I feel how I image William “Doc” Carver’s horse felt after it had been asked to dive from its 50 ft. platform into the Deep Eddy Springs in Austin, TX for the fourth time that day.
Horse diving isn’t so popular anymore (for some weird reason), and I’ll go out on a limb here suggest that horses probably don’t miss it much. First off, the water was cold. The pay was a pile of fermenting oats. And to top it all off, any animal with four hooves probably doesn’t have any business in the water.
As a fledgling ebook writer/designer/publisher/marketer I feel sort of like a diving horse belly flopping into a digital ocean from an airplane (pink belly, pink belly). Not only is the water cold, the pay zilch and my talents not always ideally suited, but its an abysmally long drop followed by a marathon swim.
This week has brought some favorable news to diving horses such as myself, now I only have to swim 578 miles to shore instead of 837 (numbers may not represent actual distance to shore). Seeing how I’ve already put the first 3 behind me, you can imagine my immense relief. [real response when news hit: “Son of a… frissle frassle… monkey love.”]
The big news is that Amazon Kindle has created an “Indie Bookstore.” A special little place on Amazon for independent ebooks — all the little diving horses like me. Accept it turns out that for a reader to find the Indie Bookstore they have to go to the Kindle department, click on the Kindle ebooks tab, scan the left navigation bar until they find “Indie Bookstore” and click on it.
Then a potential reader has the option of picking from all the diving horses who have made it to shore already, or he/she can browse through categories that include Romance, Fantasy and Science Fiction for the horses that are within a few miles of shore. Seeing how I’m still paddling around in the Kindle Triangle fending off How To Manuals on making homemade Pepsi using tantric relaxation principles, none of this does me a hill of beans.
Ah well. At least there is a bit of good news for my loving fans who still want to read Fistful of Reefer but don’t have a Kindle (or iPad or smartphone, etc.) Amazon has also unveiled their Cloud Reader, which is pretty darn cool. Basically the Cloud Reader serves as a way for anyone with a computer to read ebooks bought from the Kindle store without having to download any special application or software and without having to be on-line while they read.
You still need an account with Amazon, but you need that to buy ebooks or anything else from the site. Click the link to the cloud reader. Sign in using your username and password. Give the app permission to communicate with your account and bingo, you can then either read books via the cloud (while on-line) or click on the titles you have bought (Fistful of Reefer) in order to download them to your computer. You still read it straight from the Cloud Reader. So, if you’ve been hemming and hawing about reading Fistful, it’s now a bit easier.[divider]
In the meantime I’ve got a lot of swimming to do, and three more shows before I get my bucket of moldy oats.