Something funny this way comes

 

The English Patient, Dr Zhivago and the Purposeful Stride, and Other Stories

A collection of amusing short stories about the human condition revealing the absurdity of our existence.   

 available to download from Amazon and other online stores

What is a fable?

The word 'fable' comes from the Latin fabula, meaning 'discourse' or 'story'. Fable is a short narrative in prose or verse which points a moral. Non-human creatures or inanimate things are normally the characters. The presentation of human beings as animals is the characteristic of the literary fable and is unlike the fable that still flourishes among primitive peoples.

 The genre probably arose in Greece, and the first collection of fables is ascribed Aesop (6th c. BC). His principal successors were Phaedrus and Babrius, who flourished in the 1st century AD. Phaedrus preserved Aesop's fables and in the 10th c. a prose adaptation of Phaedrus's translation appeared under the title Romulus, a work whole popularity lasted until the 17th c. A famous collection of Indian fables was the Bidpai, which were probably composed originally in Sanskrit, AD 300. Many versions of these were made in prose and verse in different languages between the 3rd c and 16th c. The best of the medieval fabulists was Marie de France who, c. 1200, composed 102 fables in verse. After her came La Fontaine who raised the whole level of the fable and is generally acknowledged as the world's master. He took most of the stories from Aesop and Phaedrus but translated them in his verse. His Fables choisies were published in 12 books (1668, 1678-9, 1694).

La Fontaine had many imitators: principally, Eustache de Noble, Pignotti, John Gay, J.P.C de Florian and Tomas Iriarte. Later, Lessing followed the style of Aesop. John Gay's Fifty-One Fables in Verse were published in 1727. In Russia, the greatest of the fabulists was Ivan Krylov, who translated a number of La Fontaine's fables and between 1810 and 1820 published nine books of fables. More recently, Kipling made anotable contribution to the genre with Just So Stories (1902). Mention should also be made of James Thurber's droll Fables of Our Time (1940) and George Orwell's remarkable political satire Animal Farm (1945), which is in fable form.

What You Should Know Before Publishing an Ebook

The  following summary highlights the key points from a major survey by Mark Coker of SW published on his Smashwords blog:

1. Ebook Sales Conform to a Power Curve
2. Most books don't sell well, but those that do sell well sell really well. This finding wasn't a surprise. Just as in traditional publishing, very few books become bestsellers.
3. Viva Long Form Reading: Longer Books Sell Better
4. For the second year running, we found definitive evidence that ebook readers - voting with their Dollars, Euros, Pounds, Krone, Krona and Koruna - overwhelmingly prefer longer books over shorter books.
5. Shorter Book Titles Appear to Have Slight Sales Advantage
6. How Indie Authors are Pricing Their Books: $2.99 is the Most Common Price Point
7. How Price Impacts Unit Sales Volume: Lower Priced Books (usually) Sell More Copies
8. The Yield Graph: Is $3.99 the New $2.99?
9. One surprising finding is that, on average, $3.99 books sold more units than $2.99 books, and more units than any other price except FREE.

Survey taken from 120,000 indie ebooks. 

P.S. Here's my two cents: You've got to SELL your books, NOT give them away. 

The lows and lows of promoting your novel on the internet

So, you've got a book out there. OUT in the vast THERE, floating in cyber, just waiting to be noticed. Only you're getting no results. So you up the ante and get involved - you send out copies for reviews, join writer forums, internet book clubs and blogs and other such useless etceteras, and still detect NO DISCERNIBLE RESULT, right? You feel like you've hit a brick wall. There's just nothing happening and your frustration hits a new low - you start sending mass emails to everybody on the planet you have access to offering your book for a very reasonable price, invent what you feel are very interesting questions for a Q & A session with you and invite the entire universe to that earth-shattering event via your social networks, create a cyber group dedicated just to your books (that nobody has read as yet), and participate in web radio interviews hosted by a person who didn't bother to read the copy you've sent them but has a lot of enthusiasm if not training and uses a faulty microphone which will render the whole session inaudible.
Your frustration by this point should have turned into a raging depression; the mass emails bounce off as spam, the Q & A session is attended by you and your cat, the cyber group bearing your book's title has two entries - you and your cat's and the internet radio interview - you get the picture: the entire book promoting venture is a COLOSSAL failure. Sure, you might get a well-meaning stranger you've asked to friend you thank you for the add on your book's page but they will not buy the book or indeed read your carefully constructed blurb you've put up on your profile. No, the well-meaning stranger is just you wearing a different size of the same shoe - most likely they have something to flog to you. Maybe they're a budding musician promoting their 'single', or an artist trying to unload their home-made jewelry which they're keen to display on your book's page - at any rate, it hardly matters. You're two peas in a pod and there will be no sale for either of you. NO SALE.
Looks pretty grim, doesn't it? Yes, it does. However. There is a bright side. One day you'll wake up and the cobwebs will be gone. You start to feel better, feel like you've shaken off the blues, feel like you, once again, could take on the world - with just a little more work the whole thing is bound to pay off, you tell yourself and decide to give it another try. The reason behind this change? You've discovered a new book blog out in the vast THERE; your hunch is telling you you're onto a good thing - they might just be willing to review.

 

If you're in the mood for something new...