Looks what's featured on eBookDaily's Freebies page!

 It's the first book in the Haven duology, THE SIXTH DISCIPLINE!

I recently ran a promotion on this book, and it has done pretty well.

Check it out before it has gone from the site! And there are plenty of other books listed there, too. 

A Snippet from THE SIXTH DISICPLINE

The Sixth Discipline is free in most eBook stores. The story. a far future, slow burn romance is set on the isolated colony world of Haven, where the human colonists inhabit three different environments: cities surrounded by small towns and farms, a vast forest inhabited by mystics, and mountain valleys from whence fierce hunters and warriors raid the other two groups. 

Here's a snippet from Chapter Six, when things start to get really interesting.

Francesca stopped turning and pointed to a distant, snow-capped peak in the middle of the range. “That looks like Mount Fujiyama. We must be on Hayden land, which means we’re a good ways south of the city.”

South of the city might mean closer to the Sansoussy Forest. Ran-Del cleared a space in the dirt with his foot and handed her a twig. “Show me.”

Francesca squatted down and drew a small circle. “That’s Shangri-La.” Below the city, she sketched a large four-sided shape, narrow at the top and wide at the bottom, and drew a zigzag line across the middle of it. “This is the Hayden estate, and the wiggly line is the mountains behind us.” She added a dot near one end of the line of mountains. “This mark is where Fujiama is.”

“Where on your map is the forest of the Sansoussy?” Ran-Del asked, crouching down beside her.

She drew a large, amorphous, cloud-like shape just slightly south and a good ways west of the city.

“There,” she said. “I’m not really sure where your people live, but that’s the Sansoussy Forest. It’s prairie and rolling hills up until then.”

Ran-Del studied the marks and then looked up at the sun. “We’re north of your mountain, so we must be about here.” He laid a small pebble in the top half of the squarish shape.

“I think so,” Francesca said. “But Hayden land extends quite a ways. I can’t say for sure.”

“That answers where,” Ran-Del said, sitting back on his heels. “But why would your father have put us here?”

“I’m not positive.” She ducked her head, and Ran-Del sensed embarrassment. “But I have an idea. It’s related to the reason Pop snatched you from the forest in the first place.”

He focused his psy sense for any hint that she was lying. “What is the reason?”

Francesca seemed reluctant to answer directly. “Did Pop tell you about what’s happening to Great Houses like Hayden?”

Ran-Del recalled Baron Hayden’s monologues and nodded. “He said his house was in danger of being swallowed up by a bigger house. He said that I could help him to stop it in some way, but he would never say how.”

Francesca stared straight ahead as if she found the distant mountains fascinating. “Well, the reason we’re vulnerable is because right now the House of Hayden is just me and Pop; there’s no one else. Pop was an only child, and so was I. I have no Hayden cousins, no siblings, and no husband.” She paused and then blurted out, “Pop wants you to change that.”

Ran-Del frowned, still not understanding. “What do you mean? How could I change that?”

Francesca frowned, plainly annoyed at having to explain everything in explicit language. “Pop wants me to get married—to you.”

Ran-Del suspected her first of lying, and then of mocking him. His psy sense told him neither was the case. “Your father is insane. You had nehiver seen me until three days ago, and I had never seen you.”

“He may have a crazy idea in his head, but he’s quite sane.”

Ran-Del got to his feet and looked down at her. “He has day bats nesting in his upper branches. He came into our forest and shot me with a dart, as if he had been hunting his dinner. Are you telling me that he was looking for a husband for you?”

“Yes.” Francesca shaded her eyes from the morning sun as she looked up at him.

Ran-Del snorted with rampant disbelief and looked away to scan the countryside. “No one would do that,” he said, looking back at her. “He cares about you. Why would he find a stranger—a wild man your people called me—to marry his only daughter?”

Francesca still crouched on the ground. She sighed and hugged her knees. “This wasn’t a sudden aberration, this respect for your people. Pop has always thought you lived a cleaner life.” She frowned as if she thought her meaning wasn’t clear. “Not cleaner in the sense of hygiene, but more honest—more honorable. When he realized that he’d need to arrange a marriage for me, he got this idea that the thing to do was to find a Sansoussy to marry me.”

