Starting to Publish

Update (2/10/2010): The free HTML versions are now available. All my work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

Although I make my living writing code, I've been writing fiction in one form or another since high school. In fact, I had the good fortune of studying literature and creative writing at George Mason University under some very good and prominent writers. But I learned early on that there wasn't much money to be made writing fiction, and since I also love writing software, my career took a different path.

I never really tried very hard to publish my stories and books because the process didn't make much sense to me. First of all, there's essentially no market for short stories, and the process of publishing a novel (finding an agent, letting the agent find a publisher, waiting about a year for the book to make it into print, and finally making almost no money) just didn't strike me as something I wanted to be a part of. Consequently, I've typically just shared my work with family and friends, and left it at that.

Now that digital publishing is finally a reality, however, I've decided to start publishing my fiction myself. So far, I only have a few stories up (the covers are in the margin), but I intend to get most of my work up over the course of the year, including a science fiction novel I recently finished, a novella I wrote a couple of years ago, and about a dozen fiction and science fiction stories. I intend to price all my work at $0.99 (the lowest price Amazon will allow) since I'm not doing this to make money, but rather to share an important part of my life with the world. Additionally, I'm releasing free HTML versions that will work on any device with a browser.

If you have a Kindle compatible device (Kindle, iPhone, iPod touch, Windows machine, and soon Mac, iPad, and more), check out what I've published so far (I only have three stories up at the time of this writing, but I intend to get much more content up throughout the course of the year). If you don't have a Kindle-compatible device, I intent to eventually release everything for free under a Creative Commons license as soon as I have the content converted into the right file formats free HTML versions are also available.

If you like short fiction and science fiction, please have a look at my work, and if you discover that you like it, I would be grateful if you helped spread the word. Again, this isn't about money for me; instead, it's simply a way to share something that has been an important part of my life for many years.

Comments

[Anirudh Sasikumar]

Great to see that you have decided to publish!

I'm a huge fan of short stories and sci-fi. And I also have written some (which unlike yours will probably never see the light of day).

The description of Brainbox sounds really interesting. Sadly, I only have a Sony Reader.

[Christian Cantrell]

Hi, Anirudh. Free HTML versions are now available.