19th Oct2011

Can You Hear Me Now?

by Aaron

Update: Out Now!!

The audio book is out! You can get it here: http://www.podiobooks.com/title/as-darkness-ends-book-one

I’m very excited to bring this post to everyone. When I started work on As Darkness Ends I had a game plan about how I wanted to distribute the book and get the word out. One important aspect to this are audio books. Now we all know about Audible and books on tape (do people even get those any more?) but in the past few years a new medium has emerged: the podiobook.

So what’s a “podiobook”? It’s exactly what it sounds like, an audio book that is distributed in podcast form. A story is serialized and delivered in “episodes”, each one a chunk of the story. I first learned about podiobooks when I heard Nathan Lowell guest on I Should Be Writing back in ’09. He spoke about his amazing Traders Tales series and his success on Podiobooks.com. I checked out the site and found a huge amount of books on audio and free! I was hooked.

Fast forward to 2011 and I’ve listened to a multitude of books and (most importantly!) donated / supported the authors I’ve checked out. Podiobooks has a fantastic setup where you listen for free and if you like the book, you’re encouraged to donate to the author. I’ve done this for some writers while others I’ve bought their books on Kindle to support them in that fashion. Either way, it’s a win.

This is a fantastic system to distribute books on audio and also support independent authors and I HAD to get on-board with them. So that’s what I’ve done. The audio version of As Darkness Ends: Book One is coming out on audio… this Friday! The story is six episodes and narrated by me. I had a blast recording the story and producing it for everyone to hear.

I hope you check it out and enjoy hearing the story again for the first time.

Category : As Darkness Ends, As Darkness Ends: Book One
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13th Oct2011

We’ve Got iBooks

by Aaron

Today’s post is short and sweet but you can pretty much guess from the image above: As Darkness Ends: Book One is now on iBooks! It took a lot longer than I would have liked to have waited but it’s here and ready for iPad / iPhone / iPod consumption. You can get to it from my store but here’s a direct link to get to the book even faster.

With this listing added, the book is now available for all reading devices! There’s no way you can’t read the book and world domination is now complete. Thanks for stopping by everyone.

Category : As Darkness Ends
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10th Oct2011

We Live In The Future

by Aaron

Happy Monday everyone. I decided to take a break this week and post something more essay-like than something related to writing. After my ‘Meet the Author’ event on Google Plus I was shown again more proof towards a saying I’ve been using a lot the past couple of years: We live in the future.

This statement is best seen through the eyes of children and those born in the past couple of years. These future inheritors of our world enter a place so different than we did that it is almost unbelievable. Our children will never see an encyclopedia or likely a dictionary. The phrase ‘look it up’ has been replaced with ‘Google it’ or ‘check Wikipedia’.

The analog world we knew so well has been left in the dust. They’ll never see camera film or small canisters in the fridge to keep them fresher longer. Mailing away and waiting for pictures will be as foreign as 1-hour photo. Tape is only something used when wrapping presents & hanging posters while ‘skip protection’ will likely be interpreted as filling cracks in a sidewalk so no one trips.

Paper is electronic, books talk to us (using text-to-speech) and one day handling a physical book will make no sense. I already have a collection of hundreds of books that exist in the ether of the Internet, nowhere else. Even *MY* book exists in digital format, only two actual print copies are in the world (I own one of them).

Mail is checked, not delivered. Stamp prices are forever, though what are they good for? The USPS, UPS and FedEx exist to deliver goods bought online. Bills are not just paid online but pay themselves! Paychecks are available on payday and the only reason to go to a bank is to open an account or get a loan.

Drivers never get lost, tolls pay themselves and friends split dinner bills using their smartphone, Paypal, Venmo and others. Small-time merchants have become full credit card acceptors just by plugging a small card reader into their phone. Speaking of phones, our children will likely never have to untangle a looped phone wire and couldn’t dream of a time where you needed to always be sure you had some dimes and quarters in your car in case you needed to make a call while out.

Music comes in gigabytes, not boxed sets. Album art is a thing of the past. Television shows air when you have time to watch, movie selections are streamed directly into your house and movie theaters never had huge marquees outside listing their selections. They’ll never know about looking movie times in the newspaper. For them, the newspaper is out of date if the publication’s website hasn’t been updated in the past twenty minutes.

Toys require USB cords and browsing a catalog has been replaced with Amazon wish lists.

There are likely a million ways to see how in just a short amount of time, we have catapulted ourselves into a society that is almost beyond connected. If our past-selves from thirty years ago glimpsed into our average life today, they would truly say we live in the future. Now, where’s my flying car and hoverboard?

