Loading...Honolulu Hottie: a Hawaiian Cyberpunk story
I’m going to talk about something you can get for free, so be sure to read to the end. Or skip to the section marked FREE. 
In 1989 I read my first cyberpunk novel, William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive. That novel got me reading science fiction again. Until then, I’d been on a Fantasy bender for the six years, and yes, you can get drunk on fantasy. My apologies to my brother and sister, for making them dress like hobbits and forcing them to call me The Great One. They partied like ewoks on Endor when I moved out for college.
Cyberpunk is considered an old genre (the cool kids are doing steampunk) but it appeals to the mundane science fiction reader in me. It’s mundane because Cyberpunk has similarities to reality, such as the absence of spaceships flitting from star to star at speeds faster than light (at least OUR spaceships). Cyberpunk stories are near future and filled with high-tech lowlifes. It’s a good genre for tales of “warning” because it’s mundane enough to see how our day-to-day life contributes to the tale’s vision.
What’s Hawaiian cyberpunk? Sunglasses and surfboards with datajacks? (Might as well do something with that leash around surfer’s leg.) Honolulu Hottie is my take on it. It’s a novelette which is like a novel but a third of the size because I only kept the good parts. The story’s about Nafi, a world champion surfer who got a regular job but get’s seduced by a political activist. She gets him in trouble, he loses his job, and they’re on the run from a corporate coverup that requires them dead. Surfboards, datajacks, crime, and poy. You know, Hawaiian cyberpunk.
Free to Blog Subscribers
(if you’re not a subscriber, subscribe by entering your email address into the upper right corner of this webpage and you’ll get an ARC)
Honolulu Hottie is live on the Kindle for $3.00 to the worldwide public. If you’re subscribing to this blog for email service, you’ll receive a free copy. In the publishing industry, we call this an Advanced Reader’s Copy, or ARC, meaning you get it in advance of the public. You’ll receive in your email a Honolulu Hottie ARC.mobi and a Honolulu Hottie ARC.prc file which you can load onto your eReader device. The Amazon rep on the phone told me that they don’t support their Kindle users–no matter what device–loading .mobi or .prc from anywhere outside of the Kindle store. So they aren’t being helpful. But Amazon does offer a free Kindle Previewer application that you can install on your Mac or Windows computer. You can download it from here (windows, osx) or from Amazon. All you have to do is launch the Kindle Previewer, then drag-and-drop the .mobi file into the application (or file->open the .mobi file). Other free options are:
- Calibre, but they don’t handle the page breaks in the Kindle book so I don’t recommend it. It’ll work, but some of the material before the story starts gets jumbled and that’s not very pleasant. But it will display the nice custom fonts I used. (See the thumbnail to the right.)
- If you use a mobile device or Windows, you can use MobiPocketReader. To bad they don’t have a version for OSX.
Since I want you to enjoy the story rather than fiddle with technology, I suggest you go the Kindle Previewer route.
Available in the Kindle Store
Those with a generous heart may hesitate to accept a free e-book, but it turns out I have a lot to gain: Your love of course. That’s ever in the fore of my mind. And your undying gratitude. That’s cool too because anything that doesn’t die has to be pretty damn cool. Most of all, I’m after your review of Honolulu Hottie on Amazon because a Kindle book without reviews is a lonely Kindle book indeed. So take a look at your ARC (on the Mac reader, drag-and-drop the .mobi file; for the PC, I imagine you do a file->open and load the .mobi; if you have a Kindle reader, plug it into your PC and copy the .mobi file to it; for the iPhone, I couldn’t do it so maybe some smart person will post a comment on how this is done) and then follow this link to Amazon and tell the world what you think in as few or many words as you want.
I’ll close with a surfer’s farewell: if you decide to ride that giant swell cresting the horizon, remember to keep the waxy side of the board up, the fin side down, and your datajacks rust free.
Comments
Comment from Lancer Kind
Time October 7, 2010 at 09:35
Thanks to those who have left reviews for Honokulu Hottie so far! I was becoming alarmed that no one loved because I didn’t see the reviews coming live on Amazon. So I made a few calls, and yes my Mom did leave me a review (Thanks Mom!) but something has been holding up the reviews from showing up on the Amazon end.
Based on my experience on publishing on the Kindle, I’ve learned Amazon’s publishing workflow isn’t automated (yeah, I know what your thinking–but computers are for automation). Their system requires human intervention. (examples: world wide distribution wasn’t working, the story’s details section wasn’t showing up). Amazon says it takes 48 hours for things to happen but it’s more like a week to two weeks.
Amazon’s author support has been excellent though. Everytime I bring up an issue, the have fixed in 12 hours. I wish more business worked like that. So I’ve posted on an Amazon forum about the reviews not showing up, I bet they fix the problem soon.
So please, if you haven’t shown your love and left a review, leave me one.
Comment from Lancer Kind
Time October 7, 2010 at 19:12
Thanks for the review Marshall! I enjoyed reading it!
Comment from Matata
Time October 11, 2010 at 21:19
The book name, Honolulu Hottie, lands me on a famous island, whose Chinese name (Chan Xiang Shan) is quite familiar to a Chinese reader. In this story, the isand does not give a stage to a Chinese historical event, but itself is facing a potential destruction.
