The Free Indie Reader No.1
December 20, 2013
Just wanted to draw attention to this interesting project from Tom Lichtenberg - it's a collection of short stories he has put together from self-published authors, intended to act as a "free sampler." As Tom explains here, it's an attempt to reach a wider audience than he has so far managed by reviewing other people's work on his blog and elsewhere - so I hope it succeeds.
I say that with a certain amount of self-interest, because it includes one of my stories. But even if that were not the case, I would want this project to succeed because, despite the stigma sometimes attached to self-publishing, I genuinely think there is a surprising amount of good material out there - and the anthology includes several authors whose work I have reviewed here (Michael Graeme, Judy B and Tom Lichtenberg, plus Carla Herrera - whose work I have read and enjoyed, but haven't yet got around to reviewing (sorry!)).
You do, however, often have to look quite hard for these gems, because (mixing my metaphors here), the self-publishing haystack is a pretty big one (and it's growing all the time). So this is where something like Free Indie Reader can really help, by flagging up authors that may be worth further investigation to a wider audience. I certainly wouldn't expect all readers of this first edition in the series to go haring off to download all my other stuff - but if they find just one author in the collection whose work interests them, then as far as I'm concerned, it's done its job. And if it helps to convince people that they shouldn't just write off free fiction from self-published authors, then so much the better.
The Free Indie Reader can be downloaded free of charge from Smashwords here. And you can view a short and ever so slightly tongue-in-cheek trailer for it here.
Posted by Paul Samael. Posted In : Self-publishing
Welcome to my blog, "Publishing Waste" which will either (a) chronicle my heroic efforts to self-publish my own fiction; or (b) demonstrate beyond a scintilla of doubt the utter futility of (a). And along the way, I will also be doing some reviews of other people's books and occasionally blogging about other stuff.
