There are many reasons. But the best one is: because I can.

I’m happy to write. And you like to read.  So I give, you get. No money has changed hands. Awesome, isn’t it?

For the next few hours you can download the German translation (+ exercises + vocabulary + study instructions) of my recent book “Brian The Book” on Amazon for free! (offer expired)

Amazon UK – Amazon US - Amazon DE – Amazon IT – Amazon FR – Amazon ES

Tell your friends!

P.S.: Also, I finally got my act together and published a few short narratives from the “early days” that survived several HDD-crashes. They’re also in German, and they’re also free for the next 24 hours. Here’s the link. (replace the “.com” with your country-code, if necessary)

P.P.S: For some interesting facts on publishing and being a writer in the year 2012 I got a treat for you on my personal blog.

P.P.P.S.: Since this is not much of a blog post, we’ll follow up tomorrow with an exciting contribution by our guest blogger Henry Fitzgerald. Stay tuned!

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

This is the story of a book and its creation:

About a month ago, when I saw that my anarchically drawn short story for German learners found such positive feedback, I decided to try something a bit more refined.

From the beginning the idea was to create a children’s book, something that was highly visual and expressive without too many words. I needed two things: a) a character that was simple enough for me to draw repeatedly and b) a topic. People and animals were out of question from the start: anatomically too difficult. So I started looking for dead-simple inanimate objects.

One day when I was doing the dishes (good place to get ideas) it came to me: books.

I was going to create a character who is a book and make the narrative about the changing role of reading in the 21st century.

From Grey Matter To Digital Device

Once this understanding was in place I started sketching with pen and paper. Over the course of the next four weeks these drawings would get revised, scrapped and redone. When I was content with a scene, I picked up a 0.4 black fine-liner and started tracing the outlines. Finally, I scanned all the drawings and colored them digitally while limiting myself to a fixed set of colors to give it a coherent feeling from the first panel to the last.

After that, the digital “book binding” would begin. What binding does an ebook have, you ask? Well, none. But the technical details are relatively boring and I’d rather talk about something else, instead.

Paper Vs. iPads

The newspapers and blogs these days are full with debates whether ebooks are destroying the book culture or revitalizing it, whether paper or e-ink screens are the best way to read, whether a book needs to have a scent to be enjoyed or not, etc.

I’ve written extensively about these topics myself (see at the end of this post for links) and many times what I read about the topic seemed somewhat…childish, in the sense of obstinately clinging to the status quo. Also, I think the word “childish” is unfair because children often make a lot more sense than adults and we should maybe create a new word: adultish.

In that sense, Brian The Book is a children’s book that tackles the prejudices of adults. By working mainly with images my hope is that the book’s narrative will fly under the radar of logic and encourage alternatives ways of thinking about the subject.

All You Can Read: Get A Free Copy!

As usual, we’re kicking off the publication of Brian The Book with a free promotion, which means that you won’t just get a free sample or a brochure, no: You can get the whole book as a free download, no questions asked from Thursday, Apr 19th, 12am to Friday, Apr 20th Monday 23rd 11:59pm Pacific Standard time.

How does it work? Click here to go to the Amazon Kindle Store. And don’t worry, you don’t need a Kindle to read this. There’s a variety of reading apps for every device from iPhone to Android.

Since this is an independent publication and I don’t have millions of dollars to throw to the wind for advertising, I would like to ask you for help. There are many ways in which you can assist, and most of them will just take up a few minutes of your time but will help Brian The Book to soar into the minds and hearts of readers worldwide:

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

It was Clay Shirky who said in a recent interview that publishing is no longer a job, it’s a button.

In fact, I’m staring at one right now. It’s blue and it says “publish”. It’s simple. Shall I click it? No? But it would make me a world-class publisher, wouldn’t it?

Some people will say yes, others no. I’d say it all depends on how you define “publishing”.  But no matter how we define it, we have to admit that it has never been easier for almost anyone to publish almost anything. Needless to say, the content here is irrelevant. To be more precise, the fact that it has become easier to publish something hasn’t automatically made it easier to publish something awesome!

Sure, it may have lowered the bar and allowed people to be heard who otherwise would never have been able to get past the gatekeepers, but it has also brought with it a new tension between convenience and creativity.

When “because I can” is no longer enough

Like many people, when I started my first blog, I was intrigued by the simplicity. I could just write a few words, insert a picture and hit publish. I could do that many times a day, as often as I wanted. Nobody would tell me what to post or what not to post. “My blog was my castle”. This was way before microblogging on Twitter became a daily necessity of digital life, by the way.