“A Sansoussy?” Ran-Del said. “Just any Sansoussy?”

“Not exactly.” Francesca stood up but turned her eyes away as if she were reluctant to meet his gaze directly. “Pop didn’t want anyone too old or too young—or already married. And he wanted a warrior who had some psy sense, because that combination gave me the most protection.”

“So he went into the forest to acquire a Sansoussy?” The more Ran-Del thought about it, the more it fit Stefan Hayden’s words and actions. His anger rose when he realized how thoroughly the Baron had planned to hijack his life. “And I was the first one whose caste bracelet had the right beads, is that it?”

“Pretty much.”

Ran-Del crossed his arms over his chest. “What made him think I’d marry you? He could have kept me locked in his house forever, but he couldn’t have made me marry you.”

Francesca’s face turned a deep red, and she radiated mortification. “I was supposed to seduce you. Pop said you’d feel obligated to marry me if I did.”

Ran-Del had to clench his jaw for a second, to control his anger. If it got any worse, he would need the First Discipline. “You knew what your father wanted, and you agreed to it?”

Her face contorted in agitation. “No! I mean, yes, I knew, but I never agreed to it. The day before yesterday I told him flat out that I wouldn’t do anything to try to make you marry me. Then last night Pop offered me a glass of wine, and after that it’s all a blank.”

Buy links for most ebookstores here:  http://carmenspage.blogspot.com/p/free-ebook.html

Killing off characters is a balancing act

Something that came up in my writer's group once  was the question all fiction writers face: when and if should you kill off a character.  Death is a part of life.  And really, if there is no risk in a situation, there is not much tension either.  Unless you're writing a romance where the two (or more than two, in some subgenres) main characters need a happy-ever-after (or at least a happy for now) ending, any character should be fair game to get killed off, right?

Maybe not.  When you write a story, you're asking the reader to invest their time and a certain level of emotional involvement in that story, and that means making them care what happens to the characters.  Killing a character for a good reason is one thing, but killing them off just to show that you're willing to do it can leave your reader feeling betrayed, almost like they've invested time in a relationship and then found out it could never have worked out. I had a friend who is also a fan tell me that when she came to the part of THE SIXTH DISCIPLINE where a major character dies, she closed her Kindle and put it down like it was on fire.

So what constitutes a good reason to axe a character?  I heard a writer at the Pikes Peak Writer's Conference (and I wish I could remember her name!) articulate the best rule I have ever heard:  you kill off a character to change the motivation of another character.  That works for me.  But I would also say that, if possible, it should not be as simple as their death making the protagonist mad for revenge or anything like that.  Certainly you don't want a female character to get horribly slaughtered just to motivate the male hero to a blood rage (a.k.a., "Women in refrigerators syndrome"). I always thought killing off the First Lady in the movie Independence Day was really just a milder variant of shoving her body into a refrigerator. She wasn't seen as necessary to the story (she didn't fly a jet or otherwise act heroically) and her death, conveniently staged in her husband's presence, motivated him even further to kill those nasty aliens. When I killed off the character that my friend complained about, I answered that he or she was in the way of the plot.

The revenge angle is not totally bad, but I think it works better when one character's sudden, abrupt absence actually changes the other character's circumstances.  Maybe now they have to support themselves, or rule their country, or face their fears, or go on a quest, or even just finally grow up.

Of course, in spec fic, an added complication is that magic/advanced technology may make it possible to bring the dead back to life, and I don't mean as zombies or anything like that.  I mean that spec fic writers have to be careful they don't make death meaningless.  That happened on STAR TREK TOS a little bit and TNG even more so.  The damn transporter got too powerful!  If a machine can basically copy a person's molecules and later spew out a copy on demand, no character ever needed to stay dead. 

So, have you ever read a book and gotten really angry at the author for killing a character?  Or have you seen an instances of too-powerful-transporter syndrome?  Alternatively, have you ever ready a story and thought (as was said at my writer's group once), "Really, the author should have just killed off x?"

