Tag: e-book

Giving “In the Shadow of Ares” As A Gift

A friend asked me today how she could send In the Shadow of Ares as a gift.

Through Amazon, it’s very simple (as, with Amazon, you might expect it to be). Navigate to the product page using the link above or on the AresProject.com sidebar. In the upper right corner of the product page, among the other links you normally use to order merchandise through Amazon.com, there will be a button labeled “Give as a Gift” (circled here in red):

Click on "Give a Gift" on the book's product page

Clicking the button brings up a Kindle ordering page with a few extra options. Here, you can enter the email address of the person to whom you wish to send the book (even if they don’t own a Kindle or have the software installed…yet…) in the spot indicated with the red circle, and if you wish to make it a surprise for Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, etc., you can enter the appropriate delivery date in the spot indicated with the green circle:

Enter the email of the gift recipient, and the date you want it delivered (say, December 25)

Easy. And remember that the recipient doesn’t have to have an Amazon account (and you don’t need to know what their account name is if they do), and if the recipient doesn’t already have a Kindle they can simply download the Kindle e-reader software for whatever platform they prefer (laptop, iPad, smartphone, etc.).

The process is pretty similar for Nook users, but there is no up-front way to specify delivery date. Click on the link on the Barnes & Noble product page (which page you can also get to from the link on the sidebar here), indicated with the red circle:

Click the circled link to send a Nook gift

Clicking the link brings up a floating page where you can enter the gift recipient’s info and a gift card message:

Pretty self-explanatory, but no delivery date option here

I didn’t go further with the Nook version, since I would have had to buy it (which obviously makes no sense for me to do), but in screens beyond this one a delivery date option may be available.

So, that’s all there is to it — perfectly simple, and much easier than buying a dead-tree book and wrapping it.

Kindle and Nook

The Kindle version of In the Shadow of Ares is now available at Amazon.com. Thank you to everyone who has already purchased the book — plus the helpful feedback from  sharp-eyed Ari, who discovered an editorial comment left behind like a bad surgeon’s forgotten scalpel. The mistake has been corrected and the text republished, but it may take 24 hours to propagate to the product page.

We’ve had multiple requests to publish to the Nook platform, which I just so happen to be doing. It is a little bit more involved than publishing to Kindle — Kindle merely involved entering payment information, a cover image and description, and uploading the .doc file. Smashwords (the site used for Nook and many other e-reader platforms) is a little more particular about formatting and metadata, but in return it includes assignment of an ISBN number and listing in major book catalogs. This means publishing through Smashwords will not only get us onto multiple additional readers but into libraries and other outlets.