Password Incorrect

Mo-books, writer 2.0, tech-absurd | Mo-booki, pisarz 2.0, tech-absurd

Introducing #1picstory

One sentence description of #1picstory is this (originally tweeted here):

A story written within one picture, created on an iPhone from a very first idea to a very first tweet.

I started this new litexperimental project at the beginning of a year. At that time people make resolutions. New Year Resolutions are good, because you can refresh your mind. I needed a refreshment, what’s more I desperately needed an upgrade. But I’m not good in resolutions of any kind. I just knew I had to try something new. This was not enough for a tasty blog post. So I’ve been scrolling through apps at iTunes to get inspired. Yes, if I want to get inspired I just take an iPhone and play with it. After 15 light scrolls and 4 fast ones I’ve found Type Drawing. This awesome app lets you paint with words. This is what I needed.

What? Yes, you’re right. I want to say, that the inspiration didn’t come from a noble philosopher who is dead for 400 years. My imagination was reloaded by a decent 1,59 EUR application which is still available at iTunes AppStore (good) and haven’t been updated for three weeks (bad). »»»

Do I care about mobile readers? [checklist]

Year 2010 has already been called “The Year of the Mobile”. Internet activity is shifting from desktop computers to laptops to tablets to mobile phones. This is an inevitable trend. People play music on mobile phones, update their social networks, watch movies and even play games. What about reading? It seems to be one of the easiest things. It’s not.

One side of the story is that people complain about general reading comfort – and this is a common excuse to stay with paper. The other side of the story is a fact, that a majority of Internet content is still not mobile friendly.

Here’s a quick checklist of things, which can be done to make mobile readers’ life much easier.

Do I publish my books in formats optimized for mobile reading?

If you plan to publish a next book, a free teaser of a book or any new piece of writing, think not only of Scribd, BookBuzzr or Lulu. Think also of sites, which convert your book to formats tailored for mobile viewing, like ePub or mobi. The most popular services, besides Kindle Store, are Smashwords, Feedbooks, Wattpad and Kobo. »»»

EClicto e-book platform launched in Poland [analysis]

EClicto, a long awaited Polish e-book platform was officially launched on 10th of December. The company behind it is Kolporter Info SA, already running an online store with a large catalog of paper books.

The platform includes an e-bookstore and a dedicated e-reading device supporting ePub format. It’s a rebranded Netronix’s EB600 model (same as Cool-er or eSlick) with a Linux-based software written from scratch. Copyrighted content is DRM-ed with a proprietary ePub format.

E-reader’s launch price is 899PLN (approximately 312USD or 215EUR). It’s claimed to be the cheapest e-reading device available in Poland and it’s true. International Kindle with custom duty and shipping costs is an expenditure of at least 350USD. The e-reader starting pack includes 100 free books, including bestsellers. For those who haven’t bought the e-reader yet, there are a few free books (among them a Polish edition of my Password Incorrect) available for download to test eClicto Manager – a free PC application to manage and read books on a computer. »»»

15 free tools to mobilize your blog

Mobile web is growing at an extremely fast pace. Google says, that “50% of all new internet connections in 2009 will come from mobile phones”. According to the latest report by AdMob, data traffic created only by iPhone/iPod Touch has increased 19 times(!) from September 2008.

Can mobile users read your blog? There are several reasons why this is important. Make a quick check and open a blog on your cellphone (probably smartphone). If it loads fast and shows nice – you don’t have to read this post. Otherwise you might find tools listed below useful.

The tools are grouped into three categories: mobile friendly blogging platforms, plugins for self-hosted blogs and blog mobilizing services.

Mobile friendly blogging platforms

When collecting information for this article I discovered, that blogging platforms like Blogger or TypePad are one-way mobile friendly. They support writing posts from mobile phones, not reading them. There are tools to mail a post to a blog. There are special mobile apps for that. But when you’re done with writing, you will surprised afterwards how hard is to read it. The exception is WordPress, proving one more time, that it’s the best blogging tool available.

If you plan to switch to another hosted blogging platform, think of WordPress, which makes your blog available both to you and your reader. »»»

5 reasons why writers should mobilize their blogs

In this article I’ll try to describe how important is for a writer to mobilize a blook, blog or a site. In a next post I’ll give tips on how to easily do that.

Mobile Web is growing fast

According to a study by Morgan Stanley, there will be over 1 billion “heavy mobile data users” by 2013. It’s a major trend: people switch from desktop activity to mobile activity. On the other hand, mobile readers are disappointed when using mobile web. Non-mobilized pages are too slow to load on cellphones, they look ugly, and most importantly – they are unreadable.