Writing in a series, and finding a good surprise

 Writing in a series has at least one basic difference from writing a standalone:starting with book 2, you have to allow for the reader not having read book 1 in a while, or even never having read book 1 at all. Therefore, you may need to explain things from time to time. The tricky part is, you don't want to bore the reader who has read book 1 recently (or who read it a while ago, but has an excellent memory). If a story keeps telling the reader things he already knows, he will get bored with it. It's basically a balancing act between  the need to move the story forward and the need to make the reader understand what's happening and why.

Another big difference is, in a series you can follow one character for years, if you can keep coming up with interesting things for them to do. That's a real plus if you have a character you want to grow and change with time.

Readers who fall in love with one or more characters tend to love reading a whole series about them. This can be a problem for the writer, who wants to move on. Personally, I've never sat down to write a book that hadn't already sprung  to life in my head. My first published work is 2-book series set on the panet Haven , I have another 2-book series (not yet published but coming soon) called the Nameless World series. They are very different in the way there were written. I thought of the Haven books as two stories while I was writing them; there is a nine year gap between the two books, for one thing, and characters who were secondary in book 1 come front and center in book 2 for another.  Ergo, I ended book 1 before I moved on to write book 2.

The Haven Series

The Nameless World books were written as one story but it was so damn long (240,000 words!)  that I eventually decided I had to cut it into two books. I found a place where a few months elapsed, and added a little additional text to give the book some resolution, I  made that the end of book 1. I also had to add some text to the start of book 2, and I had to edit the rest of the m.s. carefully to allow for the non-reader of book 1 (see first para in this post).

Cover at for Nameless World, Books 1 and 2

My three-book series set on the planet Wakanreo was kind of an amalgam of the other two series. I saw it as two books, one about the relationship between a human woman and a Wakanrean man, and another one about their children. However, on writing it, the "second book" turned into books 2 and 3. 

The Wakanreo series

I usually end a series because I have no more story in my head for that setting and those characters. That's not a problem until readers express a desire for more books in that series. This has happened more than once with the Wakanreo books in particular. I remembered starting  a fourth book, but as I recalled, it was only a few chapters, more of a short story than a novel. I published Alien Bonds in 2018, but I wrote the first draft more than 20 years ago, using a DOS-based software called XyWrite. I went looking for those few chapters and discovered to my surprise that the file was actually 56,000 words, nine and a half chapters! Luckily, I had transferred it into MS Word so I could read it. 

Now I have to decide if I want to return to Wakanreo with a book 4. But first I have to remember how I planned for the book to end! 

The Haven books are now available in paperback!

 My first two published novels, The Sixth Discipline and its direct sequel No Safe Haven are now for sale as paperbacks.  Here are the new covers:

For some reason, Amazon put  The Sixth Discipline on sale for $11.99 even though the regular price is $14.99 If you have any interest in the paperback, get it ow befor the change their minds. 

The Ins and Outs of My Recent Fussy Librarian Promotion

First, Happy Valentine's Day! I hope someone gave you a valentine.

Second, if you're not familiar with ebook promotional newsletters, basically, a company creates an email list of ebook buyers (subscribers have to opt in, but it's free to them) and then charges authors and publishers to include their books in a daily email to subscribers. There are many of these services now. BookBub is the biggest name (and the hardest to get into), but there are others, including Book Gorilla, Bargain Booksy/Free Booksy (they separate free books and cheap books into their two emails and if you want both, you have to subscribe to both.), The Fussy Librarian, and Ereader News Today (ENT). When books are on sale but not free, the email entry has an affiliate link and the company gets a small cut from the sale.

On February 8, I ran a Fussy Librarian promotion for The Sixth Discipline (a free ebook!) . The results were pretty good. I had not used FL in a while, so I didn't know what to expect.

I gave away hundreds of copies, mostly on Kindle. And of course, even though the email itself usually generates "sales" for the one day it runs, Amazon's online algorithms push popular books to readers so increased "sales" continues for a few days. As you can see in the screen snap below, the promo offered links to the the book on Kindle, Nook (B&N), Apple, Kobo and Google Play. The results in the list below the screen snap are "sales" for the day of the promo plus three days after.

