John August

The Variant

The Variant and Snake People

Books, Snake People, The Variant

If you got a Kindle or iPad for Christmas, I have two short stories you may want to check out. Each works as a nice palate-cleanser from too much holiday cheer.

snake people coverbook cover

The Variant is a spy thriller with a strong dose of science fiction, in the vein of The Prisoner and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., or the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges.

Snake People is a tale of underage drinking and reptilian fertility set in the armpit of Florida.

Each is available for 99 cents on Amazon.

For the iPad, you have several choices of readers. The Kindle app for iPad is terrific. I prefer its font to any of the choices in iBooks.

But iBooks can handle ePub files without DRM, which is why I can simply invite you to download Snake People through a link. (This is link-handling feature is new for iOS 4.2, and extremely useful.)

If you got a Nook, they can handle ePub files as well. I had a chance to use my first Nook Color yesterday, and for its price, it seems really solid.

The Variant is also available as an ePub and pdf. Check out the details in the Variant page.

Snake People

Projects, Snake People, The Variant

snake people coverI have a brand-new short story called Snake People. It’s available today, free.

Snake People is a bit shorter than The Variant, and…well, kinkier. By movie terms, it would still be Rated R, but I feel some fair warning is called for. It’s both fleshy and scaly.

The story is part of Popcorn Fiction, an ongoing anthology of short fiction by screenwriters, including original work by Scott Frank, Larry Doyle, Jeff Lowell and many others. Derek Haas created the whole endeavor.

Cover art is by Ryan M. Nelson.

The Variant, free this weekend

Books, Projects, The Variant

On Monday, I’ll be publishing a brand new short story.

As with last May’s The Variant, I used an ad hoc collection of Twitter followers as a focus group. So if a few people claim to have read it, they might be telling the truth.

But they haven’t seen the cover art. Here’s an ambiguous detail from it: cover detail

In the meantime, I want to offer up The Variant for anyone who might have missed it. For this weekend only, you can download the .pdf free.

Free ebooks correlated with increased print-book sales

Books, Film Industry, The Variant

Cory Doctorow points to a BYU study that shows releasing a free ebook version may boost sales of the printed edition.

You’d love to see a bigger sample, and correlation does not imply causation. But to me, it suggests that increased sampling usually generates more sales than it costs.

Advance screenings of movies work the same way. When a studio expects good word of mouth, they are often willing to give up a day’s box office1 in order to get more people talking about their movie. They’ll also conduct word-of-mouth screenings tailored to specific audiences. “Free” and “exclusive” are big motivators.

(thanks Howard Rodman)

  1. When you buy a ticket for a sneak preview of The Proposal, it’s actually counted towards another film, generally one from the same studio currently playing at that theater. ↩