1st blog post on bahern7. Topic: Publishing and Ether Books

Ether Books launched at the London Book Fair in April 2010. They're a relatively new company and quite technological. Their whole premise is that, with roughly 70% of the world's citizens owning a mobile phone, the time is ripe to deliver short content (i.e. short stories) to a rapidly emerging smartphone market. As of now their free app is compatible with Apple's iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad, with plans to expand to the Android market i.e. smartphones operating on a Google designed platform later in 2011. The rise of smartphones along with the ever increasing popularity of e-book readers such as Amazon's Kindle does, indeed, seem to indicate that e-books and e-reading will be central to the future of literature.

Naturally, I'm excited to be involved with such a pioneering company as Ether. In the thoroughly modern fashion, I first came across them on Twitter. I saw a link to their submissions page and decided to try my luck. I was a little daunted when I saw that amongst the people they published were such names as Sir Paul McCartney, Hilary Mantel and the well-known Irish writer Maggie O'Farrell. Nonetheless, I sent one of my stories and heard nothing for about 5 days when the lovely lady at Ether, Maureen Scott, emailed me back to say that they would like to publish my story and others. She attached a two-year contract which I signed and scanned back to them. This was at the end of last year (2010). To date, they've published four of my stories with another, Afternoon Tea, due to be released at any time now. I've several more stories completed and several others in progress. I am hopeful of publishing as many as possible over the course of this year and next. It gives me great pleasure to think that to publish 10 stories, for example, is the equivalent of an entire collection published via the more traditional routes. Roll on the novel:-) Brian