Turkish edition of A Gift for the Sultan

I am pleased to announce that this morning I signed the contract for the Turkish language edition of A Gift for the Sultan. It will be published by Nokta Yayıncılik Dağıtım ve Pazarlama, a major publisher in Istanbul, and translated by Orhan Tuncay. So finally the Turkish warriors who gallop through the pages of my novel will be speaking their own language!

Orhan Tuncay is a prolific translator and poet and I'm confident that he'll do justice to my 15th century tale of adventure and urban/anti-urban conflict. He and I met in January when I presented the book before the reading circle of METU alumni in Istanbul; he had read the book in pdf and asked my permission to present it to his publisher. My thanks to him and (again) to all those METU alumni and others who are helping me reach one of the natural audiences for this novel.

Recommended and non-recommended sites for writers

I found this site through Google after getting an invitation to become an affiliate of "MyFreeRead" and discovered that my suspicions were justified: according to this analysis, it's more an opportunity to become a sales gateway than a self-publisher.

Writer Beware™ Blogs!: MyFreeRead.com: Not Quite What It Appears

Too many of the writer-promotion schemes offered on the 'net exploit the writer's desire for recognition to sell, sell, sell stuff completely unrelated to the production of good literature. If you get into one of them, you will probably repel more discriminating readers than you attract. So before falling for one of these invitations, check out other entries on "Writer Beware", which describes itself as “the public face of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s Committee on Writing Scams.”

This can help us avoid the faux literary sites. And, in contrast, here are some real ones that I like and use, for serious writers and readers seeking each other:

• Scribd is terrific for making your writings accessible to the world; it's also a good place to find books, some of which may have been uploaded without permission — something Scribd discourages, but apparently cannot prevent. You can find several of my articles and stories there, where they've got many more "reads" than in their original print publications.

• Fictionaut is another site I like. Writers post stories and poems, either new or previously published, say something about them and invite comments from readers. Nobody is selling anything there (although they may let you know about interesting literary publications). I have a few stories there, all previously published in print but much more accessible here.

• Narrative also has good fiction and other genres, of a purely literary (not commercial) interest. (I don't have anything published there yet, but it might be a good place to try.)

• And what must be the premier publishing site for e-books, Smashwords, more versatile than Kindle which is also great but readable only with the Kindle app. I have a Kindle reader and also downloaded the free app onto my computer, but if I wanted to read on any other device (Nook, iPad, etc.) I could use Smashwords without any further complication. My novel A Gift for the Sultan is available on Kindle, but I want to make it also available at the same price ($5.99) through Smashwords.