101 Quiet Cities -> Coming Soon to Kindle

101 Quiet Cities has now been proofed, and uploaded to Amazon, it is currently awaiting publication to Kindle. 

I am sure that there are still typos in there, and happy to take out any that anyone points out. Amazon Kindle let you update your books whenever you feel the need. 

I am expecting it to appear on the Amazon Store for purchase within the next couple of days. 

It is perhaps early days to be saying too much about the process, but although it took more than a few minutes it was reasonably straightforward to upload the collection from Scrivener onto the Amazon website. There is plenty of guidance available. The trickiest aspect seemed to be getting reference numbers for my bank account, but they are provided as part of the online banking service. Amazon kindly provided a graph indicating what level of pricing attracts what level of sales and author earnings. It suggested a price of over $2, which although it generated less sales, generated more author earnings because the 70% royalty rate kicked in, whereas you are limited to a 35% royalty rate below that. For the time being I have set the price as low as possible, I think that means that I will earn less that 30p per title sold, which seems pretty poor, but compared to traditional publishing is not that unreasonable. I might review pricing in future, but for the time being just shifting some copies  and letting people read it seems for the best. 

If you do like the book, then I am totally delighted, and you might also like John Sladek, JG Ballard, Jorge Luis Borges, The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom, A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty by Frank Kuppner, Mervyn Peake, and just mountains of science fiction stuff.

In terms of reading about cities I would heartily recommend, 

• Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities 
• Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 
• Geoff Manaugh, the BldgBlog Book 
• Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic, The Endless City
• Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn, 
• V Gordon Childe, not terribly accessible these days, but if you can find it the Method and Theory of V Gordon Childe by Barbara McNairn it is highly recommended, 
• the art of Lebbeus Woods is also worth investigating. 

Now that I have finished 101 Quiet Cities, I will either return to another collection of short stories, Losing Definition, or set about published to Kindle an earlier short thriller I wrote years ago. The collection called Losing Definition is a lot longer than 101 Quiet Cities, probably around fifty thousand words in total, rather than the rather jewel like seventeen thousand of 101 Quiet Cities. Losing Definition is a lot looser in theme and format, with a mix of stories, some longer, some shorter, with some themes across sets of stories, but no overall overarching structure. I have really loved the format of a five hundred word story on an imaginary city, it is such a great format that I am surprised that everyone doesn’t use it all the time. I might do a few more imaginary cities one of these days. I was wondering if you could use the same format for stories about imaginary buildings but I really cannot think of any for now.

Having been tightly constrained by one format, it will nice to be able to do something completely different next time. 

If you liked the short city stories published here, then check out 101 Quiet Cities, when it does appear. If you like it, tell your friends, tell everyone, if you don’t, well it cost less than a cup of coffee. 

 

 

101 Quiet Cities

 

I have published a few short stories about imaginary cities here. Pretty early on I realised that I liked the format, and would just press on to prepare a whole collection on imaginary cities. The format is basically around five hundred words on an imaginary city, ideally with some sort of twist or observation included. On writing them some themes have emerged, a few modern composers are named, a few real cities are alluded to, representation and reality feature. Quite a few are basically dreams that I have written out in story form. 

I suppose the basic inspiration was Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, but equally the spoof academic tone of the early Peter Greenaway shorts, like A Walk Through H, has been an influence. 

I have also provided some framing stories and incorporated some lines and ideas that I have been kicking about forever. 

The collection is now largely complete, so I am at the final proofing stage. I have written the stories on Scrivener (for Mac), and that allows me to format for Kindle, but it is a bit tricky. Having said that, it is like doing a web page, have a go, check it on a few devices, have another go, and carry on till you arrive at something you are reasonably happy with. Scrivener will let me prepare a version for Kindle and then the Amazon Send to Kindle App lets me send it to my own Kindle. It is amazing to read your own work on a Kindle, with Scrivener you can add a cover and contents, etc, so it does have the potential to all look very professional. 

There is also the usual proofing for typos and the like, not sure whether I will just print it all off and proof that, or proof on my Kindle, or a mixture of both. The whole collection comes in at under twenty thousand words, so it should not take too long.

Things are pretty busy at work, so it might be a wee while before I finally have it all uploaded to the Amazon store, but not far off now.