RIDE is available in these fine print and ebook formats!

Print
Nook	Kindle	iBooks

Story preview: “The History of the Bi-Cycle” by David A.V. Elver

Since Fat Cyclist raved about this story in particular, it seemed like a good one to excerpt next. Ladies and gentlemen:

CALL FOR SHORT FICTION SUBMISSIONS: RIDE 2

Announced January 14, 2011

DEADLINE FOR “RIDE 2″ SUBMISSIONS: APRIL 30, 2012 (Was March 31.)

RIDE 2 will be published in print, as well as Kindle, Nook, and iBooks.

The only requirement is that a bicycle or bicycle culture must feature significantly in the story.

Any genre, any length up to about 12,000 words, any setting, any time period, any kind of cycling. The more diversity—of locations, cycling cultures, story genres—the better. Don’t look at RIDE (the original) to give you an idea of what I’m looking for—all I’m interested in is the best eight or ten stories I can find, regardless of genre or style.

PAYMENT: Authors and artist receive equal splits after any I recoup any hard costs, which I’ll state clearly on the first royalty statement. Royalties are paid via PayPal only, so author/artist must have a PayPal account.

Previously published OK. World rights must be available. Fiction only. Submit in Word, Pages, or RTF, using standard manuscript formatting.

Questions and submissions: noteon | at | mac | dot | com

DEADLINE FOR “RIDE 2″ SUBMISSIONS: APRIL 30, 2012

Special Holiday Price for RIDE! -or- I Meant To Do That

I think I set the price for RIDE too low, but I don’t want to be a jerk over the holiday season. So Executive Decision: $2.99 is now the Special Holiday Price for RIDE on Kindle, Nook, and iBooks. After the holidays, it’s going up.

How far up? Not sure. Some up. So if you’re planning on getting it with your gift card, make a note to do it before December 28, because oh boy, you’ll need to refinance your house for a copy after that.

Nook

Kindle

iBooks

PS I’m getting emails from people asking if they can buy PDFs, because they don’t have e-readers. RIDE will also be a print book in January.

RIDE is now on iBooks in 32 countries! (And still on Kindle and Nook.)

Here’s a screenshot from my iPad:

I haven’t really bothered with iBooks much, except for testing out my clients’ ebooks on it (my novels aren’t up there yet), but there are some nice features here. The thing I liked best when this little sales page popped up is the “Tell a Friend” button, which creates a little email message. See? Perfect for, you know, telling a friend. Who likes to read books. About bicycles.

Nook

Kindle

iBooks

NY Velocity reviews RIDE!

And what a review it is…

The theme of “bike” is an obvious thread that runs throughout these nine short stories, but more importantly, identity is at the heart of many of these…perhaps most obviously in the chilling “I’m Bob Deerman.” I found the contribution by the editor of the book, Keith Snyder, to be especially poignant and his story, as well as the shop talk in Christopher Ryan’s, are the most seamless examples of bicycles serving the story effortlessly. There is a nice bit of cathartic revenge fantasizing done by Simon Wood. Kent Peterson’s contribution is an unabashed love letter to biking…and Taliah Lampert’s illustrations are wonderful…

Nook

Kindle

BICYCLING review!

Hey, Bill Strickland at BICYCLING magazine linked to us!

We’re waiting for the iBooks and print versions to go live, but here are the Kindle and Nook versions. They’re both $2.99.

Nook

Kindle

Subscribe to this blog or follow @ridebikefiction on Twitter if you want to know when additional versions are out, or we get more reviews, or RIDE 2 is imminent. And I’m not positive what happens when you click the various “Share this” buttons, but they’re all right down there, so you might as well try that, too.

The story behind RED DOT—and RIDE is now on Nook & Kindle!

This still isn’t the BIG announcement (the one that says, “Here are the links to RIDE on Nook, Kindle, iBooks, and in print!”) but this close to the holidays, I figure people with cyclists on their gift lists would rather have the extra lead time.

As of today, it’s on Nook for $2.99:

RIDE: Short fiction about bicycles for Nook
The “Buy as gift” link is on the right.

And Kindle for $2.99:

RIDE: Short fiction about bicycles for Kindle
The “Gift as gift” button is on the right.

Next will be iBooks, with print happening last. I’ll post as soon as they’re available.

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The story behind
RED DOT

Barbara Jaye Wilson’s story is the last one in the book, the cherry on top—or in bike racing and randonneuring terms, the lanterne rouge. That’s a fitting position for a story called “Red Dot.” Here’s what she wrote about it at catchthenoise.tumbler.com:

Long Story Short
(about a short story)

Keith Snyder’s Call for Submissions for bike-themed fiction was the excuse I needed. The Brenda Midnight characters had been knocking around in my head for way too long. I decided this would be a good outing for them, an opportunity to let them see the light of day, get some exercise. I figured I’d just stick Brenda on a bicycle and see what happened.

What happened was nothing. I take that back. A lot of things happened, just nothing worth submitting.

And so, back to the drawing board…literally, except these days I draw on an iPad. I amped up my work on ROGUE CONE, a graphic novel (reality: probably a short story) about a traffic cone. That work makes me hyper aware of other stuff on the street: pigeons, cobblestones, tossed out couches, gumblobs, and bicycles—some new, some not.

Then I remembered the last time I rode a bike.

I’m happy with how the story turned out. The fact that Keith included it RIDE BIKE FICTION is icing on the cake. Major yummy icing.

—Barbara Jaye Wilson

RIDE is now available on Kindle!

Also coming soon for Nook and iBooks (and print)—but the Kindle version just happened to go live first, and it’s Friday afternoon and you’re all screwing around online instead of working, so the timing was good for an announcement:

RIDE at Amazon

Hey, look at that. There’s a GIVE AS GIFT button over on the right.

Nerves

(A note from the editor/publisher.)

I’ve been a writer and graphic artist for a long time, but RIDE is my first effort as a publisher.

Ebooks will be going live soon (Amazon first, others to follow, then the print version after that), and the jangle of nerves is a little different from what I’ve experienced when my novels were about to come out. With a novel—one put out by a publisher not oneself, anyway—you get the advance reviews as your editor or agent sends them to you, and the good print ones make your week, and the vicious online ones stick in your heart, but at least you’ve got the good print ones, so first-month sales might turn out okay. It’s both the good and bad kinds of unsettling.

With RIDE, the jangling is more diffuse. As the editor, I want not to disappoint any of my authors. As the publisher, I want to sell enough copies to get some movement going for the next one (yes, I do intend RIDE 2; there’s a submission guidelines page at the end of RIDE). As the marketing director, I hope I didn’t send the story previews live too soon, or too late, or in the wrong way, or let the first few ARCs (Advance Reading Copies) see daylight when there were still too many missing changes. (As one of the authors, I just want to get email that allows me to act modest.)

And I suppose as a bike guy, I want other bike people to like it. But that’s not nerves, that’s just pleasant anticipation. The stories are so diverse that it’s hard to think of even a really big crank (pun intended, let’s say 185mm) not finding something to like.

As of yesterday, the first two story previews are up at the blog, and I intended to promote them when I sat down to write this. But frankly…I hate promoting, so I ended up writing about how I feel about the book instead. Which is:

I really kind of love it.

Story preview: “The Cyclist” by Simon Wood