Another Collection Coming

The other day my friend James R. Tuck Jr. offered to assist me with a Kindle and CreateSpace collection of my short stories. Given what I'd already been pondering about collections vs. individual short stories, I gave it some thought and decided to take him up on the offer.

James has already gone into the independent Kindle publishing world himself, with this new Deacon Chalk project his newest offering. Although my preferred style of cover is more elaborate (see some of my commissioned covers here), this cover is more professional-looking even though it's more simplistic. Between the better-looking cover and the fact longer works generally seem to sell better, I have high hopes for this project.

So what's going in it? For starters, all of my Kindle stories, including the story "Coil Gun" that appeared in the anthology Pressure Suite: Digital Science Fiction #3. All of my previously published works with the possible exception of "Nicor" as well--although I have the right to anthologize it, Amazon might not take kindly a substantial chunk of material being available for free elsewhere. I had to e-mail a message-board somewhere to have them take down the text of "I am the Wendigo" somebody posted after its original purchaser shut down but before the website disappeared from the Interwebs. Fortunately, since "Nicor" would be one of perhaps ten stories, I can claim it's just an excerpt. :)

And there'll be some new content never before seen by anybody other than some people in my writing group, including the sword and sorcery tale "Lord Giovanni's Daughter" and the supernatural animal tale "Sam." Maybe the terrorist story "The Past Is Ashes" will put in an appearance, although I've got that out to a potential buyer at the moment.

And guess what else there'll be? Some authorial comments by me, including how these stories came to be. You'll get all sorts of spiffy back-story bits, including shout-outs to famous authors like Saladin Ahmed and Mary Robinette Kowal who've given me good advice.

Not sure when it'll come out though. I'm very busy with graduate school. Fortunately unlike the Andrew Patel collection, this doesn't involve creating (much) new content, just tinkering with stuff I've already got.

BTW, buy James' Special Features. I just did. :)