The writer is quite skilled at finding, in the rich vocabulary of the English language offers, a strong, precise word and metaphors to picutre scenes and behaviors. I enjoy reading it slowly while drinking my jasmine tea, although I prefer coconuts to pineapples and Dole pineapples are sold expensively at Auchan.
I shared these acquirements with my BF, hoping he could drop his Chinese chess pieces at night when I was already asleep: Women were why you bathed and who you wished for when going to bed.
Comment from Rand Huso
Time October 20, 2010 at 08:21
Lancer – I grabbed lots of free books that interested me, or that
replaced many of those in my library from the many sources available
(see below). Then I connected my Kindle to my MacBook Pro or my Ubuntu
desktop, and copied about 140 free books to it for reading (I put them
in the Documents folder on the device). No idea if this works for
Window$, but I suspect it does.
Then I experimented with Calibre and found it was even easier to get
free books to the Kindle. I recommend it. It works on all the usual
operating systems too.
Simply grab the free books, use the red “Add books” button on Calibre
to add the books to its library, select them all and press the
“Convert books” to convert them all over to the .mobi format (which
the Kindle also uses.) This is because most of the books that I’ve
found are in the .epub format. That format is used by most of the
readers, but not the Kindle. I do wish they’d embrace more open
standards.
Connect the Kindle with the supplied USB cable and after a few seconds
there will be a message “Device Amazon Kindle detected”, and the extra
buttons for looking at the contents of the “Reader” and “Send to
device” buttons appear. Select all the books and “Send to device”.
It’s that easy.
I’ve also sent .pdf, .txt, and .html files to my Kindle.
Here’s a few of the links I found for free books – no guarantee
they’re all still working:
http://www.gutenberg.org/
http://bookmooch.com/
http://www.baen.com/library/
http://www.ebookspyder.net/
http://freecomputerbooks.com/
http://librivox.org/
http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-106145.html
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.dailylit.com/
http://www.web-books.com/eLibrary/
http://www.feedbooks.com/publicdomain
http://pdf-free-download.com/
http://books.google.com/
http://www.justfreebooks.info/
http://www.docstoc.com/
http://memoware.com/
http://www.bookyards.com/
http://www.archive.org/
http://tknerr.de/ebooksearchr/home.html
http://www.pmillett.com/tecnical_books_online.htm
http://www.bookrags.com/browse/ebooks/
http://www.podiobooks.com/
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/
http://www.librarything.com/
http://flazx.com/
http://pinkmonkey.com/
http://www.paperbackswap.com/index.php
http://www.thebookcart.com/
http://www.swapsimple.com/
http://www.zunafish.com/
http://www.titletrader.com/
http://www.realtimepublishers.com/
http://www.pdfchm.net/
http://www.moochmuch.com/home
http://www.bizbooktalk.com/ (Japanese)
http://www.wowio.com/
http://welltoldtales.com/
http://www.bookins.com/
http://www.freetechbooks.com/
http://worldlibrary.net/
http://www.scribd.com/
http://libraryelf.com/
http://www.bookcrossing.com/
http://manybooks.net/
Enjoy! Maybe someone else will have time to sort through the list and
provide an updated version.
Rand.
Comment from Dave
Time December 6, 2010 at 12:31
Lancer, it’d be nice if you showed some love to the minority who don’t have/want/use Kindles…Consider Smashwords or Feedbooks for everyone else.
Comment from Lancer Kind
Time January 1, 2011 at 21:57
Dave, I’m not clear if you are:
1 acting out of “publishing activism” in this suggestion, because you don’t like Amazon,
2 you don’t know that the Kindle reader is free for most computer/phone platforms, or
3 Amazon is being a prick to your part of the world in not selling you ebooks despite author’s like myself telling them we want world wide distribution.
Point 1, I support but I’m less worried about an Amazon monopoly in that Apple has the iBook store, and B&N has their own store. I have nothing against Smashwords and will likely publish on them when I get some time. I do have work published on Smashwords as part of the Speculative Realms anthology: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/8860
Point 2, You just need to install the free software and go. It works nicely.
Point 3, Damn Amazon. This is some control freak nature in that their own infrastructure wasn’t designed to support the agreement I made with them to distribute the book *world wide*. I have the same problem and work around it by using my US business address rather than the address of my Chinese apartment. It makes me angry and affects me often, and none of my Asia Pacific readers can support my work. I hope the iBook store works better.
Perhaps #3 can be fixed by publishing on Smashwords eh? You’ve led me to a convincing argument.
Comment from Lancer Kind
Time September 29, 2010 at 13:54
I later found out from Amazon that they don’t support allowing their users to use their Kindle devices to load books from any other source than the Kindle store. If you don’t have a way to open the .mobi file I sent to blog subscribers, I recommend you install the free Kindle Previewer. Links for downloading the Kindle Previewer are included in the above article. If you live outside the US, use the link I supplied or Amazon will not let you download the Kindle Previewer. (Say, “bad Amazon.”)
You can also find other sources of Kindle Previewer on the Internet.