Now, almost a decade later, I have sobered up a little. I know how easy it is to publish something and I’m also painfully aware of the millions of blogs that get absolutely zero traffic because they’re full of redundant, inarticulate or irrelevant stuff!

I can do it. But should I?

The English verb can is interesting, but its seeming simplicity is misleading. The French have two words for it, with very different meanings. One of them, pouvoir refers to being able to do something regarding time or circumstance and the other one, savoir, refers to being able to do it as in having learned it

Returning to Clay Shirky’s quote from above, yes, everyone can be a publisher in the sense of pouvoir, because it’s so convenient. But the savoir-faire, or the know-how, as we say in English, is something very different.

Now, I’m aware that measuring competence is a difficult and all too often highly arbitrary endeavor. I leave that up to the professors of publishing 101 classes. Furthermore, I can’t claim that I’m competent, myself. I can only aspire to it. And this is where it gets interesting, because it shifts publication from product to process.

But when anyone can publish anything, what is its value? Are we experiencing a revival of creativity or just a publishing inflation?

More Of The Same And Less Of Something Else

As Sam Anderson wrote in his brilliant piece about contemporary gaming culture, the production of big video games mimics the Hollywood model of ”imitations, spinoffs, prequels, sequels and even subsequels” because it’s just too risky to produce something new and unique and then not be able to sell it. For the consumer, or gamer this means: more of the same and less of something else.

Fortunately, independent game developers are challenging this model. The games they make don’t require millions of dollars and hundreds of programmers to produce. And therefore, if a game fails, it’s not the end of the world. Some of the most creative games I’ve ever seen were conceived, built and distributed in this new way.To give you an example, check out the Humble Indie Bundle and you’ll see that not just the games are very different but also the whole philosophy around them.

And there are not just indie game developers these days, there are also more and more indie publishers.

When I first heard the term, I was happy to finally have an alternative to the dreaded self-publishing, a close cousin to the horrible vanity-publishing. Indie publishing, that sounded like punk in the 70ies: wild creative expression that answered to noone.

Unfortunately, when you look around the web these days, what is self-advertised as “indie publishing” is often surprisingly dull. Not having a lot of money for editors or stylish covers is not what I mean. These are more or less technical issues. What I’m referring to is the endless amounts of more of the same, less of something else, to be more precise: Harry Potter imitations, Twilight spinoffs, Hunger Games wannabees and endless covers with scantily clad females and males hovered over by an aura of paranormal mystery or kitschy longing.

Yes, I know, it’s tough to make a living from writing, and before you start working on that 900 page novel you want to be at least marginally assured that it will be read, not to mention being sold, so why not just piggyback on what is already out there?

Pulp magazines have always existed and they’ve proven to generate cash. So, instead of being one of a hundred type-monkeys collaborating on the next “Gone With The Wind” spinoff for the supermarket aisles, people now do it individually. As long as it brings cash, this is where being an indie publisher literally pays off for most people, but I believe it hasn’t even begun!

Sure, bills need to be paid somehow. But being an indie publisher means you can do something really wild and uncompromising. Many times it will fail. But the times when it works (and sells) it’s so much better than just driving down imitation lane and making a few pennies along the way.

To give you an example, when I published Peter und das Huhn I couldn’t have cared less what people thought about it. The “drawings” were midwifed onto paper by reckless scrawls on telephone notepads. I thought it was some kind of joke. But it just keeps selling and I recently dropped the price as low as possible because I couldn’t see people spending 2.99 for something I came up with in just a few measly minutes.

My secret guess is that what people like about it is that it’s somewhat reckless. It just is what it is and doesn’t try to be something else.

No, I didn’t get rich from this. But I learned something very important. The fact that I can publish something quickly doesn’t mean that it gets easier to publish something great, but it certainly allows for experimentation and creative development beyond my wildest dreams.

For example, only through this process did I begin to take my scrawling more seriously, eventually came up with an illustrated detective story and an elaborately illustrated children’s book (soon to be released).

I’m going to click the “Publish” button now. Feel free to share this article with your friends or leave a comment below.

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img credit: broken glasses  Some rights reserved by helena_perez_garcia, publish button by wordpress

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

The result of which I would like to present today.

Text is Great, But Context Is Better

It all started about one month ago. I had this idea of a detective story for German learners, but I wasn’t just thinking in terms of text. Instead, I wanted to build an interactive reading experience that would make the most of currently available e-reading devices.

Ever since Al Gore presented his multimedia ebook last year, people have been prophesizing that the future of the book will not consist of text but will include audio, video and interactive apps.

