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...

The Short Story: History and Development

 

What is a short story?

A short story, as described by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), is a prose narrative of indeterminate length requiring anything from half an hour to one or two hours to peruse, and is a story that concentrates on a unique or single effect and one in which the totality of effect is the main objective.

Over time the form has shown itself to be so flexible and susceptible of so much variety that its possibilities seem almost endless. For example, it may be concerned with a scene, an episode, an experience, an action, the exhibition of a character or characters, the day's events, a meeting, a conversation, a fantasy or anything else that is an event in the mind of the writer.

When it comes to classification this is one of the most elusive forms. How long (or short) is a short story? If we take the novella as a 'middle-distance' book/story, then the short story comes into the 100/200 metre class. A short story could have anything from about 1,600 words to 20, 000 words, but the vast majority fall somewhere between the two.

 

Where did the short story begin?

Historically, we find many inset stories or digressions in Classical literature which amount to short stories. In the Bible the accounts of Cain and Abel, the Prodigal Son, Ruth, Judith and Suzannah are all short stories. The forefathers of the short story are myth, legend, parable, fairy tale, fable, anecdote, exemplum, essay, character study and even the ballad. The yarn, the sketch, the tale and the Russian 'skaz' are all short stories.

How did the short story develop?

In the second half of the 18th century the short story was being developed and established in Britain, partly as a result of the popularity of the oriental tale and also the Gothic novel. This new kind of the horror story was becoming increasing popular and by the end of the 18th c. the German 'novella' was firmly established as a term and genre of fiction, a trend which also saw the 'short story' evolve into a highly organized literary form. The popularity of the genre at this stage was mainly due to ghost stories dealing with the supernatural. In the English-speaking world two of the most important pioneers were Sir Walter Scott (1771 - 1832) and the Americans Washington Irving (1783 - 1859) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 - 64).

 

The development of the short story during the 19th century

The realistic short story became highly developed in Russia. Alexander Pushkin was among the first to exploit it in the 1830s with The Tales of Belkin (1830), the Queen of Spade (1834) and The Captain's Daughter (1836). Gogol's stories were published during the same period. He wrote about everyday things and events and ordinary peoples. Among his most famous works are Nevsky Prospekt (1835), Notes of a Madman (19=835), The Portrait (1835), and Nose (1836) and The Overcoat (1842). Chekhov, who was to have a profound an universal influence on the short story, published several collections, including Motley Stories (1886) and In the Twilight (1888).
In France the short story was established in 1829-31 with the publication of a dozen 'contes' by Prosper Merimee, Balzac and Gautier. The outstanding French writer of short stories in the 19th c. was unquestionably Guy de Maupassant, among whose main collections were La Maison Tellier (1881), Mademoiselle Fifi (1882) and Yvette (1885).

Chekhov and Maupassant are generally accounted the masters of the genre in this period. Their combined influence has been immeasurable.
By the middle of the 19th c. the ghost story and the horror story were very well established. Many hundreds of short stories during the second half of the century were one or the other, or both combined. There were also hundreds of short stories with supernatural or supranormal themes; often tales of suspense and mystery. This popularity was to continue in the 20th century and beyond.

The short story in America

In America, during the second half of the 19th c., eight writers made a considerable name for themselves in the short story form: Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, O. Henry, Stephen Crane, Jack London and Sherwood Anderson.Herman Melville's three most famous are Brtleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno and The Encantadas. These were published in his collection The Piazza Tales (1856).

Twain's main collection is The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calveras County and Other Sketches (1867). This is an example of the tall tale or tall story, a kind of fiction which was popular in America in the 19th century.

Francis Bret Harte was a prolific writer of short stories and helped to popularize the Western. One of his best collections is The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870).

Ambrose Bierce is still well remembered for his collection Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891).

Stephen Crane published two distinguished collections - The open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure (1898) and The Monster and Other Stories (1899).

O. Henry, especially, was very prolific and, like many of his here mentioned contemporaries, wrote tight, well-crafted stories, almost slick in their adroit contrivance, and was a master of the surprise ending or 'twist in the tail'. Among his main collections are Cabbage and Kings (1904), The Four Million (1906), The Trimmed Lamp (1907), and The Road of Destiny (1909).

Jack London was equally prolific. Two of his main collections are The Son of the Wolf (1900) and Tales of the Far North (1900). His Two Thousand Dozen is one of the best of all tall stories.

Sherwood Anderson's collections include The Triumph of the Egg (1921) and Horses and Men (1923).