Vendor:           No. of Copies given away February 8, 9, 10, and 11

Amazon Kindle: 277 (plus 5 paid*), 88 (plus 2 paid*), 28 (plus  1 paid*), 21 (none paid*)
Google Books: 20, 3, 2, 0
iBooks/Apple Books: 19, 0, 0, 0
Barnes & Noble 0, 0, 0, 0
Smashwords: 0, 1, 2, 0 (note: their link was not listed in the ad; these are normal numbers for comparison)
Kobo 0, 0, 0, 0

* The Kindle version wasn't free in all Amazon bookstores so the paid numbers represent foreign sales.

Note that The Sixth Discipline was my first published title, and it came out in 2011. It is free on Amazon only because Smashwords lets an author make a book free, and because Smashwords is a distributor as well as an e-tailer, the book is thus free on other platforms as well. Amazon practices price matching (which is why you see "Tell us about a cheaper price" links on a book's Amazon page);  if you make the book free elsewhere, Amazon will make the Kindle version free also. These days, I usually give away from zero to three Kindle copies every day, so promotions are helpful to boost "sales."

I think in a way, these numbers do a good job of representing how well each vendor is doing at ebook sales. Amazon is way ahead of the pack; its second day number beat all the others' first day totals combined. But Google and Apple both have a significant ebook presence, On the other hand, Barnes & Noble is pretty much dead in the water, and Kobo is going nowhere (at least in the US; it is more popular overseas where Amazon is less dominant). This explains one of the main reasons Amazon can tempt authors and publishers into enrolling their books in Kindle Unlimited: they give up small sales numbers on other platforms in return for money from KU borrows.

Right now both The Sixth Discipline and its sequel No Safe Haven are available only in ebook form but I am having new covers made, and formatting the books for print. I hope to have paperback versions available in a month or so. I might run another promotion after that, as a test of the new covers.

A word to other authors: Giving away this book makes some sense because there is a direct sequel that is not free, and I always see increased sales of it after a promotion of the first book. Giving away a standalone book is not usually as good an idea.  For one thing, a huge number of free ebooks are never read. Making a book free eliminates the cost barrier, so a lot of readers download a free book first, and then look to see if they want to read it. If you have books that are very similar, it can still be a good idea to make a book free for a day or two, in that it can drive up your sales numbers on Amazon temporarily and thus get the book in front of a lot of readers through the "customers also bought" function. That's another benefit of Kindle Unlimited; authors can make their books free or discounted for short periods of time.

You can reach the world via Google Books

To be frank, I don't sell very many ebooks via Google Books. I give away about 6-10 copies of The Sixth Discipline (free almost everywhere) every month, through Google Books, but it has been a while since I broke double digits on annual sales.

But what's amazing is, where the books go. Through Google Books I have found readers in the US and the UK, but also in Poland, Lesotho, Indonesia, India, Myanmar, the Philippines, New Zealand, Colombia, South Africa, and  Romania. That's amazing!  My words have traveled a lot farther than I ever did.

My books are like my babies

I was the third of four children, and when my mom got stressed and wanted to yell at one of us, she would often yell all our names instead of just the one who was about to do something bad or dangerous. Sometimes she even threw in the dog's name.

I thought of this the other day when I recalled writing a specific situation, and then I couldn't remember which of my books had that scene in it. All my titles repeated in my head, one after the other, and it came to me that in some ways, they are my children.

If you think about it, a story idea formed in my head and was made fertile by something in my life, either personal experience, or something I had read, or even just my imagination. The idea developed and took form, much like a fetus, until it had a life of its own. I could send it out into the world without me. But unlike people, books don't always have the same gestation period. Some might take nine months, but some might take nine years. 

About 25 years ago, I started writing seriously. Before that, I had dabbled in writing. I had started a book, which I later called Child of the Sand (still not published) but I hadn't finished it. Then somehow the beginning scene for The Sixth Discipline popped into my head. A man with a bow and arrow was walking through a forest. He had a premonition of danger and then he was shot (not fatally) and kidnapped. That was it, to start with. I sat down and started writing (I have never been an outliner; I am a classic pantser) and six week later I had a first draft. In actual fact, that first draft became two books, since it was too long for one. The working title had been Haven but that became the series name for the two-book series, The Sixth Discipline and No Safe Haven. It was the fastest I ever wrote a first draft.

