Corey McKinnon's Blog

My new short story, "Charred Wheat," was available as a free download for five days recently. I did this to gain a bit more exposure and hopefully get a few sales of my first book, Unity Alpha. So, how did it go?

While it's obviously a bit early to draw any real conclusions, I do think it was worth doing. I had over 300 downloads of the story over the five day period, and at one point, it was #39 on the top 100 free book list in the Science Fiction category. That was really cool, and I wish I ...

Just a quick entry to note that I put my recently published short story, "Charred Wheat," on promotion at Amazon. Through the end of the day on Monday, January 23rd, you can get the story free of charge from any of the Amazon Kindle stores. Go to this page for the links.

Cover for "Charred Wheat" short story

So, back in August, in between finishing the first draft of Unity Alpha and starting on revisions, I took time out to write a short story, called "Charred Wheat." I wanted to keep writing, but wanted to do something...

This post is for all of you who have read my book, Unity Alpha, but have not yet left a review for it somewhere. Reviews are important, especially for self-published authors. A lot of people won't even consider a book if there are no reviews yet. So, if you have read my book, and if you enjoyed it, would you please consider taking a few minutes and writing a review on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, or wherever else you may have bought it? It's OK to leave a review in more than one of those p...

I've been pretty quiet lately, and if you've even been to the blog, you may have noticed that the progress bar hasn't moved at all for quite some time. I wish I could say that I was just too busy writing to update the site, but unfortunately, I've been slacking off. I got a nasty cold, which halted my progress for a few days, and after that, I just haven't been able to get back into the swing.

However, during that time of not-writing, I did some thinking and came up with a new strategy for...

A couple of weeks ago, I uploaded Unity Alpha to Smashwords to get a few more sales channels going. One of the big ones they deal with is Apple iBooks. Apple doesn't want to deal with individual authors, so you have to go through a third-party distributor to get your book on sale there. Yesterday, the links went live, so you can now buy my book for you iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch in six different countries. Go to my Unity Alpha page for all the links.

Another thing I thought it would be fun to ...

Now that I've begun working seriously on my next book, I decided to reveal my title (at least, the working title). I'm calling it Unity Strike Force. It will still be set on Unity, the generation ship from Unity Alpha, but it will follow the character of Marshall Mabrey, who was introduced in Unity Alpha as Miyuki's ex-boyfriend, as he is recruited into the elite special ops team called Unity Strike Force.

Also, I've added a progress bar in the left column on the blog. I'll try to keep this...

I'm pleased to announce that my debut novel, Unity Alpha, is now officially released! (Actually, it's been up for sale since last Thursday, but I was waiting until I had links to more of the places it would be for sale before writing this post).

You can click on the cover of the book just to the right of this text (or here, if for some reason you can't see the cover) to find out more about it and where you can buy it. Also, if you buy it based on reading this post, would you please comment...

I received the proof copy of my first book in the mail yesterday. It was pretty exciting to see something I'd written in a bound paperback book form. I had expected my review of the proof to be mainly looking for typos and checking the formatting. I had hoped I might not even need to order another proof. However, once I started looking at it, I realized it's going to need some major fixes.

First, when I set up the header, I hadn't noticed that I had dropped the text quite so far. There's a...

In my last post, I mentioned I had started planning my next book. Since then, I've written over 6,000 words of outline and general notes about the book. I think that's a pretty good start. I have the parts mapped out (it will have 3 parts, each covering a different aspect of the story, but all linked together) as well as fairly detailed descriptions of each chapter (I currently have 35 chapters outlined).

One thing I learned from my first book is that I need more details in my outline. My...