by Judith Ashley
February 1 is the second Blog-O-Versary of our sister
site, Free Reads From The Genre-istas. Our readership has grown and as I write
this, we are less than four hundred page views from reaching 10K.
If you aren’t aware of Free Reads, let me tell you a
little about it. First founded as a way for some of the Genre-istas to explore
new-to-them genres using Flash Fiction, it soon grew from Flash Fiction to
short short stories of 3 – 5K words or more. Several of the Genre-istas used
their Free Reads as a starting point to expand the story into longer short
stories.
Another use of the Free Reads stories is to expand and
publish them. Both Paty Jager and Mae Pen have done that. On February 14, 2014
an anthology Love and Magick - Mystical Stories of Romance from Judith Ashley, Diana McCollum and
Sarah Raplee will be released.
The anthology contains original short stories as well as ramped up versions that
first appeared on Free Reads.
But I digress.
While Free Reads has been a place for the Genre-istas to
showcase their work and to launch early versions of later-published short
stories, it has also been a lot of work. When Sarah and I realized we were
publishing in 2014, we also realized that something had to give. We did not
want to shut down Free Reads so we revamped it.
Check out Free Reads and see the New Look.
A new feature is the “Side Bar” on the right. The side
bar lists the Genre-ista or Friend who is ‘responsible’ for that month, the
date their story will be published and who else is coming to visit.
Another addition is the "Headline" where you can see not
only the writers for the month but also the title of their short story and any
other news such as the title of a new release, an award/contest they’ve won,
etc.
These changes mean Free Reads is more diverse than ever
and writers have another platform where they can be seen and read. Plan on
joining our audience of readers from around the world: Russia, Germany, Poland,
India, China to name a few!
6 comments:
Looks good! I Just realized I'll be in a western anthology coming out in March and I need a short story for the Free Reads then! OOPs! Guess I better start thinking about that.
Thank you for all you and Sarah do for this and the Free Reads blog!
The new free reads site looks great. You and Sarah do such an amazing job on the blog and free reads. Thanks for all you do.
Thank you for the compliment, Paty. And thank you for your support. I'm already looking forward to the new Free Reads short story. BTW: Christy Carlyle was instrumental in creating 'the new look'! Most of the time Sarah and I think this is fun.
Thanks, Diana - Sarah and I always appreciate compliments! And we've appreciated your contributions to Free Reads and to RTG!!!
Looks great. I'm always appreciative of your blog and, until now, had never really taken the time for any of the free reads. Definitely plenty of talent among your ranks.
Happy New Year to all the genreistas.
Thanks for stopping by, Maggie. Yes, there is a lot of talent at Free Reads. This year Free Reads is showcasing even more talent because we've added "Friends" who will sharing their stories with us.
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