Don’t worry! I am still writing and still publishing!

Did you know I had my own e-bookstore? (Probably not!)

I launched my store back in January of 2013. Here’s a post on it, if you’re interested in the software or the process. I launched it to ensure my complete independence and because, at the time, some of my readers in “non-Amazon” countries had to pay a premium to pick up my books.

The store was a fine experiment, and it had a good long run, but in the rapidly changing world of indie publishing, it ultimately became more of a burden than an asset. So I decided to close shop.

Be assured that my books are still available through major vendors.
You can find them at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and iBooks — all of which are a lot more convenient to use. You can also find several of my titles at Book View Café. The only thing that’s changed is that you can no longer buy them from my personal store.

Thank you to everyone who visited my store or used it to purchase books! And please, keep reading!

Find my ebooks at these vendors:

• Amazon
• Kobo
• iBooks
• Barnes & Noble
• Book View Café

For no particular reason, I’m putting The Dread Hammer ebook on sale for $2.99 until the end of the week — but only at my webstore.

The Dread Hammer is a fantasy novel, but it’s not “fat.” The print version comes in at a spare 214 pages, so no long-term commitments here! But if you like this one, there is a second book, Hepen The Watcher.

Here’s one reviewer’s conclusion about The Dread Hammer:
“It is the amount of heart this book has that really sells it for me. It is a book that falls into the gritty fantasy label for sure, but with a certain amount of sweetness.” —Fantasy Review Barn

And from an enthusiastic reader:
“Richly developed characters drive the action of the novel and lend it the feel of an epic fantasy without the page count. The book’s hero, Smoke, is an almost mythic figure: complex, powerful, and conflicted. Smoke’s relationships are filled with turmoil, passion, and deeply human moments. Smoke’s vulnerability serves as an excellent contrast to his power.” –Jared Nelson

Find the book on sale here. Scroll down to read the opening.

Toward the end of December, I spent some time putting together my very own e-bookstore at MythicIslandPress.com, the website I set up for my publishing company. In this blog post, I’m going to talk in general terms about how I put the store together, on the chance that other indie authors are interested.

The Mythic Island Press store is a highly simplified, single-author version of the store I set up for Book View Café. Both stores run on WordPress software, which isn’t something I really recommend from a technical point of view. WordPress is adaptable of course, but it’s blogging software, not e-commerce. Still, it works well enough at a small scale, and my little store is definitely small scale. So I opted to start with a system I already knew well, with the goal of putting up a smoothly functioning store in a very short time span.

BVC uses a paid WordPress plugin called Cart66 for the ecommerce portion. At Mythic Island Press I’m using Cart66 Lite, which so far looks entirely sufficient for my less-demanding needs.

To create the store, I installed WordPress and then Cart66 Lite, created a “child theme” of one of the standard WordPress themes, and then modified that to match my existing website. I grabbed a small portion of the functions I’d developed for BVC and included those in the child theme, along with some directives from the style sheet — again, so I wouldn’t have to re-invent the wheel I’d already invented last spring.

What took a surprising amount of time was figuring out how I wanted to present the books. I settled on a largish cover pic, the book’s description, and quotes, with a link to “read a sample.” (You actually need a function to change the wording of that link.)

I decided to present all the books on one page, but once you click through — either by clicking the book cover, the book title, or the “sample” link — then it’s one book per page, with links to scroll to the next and previous books. In the right-hand column I used a WordPress text widget and hand-coded an index with links to all the books.

For my store, payment is via Paypal. The Cart66 system does support some other options, but I already had PayPal set up and it doesn’t cost me any extra. Once a book is purchased via Paypal, the buyer is returned to a receipt page with a link for immediate download of the ebook. The link is also delivered in an email sent to the buyer. It was this ability to handle digital downloads that led us to use Cart66 in the first place.

So that was the process. Do stop by and check out the result.

There are great aspects to having a store on your own website–complete independence for one. Also, receiving the money at the time of the sale and not months later, as well as receiving nearly all of the sale price instead of yielding a hefty cut to the host store. In my store, prices are the same no matter what country you, the buyer, reside in, which is not always the case with other vendors.

Of course, you need to know how to get the downloaded file onto your e-reader of choice. That’s probably the trickiest part for those who are used to automatic downloads from Amazon. But it’s a fairly easy process. And whether you buy books from me or not, I do encourage you to consider doing at least some of your buying from small vendors. After all, monopolies aren’t good for anyone.

Toby Neal is a friend of mine and a fellow Maui writer who has just published her first novel.

Blood Orchids is a police procedural set in sleepy Hilo town on the Big Island and featuring the intrepid cop, Lei Texeira. It’s the first in a series of four novels, with the next books scheduled to appear in 2012.

Blood Orchids is also a first for me–it’s the first book not my own which I helped produce. I did both the ebook creation and the interior layout for the print book as part of services offered through my company Mythic Island Press LLC.

Here’s the back cover description of Blood Orchids. The ebook is only $2.99 right now at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Check it out!

Hawaii is palm trees, black sand and blue water—but for policewoman Lei Texeira, there’s a dark side to paradise.

Despite her obsession with the case and fear that she’s being stalked, Lei finds herself falling in love for the first time. Steaming volcanoes, black sand beaches and shrouded fern forests are the backdrop to Lei’s quest for answers—and the stalker is closer than she can imagine, as threads of the past tangle in her future.
Lei is determined to find the killer—but he knows where to find her first.

Look what came yesterday:

That’s the proof copy of the new Mythic Island Press LLC print edition of Deception Well, next to The Bohr Maker. Both enjoy Bruce Jensen’s terrific cover art.

I’ll look at the proof in more detail later today, but so far, it looks good, which means that Barnes & Noble, at least, should have it available online by next week. Amazon is more problematical, but that’s for another blog post.

It’s not at all clear that the time, money, and effort spent to put The Nanotech Succession books back into print will prove financially worthwhile, but it’s definitely emotionally satisfying. Vast will be next, likely as a September book.