and free ebooks by the bucketload at  smashwords.com and the Grange novels, Iceline Control Escape are available free with the discount code SW100 and What You Ask For, the Nanowrimo 2012 winner,  remains free to download here.  Help yourself, have a good read and chill out this summer with some great new writing.

Freeby Friday

Free eBooks | Freebie Friday | Indies Unlimited | Indies Unlimited  The weekly free ebook fest at Indies Unlimited is here again, stock up on your holiday reading, get something for the daily commute or vegging out for the week-end.

Summertime, and the reading is easy

And so it should be, with that in mind The Grange novels, Iceline and Control Escape have been listed in the Summer"Winter promotion at smashwords.com kicking off at 0001 Pacific Time and running through the entire month, take the opportunity, if you have been hanging about waiting to take the plunge, jump in. Stick the code SW100 in the appropriate box when you click to buy. Load up the ereader in time for the holidays.

My personal choice is a Kobo mini, compact - literally pocket size - with a couple of gig of memory and a battery that lasts for weeks. Check out the spec, doesn't work too good in the dark. I'm having a ball with mine proofreading What You Ask For, my 2012 Nanowrimo entry (and winner). Still a freebie at Smashwords, and when the proofreading, editing and all the other post-scribbling gubbins has been dealt with it'll go through the channels.

A whole month to explore some of the most original imaginations around, I can't wait  for midnight pacific time (it's about 8 am on a Monday morning locally).

Summer/Winter Promo at Smashwords.

Less than a day away; more ebooks than you can shake a stick at Smashwords summer/winter promotion begins at 00:01 Pacific Time. Discount codes available for ebooks on the Smashwords' site.
The Grange Novels, either free or discounted to free when the promotion starts.

How Much!

The big question when you put anything out into the open market, and probably the biggest conundrum facing any author, self-published or otherwise, how much will the book sell for. Being an Indie I can't hand it over to marketing to do the calculations for me, but I know that Mark Coker at Smashwords has given the subject considerable time and thought. He's posted on the Smashwords blog and at Slideshare a couple of presentations (here and here) based on his research into the dynamics of ebooks sales.

Both presentations are worth a look at, and provide considerable food for thought. There is no magic bullet that I can see but more helpfully a solid appraisal of the situation facing any writer in the market place today.

There are likely to be as many ways of selecting the price for a book as their are writers, but one or two common factors seem to pop out. Obviously free shifts more dowlnoads than anything else, about 92 times more than, and ebooks come in a variety of prices but there is a correlation of approximately 30000 words per dollar, putting a full length novel edging towards epic length, (70000 to 1000000 words) around the $2.99 tag.

Have a look at the presentations, and see what you think.

Source material - looking for something original?

Slow word day today, What You Ask For is having one of those days and the word count is apparently going nowhere, a day when staring at the screen seems to be the highest ranking activity, until now that is. The current reading list on the blog needs updating, the listed titles are still being read but I have been distracted. I Recently sat down to watch Disney's John Carter, based on the novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs about the Virginia gentleman soldier whisked away to Mars and his amazing adventures  The byline for the DVD describes it as Star Wars for a new generation;  an interesting viewpoint considering the stories were written decades before Star Wars.

They are very much of their time, and Burroughs makes no apology in his work for that, like all of us who work with words our cultural background and social niceties exert a greater or lesser influence on what and how we write. I downloaded the books from Project Gutenberg, as free ebooks and can currently be found at most opportunities with my nose pressed into my e-reader following the latest tale. 

One description of a particularly loathsome character in the Carter stories flashed a very strong image of Jabba the Hutt, and I started chewing over sources and inspiration, how these two seem to constantly cross fertilise each other. I've used it myself, tucked oblique references into stories, and had readers comment about it.

The mental ramble through this landscape brought me back to my bookshelf and Christopher Booker's "Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories", a weighty chunk even in paperback but the results of years of consideration and an excellent read. The book explores the history of storytelling and compares some of the great and significant stories of the past with their modern siblings.  The premise is that there are seven basic plots, or story-lines and every story is one or a combination of the seven: Overcoming The Monster; Voyage and Return; Comedy; Tragedy; Rebirth; Rags to Riches; The Quest.

The comparison that caught my attention linked an old flood legend and James Bond; in the Seven Basic Plots; the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, among the earliest known stories was aligned with Doctor No, Ian Fleming's James Bond adventure, both are examples of Overcoming the Monster, and similarly the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf stands up with Jaws; Grendel's mother and the shark being the monster. The exploration continues and it is easy to wonder why a work of fiction could ever be called a novel if we, the writer's amongst us are retelling the same story-ies. Novel, something new, and each one searching for that original spark. 

Perhaps we are the spark, the original is the writer and the personal perspective. As witnesses to an event, no two people will tell exactly the same story, some details may match and the general plot will be recognisable but the intimate details of how the tale unfolds will be inspired by our personal story. 

On the slow word days like today, (after this you may wonder what a fast word day looks like) the idea of something to prompt the stream and get things moving becomes attractive. A recent acquisition is a set of story cubes, nine dice with a pictogram on each face, giving fifty four prompts. You roll the dice and use the nine images face up to create a story. An idea of such delicious simplicity it's child's play, and it works, just writing this and thinking about the seven basic plots, nine cubes and the mind-bogglingly huge variables possible kick-started something. Cubes, Borg, Star Trek, Seven, Nine, cybernetic implants, (six things already - and you know where this is going, unfortunately this has been done)
The storyline (of Seven) from the cubes ( Of Nine) is already familiar.

I can always roll the cubes again, and see what they come up with!

Keep it rolling

There are still Smashwords discount codes available for Iceline and Control Escape, 100% off until the 31st March.

The code for Iceline is TA34B and for Control Escape is BU95A, get hold of one, or bag the brace, spread the word, be part of the action. 

Almost there!

The last few hours of Read An Ebook Week 2013, and the search through the catalogue at Smashwords brings one or two things to notice, Iceline and Control Escape have a good showing in the Fiction - Thriller and Suspense categories; Iceline is hanging around at the bottom of page 1 in the units sold, epic (>100,000 words), RW100 100% off listing; page 2 in the full length (>50,000 words) RW100 100% off and Control Escape is over the page at 3 on page 3 in the full length listings. Like the listing says, Thriller and Suspense, Intrigue and conspiracy.  Not long left for this annual extravaganza, don't be the pumpkin, the codes run out  at midnight Pacific Time tonight, March 9th.
Thanks for your interest, grab one or both, bag the brace, enjoy them!

Somebody's reading free ebooks

Is it you, or the person next to you. Are you going to be the only pumpkin in town midnight on the 9th, after all week thinking about it. This is the time for action. That ebook, you know the one I'm talking about; you've hovered on the Smashwords page view for ages, now chase it down. Hunt it across the four corners of the web and bag it. Get a brace of them if they're in a pair, take the trophies back to your favourite chair and enjoy.

Read an ebook

Go on, you know you want to. The week has started at Smashwords, so the code is live and you won't feel like a total pumpkin for jumping the gun. The code is RW100 for free copies of Iceline and Control: Escape, follow the links.