All posts by David Kudler

Speaking in Code: Ebook HTML basics

This post originally appeared on Joel Friedlander’s wonderful site, TheBookDesigner.com.

If, as I keep saying, an ebook is just a website a box, then in order to know how to get in and edit your ebook, you’re going to want to know some HTML. However you choose to work on the file, knowing the basic building blocks is essential in creating a finished  product that presents your book to its best advantage.

 

When we talk about HTML, we’re actually talking about two separate things:

Continue reading Speaking in Code: Ebook HTML basics

Launch your summer reading with a free time-travel adventure!

Looking for a great way to launch your summer reading?

Last month, Heather Albano’s Timepiece: A Steampunk Time-Travel Adventure hit #1 on Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Barnes and Noble, and Google Play in the Steampunk genre! It was part of a two-day promotion that was more successful than we could ever have hoped.

Well, in case you missed it, here’s your chance to get the book free! Continue reading Launch your summer reading with a free time-travel adventure!

David Kudler on The Hero’s Journey® in Sacramento

CWC SacramentoStillpoint author and publisher David Kudler will be giving a talk this Saturday at the California Writers Club Sacramento on the subject of “The Enduring Hero’s Journey®: How to Make your Writing Compelling and Memorable.”

Kudler, who has worked with Joseph Campbell Foundation since 1999, will talk about Campbell’s concept of The Hero’s Journey®, as it was laid out in his seminal book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Kudler edited the 2008 edition of the book. He will look at the ways in which the Hero Journey can serve as a blueprint for creating an enduring, transformative story.

Location: Cattlemens Restaurant, 12409 Folsom Blvd., Rancho Cordova, CA
Date/Time: Saturday May 20, 2017, 11:00 AM-1:00 PM
Website: http://www.cwcsacramentowriters.org/2017/luncheon-david-kudler/

“The Hero’s Journey®” is a registered trademark of Joseph Campbell Foundation (JCF.org) and is used with permission

Giveaway! WIn a copy of Timepiece

Sign up now on Goodreads for a chance to win a copy of Timepiece: A Steampunk Time-Travel Adventure by Heather Albano!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Timepiece by Heather Albano

Timepiece

by Heather Albano

Giveaway ends May 08, 2017.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

You only THINK you know what happened at Waterloo

The real story involved more monsters. And a lot more time travel.

It’s 1815, and Wellington’s badly-outnumbered army stares across the field of Waterloo at Napoleon’s forces. Desperate to hold until reinforcements arrive, Wellington calls upon a race of monsters created by a mad Genevese scientist 25 years before.

It’s 1815, and a discontented young lady sitting in a rose garden receives a mysterious gift: a pocket watch that, when opened, displays scenes from all eras of history. Past…and future.

It’s 1885, and a small band of resistance fighters are resorting to increasingly extreme methods in their efforts to overthrow a steampunk Empire whose clockwork gears are slick with its subjects’ blood.

Are these events connected?

Oh, come now. That would be telling.


“Waterloo and time travel are made for each other and Heather Albano has done a wonderful job of giving us a delightful cast of characters, tasked with stitching together the proper nineteenth century while fending off several monstrous alternatives. Propulsive adventure with historical insight.” – Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars and 2312

Austen, meet Waterloo. When a genteel 1815 heiress is given a strange watch, she time-travels to an 1885 England where history has gone hideously wrong. Now she has to change it back to what it “should” have been—and that never works out well, does it? A delicious supercharged blend of steampunk and the Napoleonic Wars, with a thrill on every page.” — Sarah Smith, The Vanished Child

If Jane Austen and Mary Shelley had locked H. G. Wells in a dungeon and revised his wildest work, the result would have been something like this rollicking steampunk time-travel adventure that still manages to be a comedy of manners. Albano’s delightful characters confront the not only monsters and killer robots, but their own divided loyalties between personal happiness and the fate of their country.Ken Schneyer, The Law & the Heart

The Power of Where: Setting, Place, and the Hero’s Adventure

Power of Where - Wandering KnightI’m going to be running a workshop as part of Redwood Writers 2017 Academy on Joseph Campbell’s concept of the Hero Journey as it applies to exploring setting for writers!

Every story explores a hero’s journey along a path toward discovery. It’s easy to focus on the hero or on the goal, but what about the path? With David Kudler (author, publisher, and editor for the Joseph Campbell Foundation), explore the ways in which you can enrich your settings using the hero cycle explored by Campbell in his classic The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

The Workshop will be Saturday, March 25 from 9:30 to 12:30 in Santa Rosa.

If you sign up for all three monthly workshops, you’ll get a discount; space is limited, so register now! Continue reading The Power of Where: Setting, Place, and the Hero’s Adventure

Two by Two: Happy Valentine’s Day!

It is interesting that St. Valentine’s Day, celebrated in the second month of the year, is the festival of romantic love in Western culture. Interesting for a couple of reasons — the first being that poor Valentine wasn’t really much of a lover himself, as nearly as we can tell (though he was martyred for marrying Christian couples). Of course, his symbol has become the stylized “heart” shape, and the heart has long been identified, both East and West, as the seat of love. And so where earlier Europeans identified May Day and Midsummer Night as the festivals most connected with passion, the Christian world focussed on the day of the saint of the pierced heart.

The other interesting thing about February 14th being the lovers’ holiday, it seems to me, has less to do with Valentine, and everything to do with when it occurs: smack dab in the middle of the second month. Continue reading Two by Two: Happy Valentine’s Day!

Inside the Box: The Anatomy of an Ebook

Over the next few posts, I’ll be showing you how ebooks are coded and formatted. We’ll look at the anatomy of an ebook, and what makes it tick.

You’ve heard me call an ebook a website in a box. This time we’re going to talk about what’s inside the box.

First thing’s first: let me share an ebook with you. It’s the ePub file for a short story of mine called White Robes.

You’re welcome to read it, obviously, but for the purposes of this post (and the next two), we’re going to be opening up the box and dissecting the ebook.

This is the actual production file that I’ve uploaded to Amazon, by the way — it includes all of the coding and formatting that I typically include in creating an ebook. It will be the model that I’ll be using over the next few posts in discussing an ebook’s innards.

Continue reading Inside the Box: The Anatomy of an Ebook