Sound off in the comments how you believe we live in the future. I’d love to hear the stuff I overlooked or just plain forgot about.

Category : Just me
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07th Oct2011

There’s Fire in Your Books

by Aaron

Last week Amazon announced their highly-rumored tablet reader, which is also a competing product to B&N’s Nook Color. It wasn’t so much of a secret and more of a ‘when is it coming?’ situation. The tablet, called the Amazon Fire, is revolutionary in one big fact: the price. Amazon knows about pricing and knows they need to get it right in this market that’s not just hot completely changing how everyone reads books and accesses information.

So what is the Kindle Fire? I could go into technical specs and quote CPU speed and all sorts of geeky stuff but none of that matters. All you need to know is that it’s a 7-inch, color, touch-screen device that costs $199. It also ties together all the digital goods Amazon’s been peddling for the past few years. Bought some MP3′s from their music store? It’s there. Picked up a digital movie last year? It’s there. The tons of Kindle books you have in your library? It’s there too. Amazon has brought us a device that delivers all of the content they sell and keep on their servers. The Fire utilizes their storage (called cloud storage) to keep all your stuff. You just download it again whenever you want and it’s on the device.

The Fire looks great so far and I believe will fully occupy the sub-iPad market where tons of Android tablets are left to whither and die. But Amazon didn’t stop there. They also changed their entire Kindle lineup with the Kindle Touch and a redesigned Kindle. The keyboard’s been removed and frankly that means the base Kindle (with no touch) doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Who wants to input text with a compass button with a selector in the middle? Not this guy.

Here’s a quick run-down of the updates:

Amazon has countered B&N’s Nook with their own touch version. It works the same way, using an infrared overlay that sits on top of the ePaper display and tracks touch. The display itself isn’t touch at all. This means you keep the fantastic ePaper technology but get touch capability. The touch comes in a wifi and 3G model while the base Kindle is only wifi. Luckily if you prefer the last-generation Kindle, they’re still selling those at $99.

I find it amazing how quickly the price has dropped on the Kindle. Just a few years ago when it came out, it was $399 and I bought one. Not to mention there was a 3-4 month wait to get them. Now they’re selling for $79 (base Kindle with ads on the lock screen) and you can have it shipped next-day. Amazon is single-handedly ushering in the eBook revolution with B&N, Apple and Sony helping out to make this the STANDARD when it comes to reading. In ten years will reading a physical book be an oddity? Based on price, convenience and selection, it’s difficult to see why people would want to build a collection of physical books over a digital one where space is infinite.

Where do you fall on the eBook / physical book debate? Do you like the new Kindle’s? Sound off in the comments!

Category : Just me
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05th Oct2011

Thank You Steve Jobs

by Aaron

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I’m sitting here on my couch feeling nothing. I’m numb. My fingers are tapping out this blog post on my iPad, the same device I was using just a few minutes ago when I learned that Steve Jobs died tonight. Twitter has become a stream of reminiscing and sorrow as everyone is telling their stories about their first Apple products and also how they learned about the news.

I consider myself lucky that I had an Apple in 1985 and grew up with a computer in the house, an oddity in the 80′s. I never would’ve thought that that machine would lead me down a road where I would be passionate about technology. I fondly remember playing Lemonade Stand on my Apple //c, working day after day to make a profit. I was likely the only kid around who knew how to play blackjack, a favorite of mine on “The Apple at Play” disk. Many years of mine growing up were behind a small, 6″ display playing Jeopardy, Kids on Keys and learning AppleSoft Basic.

My passion for Apple was reignited in 2003 when I bought my first Apple product ever as an adult: the iPod. It was seeing and holding this revolutionary device that forever changed me and let me see that there was a different world out there than what I was living in. In three short years I had a Mac Mini running alongside my PC and I never looked back.

Today my house is a Mac-only house. I write my books and do all my work on my iMac. My wife uses her MacBook every day and it’s already her third Mac that she’s owned. Two iPods, two iPads, an airport router and other scattered iPods around the house that I’ve lost count of all come together to create my tech world.

I swear by Scrivener as my writing software but the creativity it helps foster is based on the creativity of the Mac OS and the realm in which all creative people work. In the end, the technology doesn’t matter. It’s the connections we make with each other through these machines and the passion it brings out in us. Steve Jobs knew this and forever changed the world by bringing us an emotional connection to a world that is very difficult to navigate.

So tonight as we all remember Steve Jobs and the vast contributions he’s made to the world, take a moment to use that device to show someone you love them. Take a moment to connect with those who matter. In the end, it’s all we have.

Thank you Steve for forever changing my life and for creating a world where those who wish to contribute to the world have the tools to do so.

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