A friend told me she tried to find my short story, “The Odds of Death,” on LULU.com so she could download it. After a bit of snooping I discovered why: Lulu.com’s Search function clearly favors for-fee downloads over free downloads (I’m shocked, shocked to hear there’s commerce going on at LuLu.com). In addition, even if you’re searching for something you’re willing to pay for, the mechanism for downloading PDFs from Lulu.com isn’t exactly obvious.

So, here’s a roadmap to my iPhone short-story collection (The Evil That Men Do, $1.99) as well as to the free, individual PDFs of most of the stories:

Step 1: Go to www.lulu.com and click on BUY (even though you don’t want to buy anything).

Step 2: Search the Books category for my last name (Mambretti).

Step 3: Click on my name in one of the listings (as opposed to clicking on the title or cover image). This should take you to the Light Pages’ Storefront.

Step 4: Click on the small icon labeled “Free Download.” If you have Acrobat installed on your PC (or Smartphone, for that matter), the story should pop up on your screen.

Step 5: Save the file.

To view the story on a handheld or mobile device, you can sign up with Lulu.com and then surf to your account online using the device; or, if you don’t want to sign up with Lulu.com, you can download the pdf to your PC and then synchronize your mobile device with your PC.

An edition of The Evil That Men Do is available for the Kindle at Amazon. ($0.99).

The Evil That Men Do is a collection of short stories I’ve written over the past decade. Three were published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; one in the defunct ezine, HandHeld Crime; one was scheduled for publication in two, separate periodicals that went out of business before it appeared; one was developed and previewed at www.zoetrope.com. Three are new.

(BTW: If you don’t like the stories, please don’t tell me. If you’re a lawyer and you find technical errors in “The Odds of Death,” though, I’d love to correct them.)