I finished publishing the book just yesterday, uploaded a copy to Internet Archive, and then the Internet Archive worked its magic so that the PDF I uploaded is a full-fledged Internet Archive book that you can read, search, link to, download, etc. So, for example, you can do a search for all the rabbits, and read through the book going from one rabbit to the next using the navigate-by-search-results option; you can also share the actual search results by means of a link: Rabbit.
The book is also available as an EPUB and in other formats here: Africa.LauraGibbs.net. There's even an audiobook. :-)
As you can see from the list of stories there in the audiobook index, the book contains 200 "tiny tales" with animal characters from a wide variety of storytelling traditions; each story is 100 words long. You can see the list of sources, with links to their Internet Archive versions too, here: List of Sources. Some of the books on that list have been featured here already; other books will be appearing here in November (I'll have more to say about the November focus in tomorrow's post).
I started writing 100-word stories for my dad about two years ago, and you can see all the "Tiny Tale" books that I've published so far here: 100 Words. The books are all free to download (PDF, EPUB, etc.), and they are also available as Kindles and as paperbacks from Amazon.
I really like writing 100-word stories: I try to make sure they really feel like stories, not just summaries of stories, and because they are so short, it is easy to include 200 of them in a single book. A friend of mine calls them "potato-chip stories" because you can't stop reading them once you get started. That's my hope anyway. :-)
In addition to being free, these books are CC-licensed OER (online educational resources) so that teachers can adapt the materials in whatever ways might be most useful to them; you can find out more about that in the Teacher's Guide that I prepared, with excerpts from the first three books paired with storytelling ideas.
This book of African animal tales is the first one where I've included illustrations, which was really fun to do! I used Fotor's GoArt to create "sketch" versions of CC-licensed photographs, and I also used some greyscale versions of photos with the Fotor editor; I went with these black-and-white options so that the photos would work in the paperback version also. (The image credits are in the back of the book.)
As you can see from the title of the book, I have optimistically labeled it as "volume 1" because there are still hundreds of animal stories from Africa I want to retell. The next volume should be ready in January; I've already got all the stories I need, so it's just a matter of doing all the editing and book preparation in November and December to get it ready to go. You can browse through the stories now if you are curious: African animal tales for volume 2.
Meanwhile, I hope you will enjoy this book... I had more fun and also learned more writing this book than any other of the books that I've done, and that makes me optimistic that it will be fun and useful for readers also!
by Laura Gibbs
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