While that sounds very exciting, we have to be aware that there are actually two general types of ebooks or e-reading experiences at the moment:

1. The e-ink experience (mostly monochrome and specialized on displaying static text or images without screen glare)
2. LCD screens (think iPad, laptops, smartphones: high resolution screens that can display everything, but not without glare)

In my experience at least, the second variety doesn’t really lend itself to reading. It’s fun to swipe and tap around on a touchscreen, jump through feeds, surf the web and watch videos, but it can’t compete with the paper-like feel of e-ink screens when it comes to reading and focusing on (long) texts for prolonged periods of time.

So for me it was clear that for the detective story I would target e-ink screens in general, in particular the Kindle, since it’s so widespread.

What kind of interactivity can you get with a screen that’s black & white and doesn’t do video or animation, you ask?

Surprisingly, a lot, especially when you stop thinking about interactivity in terms of reacting to menu items and clicking/tapping but more in terms of navigating a text both internally and externally i.e. psychologically and motorically. (Keep in mind also that reading itself is a highly interactive experience)

Put simply, I did the following:

• create illustrations for each chapter optimized for e-ink screens that encourage visual (and emotional) access
• append vocabulary and multiple choice questions to each chapter in order to enhance text-comprehension
• prepare the material in such a way that it can be navigated with a Kindle device and show translations of difficult words directly on screen

I’m aware that none of these is really unique or new on their own  (except the third maybe) but together they make for a very different experience of immersion.

Test-Drive This Publication: Download it for free!

From Wednesday, Apr 4th, 12am to Friday, Apr 6th, 12pm the book will be available as a free download in the Amazon Kindle Store. (The promotion will start at approximately 12:00 AM Pacific Standard Time and end at approximately 11:59 PM Pacific Standard Time)

This is to give as many people as possible the chance to try it out and help improve it (if necessary).

You can get it directly here or by checking out the unique web flyer I built for this publication with a new but very promising tool called Smore. (It’s currently in invite-only mode but after a few days of testing I highly recommend it!)

As usual, if you have any feedback on this I’m more than eager to hear about it here in the comments on the blog or in the form of a review over at Amazon. Tell me what you think! If I like your idea, I might integrate it into the next edition! Oh, and you can also comment directly on the Smore page.

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img: icon by Ola

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

While some people still entertain themselves with the predictable mudfight of “ebook vs paper book”, I find another question far more interesting, namely the role of reading in the age of continuous partial attention. How do we read in the 21st century? What do we read? Or do we read, at all?

As Seth Godin wrote in a recent blogpost:

One of the very real truths of our culture is being hidden in the dramatic shift from paper to ebook–lots of people are moving from paper to ‘no ebook’.

So, instead of lamenting the lack of paper smell and the disappearance of book covers to impress potential mating partners, maybe we should observe our own reading habits first. I’ll start:

For example, I have to admit that sometimes the Internet makes me crazy. It’s just too fast, too much, too random sometimes. I found out that reading can be the perfect antidote to the darker sides of the “always online” state where the horrors of multitasking, procrastination and twitchy eyelids reside.

Reading seems to counter many of the negative behaviors that come with daily Internet use: they make you slow down and use your imagination, they allow you to experience psychological realities not from an outer but from an inner perspective.

As much as I love the Internet and its infinite amounts of awesome, inspiring, informative, (insert adjective) content, I notice that the more I consume of it, the less I seem to be able to value.

Therefore: the more I use the Internet, the more books I need to read.

(If I don’t get to read my daily portion, I don’t want to know what happens.)

Reading good books (mostly novels that are mentally and emotionally challenging, not just “entertaining”) I seem to be able to retrieve some of that focus lost on the bottom of the first graph.

sidenote: I don’t always use graphs, but when I do, they make total and immediate sense without being contrived in any way, shape or form. *load sarcasm module*

But enough with my own pseudo-scientific observations for now.

Publishing In The Age Of Immediate Gratification

I had this idea a while ago that if I’m beginning to see my attention span being altered by daily torrents of online information (especially the “social media” stuff) I’m probably not the only one.

Then I saw that a lot of people were complaining about overpriced ebooks.

So I put two and two together and starting building “books” that were geared at small wallets and short attention spans. And, surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly they sold very well and still go like hotcakes.

I put “books” in quotes because I’m not even sure they are really books. I look at them more in terms of the old Marshall McLuhanism of “the book is an information service.” The publications in questions are little information snacks that can be consumed in 5-10 minutes, complete with some experimental illustrations and not more than necessary text.

If a novel by Thomas Mann is a full-fledged three course dinner, for example, these mini-books (not sure that is a better term) are like a sandwiches in between two meetings or changing trains.

