I have just published my third issue of Odds and Ends for my patrons: free books in Italian and English, Scottish voices and folk tales, the language of poetry, and a tool to find where your house was when dinosaurs ruled the earth.
Because it’s good to be my Patrons.
And for everybody else, too: the first batch of recommendations in the Odds and Ends series was posted yesterday to my Patreon page. It features:
Check it out if you are my Patrons and you missed it, and if you feel like, please give me feedback. I’m having quite a lot of fun sifting through the web for items to include in these posts, but I’d like to know what you’d like to see.
Thank you!
They say we should always steal from the best, and they are right. Case in point: writer and game designer Shanna Germain has just launched her Patreon page, and among the perks she is offering to her Patrons there is a curated collection of cool stuff – free or inexpensive – that she likes, and that she thinks her Patrons might like too.
And that’s a great idea, and one worth stealing.
After all, I already do something similar with the Karavansara University and in Italian with my strategie evolutive book club, and a weekly collection of cool stuff for my Patrons sounds like the perfect thing to expand my Patreon offer.
I might call it Odds and Ends.
There’s this story I heard a few days ago, that goes like this:
Q: How do you know that a stand-up comedian is being too successful?
A: All of their new jokes suddenly are about hotel rooms, airports and comedy venues.
The risk of success is, you start working on your successful routine and you lose touch with everything else. Staying in touch with what’s out there, with everyday life, with people and events and ideas is absolutely indispensable to keep having fresh ideas.
Continue readingAnd now for my next trick, I will do something completely different.
One thing I learned in my early days in the trenches as a self-publisher is, pushing my colleagues’ work costs me nothing, and it is good both for my readers – that discover something new and interesting – and for the colleagues, because this way they my reach a new audience.
And I cash in some good karma.
So, I will start pushing my friends’ work here, once in a while – new books, Patreon pages and what else. And right now I will start with something really different – Francesco A. Pizzo’s Patreon page for his Ghamak project.
Take a look at this…
Continue readingI am preparing an online archive of all the contents I shared with my Patrons in my first year on the platform. Patreon is an excellent service, but it does not allow an easy search and retrieval of previous contents – so new Patrons might have a hard time getting the old stories I shared.
In 2018, my Patrons had the dubious pleasure of reading:
One Night at the Circus (Urban Fantasy)
The Tales from the Frontier (Oriental Fantasy):
 . The Demoness with White Hair
 . The Last House in the Valley
. The Waterfall’s Wife
She Who Mauls, A story of the Contubernium (Historical Fantasy)Â
Funeral Point (urban fantasy)
The Chopping Squad (horror novella)
The Annotated Imaginary Girls – season #1
 . Sara
 . Lucy
 . Tamara
 . Alice
 . Michelle
 . Cheryl
 . Livia
All of these stories were made available both in Italian and English.
My Italian Patrons also gotÂ
the Burning Typewriters Story (science fiction)
Dracula: The Duel (dark fantasy)
Plus articles, behind the scenes, artwork, development notes and what else. AND discounts or free copies for all the ebooks I self-published.
Now all the stories will be revised, turned into handy PDF and uploaded somewhere easy to browse. I’m open to suggestions, by the way.
Once this is done, I’ll start working on the new material and on a general revision of my Patreon page, to make it more pleasant and easier to access.
As they say, it’s good to be my Patrons.
Karavansara 