Life In Shadows

The cover looks better on Amazon!

After two to three weeks of wrestling with Amazon’s Digital Text Platform, trying to publish my long short story Life In Shadows (more of that later), I’ve finally realised that as with most computer problems I experience the fault was not, in fact, with the technology, but rather with my lack of understanding of the technology. Anyway, paragraphing issues have been sorted, rogue italics ironed out, page breaks inserted and the story is now “In Review”, and should be published in the next few days.

I went for the lowest pricing option available, 99c in the US and 75p in the UK. If it had been possible, as it’s a short story, not a novel, after all.

Or is it?

 Turns out that Life In Shadow’s length puts it into the category of “novelette”. According to dictionary.com, a novelette is “an extended prose narrative story or short novel.”

Wikipedia says a novelette has a word count of between 7,500 and 17,499.

So novelette it is. Which eases my concerns about the price somewhat.

And Life In Shadows? Here’s the product description I painstakingly entered into Amazon:

Set in Thailand, Life In Shadows is a 10,000 word short story [damn, I should have said novelette], about two writers: why they succeed, why they fail, and why sometimes they never even start.

Thirty years ago, Charles Shaw wrote his critically acclaimed first novel. The world is still waiting for his second book. When aspiring writer and freelance journalist Michael Hayes is granted a shock interview with Shaw, he is determined to discover why the author is now a recluse. But Shaw doesn’t give his secrets away easily, and Michael discovers there are reasons why some people remain in shadows, and many more why others, including himself, should come into the light.

One of those reasons might be the beautiful and mysterious Francesca, who Michael meets while waiting to interview Shaw.

Tags: Amazon Kindle, Bangkok, Life In Shadows, Short Story, Thailand

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 24th, 2010 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Short Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.