The idea here is not to downgrade quality in favor of quick consumption, rather to shorten its quantity to allow people with increasingly limited amounts of time and attention spans, to read them in the first place.

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img credit:  Some rights reserved by TangYauHoong

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

The first ebook I ever saw (it was at the end of the 90s) was one of these “How To Make Money Online” schemes. It came with all the obligatory gratuitous images of bank notes, long sales letter including “social proof” of how Anne and Herbert became millionaires by following the “three step guide” and repeated oversized “buy now” buttons, not to mention a 3d-mockup of the “book”, which in fact was just a flat pdf.

I always wondered who would be so stupid to give these people money for their hopelessly overpriced publications. Even if the content of these dubious electronic books was beneficial, who would actually read a book on a computer? It seemed so counterintuitive.

From The Gutter To The Stars

Somewhere around this time I also discovered the Gutenberg Project and its hundreds of freely available classic novels and plays. Downloading a text file that contained Goethe’s Faust I wondered what to do with it.  I certainly was not going to read it staring into my pre-TFT era screen. To the surprise of my friends, I started consuming these pieces by letting a computerized text-to-speech voice read them out loud. To cover the uncanny effect of listening to a lobotomized virtual “Sam” or “Harry”, I put some Brian Eno ambient music in the background. My friends thought I had gone crazy, listening to the slaughtering of one classic text after the other, its broken limbs and innards insufficiently bedded in “music for airports”.

Ebooks: The Resurrection

Fast forwarding to the year 2012: ebooks have shed their dreary past of cheapskate schemes and clunky delivery. They have become a fixture of contemporary culture, although I still don’t know when exactly the ebook stopped being something you wouldn’t mention in public, and started becoming a serious alternative to dead-tree reading.

For me, at least, it was with the discovery of e-ink. The main drawback of electronic reading had always been the glare. With e-ink, even though the words were rendered on the “page” not by ink but by circuits, the feeling was comfortably unlike staring into a desk lamp.

But the further the ebook makes its foray into our homes, minds and hearts, a new generation of Luddites is fighting its advance.

(img via lMystery Fanfare via jeffreykoterba.com )

Of Book Fetishists and Coffee Table Literates

Whether it’s articles by Jonathan Franzen claiming that ebooks are “damaging society” or those worrying about an ebook-induced memory-impairment, the criticism is rising parallel with Amazon’s ebook sales.

Speaking about Amazon and ebook criticism, I’ve been following a blog called “The Kindle Monologues” for the last few weeks whose purpose is to collect and address the complaints of e-reading critics worldwide, its tagline saying: “I’d rather read books, than whine like a child with a skinned knee, about formats, and what constitutes a “real” book.”

Surprisingly, the arguments of ebook critics are highly redundant:

• ebooks don’t smell good
• with ereaders it’s impossible to show off your book to people in public
• ereaders need to be charged too often
• etc.

Here’s a link to the entertaining rebuttal of these and more by the Kindle Monologues. Reading and thinking about this, it seems that a lot of ebook critics are in fact not as interested in the actual reading as in the secondary effects such as being seen as a literary person, touching and smelling, etc. Here’s a telling quote from the article:

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first image credit:  Some rights reserved by kandinski

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

A book, printed on paper, bound in leather or glued together is a comforting thing. You can put it on a shelf, and it won’t go anywhere. If you scrawl in the margins, it will remain. If you leave it in a dry place and don’t drop any water, fire or bombs on it, it might even survive hundreds of years without any effort!

Ebooks on the other hand can’t boast such a certain fate. In fact, it’s rather difficult to pin them down. They change their fonts and paragraphs on a reader’s whim, they fill the pages horizontally or vertically, they move from smartphone to desktop to ereader, they seem to be in constant motion and transformation.

The books you purchased on your Kindle, for example, where are they? In the “cloud”, they say. Which sort of means that they’re everywhere and yet nowhere at the same time.

We don’t have a clue if people in the future will treat PDFs or ePUB files in the same way our archeologists look at ancient Sumerian clay tablets, for example.

Ebooks: Little Quantum Critters

Some people hate ebooks for that. They don’t want their tomes to act like Schroedinger’s Cat, all uncertain and shifting between existence and non-existence like flickering lightbulbs. They want something solid and reliable which doesn’t change once you look away or accidentally press a button.

And while I do sympathize with the general sentiment to preserve and conserve the time-tested, fighting ebooks seems a rather Quixotic attempt.

It is often said that we live in ‘uncertain times’. And while this may or may not be true (haven’t people always claimed that their times were the worst?) uncertainty surely has some great advantages.

One of them is flexibility. Another one is ubiquity.

