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Books are like zucchini.

Imagine this: You’ve set aside a nice corner of your garden to grow some zucchini. You’ve never grown zucchini before and overplanted. You’ve got zucchini growing everywhere. The neighbor keeps tossing it back over the fence. The freezer is full of shredded zucchini. You’re actually searching epicurious for a new chilled zucchini soup recipe.

You need to sell your zucchini. You can’t go to your local grocery store- they have their own buyers. The local restaurant owner looks at you like you’re mad. You can’t set up a zucchini-ade stand in the front with the kids. You need a market.

So someone reminds you of the local farmer’s market. You go and rent a space for $20 and set up a table. And you wait. You Sit and do some people watching. Over there is the local herb farm. They’ve got gift baskets. Hey- There’s that restaurant owner selling homemade soup from the back of his van- you know the van with the graphics on it advertising his restaurant. That’s not fair. You can’t sell any zucchini, so you end up giving a lot of it away at the end of the day.  And next week, you’ll be back with some more, but you’ll be better prepared.

It used to be simple. Writers used to sell to agents and editors. There was no “Market.” This was like selling the zucchini directly to the restaurant or grocery store. Agents and publishers were the gatekeepers making sure the product was fresh for the consumer. They were easy to find: Go to the library, Check out ‘Writer’s Market: This year” or LMP and start searching. Look at the wirter Magazine and avoid the Book Doctor and Vanity Press scams. Send out your work, wait several months and then sob uncontrollably into your pillow after you’re rejected. Repeat.

Those days are gone. These markets don’t exist. Swallowed up by conglomeration or the internet, fewer and fewer publishers are buying unpublished writers. Heck, fewer and fewer publishers are buying proven writers.

You’ve still got a product to sell and you still need a way to sell it. So new markets have sprung up. Amazon, Smashwords and the rest allow you to sell directly to the consumer from the e-quivalent of an open air stall. Anyone can walk by and see your product, and choose to purchase.  Yeah it’s tough, and yeah you’re competing with professionals. But it’s becoming the only game in town. To get an editor to look at your work, you have to prove you can sell it first. It’s not a Catch-22. It’s just up to you.

So Here’s a list of Markets where you can start selling your work:

• Amazon Direct Publishing- The 80 lb. Gorilla. this is where you go first.  Why? You’re kidding, right?
• Pubit!- The 400 lb. Gorilla. Barnes and Nobles site. The nook seems to be here for the long haul, and it’s bringing your brick and mortar with it.
• Smashwords- the 200 lb. Gorilla, As an aggregator, gets your work out to multiple stores at once. Sony, Kobo, Aldiko, B&N, Apple and more. Also offers coupons. all for the same 15% cut your imaginary agent would get.
• Google Books- Google’s primary business ain’t books, and it shows.
• iBookstore- Still Not Easy.
• Scribd- Get your short works out here.
• Wattpad- I’ve never been impressed with Wattpad. It strikes me as a bunch of highschoolers publishing fan fic. But look at how many people use it. Oh, And there’s this author who has 13 Million reads on Wattpad. I Can’t afford to ignore this anymore. Can you?
• Goodreads- The FB of readers. Look, iOS has 40 million devices in use. FB has 800 Million.But you know how they don’t market reading as the  primary use? There’s a reason for that. Goodreads is nothing but Readers and Authors shouting over each other. It’s fun and just what you need.

So here’s the first chapter of the novel free:

I recently had a science fiction novel called Exchange published by Stairway Press, a small independent publisher. I previously self-published a book of Alternate History scenarios called American Indian Victories. I’m going to talk about how I’ve incorporated open source and free writing tools into my writing and promotion process, and then talk a little about the resulting book.

How did I use open source and free writing tools to write and promote those books? First, I do most of my plotting in Ywriter, which is free, though apparently not open source. I like the structure of YWriter, and use it to develop characters and locations as well as the plots themselves. I do most of my writing these days using Write or Die (see the links section for the online version). I set it for twenty minute sessions and try to write 450 words in those twenty minutes. Most times I don’t quite make it, but I come close. I like writing in a series of sprints because it keeps my inner editor in check while I write. It works well for me. I’ve written over 80,000 words for each of the last three NaNoWriMo months.

I do have a website at www.DaleCozort.com. It’s partly for promotion and partly for my alternate history essays. I started out using NVU as my HTML editor, then switched to Kompozer. Both are open source, as is Filezilla, my FTP program. I use Scribus, an open source desktop publishing program, to create newsletters for promotion, and use Gimp and sometime Pinta for the graphics work. Once in great while I even find a use for TuxPaint, the open source kids’ painting program. A free e-book program called Calibre helped me help the publisher debug a couple of glitches in the e-book version of Exchange.

I’m sure I’m missing some open source tools I use from time-to-time, but those are the big ones. I could do all of those jobs with proprietary tools, but the cost of keeping them all current would be prohibitive. I hate to admit it here, but while I do sometimes use OpenOffice, I usually use Microsoft Word because my work standardized on it and I need to be able to support people using it.

So what about the resulting book? What is Exchange about? It’s set in the near future. Our reality is experiencing a series of Exchanges. Basically, with three hours warning a town-sized chunk of our reality switches places with a same-sized chunk of a reality with no humans but a lot of fierce animals. The two chunks stay in the wrong reality for a week or two, then snap back where they belong. If you wander off the Exchanged chunk and stay there, you’re stuck in the other dimension.

It’s an interesting concept because you end up with an empty world that should be infinitely exploitable, but is surprisingly hard to exploit. You can’t get enough resources into an Exchange zone in three hours to make a viable colony in the other reality, and international agreements prohibit governments from sending people across on the piece of the other reality that has been our reality for a week or two. The agreements are backed up by international observers and the fact that Exchanges can be detected all over the world, so other countries know when and where one is going on.

A big concern: diseases and vermin spreading from the alternate reality to ours. The military and National Guard send teams to protect anyone they can’t evacuate and keep animals from the other reality from getting to our. They also send autonomous solar powered drones into the other reality so they can radio back information if they get within radio range of another Exchange.

That’s just the background. The story itself pits computer guru Sharon Mack against some very high odds as she tries to get her kidnapped daughter back from a group of crazies who want to settle in the other reality with no preparation. That means she goes up against fierce predators, escaped convicts, a marauding street gang and a cult, not to mention an ex-husband. They say to make your characters struggle, and I certainly do that.

If you have any questions about open source or writing or Exchange feel free to ask. I’ll check back every once in a while and would be happy to answer any questions you might have.