A few days ago, I blogged about my experiences in taking Joe Konrath’s eight hour e-book challenge and the resulting book, Old Mommark’s Tale.
Turns out that I was not the only writer to accept Joe’s challenge. In fact, more than 140 writers accepted and beat Joe’s challenge and Joe has put up monster post listing all winners complete with covers and mini-blurbs. Old Mommark’s Tale is there as well as many other fascinating, exciting and hilarious e-books. The broad spectrum of offerings alone is amazing, as is the quality, at least of those I have read. And best of all, many of the books are free at the moment.
Several writers have also blogged about their experiences taking the challenge, including Ruth Nestvold, Laura VanArendonk Baugh, T.R. Goodman and Cege Smith. Meanwhile, Lindy Moone has set herself the challenge to review as many of the Konrath challenge stories as she can, spending one hour per review.
As I said before, I won’t be producing every e-book or even the majority of them the eight hour way. However, on occasion it can be enormously liberating to just let go and write something from scratch. In fact, it was so much fun that I will probably do it again some time.
In other news, Amazon has opened a Kindle store in Mexico. So Mexican readers can now buy Pegasus Pulp e-books at Amazon Mexico. And readers in Brazil now have an alternative to Amazon Brazil, for Pegasus Pulp e-books are now also available at Livraria Cultura. Meanwhile, David Gaughran compares the distributors Smashwords and Draft2Digital at his blog.
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Thanks for the link! “Monmark” is one of the challenge books I’m grabbing, and I love the background of how he got his name!
I am sympathetic to the lost time researching rubber plants and alternatives. I took some time to learn all about true baize and its modern adulterations and substitutions — fascinating, but not the best use of my 8 hours…!
For me, the challenge was good practical therapy; I tend to pulverize a piece into perfection, given the chance. I look forward to reading “Monmark” and will review when I’m done. 🙂
Thanks for the comment, Laura. I hope you’ll enjoy Old Mommark. Your book is one of those challenge books I grabbed as well. Love the cover BTW.
I agree that this challenge was great therapy for perfectionism and for getting lost in a research rabbit hole. I wouldn’t want to write every book that way (never mind that it wouldn’t work well for anything above novelette length), but once in a while it was liberating.
When I looked through Joe’s completed list of challenge winners, I was surprised at just how many there were and how widely they varied. I picked up Old Mommark and look forward to reading it. Everything’s better with pirates, especially pirates named after cheese 😉
I definitely sympathize with losing time to research. I was worried that I was going to end up in a research spiral, so I ended up just sort of glossing over the deeper technical details of the technology in my story.
Considering you wrote about a Steampunk tech support lady, it’s no surprise that your story required some research. But IMO one of the valuable aspects of the excercise was also the realization that sometimes it’sokay to gloss over details rather than vanish into a research rabbit hole.
Hopy you enjoy Old Mommark. I picked up Abigail Abernathy BTW and look forward to reading about her adventures in tech support.
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