These are among the reasons why ebooks are an increasingly popular alternative to paper books.

The flexibility part I already discussed above (changing fonts, size, paragraphs, etc.). But what about ubiquity?

Instead of lugging around cardboard boxes full of dictionaries and paperback novels the next time you move, you can put all of them on your ereader, slip it into your pocket and be done with it. And if they’re in the cloud, there’s no need to even carry a device. A username and password is enough.

Unfortunately, there are some barriers to this ubiquity. These barriers however are more of an economic and political than a technical kind.

Reclaiming Ubiquity

For example, if you buy a book over at Amazon it may not be that easy (or almost impossible) to copy it to a different device such as Kobo or Sony Reader which, of course, use different formats.

Luckily, software like Calibre makes it relatively easy to convert and transfer your tomes above and beyond artificial platform boundaries, but the ebook market of today can nevertheless  be confounding with its different formats, prices, devices and (arbitrary) limitations.

From a publishing perspective it gets especially confusing once you try to decide on what platforms and under what conditions you want to place a work while taking all your different readers (who own different ereading devices) into consideration.

Therefore, I’m happy to announce that after days of intense code-wrangling and database-tinkering we now have a completely revamped bookshop, in which you can find all our publications in all their available formats at one comforting glance! (After all, with all this uncertainty, it’s nice to have things organized a bit, don’t you think?)

learnoutlive.com/shop

If you have any suggestions, wishes, etc, please do tell us!

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img:  Some rights reserved by h.koppdelaney

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

What started out as just a little experiment (yours truly listening to punk rock and doodling away like a madman) quickly grew into a serious undertaking when I saw that this stuff actually seemed to help people or at least bring a bit of welcome unseriousness to the sometimes ardous task of learning German.

Therefore, I decided to create a follow-up, this time incorporating all the things learned in the making of the first and integrating constructive feedback from both friends and the general public.

One remark for example was that the pictures could be clearer, and while I’m still no Picasso, I optimized the image digitalization process for more contrast and clarity.

Also, my colleague Louis George Machlan pointed out that he’d like to have some audio for the pronunciation part, so this time I’m proud to present not only a picture book with vocabulary but an accompanying audio, as well!

And before I now talk a bit about the methods & politics of accomplishing this, everyone just interested in getting the goodies, can download it here for the next three days  (update: this offer has expired) (I’d love to make it free for longer, but Amazon only gives me only 5 days in 90 days, so just like Peter und das Huhn, there’ll be 2 more days, so make sure to follow us on Twitter.)

Kindle, we need to talk

After having gone overboard a bit with the audio and creating a background soundscape with special effects and imitating the sounds of krakens and exotic sea-birds, I had to start explaining both to myself and my readers how they can listen to the German voiceover. Huh?

If people download the book from Kindle it gets automatically beamed down to their Kindle device or app, right?

Ok, so far so good. Most Kindles have speakers and a headphone jack and they can play audio files. So it should be no problem to just sort of piggyback the audio on the picture book, right?

Wrong…

First of all, there’s no way to directly embed audio into the ebook format Amazon uses. Secondly, even if you use the Kindle “experimental” browser to navigate to a homepage with an embedded audio, it refuses to play it.

While I read that once upon a time Amazon allowed integrated media in ebooks, it now seems that it abandoned this for mainly two reasons, one being the precious bandwidth of its Whispersync technology responsible for beaming down the file directly to the device, the other probably having to do with Amazon’s trying to separate everything audio and route it exclusively through Audible.

In any case, you’ll be happy to know that I found a way for you to listen to the audio even on your Kindle. Both the file and an explanation how to listen, transfer it to your Kindle or computer are included at the end of the ebook, under the vocabulary & pronunciation section.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever do this again or how helpful this is for learners, but this is part of the reason why I’m doing this in the first place: to find out! So if you have any input on this, please let me know either here on directly in the Amazon reviews. Thanks!

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

Note: This is a guest post by Alex Morris.

Alex Morris works for Office Kitten in Manchester where he writes, researches and blogs about the business world. He can also be followed on Twitter.

The Good Earth – Pearl S. Buck (1931)

Depicting life in China at a time before mass political and social upheaval, The Good Earth follows the life of a peasant who marries a servant. The subsequent trials and tribulations they suffer through as they raise their family displays a China vastly different to the one we now observe as a Superpower. Buck won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel in 1931, and her tale of the cycle of life is a powerful statement.