But in the way of things, both books sat there and germinated a while. I always wrote whatever floated to the top of my brain, to take advantage of the energy that a story has when it's newly formed. I had a day job, a helpful husband and two wonderful kids, but I always made time to write in the evenings. I eventually joined a writers' critique group, and I took a writing class, both of which I found helpful. But in writing, I have found nothing more helpful than the actual doing of it. Getting feedback is 100% essential, but it's not how you start. You start by doing it.

And if you're lucky, you give birth to one or more stories. 

My X-Rays are in!

I finished the X-Ray set up for all my titles! It was actually a fair amount of work, not difficult but a little tedious. Electronic housework, in fact.

As I blogged about earlier, Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform has a new tool for indie authors and small publishers (possibly they have something similar for big publishers). The tool creates an X-Ray file for a Kindle book and enables that function for that book.

X-Ray is a very useful feature, especially in certain kinds of books. If you're reading a sprawling fantasy trilogy that has dozens of characters, spreads over a decade or two, and has six viewpoint characters, and suddenly a vaguely familiar character's name pops up, your reading pace can stall as you try to figure who the heck this new elf or mage is.

The feature isn't supported in all versions of the Kindle app. Kindle for PC still doesn't have it, but the Android and iOS versions do. And of course, the newer Kindles all have it (not entirely sure about the ones before the Kindle Touch).

How X-Ray Works

Here's what it looks like on my Voyage when I highlight a character's name:

Here's the same function on my Android tablet: About the only difference is in the menu that lets you create colored highlights, impossible (naturally) on an e-ink Voyage screen. 

You'll notice the source is listed at the bottom as Shelfari. The new X-Ray tool allows the author/publisher to either write custom descriptions for characters and "terms" or to link to Wikipedia articles. However, before there was a tool, Amazon would use the information that authors and publishers could list in Shelfari, a book-lovers site Amazon bought. I had done that for The Sixth Discipline, and when I had a BookBub promo and gave away 14,000 copies of The Sixth Discipline, Amazon created an X-Ray file from the Shelfari info I had entered. I have since edited and added a lot of the info using the new tool, but I can't see those changes unless and until Amazon support staff push the changes to my copy of T6thD.

Here's what it looks like when I pull up the menu and Select X-Ray (next to Go To):

You can see from the menus that you can get a list of characters or terms on the page, with references to where they appear in the text (clips). I couldn't find a way to use this part of X-Ray from Kindle for Android, but I don't know if that's because it isn't there or I couldn't figure it out

For any other authors out there thinking of using the new tool, I will say that you should always go back into the tool after you publish your changes, because either it is easy to miss something, or sometimes the changes I had marked did not actually get published. Also, the sorting features are very helpful in looking for variations of names and terms.

So now, anyone who looks at my book descriptions in the Kindle store will see X-Ray enabled!  Here's Saronna's Gift, to illustrate:

Questions?

Any authors who want more info on how to do this, or readers who want to know how to use it, feel free to comment!

I'm really looking forward to launching Alien Bonds with this feature enabled from the get-go! 

eBooks Down Under now includes a Kindle store

Amazon just opened a Kindle store for Australia! My books are all there, although, sadly, The Sixth Discipline is $1.03 AUD instead of being free. If you have an Australian account with Amazon, do us all a favor and click the link that says “Tell us about a lower price,” and then report the link for that book in iBooks in Australia, where it's free. You can add a link for it being free in the Kobo store for Australia, too, if you like.

And g'day to you, too!

Rankings and reviews

While the recent flap about JK Rowling writing a non-best-selling mystery as Robert Galbraith proves reviews aren't everything, Amazon reviews really do help! That's why I was happy to see that The Sixth Discipline reached the half-century mark on Amazon.com—50 reviews!

At the same time, I am also looking at its ranking, which has fallen a bit lately, after the huge rise in May.  In Italy though, where the book has just recently become free, it would look like it's doing really well.

That's 762 in all free Kindle books, and 8 in "Fantascienza" Kindle books in English.  I think Fantascienza is Italian for science fiction, except it looks like it could also come from the word for fantasy. Actually, that's probably a pretty good word for my books, as I make no claims that the science in them is plausible. Some folks would call my work science fantasy. I hope bambini e ragazzi doesn't mean Amazon has classified it as a kid's book!

