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I finally published my short story collection on Amazon!

Writer's picture: Michael SerrurMichael Serrur

Updated: Jul 3, 2024

My new eBook, No Right on Red: a short story collection inspired by the weirdness of New York, is available on Amazon (cue the confetti). Each of the five stories takes place in New York City and all the plots are twisty, suspenseful, and a tad weird think Black Mirror or Twilight Zone. The eBook will be free to download TODAY (July 1, 2024). Otherwise, it’ll cost you .99 cents. And if you like what you read, please leave a nice review. If I get enough reviews then my book moves up the ranks — then more people see it — then it moves higher… and you get the idea. So please download. (Click here for the link).


I’ve been working on this short story collection for well over a year, and I consider it to be my first true foray into fiction. At times the writing process was painful. I didn’t know what I was doing and just kind of figured it out as I went along. I’d start each story with a word or a phrase or a line of dialogue and then try to weave it together into something somewhat original and somewhat coherent. A lot of times this didn’t work out. There were many rewrites.

 

Then there was the publishing aspect…I didn’t work with an agent or publisher (big surprise, I know), so I self-published on Kindle Direct Publishing. Again, this took some time to figure out. Kindle has specific formatting requirements and these can be annoying if you don’t know them. You also need to understand how to market your book, and this means analyzing different genre categories, subcategories, and keywords and seeing how you can carve out your own specific niche. You also need a cover, a snazzy book description, and all sorts of other little details that are easy to overlook.

 

But the most eye-opening revelation came as dove deeper into the most popular eBooks, the ones that people were actually reading. Scrolling through the Amazon “Top Sellers,” I noticed that much of mainstream contemporary fiction is weird. Really weird. Like I’m not sure the word weird properly expresses the true depravity of what is going on within the shapeless, imaginary walls of the Kindle eBook Store.

 

I consider my imagination pretty loose and screwy, but I’ve never considered writing a book like, “Deep Fried Death” or “Mail-Order Bride Mommy” or “The Husband Killer” or “Secret Baby for My Ex’s Seal Brother,” or “Christmas with Daddy’s Best Friends" (not to be confused with “Christmas with Dad’s Best Friend,” “Doctor Daddy for Christmas,” “Daddy Christmas,” or “Fake Married to My Best Friend’s Daddy"). Apparently, if you’re not writing about mafia bosses, billionaire bad boys, post-apocalyptic sci-fi serial killers, Mormon love triangles, or age-gap pregnancy romances then sorry, but you are poor.

 

Alas, I don’t care. I like how I write and I like what I write. I hope that you all like it, too (and I’m happy to announce that another five stories will be released in the coming months). I don’t think storytelling should be so formulaic and commercial. That's when things get boring. Thinking more about SEO, cover art, #booktok influencers, and keyword selections than the sentences on the page probably won't result in the best novel, but that's just the way it is, and I imagine that it's the same for music or theater or film or any other art.


So I’m going to keep at it, learn the ropes, and hopefully continue to get better. And who knows, maybe one day you’ll see “Sodomized By My Ex-Girlfriend’s Waffle Iron” at your local Barnes and Noble on the shelves right next to Anna Karenina and The Great Gatsby, and you’ll smile and think to yourself: “Well, I’ll be damned; Michael finally made it.”

 

Jokes aside, thank you all for sticking with me over the past few years. Although I don’t update the blog often, I always find this spring of support to be particularly nourishing. Thank you all for reading my stuff even when it sucks. And like I said before, bigger and better things are yet to come.   

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