Social sites dominate mobile web

A report by Openwave shows that four out of ten top mobile destinations are social networks. Why is that so important for a writer? Because probably for most of us social networks like Twitter, Facebooks and alikes are an effective way to communicate with readers. Ask yourself a question: how many of the readers of your blog and potential buyers of your book are opening your messages from a mobile device? In my case it’s a prevailing majority.

Links from mobile apps

And here comes the problem with links. If you tweet a link to your site, which is (still) not mobilized, it’s OK when a reader opens it from a computer. It can be disastrous when opened from, let’s say iPhone’s Tweetie. The reader will probably never try it again. You loose a chance to be read – and to be retweeted. »»»

Short stories made cellphone friendly

I’m a mobile freak. As you might know from my Twitter updates being read on your shiny cellphone, a couple of weeks ago I started to publish my stories through a mobilized site.

The project is called Mobile Fiction Stories (click for preview here). Every Friday I’m adding a new story, hoping that some day this would become a nice 5-minute-Friday-cellphone-reading habit. You can easily find the stories on Twitter – they’re tagged #mobilefiction. I tweet each one twice a week, so that you don’t need to spend too much time scrolling back your Twitter stream.

The stories come from my book Password Incorrect, which is free to download from Feedbooks. Obviously, ready for download to mobile devices like eReaders and cellphones.

I went mobile with Mofuse. Really cool thing. Mofused blogs show nice and load really fast on most cellphone models with a browser.

If you haven’t tried to read a piece of fiction on your mobile phone, give it a try right now. Just type mobilefiction.mofuse.mobi or choose one of the other easy options. And if you experience any problems with that – well, that’s what my tech-absurd stories are about.

Publish a book with your literary tweets

Have you ever thought of making an e-book with your literary tweets? If you still have doubts, consider this: you can easily do it yourself, you can do it without any costs, you can use the book as a promotional tool.

Below there are tips based on my personal experience. Just make sure you’ve got a large coffee ready – and make your book happen!

How to collect a content?

Twitter search is currently showing results from 9 recent days. Nobody will find your fantastic tweet, if it’s 10 days old. 10 days means  “gone”.

It might be difficult even for yourself to collect your own Twitter stream. And here is a rescue: Tweetbook. It’s a wonderful web service, where you can make a pdf or xml file with your tweets (up to 3200). Having all of them in one editable document will make it really easy to select the golden ones – those you want in your book. »»»

15 free covers for Twitter fiction books

If you are considering to publish a book of your literary tweets, the only thing which stops you might be a lack of a cover. Problem solved. You can pick up your favourite one from below. They all are for free. I’ve designed them to help self-publishers like myself. What I’m only asking for is to download my free book, leave a review and spread the word.

Series 1

Series 2

Series 3

Series 4

Series 5

“Twitter Fiction Book Cover” by Nick Name is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share alike 3.0 Unported License.

How to turn Wordle into an e-book cover generator

Wordle is a fantastic word cloud generator. Its creator, Jonathan Feinberg, has managed to do one great thing: with the selection of fonts, colors and a whole idea how the words are composed, the effect is far beyond the IT world. It already belongs to the world of art.

With Wordle it’s all fun. You enter URL address (f.e. of your blog) and get the cloud of most popular words used. You can also paste a text – and this is actually a possibility Wordle is giving to self-publishing authors. When a writer wants to publish an e-book, with a destination places like Feedbooks, Smashwords, Scribd and alikes, the prepress knowledge is not needed any more. In fact, in most cases the only missing part is just a jpeg picture with a catchy cover. And it doesn’t need to be hi-res CMYK file. One screenshot is enough.

Below there are some tips and examples of how to create it. »»»

“Zany collection of tech-absurd short stories”

Please find below a full text of Court Merrigan’s review of my book Password Incorrect. I’m really proud of is as this is a first, and I hope not last, international assessment of the book, which I’m trying to promote to English-speaking readers without any publisher’s help.

Court Merrigan
Originally from Nebraska, Court Merrigan has lived in various places East and West and is currently back in the US with his family. His short stories have appeared in Blackbird, Weber Review, Porcupine, Evergreen Review, The Summerset Review, Dublin Quarterly, The Kyoto Journal, Pindeldyboz, Identity Theory, and Angle, among others. He is currently working on a novel. He blogs at Endless Emendation

Password Incorrect is a truly zany collection of “tech-absurd” short stories by Nick Name, pen name for Polish author Piotr Kowalczyk, which only a networked world could have unleashed. It’s available for free from Feedbooks. »»»

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