How to find good stories online for free

It can be difficult to find good books to read in the M/M genre, especially when you are looking for genre-style stories, so I thought I'd offer a few good links for places to look for that sort of story. The best three sites I've found are Goodreads, Fiction Press, and Archive of Our Own, though there are many others out there.

Goodreads

Goodreads is a lovely site with so many things to offer. There are special groups for you to chat about specific genres or even specific authors or books, and then there are the lists. All help you connect to others who enjoyed the same book you did, and which might have lists of other books of the same sort for you to try. Obviously, not all the books you will find here are free, but there are many that are, and even if they're not, you can always put them on your Amazon wishlist for later.

Some good places to check on Goodreads:

• M/M Romance group -- you will need to request to become a member, but they're usually pretty good about adding new members.
• M/M Books that are/were available online list
• Favorite Unpublished M/M Stories list
• Unpublished or Free M/M - Scifi/Fantasy Edition list
• Online M/M Stories That Deserve To Be Published list
• Great M/M Webcomics list (not strictly books here, but definitely worth looking at)
• LGBT Webcomics list (ditto above)

Obviously, this is in no way a comprehensive list, but it'll give you a good place to start.

Fiction Press

Fiction Press is the original work sister site to Fanfiction.net, and works in basically the same way as the fanfiction site, up to and including groups. Obviously, groups can include anything the moderator decides, and there are many groups that focus on slash stories.

Some groups to look into:

• - slash stories -
• Slash, Slash, And Then Some More Slash!
• Slash Love
• Slash Fantasy
• Completed Slash
• Human Prisms
• Slash: Completed Works and Oneshots

Again, nowhere near a comprehensive list, but all of the above lists have over a hundred story links each. Certainly plenty to choose from.

Archive of Our Own (AO3)

Though AO3 mainly has Fanfiction, some original stories do make it onto the archive.

Some tags good for finding original stories:

• Original Work
• Celtic Mythology
• Greek and Roman Mythology
• Norse Religion and Lore
• Religion & Lore
• Ancient Egyptian Religion
• Arthurian Mythology
• Christian Lore
• Fairy Tales and Related Fandoms

Most of these will be generally filled with fanfiction, so you will have to do a lot more digging than at the other two sites (unless you don't mind fanfiction, which is fine, too), but there's still plenty there to be found, and it's well worth looking.

Other Sites

There are plenty of other sites out there as well. You never know what you might find.

Some places I've found other works:

• Gay Authors - a forum that specifically hosts stories about LGBT characters.
• Smashwords - has books for free as well as those for a price.
• Adult Fan Fiction - lots of stories here, though the quality is not always the best.
• Nifty Archive - featuring all sorts of LGBT stories.

There are others out there, but those are the main ones. There's always Amazon, too, though that can be tough given the filters they have in place. But hopefully that will give everyone a good list to pull from. Good luck, and happy reading!

Finding Free and cheap reading on Amazon

When I first started reading again, I limited my reading to stuff I downloaded off free sites and fanfiction, simply because my budget was still limited. The thought of spending money on books still felt too frivolous after more than a year of a very limited budget.

Then I met a young lady at my office who had a kindle as well, and we began to talk regularly. She was a long-time user of the Kindle, and had all sorts of tricks she shared with me. I'm going to share the same with you here, because I've been amazed at how well it works.

Tip #1:
If you don't have an account with Amazon (though you should with a Kindle), get one. They're free, and even if you don't have a Kindle, they're worth it for keeping track of what you'd like to get. Of course, this can also be done on most other sites these days, so if you have a Nook or other E-reader that works better with another site, just change Amazon to that site. Granted, I don't know if you will get quite the deals you will with Amazon, but books drop in price all the time, so you should get some at least.

The next step is to set up a special wish list for the e-books you want. Go crazy. Even if you don't buy them, this way at least you can glance at the list when you have money and decide what you would like.Amazon even has a nice little feature that shows items whose price has dropped since you put it on your wishlist, so you can easily see when things are on sale.

Check this list regularly. You never know when a secret sale price will appear. And when they do, you can just snap it up for your kindle.

Tip #2:
Get yourself Amazon cards when you have a little excess cash. I like to buy them every other paycheck, so long as I have the extra cash around. They come in all sorts of denominations, and you can just put them on your account, then use them when something good is on sale. So long as it's an Amazon card, it really doesn't matter what it says on the front. It all just goes into the same pool of money, and it's up to you how you spend it.

By the same token, when you get one for a gift, put it on your account so that it will be there later. No need to buy things right away, or save it until you're sure something is on sale. So long as you have it, put it on your account and use it when needed.

One warning here is that if you buy other things on your account, it will pull from this pool if you don't tell it not to, so be careful.

Tip #3:
Want some free Amazon cards? Join Bing here and earn them with searches. It's not the only reward you can get there, but it will definitely build up if you do it every day. I've gotten a number of books this way, and it's well worth it, even if you prefer another search engine. After all, you only have to do a certain number per day. So what have you got to lose?

Fan Fiction Downloader

One of the first things I did once I got my Kindle was find ways to download free stories online I thought I might like (including a lot of fan fiction), especially from AO3. But AO3 is still such a relatively new site compared to some others, that I knew I wasn't getting nearly what I could, so I did a search to find out how others downloaded things from the web. The first thing I found to try was a little program called Fan Fiction Downloader.It quickly became my second-favorite way to download free stories from the web.

The program is a simple one. Just download it and follow their instructions, then start it up and go to the first page of a story on one of the sites they cover, copy the address, and bam, it starts to download to your computer. Of course, you still need to transfer it to your kindle, but it definitely makes the number of stories you can access multiply by the thousands, regardless of what you're looking for.

While their list of sites is short, just the fact that they include both FanFiction.net and it's sister site Fiction Press means that the number of stories you can access are in the millions. It also accesses Adult Fan Fiction.org, which increases that number by quite a bit more. The full list of sites they access and what exactly they access is here. While their list does include AO3, AO3's own accessibility includes a download link for Mobi (Kindle), EPub, PDF, and Html. So unless you are having problems with their version on your e-reader, I would recommend using AO3's links instead of using this downloader.

Otherwise, I highly recommend this program. It definitely increased the amount of stories I had access to on my Kindle. And enjoy, everyone!