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.
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