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Welcome to the Mt. Sneffels Press home page. Check out our Mt. Sneffels Press catalog to see our current offerings. Also see our Extended Catalog, listing non-MSP authors for whom we do web fulfillment. You can order from our catalogs using PayPal, a highly secure way to accept your credit card. To learn more about Mt. Sneffels Press, read our About page. To contact us, see our Contact page. You can also subscribe to this blog via e-mail.

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I’ve renamed the catalogs. Formerly, I had one catalog (“our catalog”) for books actually published by Mt. Sneffels Press, and another catalog (“extended catalog”) for books I don’t publish but for which I do web fulfillment. With the addition of the OCHS book, there are enough history-oriented books to re-divide the catalog, and history is proving popular. Now there are three catalogs: the History Catalog, the Fantasy Catalog (fantasy novels, including the Flying Broomstick series), and the Medley Catalog, which includes humor, poetry, essays, a children’s book, and short stories. Those books that aren’t published by Mt. Sneffels Press are so indicated. Enjoy!

Mt. Sneffels Press

Mt. Sneffels Press is proud to announce that we’ve published the Ouray County (Colorado) Historical Society’s Journal Volume 4, new for 2010. The book has 11 well-researched history articles all illustrated with multiple black and white photographs. You’ll enjoy stories such as the mining history of Ouray County, memories of Ouray’s San Juan Miners Hospital, the Sneffels Stagecoach holdup, the Marlow brothers’ Texas ordeal and their life in Ouray County. This book joins our History Catalog, bringing to you life as it was in Southwestern Colorado. You can go to our History Catalog here to see other books about life in our area as it once was.

To learn more about OCHS, click here, where you’ll find directions to the museum in Ouray. The site has many more details about the museum.

Mt. Sneffels Press, Our Authors

This review of our own Narrow Gauge Railroading in the San Juan Triangle in the Summer, 2010, issue of Classic Trains on page 84, generated lots of sales. The contact information got a bit muddled—the address given is for Mt. Sneffels Press, not the Ridgway Railroad Museum. Although the web URL is provided, I received many letters with checks, some made out to Mt. Sneffels Press, some made out to the Railroad Museum, and some even made out to both! No problem—the books were all shipped promptly.

Railroad

They say (whoever ‘they’ are) that one should write about what one knows about. Okay, fair enough. My new fantasy novel, The Unexpected Traveler, involves longbows. I’d never shot a longbow. As can be seen in another post (here) I borrowed a modern compound bow and shot it off a few times. But a compound bow is a precision machine. The parts being flexed are made of modern materials. There’s a front sight and a rear sight to help with repeatability. The draw weight is precise.
 
In other words, a compound bow is nothing like a traditional longbow. Read more…

Fantasy, Writing: Research

Well, actually, the correct spelling is Sneffels. That’s f-e-l-s. But apparently people are having trouble finding the website because Sneffels just has to be spelled Sneffles! So, I bit the bullet today. www.mtsnefflespress.com now redirects to www.mtsneffelspress.com. Hopefully that helps!

Mt. Sneffels Press

I had a great time at a workshop hosted by the Montrose Library and Carole London of London Publishing. I was asked to speak on e-books. Those wishing to see the slides I presented at the ebook workshop can find them here.

To prepare for the conference, I put my first broom book up on Smashwords. That’s a feeder site for Barnes and Noble, Sony, and the new Apple bookstore. You can see the details in the charts.

UPDATE: Here are two questions posed by Cheryl:

Question: Hi Dave,
I enjoyed your workshop at the library yesterday. I have questions! When preparing my book as an e-book, do the various ‘stores’ have a preference for number of pages in the book. In an 81/2×11, single-space format, my book has about 108 pages, including the cover. In 5.5×8.5, single-space pocketbook format, it has 218 pages. Does length of book matter? Does page size matter? Also, I’m still looking for a POD company. Do you offer that service? Thanks, Cheryl Read more…

Writing: Business

It’s hard to write about something I’ve never tried. The Unexpected Traveler, my new fantasy, uses archery and swordplay as primary weapons of war. Not having fired a bow before, I borrowed this one and got 30 minutes of instruction. Randy Cassingham, of This is True fame, handled the camera.

Yes, this is the one shot that hit the target! We managed to break the nocks off three arrows, and given this is borrowed equipment, we thought we ought to stop while we were ahead!

Fantasy, Writing: Research

The AmericanFlyingBroomstick.com Web Pages Consolidated into MSP

As part of an ongoing “look and feel” consolidation, the web pages for www.americanflyingbroomstick.com have been placed onto the Mt. Sneffels Press server. All the information is intact, including the videos. You can go to the AFB pages directly or you can navigate by using the menu bar at the top of the page. Hover the mouse over “Projects” and you can click on “Flying Broomstick,” which has all the links. As usual, you can order any of the three books in the series via our catalog page.

The “Technology” page has been bumped up a notch to be its own “Project” page. I get questions all the time about doing this and that. You’ll find the answers on the Technology page.

And the “Weather Station” is also its own project. It took several hours of work Read more…

American Flying Broomstick, Mt. Sneffels Press

Here’s a fun one for you to play with. It’s a little utility called Wordle, and it’s available at www.wordle.net. You feed it text and it spits back these cool maps, much like tag clouds. The most common words get the biggest font; it goes down from there. Options abound, including fonts, color scheme, and shape. The main photo is what happened when I pointed Wordle at this site. I find it rather interesting that I can tell a lot about the site simply by looking at the map.

Well, of course, there’s more. I couldn’t help myself, in fact. Next comes a Wordle word cloud from a section of the first Broom book, The Story of the Great American Flying Broomstick Book 1: Genesis. Here it is: Read more…

Fonts

This is an experiment. Randy Cassingham made a very nice video introduction for me to put on the www.americanflyingbroomstick.com home page. And he did a great job! But I did it on a day that my bipolar illness had taken me way, way down. So, I thought I’d try something a little different:

The production values stink, but I would like some feedback on the concept. The video is much shorter and hopefully more entertaining. So, compare it with the old one here: Read more…

American Flying Broomstick