But to return to the number, 762 sounds great, and 8 sounds even better, but remember that the Kindle store in Italy seems to consist almost entirely of books in English. All the top sellers and top free books are in English. And in fact, the number of books I have given away in Italy is still in the single digits, which means there are not a lot of people in Italy downloading free Kindle books!

I guess this means I can get in on the ground floor—or as they would say in Italy, the pianterreno.

How do you say “free” in Italian?

It turns out it's gratuito. I looked it up because Amazon has made The Sixth Discipline free in the Italian Kindle store! I'm not quite sure why the book is free in the US, UK, Canadian, and now Italian Kindle stores, and not the others, but I suspect it's because someone in those countries clicked on the “tell us about a cheaper price” link. Brazil, Japan, Spain, Germany, France, and India, it's your turn. Demand my book to be livre, 自由に, libre, kostenlos, librement, and मुक्त!

BookBub promotion: second wave of numbers

The one drawback to using Smashwords as a portal to other retailers (iBooks store and the Nook store are my biggest non-Kindle markets, but they also cover Sony and Kobo, and a few others) is that it takes a while to get the sales numbers back. Smashwords just recently updated the May numbers both Apple iBooks and Barnes & Noble Nook sales reports. When it came to giveaways, Nook was a winner, at least for me. I gave away over 4,000 Nook copies of The Sixth Discipline! That doesn't compare to the 15,000 copies I gave away in May on the Kindle, but it's still a lot more books than I ever gave away before on any other non-Kindle platform. Sales figures for No Safe Haven, the sequel to the free book, were pretty good for the Nook, but about 20% higher for Apple. I wish I had some giveaways stats for iBooks, but it seems like Apple no longer bothers to report “sales” for free books, so I don't have much to go on in comparing, but since the Kindle and Nook giveaway-to-sales ratios are very similar, I think I probably gave away about 5,000 iBooks copies. Since I don't know for sure, I will go with Nook as the giveaway winner.

Update on my books

So, here is where we are in Buxton World:

King of Trees is now on iBooks as well as Kindle and Nook.

The Nostalgia Gambit is still not on iBooks! I don't know why, since KoT made it onto that platform in days, but TNG is still not there after two months.

The Sixth Discipline had a fantastic month! Thanks to the Bookbub promotion, it has already topped 15,000 (free) copies in May, and that's on Kindle alone. It's also now free in the UK and Canadian Kindle stores.  The sequel No Safe Haven is selling well in consequence.

Lastly, my science fiction romance (working title is now Saronna's Gift) is back from being critiqued by my writers group, and is now undergoing some revisions.  I'm still aiming for a late summer release.

The Sixth Discipline is now free in the UK Kindle store!

It seems like Amazon is on a mission! They have made The Sixth Discipline free in the UK Kindle store. That means it's now free in the US, UK, and Canadian Kindle stores, as well as most other retailers.

Fly free, little ebook! Fly free!

The Sixth Discipline just got X-Rayed!

The X-Ray feature on Kindle is really handy for epic books with a large cast of characters or those stories that span years, where a character can disappear for pages and pages and then pop back in again. X-Ray give you a idea how important the character is, and who they are, but it only works if the publisher has gone the extra step and provided Amazon with a file to use to generate the X-Ray.

In addition to the newly-purchased Goodreads, Amazon also owns social reader site Shelfari, and one of the things this means is that on Shelfari, the author or any reader can create lists of characters and places in the book. Those lists are then available to view on the bottom of the product page on Amazon.

It looks like Amazon might be planning to spin this function off into creating X-Ray files for KDP books, because my book just got a whole bunch of characters added by someone known as "X-Ray," who has also added characters to a boatload of books!

It would be cool if it's true!

Update:  I just downloaded this book again and it now has the X-Ray feature!  Yay!

The Sixth Discipline is free in Canada!

Good news, eh? The Sixth Discipline has been free in in the US Kindle store since August (due to price matching) but now Amazon has made it free in Canada!