George Orwell – Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)

Orwell’s much lauded later works are contemporary classics. 1984 and Animal Farm are well within the literary canon; supremely well observed, highly intelligent, and fiercely written. Yet, for many Orwell fans, Down and Out in Paris and London remains their favourite. It is in keeping with his early interest with poverty (The Road to Wigan Pier soon followed) and dabbles with his time in destitution in the stated cities. The book is badly structured and quite aimless overall, yet the Parisian account is an utter joy to read, whilst his observations of London are fascinating. A must.

Jean-Paul Sartre – The Age of Reason (1945)

Exquisitely written, Sartre’s stunning novel follows the plight of philosophy professor Matthieu, who is seemingly indifferent to all around him yet must manage all the problems he creates. The novel, unsurprisingly, deals heavily with Sartre’s conception of freedom as the ultimate goal of human existence. The existential leaning does not overwhelm things, as the cast of characters is diverse and wonderfully realised.

Truman Capote – In Cold Blood (1956)

An exceptional piece of investigative journalism, Capote’s finest book is a must for any literature fan. It details the grisly murders of the Cutler family in Kansas, 1959, before following the subsequent investigation and trail of murderers Robert Hickock and Perry Smith. Capote gained remarkable access to the two men, interviewing them at length to gain an insight into their motives. At once chilling and mesmerising, it was also Capote’s final full piece of writing.

Philip K. Dick – The Man in the High Castle (1962)

Whilst now remembered as the science-fiction mind behind such cinema staples as Blade Runner, Minority Report, The Adjustment Bureau, and A Scanner Darkly (all adapted from his novels), The Man in the High Castle is possibly his best. It sets out a nightmare version of reality where the Allies have lost The Second World War. In this new world a handful of solitary figures struggle to comprehend reality and how it has dealt them this unusual hand.

Jack Kerouac – Big Sur (1962)

Much is made of Kerouac’s earlier works, particularly On The Road with its youthful lust for life. It is Beat Generation writing at its most trendy. However, Kerouac’s superior Big Sur is just as important. Highly autobiographical, Big Sur finds a middle-aged Kerouac suffering from the effects of a lifetime’s heavy drinking. Searching to understand his myth in solitude, his delirium tremens are well chronicled and display his descent towards an addiction that would kill him in 1969. Paranoid, funny, tragic, and ever-interesting.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn – Cancer Ward (1967)

Solzhenitsyn struggled against an oppressive regime to get his superb novel published. It was banned outright in Russia in 1968 and Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union until 1994. Based on his experiences in a cancer unit, Solzhenitsyn uses the novel as an allegory for the state of Soviet Russia. It is uncompromising and brilliant, with protagonist Kostoglotov at one stage left to muse: “A man dies from a tumour, so how can a country survive with growths like labour camps and exiles?”

Mikhail Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita (1930 – published in 1967)

Bulgakov’s fraught attempts to write this novel (including burning the whole manuscript, before changing his mind and having to start again from memory) are well documented. A wild and fantastical tale, it sees the devil arrive in the capital of atheism (Moscow) with his travelling band of assorted cronies. They include a giant talking cat called Behemoth and an assassin with a cracked pince-nez. In amongst this is the Master, who is in a mental institute. A remarkable work of the imagination.

Toni Morrison – Beloved (1987)

One of the most celebrated female writers of modern times, Morrison’s Beloved received wide praise. Chronicling slavery and its aftermath in America, protagonist Margaret Garner flees her shackles and makes for the safe haven of Ohio. The novel deals with subsequent events of America’s Slave Act and Garner’s attempts to liberate her children from its prejudice. A brutal novel, but culturally important and a modern classic.

Miracle in the Andes – Nando Parrado (2008)

Perhaps not yet a modern classic, but Parrado’s stunning account of the 1972 Andes Plane Crash is a remarkably humane piece of writing. It details the incident from a first person perspective; in October 1972 a plane carrying an amateur rugby team crashed into the Andes mountain range. Trapped for several months with no food except the remains of their dead friends (preserved in the freezing temperatures), it is ultimately a two week trek out of the Andean terrain which sees Parrado end the ordeal. Thrilling and humbling.

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img: thumbnail ~ Some rights reserved by Casey David

About the author: Alex Morris Alex Morris works for Office Kitten in Manchester where he writes, researches and blogs about the business world. He can also be followed on Twitter.

( tl;dr – wrote a short story, you can download it here)

I’ve lived both in the Far and Middle East. Both experiences left strong memories, traces, impressions. And I noticed very early that if I wanted to convey any of my experiences to others in writing, an autobiographical account wouldn’t cut it.

Short Fiction Instead of Travelogues

It lies in the nature of subjective experience that what to one person is life-changing, to another may be trivial. In other words, the things that leave a strong impression on us are not just very different, they are often intangible, as well.

