Almost ready!

I mentioned about two weeks ago that, to mark the first anniversary of Sci-FU being self-published, I was going to try to self-publish two short stories; The Death of Heroes and Professional Witness. Well, I'm better than half way to that goal! The Death of Heroes is ready to be published and I just need to edit Professional Witness, which I think I can do before the end of today. Not sure though, since it comes in at ~25,000 words (The Death of Heroes is only ~15,000) and is a more complicated story, so any continuity fixes may be more complicated to make as well.

Even if I do get them both uploaded to the Kindle Direct Publishing system today (actually, The Death of Heroes already is as a draft) I may still miss the October 17 goal, simply because Amazon takes the time to review at least the formatting of submissions through KDP. I'll still call that a victory though, since I cannot control that.

Doing some things a little differently with these than Sci-FU, by the way. First, instead of just making it "All Rights Reserved" I'm putting these under a Creative Commons license. Specifically the license that requires other people to attribute the original work to me and to prohibit them from doing anything commercial with it: the Attribution-NonCommercial CC license. I also threw in a little blurb on the copyright pages trying to explain that.

I am also not making the choices that would limit my ability to distribute these stories as I would like. You should read the publically available license for the KDP and KDP Select programs, because there is apparently a Non-Disclosure Agreement in there. Not sure how publicly accessible knowledge can be under an NDA, but I'd rather not annoy Amazon. Let's just say Amazon protects themselves from being taken advantage of. I think it is a good thing for them to do, but I think it is also a good thing for me to not agree to that specific part of the license with at least these short stories. (There are multiple aspects to KDP and/or KDP Select, so some parts of the license can be avoided by selecting different options.)

Also, no DRM on these. Can't change the DRM status of Sci-FU at this point, but these will not have it. While Amazon's DRM I do not think is that terrible, on a matter of principle, I'm forgoing it.

I'll update the links on this blog once the stories are up for sale at $1. No print-versions of these, so I don't have any reason to set a higher price so the hard copies can compete with the digital version. (That is why Sci-FU was first $10 on the Kindle. Still is $15 for the print, but I can't change that without making changes I'd rather not.)