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Tag Archives: kindle

I have a Kindle So Why Did I Buy a New Paperback?

19 Wednesday Sep 2012

Posted by Martin J Frankson in The Arts in General

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

ebook, Frankson, kindle, paperback


I have a kindle.
A lot of people do.
Big deal you may say.
That’s fair enough but today I deliberately bought two paperbacks in Waterstones. I could have bought them over my wifi link and download to my kindle but I chose not to.

Why?
Am I turning into a Luddite?
Absolutely not!
The thing is, no matter what wizardry there is in this brave new world, at the end of the day, I’m an aesthete and a physical entity and I do prefer to hold a book, feeling that cold crispness of a fresh virgin page, get heady on the scent of its perfume, admire the cover art and ultimately take it home

While there is a future for eBooks, a happy equilibrium will be established within the decade.

Paper can lie down with the eReader.

Hardbacks, folios, collectors editions and the like will still be available as perhaps gifts etc with a code to allow one to download the electronic equivalent.

The difference between a paper book and an ebook is really the difference between sex and phone sex. One is preferable but sometimes expediency wins out. Not that that’s a personal endorsement of the latter but merely a personal opinion of an observed reality of the modern world.

I buy eBooks and I buy paper books.

Sometimes I’m an aesthete, sometimes I’m not.

Black Champagne – My First Novel…

10 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by Martin J Frankson in Self Publishing, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Black Champagne, createspace, kindle, lulu, Martin J Frankson, novel


As you may know, my first novel, Black Champagne will be released later his year. It’s set in Chicago in the US and it’s very much steeped in the noir/crime/mystery tradition. It’s main character, Callum McCambridge is a private detective and ex Chicago PD. A face from the past returns to the present to wreak revenge on Callum from the shadows. As Callum watches the life he knows slide down the pan, he goes to ground, coming face to face with his past to find out who’s behind it all.  

In a journey that takes him from the seedy underbelly of Chicago to the other worldliness of rural Illinois,  from the death of Jimmy Hoffa to the mysterious suicide of his wife, this is a tale of a man who lost the soul the though he never had but missed it when it was gone.

Does he get it back? Fate whips its tail in one final awful crack that could send him hurtling to even a lowlier  place but does he succumb?

The editor is Emma Warnock who lives and works in Belfast, United Kingdom/Ireland and the cover art work is being designed by Roberta Martucci from Naples, Italy.

 If all goes to plan, my book will be available for sale on Kindle, CreateSpace and Lulu from September 2012 so watch this space!

Kindle : How To Email Documents to Yourself for Reading on Kindle

20 Monday Feb 2012

Posted by patrickmartinthewriter in Self Publishing

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Tags

Fiction, kindle, Martin J Frankson, Noir, writing


One of the many wonderful features of Kindle is that you email your humble documents to yourself for reading on Kindle.

“How do you that?” I hear your whisper

Well, I have pieced together the following and it’s a definitive guide:

First of all, log into your Amazon account and choose Your Account from the top right

 

 

1. Save the document as a pdf file to your computer’s hard drive.
2.  Email the document as an attachment to your special email provided by Amazon.  In the subject line of the email type the word “Convert”.  This is the magic word that lets the document “reflow” or resize text once it hits your Kindle.  Send the document.
3.  In under a minute (in my experience) you will receive an email from Amazon telling you that your converted document has arrived and is available for download.  Download the .azw file to your hard drive.  Pay attention to where you save it.  I have a folder named “My Kindle Docs” to which I save converted documents.
4.  Connect your Kindle to your computer via the usb cable.  When you first connect the Kindle it acts like a removable drive.  Open this Kindle folder.  Drag the .azw file you received in the email to the documents folder on your Kindle.  Viola!  You can now read the document and resize the text size as needed.

Kindle : How to Read Your Own Documents on Kindle

13 Wednesday Jul 2011

Posted by patrickmartinthewriter in Self Publishing

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Tags

kindle, Martin J Frankson


 

By hook and by crook, I finally got this to work. If you follow the steps below, you should be able to make this work for you too. Its basically on the principle of emailing a PDF to your Kindle email account that was provided to you when you registered your Kindle’s settings on page 2 under Device Email.