This is why at the moment I’m working on a series of short stories (and not travelogues!) about the Middle East. On top of that the Middle East as depicted in these writings (you’ll find the first short story below) is completely fictional in order to avoid the straight-jacket of preconceived notions and opinions.

Individual Publications For Individual Readers

These writings will be published independently, that is without the help of publishing houses, marketing and extensive copy-editing. It is an experimental process and whether I’ll follow through with the rest of the short stories in this series will depend (to some extent) on how people respond to this idea of a fictionalized Middle East that still contains all its defining characteristics of conflict and contradiction.

What You Get For Downloading This Story

This first short story is completely free. You’ll find the download link at the end of this article.

A few notes:

I arranged it in such a way that by downloading it, you’ll get the story in what we call here an “Indie Publishing Pack”, meaning a zip file containing a styled PDF, .MOBI file optimized for Kindle and an .EPUB for Sony and other e-readers.

The idea is that if someone downloads an ebook (or short story) he or she should be able to decide on what device and in which way to read it. So, in order to take out the guesswork, you’ll get three versions at once.

(If you need help with transferring the files to your device, see also here)

Support Independent Publishing

If you like the story and want more, here’s how you can help and support this project by one (or more) of the following ways:

Your responses will determine when the next story comes out and if it published in the same way like this one.

And now *drumroll*, the Download Link

Here it is, the first short story about a fictional Middle East, titled: “Don’t Call Me Naomi”

         —> click here to go to the download page <—

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

Note: The term indie does not have anything to do with Indiana Jones, Native Americans or Bollywood but is simply a short form for independent as in indie rock or indie games.

Indie Publishing Vs. Traditional Publishing

What is the difference between traditional publishing and indie-publishing?

Well, they got money, we ain’t got none…

But, seriously… I would define it as follows:

“The indie publisher strives to provide the highest quality output based on the lowest quantity of physical or financial resources.” 

In other words, as an indie-publisher I have exactly one employee (me) who does everything that in traditional publishing would be handled by whole teams and departments:

I’m everything from my own worst boss, waking me up in the middle of the night to catch that deadline, to the disorganized cover-designer, over-worked tech-guy, bad-tempered pedantic editor and coffee cooking intern.

Why would anyone put up with all of this?

One word: freedom. You can do whatever you like.

This doesn’t mean not being able to process criticism or get all snobbish when someone doesn’t understand a sentence that – to you – was poetic genius but to most of your readers only comes off as syntactically garbled mess.

Freedom without responsibility is not real freedom. It’s just recklesssness. But that’s a different kind of discussion. So let’s just leave it at that.

The indie publisher can choose what to write, how to write it, in what order to present the material, how to package it, and so on and so forth. Traditional publishers may have the benefit of out-sourcing or distributing the work among various professionals, but the indie-publisher can imbue his work with a strong character, spirit or attitude from the way the fonts look to the way the product is being marketed.

It is this wholeness injected by one individual’s spirit that gives this feeling of authenticity, of not just another mass-produced thing off the shelf but something real.

The success of the indie game Minecraft (made by one person) is a good example of how convincing and captivating this spirit can be, compared to all the many corporately produced games that take millions to make and feel just like all the others.

But there are many other examples in the music world. Read this article about Sargent House for example.

OK, enough preparatory preachery. Here are my 5 insights of the year:

#1 Piracy Is Not A Problem: Inflexible Publishing Models Are

If you open any newspaper this day you’ll find the reports of “ebook sales soaring” next to warnings of “intellectual property theft”. But it’s a misconception that piracy destroys writer’s lives. Whether it’s the music, movie or book industry, people have been copying stuff for decades. With each new technology, our abilities to copy stuff have soared but not less music, books or movies are produced. The opposite is the case: The lower the threshold to write and publish a book or record a music album, the more artworks are actually getting out there.

As publishers we have to ask ourselves: If stealing our stuff is more convenient for the reader than buying it, maybe we should do something about it? Maybe we should remove hurdles, reduce complicated sign-up procedures and just deliver the bacon?

And: If the payment process can not be streamlined, then maybe free is the best option.

#2 Free & Premium Is Not A Contradiction

We had a few free offers this year. And what I learned is this: Giving books away for free is the best possible thing you can do. If you absolutely have to, offer the books as a “bribe” for signing up to an email list but the best thing is to let people just download, no questions asked.

Interesting: Some works I put here on the site and simultaneously on Amazon for a low price. The result: The more people download something for free, the more will also buy it.

