An Experiment in E-Publishing and Gender Roles

My wife and I have one baby and are expecting another in a few months. Next year we'd like to take the whole family to Disney World so my wife has started a little fund that she's been putting change into and other spare cash we get. But then she got a decent sized bonus for her work and dropped that into the fund and I started feeling a bit in adequate as a provider for my family. So I started thinking about ways I could contribute to the Disney fund. I don't get bonuses at work and I don't really have the time or the energy for a second job so that was out. But there was one thing that had brought in a little cash over the last year or so and that was my short stories.

Around this same time I read a series of fascinating blog posts from Joe Konrath detailing his experiments with selling electronic versions of his short stories and novels through PayPal and for the Amazon Kindle E-Reader.

Hmmmmmmm.

I wasn't comfortable putting up my unsold novels for sale, because I truly believe they are unsold for a reason. And the short stories that have made me some money in the past are still readily available at bookstores in the fine anthologies they were purchased for. Instead, I took three of my favorite stories that had been previously published online or in small circulation magazine but are now almost impossible to find and bundled them together in a collection I'm calling A LOAD OF QUERTERMOUS.

Featured in the collection are the following stories:

LOAD - The tale of a sperm back robbery in Detroit gone off the rails

MR. SATURDAY NIGHT SPECIAL - A little ditty about a private detective in Flint, MI who spends his daughter's birthday helping his ex-wife's lawyer save his son from jail

ALTER ROAD - A story that follows a preacher with a violent past who faces the greatest test of faith and grace when his son is murdered by hillbilly meth dealers

I've also written brand new introductions for all three stories discussing their creation and the inspiration behind them. This collection is available now for the amazing low price of $1.99 and can be had as PDF file for reading on any computer (or for printing to read on the train or in bed or wherever) or as a download for the Amazon Kindle. The Amazon dowload is immediate but the PDF will come once PayPal sends me an email indication a donation has been made and then I'll zip it off to the email address used for the donation.

I really don't know what to expect from this little experiment so you all can learn with me. If you aren't able to make a donation, you can still help by spreading the word. I thank you, my kids thank you, and the Disney Empire thanks you.