The French Emerald now an ebook (and still free)

Serial novel. Sweet, funny, fast-paced — perfect to read with a cup of coffee (or glass of wine!)

I’d been planning on doing this for some time, and with the pandemic and all I finally got around to it :)

The French Emerald is now available as an ebook. Here’s the Amazon link.

You can also get it for Nook, Apple Books, and Kobo.

Also: it’s free :)

Enjoy and let me know what you think!

About online romance scams…

I happened to come across an article in The South China Morning Post (global media yeah) titled “Huge explosion in online romance scams in Hong Kong in 2018.”

If you’ve read my online serial novel The French Emerald, keep going.

If you haven’t, this might spoil things for you, so if you are at all fond of #chicklit or light readin’ fiction in general, click here to read the novel first (it won’t take long, it’s really more of a novella) then come back :) Continue reading

The French Emerald. My (free, for now!) serial novel

Serial novel. Sweet, funny, fast-paced — perfect to read with a cup of coffee (or glass of wine!)

My serial novel, The French Emerald, launched on March 4th.

I am enjoying this project so much. I love that my readers are enjoying it. I love it when I get emails saying, “help, I missed a week, where’s the link again?” I love finding new readers who read through all the past chapters to catch up :)

If you haven’t joined the fun, click here to get started.

The book has 43 chapters in all, and there are plenty of new twists to come. Enjoy and drop me a note to let me know what you think :)

UPDATE: All chapters are now online and free for you to read — just click the link above :)

Looking back: the first 6 weeks of The French Emerald serialized novel

The French Emerald, Serial Novel by Kirsten Mortensen

Serial novel. Sweet, funny, fast-paced — perfect to read with a cup of coffee (or glass of wine!)

Six weeks.

Hard to believe!

But that’s how long it’s been since the release of Chapter 1 of my new serial novel, The French Emerald.

It’s been an interesting experiment. I’ve been pushing notifications of new chapters out to my email list and on the Tuesday Serial Linky aggregator here. The book is also running in some regional newspapers (please say “hi” in the comments if you found me that way!)

If you haven’t seen any of the story yet and would like to take a peek, you can start on chapter 1 here.

The most unexpected aspect of doing all this? How complicated it is to set up all the files.

Mind you, I completed the entire novel before I published the first chapter. There are 43 chapters in all — and each chapter has a reminder of last week’s chapter and a teaser for the next week. So even before I put the first one out, I was dealing privately with questions about managing 43 files in a way that would let me tee them up for week-by-week release–not to mention help me keep them all straight =0

That, it turns out, was the easy part. Year 2018 and it’s still a PIA, if I may be blunt! to transfer formatted text across apps. I wrote the book in Word, and it’s impossible to paste it into WordPress without having to re-do the formatting. (Maybe if you use localized formatting it would work, but I use Styles, because in theory that will make it easier later to import the book into InDesign for print. So my Word files come over to WP with zero formatting.) For my email version (using Mailchimp for that) I have to copy/paste and reformat again.

Then there’s the links, since all the chapters in every version have to be cross linked so people can move from one chapter to the next. I just now realized some of the links in the first few chapters of the website version were broken. Sorry if you ran into that — fixed now :/

And then there’s the scheduling! It’s a lot easier to write a post, like this one, and hit “publish.” With the serial novel, I’m prepping chapters in batches and scheduling their release. So I live in terror* of accidentally releasing chapters out of order, or tweeting a chapter link before it’s officially published.

All the same, I’m enjoying it.

And I believe the serialized novel is poised for a resurgence. Microfiction, baby. Let’s do this thing.


*Well, okay, maybe not terror, exactly. More a state of being resigned to constant low-level anxiety. hahahahahaha

Countdown to Launch: The French Emerald

The French Emerald, by Kirsten Mortensen

It’s a mystery! It’s a romance! It’s a … serial novel? =O

I have written a serial novel.

I have written a serial novel. I’ll be publishing on my site, one chapter per week.

The first chapter debuts March 4.

I’ll post more about the how’s and why’s at some point.

But for now, please click here for the teaser copy and how you can play along :)

UPDATE: All 43 chapters are now online and free to read! Click here to start with Week 1.