More about this: >>> 

#3 From Zero To Hero: Publishing A Bestseller Is Easy

Books are not what they used to be. The role of publishing is changing. So is the meaning of a “bestseller”. I found out this year that it’s fairly easy to write a bestseller on Amazon. Why? Because a bestseller is relative to its category or target group, there is not only one bestseller list but hundreds!

More about this: >>> 

#4 Collaboration Still Rules

The book “Education Is A Cow That Anyone Can Milk” was different from the beginning. Instead of just editing it on my own as usual and giving it to one or two friends to proof-read I made an open call on this blog to participate. Many people sent in their feedback and helped to improve the final result. It was so much fun that I’ll definitely do it again. The book is available for free, by the way, or on Amazon for a reasonably small price.

More about this: >>> 

#5 Blogging Is Not An Option, It’s A Must

I published a little guide about blogging this spring and I’m convinced now, more than ever, that blogging is an absolutely essential component of making this whole indie publishing thing work. It has many reasons, but the two most important ones are: developing reach and creating new contacts. In other words: The content of a blog is important but not as much as its context! Its power is indirect (people will find a blog for one reason and become interested in it for another) and asynchronous (people will stumble over older articles through search engines).

More about this: >>> 

Having said that..

I wish you a Happy New Year!

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.

On many people’s wishlists this year was probably one (or even more) of the many different Kindle devices. Americans might have scored a Kindle Touch or Kindle Fire while the rest of the world had to make do with the entry level devices.

But politics aside…

While many people know that using an e-reader with e-ink or similar technology does improve the electronic reading experience (no glare!), not many people are aware that their Kindle can be a real power-house when learning a foreign language.

1. (Foreign) Language Dictionary

Every new Kindle comes with a built-in dictionary in English and (correct me if I’m wrong) depending on your location, another one for your native language if you live in one of the “Kindle Countries” (UK, US, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, etc.)

It’s a well-known fact that reading in a foreign language is one of the best ways to extend your vocabulary, see grammar in action and simply have fun.

By using the built-in dictionary you can easily move the cursor to the beginning of a new word and you’ll see the definition directly on screen.

So, if you’re learning English as a foreign language, you don’t need to do anything, at all. Just start reading one of the thousands of free classics and use the built-in function to look up new words.

But what if you’re learning French, Spanish, German or another foreign language?

Also not a problem. Here’s how it goes:

• You’ll need to get a dictionary file for your language. You can buy one or check out this list of free ones. (Please note that all of these dictionaries are one-way (Eng->German, German->Eng, etc.), so make sure you get the right one!)
• Transfer the file to your Kindle into the documents folder. (If you bought one this happened automatically)
• Press Menu, go to -> Settings, press Menu again and select Change Primary Dictionary
• choose your dictionary and start learning!

2. Kindle Notes

While opening any Kindle book (dictionaries, too) you can highlight words and sections or even add notes. Your notes are saved in a file called Name-of-Book.mbp (read-only). The notes also go into another file called My-Clippings.txt.

There are many ways to use this, but one of the most obvious is to create vocabulary lists.

After reading you can go to clippingsconverter.com and convert your notes into Excel or Word format, PDF and even post them to Evernote.

This way you can easily print or edit your notes for further study or exercises. A good idea for example is to use the new words from your clippings by building sentences from them in the foreign language you are learning.

3. Foreign Language Learning Materials

Now, the Kindle shop offers a huge variety of bestselling top titles for lazy afternoons and holiday reading. But did you know that there also many different publications on Kindle specifically aimed at foreign language learners?

Yep, there’s actually a huge variety of non-fictional works that can be useful, besides the already mentioned dictionaries for Kindle. Here are some ideas:

• textbooks & workbooks: Search the Kindle Store for “Learn Hebrew” and you’ll find a little booklet published by my colleague that includes 5 Hebrew dialogues with transliteration, translation, vocabulary lists and exercises. This is just an example, of course. There are many such materials available for other languages as well.

• flashcards: Something not as obvious is to use Kindle as a Flash Card browser. Yes, really. Here’s how it works: Each word occupies one page on your Kindle; by clicking next and previous page on your device you can “flip” the words and see the translation, just as you would do with flashcards on paper. Here’s an example.

Note: Although Kindle officially only supports a handful of languages, there are many publications in the Kindle Store for other languages as well. Since Kindle doesn’t display Hebrew, Arabic or Cyrillic letters, for example, these books use images as a workaround.

You won’t be able to use the dictionary function, but until Amazon supports more languages natively this is better than nothing.

If you buy ebooks in PDF you won’t have any problems on your Kindle, either, by the way – no matter what language.

Happy Reading and Learning!

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img: tutorial screenshot via rekindle, photo by mwkelley 

About the author: André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.