Yay for price matching! I wish I knew what caused this? I've only given away a few copies but it' already moving up in the rankings!

BookBub: a great resource for readers of digital books!

BookBub is a new service that lists both free and reduced price ebooks, available on Kindle and other platforms. They charge authors a (very reasonable) fee for the promotion, but readers can get the info for free. BookBub posts to the web, and also to FaceBook, and they even offer free daily email, which you can filter so you only see books in the genres that interest you.

It's a great service! Did I mention that The Sixth Discipline is listed there today?  here's the blurb they wrote for it:

“Ran-Del, a skilled forest warrior, finds his life turned upside down when a mysterious kidnapper takes him to a terrifying city, foiling his every attempt to escape — a gripping, futuristic novel simmering with suspense.”

And it's going like hotcakes, too! #42 in Free Kindle Books and #4 in free science fiction!

As of 7:30 pm, it was up to #19 in free Kindle books, and #1 in free science fiction!

Writing in a series: why I created my own universe

I got a wonderful email the other day, from a reader who was requesting the free story I offer via this blog. It was the kind of email authors dream about because she said she had read The Sixth Discipline (which she got free in iBooks, but it's also free almost everywhere) and loved it enough to buy the sequel No Safe Haven, and loved it enough to buy all my other books in the iBooks store. On top of that, when I checked, she had left a review on iBooks! Talk about your ideal readers!

When I sent her the story, I suggested she read Tribes first, because it's most like the Haven books in overall tone, and I warned her that Shades of Empire is noticeably darker and more explicit than my other books. But when I was writing the email, it occurred to me that in some ways, the fact that she loved the Haven books so much could make it difficult for her to enjoy the other books.

Readers love books in a series. Once they find a character they like, they want to stick with him or her. When a local book club read my fantasy novella Where Magic Rules, one of the questions the readers asked me was did I have any books in a series.

Authors, on the other hand, often find it difficult keep finding new things to say about a character. The Haven “series” is only two books long, and I didn't know it would be two when I started it. As it turned out, I had too much story in my head for it to fit into one book. Fortunately, there was an eight-year gap in the story, which made a logical place to end the first book; I just had to be sure there was enough resolution of all but the one significant plot point that continues in the second book.

But in a sense, most of my books are in a series. All of my far future science fiction stories take place in a universe in which people from earth colonized other worlds in a way that left them cut off from our earth. The societies and cultures they created varied, depending on why they left their own world. I call them "sleeper worlds," partly because the colonists traveled in suspended animation. In the Haven books, there were three distinct groups on the colony world of Haven: one looking for new resources, one wanting isolation to experience harmony with nature, and one hoping for a total lack of government. In Tribes, the world was a prison colony, and its culture and government evolved from prison gangs. The colony world in The Nostalgia Gambit is an exception in that it's not a sleeper world.

I named my universe the ThreeCon universe, for the Third Confederation of Planets, the organization I created to oversee commerce and other interaction between the worlds. Although there are no characters shared between stories (except for the Haven books), the universe has a consistent, shared history. There are events mentioned in one that carry over into other stories, too.

My next book, most likely titled Saronna's Gift will be a romance, but it's also set in the ThreeCon universe, and the sleeper world the story takes place on was founded as religious colony by a charismatic but despotic leader who believed in an Old Testament-style patriarchy. After a few centuries of isolation, the world is a pretty awful place, in a lot of ways. The story starts when a young woman's father takes her to a city to sell her. I'm hoping the book will appeal to both romance readers and science fiction readers.

Really, my kind of series is the kind authors like: low overhead for the writer in creating the overall history, and a new set of characters each time. I don't know how much benefit that is to readers. If you have an opinion, let me know in the comments.

The Sixth Discipline is on a roll!

The Sixth Discipline, which has been free in the US Kindle store since last summer, has been holding steady at about the 5,000 rank in the "freebie" part of that Kindle store. Today, for some reason I can't understand, it jumped to 1,077, and it's #30 in science fiction freebies.

Wish I knew why! I did a Google search but couldn't find anything. But I'm not complaining. Just hope it lasts for a while.

Update: As of 4/18/13, The Sixth Discipline is up to #13 in free science fiction and #652 in overall free Kindle books.