I will use the reference myemail@kindle.com

You will find your Kindle Email address on page 2 of your Kindle’s Device Settings

1/ Convert your document into a PDF

2/ Log onto Amazon and then choose Your Account on the top right

3/Scroll down until you see Digital Content on the left hand side

4/ Click on Manage Your Kindle

5/ Click on Personal Document Settings

6/ Now you have to tell Kindle which email addresses are approved senders. You cannot send email to your Kindle from any old email address. Well, you can but Kindle likes to know if it’s legitimate. Click on Add a New Approved Email Address and just type in the name of your email address you are mostly likely to email from. You can add as many as you like but you must click Add A New Approved Email Address each time

7/ From one of your approved email accounts, send an email with your PDF attachment, with the word CONVERT in the Subject line and send it to mymail@free.kindle.com

That’s right. It looks different from the email mentioned in your Kindle device settings. The snag is that if you email to the settings email, you could be charged $2.50. By sending it to the free.kindle.com email address, you can do this for free. Why Amazon does this, who knows

8/ Now assuming your Kindle is on wifi or 3g, just wait a few seconds and hey presto, your document now appears on the Home screen and is ready for reading

Nothing’s simple, is it? Let me know how this goes for you. It worked for me but I had formatting issues i.e. page breaks were ignored but it’s only my document.

 

Unread Stories – My First Venture into Kindle Self-Publishing

12 Tuesday Jul 2011

Posted by patrickmartinthewriter in My Collections

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Tags

Amazon, kindle, Martin J Frankson, Unread Stories


I have published a short story for sale on Kindle, Unread Stories  which is a hardboiled, noir mystery set in Chicago.  It’s for sale for the basement price of 99pence/cents and I do hope you enjoy it.

Sugar and Spice by Saffina Desforges

06 Monday Jun 2011

Posted by patrickmartinthewriter in Review

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Amazon, Crime, Frankson, kindle, novel, Saffina, sugar and spice


 This is the first novel by one of the most  recent heroines of crime fiction and self publishing, Saffina Desforges who hails from England.

Set in England, the backdrop is the disappearance and murder of young girls. A hue and cry goes out. The tabloids bay for blood, the police are under pressure. The usual suspects, literally, are rounded and hounded. One in particular, a convicted paedophile with insight into his condition, gives help, understanding  and succour to the mother of one of the victims, to the chagrin of her partner.

There are several strands of narrative which are expertly and seamlessly sewn and woven together which coalesce with aplomb at the end – which I shan’t give away.  One of the strands is a family man who seeks private treatment from a leftfield private clinic for his burgeoning feelings he has towards children.

I’ve personally never read this subject before in any work of fiction and this does break a dark but new ground and one well worth exploring. I shuddered while reading this strand. I admit to being shocked at first and I wondered where on earth it would lead.

It led me to the very end of the book which I read inside three days flat – a fast feat for this blog. Sugar and Spice is not just a piece of well written, well paced, heart stopping crime fiction but has been built on a bedrock of detailed and in-depth research.

 This research, which I understand was years in the doing, has resulted in dressing the characters, plot and storyline in robes of depth and credibility. Empathy even. Empathy is a much bandied about word but to ascribe empathy to a character who, according to popular culture, is a monster, takes great skill and literary dexterity in negotiating some very precarious literary paths.

Do it too well, one would suspect the novel of having its own questionable agenda. Do it badly and the novel becomes a populist one dimensional foghorn from which one would learn nothing.

This novel is neither for the reasons I’ve given above. Given the subject matter, this is no mean feat. Considering how well Saffina has pulled this off, one can only imagine what her other and future works would be like assuming she tackles less controversial subjects.

But I dont want her to retreat into the warm beds of literary safety. In this largely post-taboo world, whatever taboos that remain happen to be uber-taboos, taboos that dare not speak even their names. That is not to say that piercing the membranes of ignorance with the spears of literature equates to giving sympathy to them or being the thin end of the wedge.

Empathy and understanding is the spirit of awareness and education and exposition. Considering the de facto heavy moral responsibility the novelist has when venturing into the Terra Incognitas of unexplored taboo-laden subject matter, Saffina has understandably, written more exposition that would be needed or required in other crime novels but for this venture into a highly controversial area, it is very much needed for imparting of cold fact and information without equivocation or ambiguity.,

This book has no doubt, ruffled a few feathers  and made a few people uncomfortable but it’s been done in an bold, gracious and extremely well written and responsible manner with no forays in salaciousness or sensationalism.

Dare I say this is a ground breaking novel which I believe will be spoken off in many years to come? How many books can I say that off in recent times?

I commend this book and have given it 5/5 on Amazon.

Available for Kindle and Nook.

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