I have just launched a Digital Bookstore to make my tales available. The commercial details can be found in the official announcement at Richard Falken’s Site.
What is not explained there is why I deployed the website and how I did it.
Magazines are not interested in long series of short stories. Those who are, don’t want cross-genre series. This is a problem when it comes to marketing The Worth of Immortality, the short story series I have been working on as of late.
The Worth of Immortality follows the steps of an immortal man, and features both Fantasy and Science-Fiction elements. While this is a great concept from the literary point of view, it is hard to market. Magazines that publish Science-Fiction won’t take the series because of the fantastic components; publications that want Fantasy won’t take the tales because of the Science-Fiction in them.
Having my own store solves this problem.
As for how I created my store, I installed an Opencart CMS on an OpenBSD server. If you have been following my activities, you’ll know I wrote an article about Opencart for Linux Magazine. Opencart has a big advantage in that it is very cheap to get running. Notice I say cheap, but not free, because despite being Free, Open Source software, if you want to do anything with it you will end up having to purchase some plugins for it.
Opencart’s big handicap is precisely that it is not an out of the box solution. You need to either buy or produce a whole lot of code to bring it to working status, and the documentation for doing so is not great.
Still, I am satisfied with the result.
Don’t forget to check the store out!