A lengthy article by blogger and historical novelist Ben Thomas about some ancient Chinese skeletons (or do I means skeletons of ancient Chinese people?) found at a site dating back to Roman Britain is interesting, because no one knew the Chinese had gotten that far west. It's especially interesting to me, as my newest book to launch in print,King of Trees, is set in an alternate universe and includes an alternate Britain, where Boudicca won and drove the Romans out of Britain. The story includes the arrival of an invasion fleet from an alternate Chinese empire.
The point of the article is that Asia in general and China in particular were, in many ways, more advanced than Rome. Thomas lists some of the empires that covered parts of the Middle East, India, and China, and articulates something I have observed myself. The ancient Chinese concept that heaven ordains who will be emperor was actually very pragmatic. When the divine emperor was overthrown, it didn't mean there were no gods. It simply meant heaven had willed the change. Life could go on and everyone could shift their allegiance to the new emperor with no problems.
My Chinese empire not only invented gunpowder, they made guns; this article doesn't mention weapons much, but the ancient Chinese in our world also invented gunpowder but didn't use it for much except fireworks and primitive rockets and grenades.
I have been working with book cover designer Alexander von Ness to get a new cover made for King of Trees, which will also launch as a print book. This is what the print version will look like, with just one minor tweak.
I'm very excited about this cover! I think it does a much better job of conveying the themes of the story than the first one, which was thrown together in a hurry. I can't wait for this change to happen!
Blurb:
Stranded in an alternate time line, a small group of time travelers alter the course of history in a version of Britain that never had an Industrial Revolution. The settlers help dethrone the Druid-backed monarchy, but generations later, Bardolph Patrickson, loyal son, hardworking blacksmith, and King of Albion, must work with their descendants to keep the island nation free of new invaders.
My fantasy novella Where Magic Rules is now available as a paperback as well as an ebook. The paperback is $5.99 but if you buy it, the Kindle version is free. If you buy the Kindle version alone, it's 99¢.
Note that the paperback is also available on Barnes & Noble for the same price, but that does store not offer the ebook version for free.
Here's a quote from my celebrity review of WMR by singer/songwriter Janis Ian:
"The story hooked me pretty quickly, which is no great feat in an experienced writer. However, it kept me hooked, which IS difficult when you have an omnivorous reader looking at your work with a jaundiced eye. I've downloaded so many books lately that start off well, but disintegrate a little ways in - it's a real joy to discover a new author who holds her ground throughout."
So, now that I have mastered InDesign, I am working on putting out my books in print, via CreateSpace. This is going to be a fair amount of work, so I started with the shortest, the fantasy novella Where Magic Rules, which is only 25,000 words long. I made it free a while ago, and have left it that way until now.
[For those who care, the way to make a book free in the Kindle store is to load it to a platform like Smashwords, which will let you make it free forever, and also sends it to the B&N Nook store, the Apple iBooks store, Kobo, and others, as a free book. Once AMazon knows it's free on those platforms, they will price match.]
Now, however, as the paperback is coming out, I am going to price the ebook version at its original price of 99¢ but I will offer it free to anyone who buys the paperback. The Amazon program for this is called "matchbook."
So, if anyone wants a free fantasy novella on Kindle, get it now! In a day or two, it will cost 99¢ (or $5.99 for the paperback).
I never had any ambition to write nonfiction. I'm too much of a control freak. In addition, I love the freedom of science fiction and fantasy to write my own rules, and create my own cultures.
Nevertheless, I admire good story telling, and when the story is 100% true, it's wonderful to see someone tell it well. I recently watched the Ken Burns PBS documentary series on the Roosevelts (Teddy, Franklin, and Elinor). The full title is The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, and it is about their personal, intimate lives. This series is fabulous for so many reasons! And it's good story telling.
Teddy
The series opens with Teddy, as he came first chronologically. I really hope this series gets shown in classroom across America. For one thing, Teddy illustrates how new our country is. He was a 20th century president, yet he was born during our Civil War, and watched Lincoln's funeral cortege as a small boy, from a window of his grandfather's house.
He was also an amazing person. He was born into wealth, but also into terrible health. He had asthma back when there were not good treatments for asthma. He was considered very sickly. He also suffered from time to time from depression. But he made himself into a strong, active person by the strength of his will and from determination (and, of course, he wasn't hampered in this by working for a living).
Franklin was a sixth cousin. Also well-to-do, he was the only child of his mother, who was much younger than his father. He had an older half-brother by his father's first wife, but does not seem to have seen him much.
A young FDR
One thing I never knew is that FDR chose his eyeglasses to match the kind worn by his cousin Teddy. I had always assumed that they were just a common thing back then, but he admired his cousin a lot.
Also, while Teddy was a Republican, he was a progressive Republican (what a concept, these days!) , and his cousins all supported him even though Franklin's family were Democrats.
Elinor was actually named Anna Elinor. Her father Elliott was Teddy's brother. He was a doting parent, but also an alcoholic with mental health issues. Both her parents died when she was a child, first her mother and two years later her father. Her mother was a beautiful woman, but Elinor herself was always considered plain. She had rather a lonely childhood, and in many ways, an unhappy marriage. She and Franklin had six children, all of whom survived to adulthood, and outlived their mother.
Over her long life, she became known as a tireless worker for good causes. She supported her husband's career even through he wasn't faithful to her, and she never spoke publicly about her pain.
Elinor as First
Lady of NY State
The series makes clear that what ties all three of these people together is not just their name, but a sense of duty. They lived and breathed duty. They lived well documented lives, writing tons of letters and giving speeches that make their beliefs plain. Teddy may have loved the limelight, but he was always motivated by what he saw as his country's good. Franklin was a better president than husband (doubtless true of many, many presidents), and Elinor herself might have been more comfortable as a First Lady than as Franklin's wife, but both of them knew they could do more good together than apart.
If you haven't seen this series, then you might want to check it out. Ken Burns is a master at story telling. And telling you about his work gives me a chance to use one of my favorite little jokes. Elinor was clearly a feminist. After all, she kept her name after she got married. :)
Kindle Scout is the program Amazon started when they killed the ABNA (Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award) contest. The deal with Kindle scout is, an author posts a never-before-published book-- cover and manuscript-- of at least 50,000 word. Amazon displays the cover and the first 5,000 words of the book for 30 days. People (Amazon customers, the author's fans, anyone a US Amazon account) can nominate the book to be published as an ebook by Kindle Press. In fact, they can nominate 3 books per month. As a nice bonus, if a book wins, everyone who nominated it gets a free copy a week before it's released, with some encouragement to write a review.
The process isn't purely a popularity contest. The Kindle Press editors review each book that gets enough nominations to merit it, and they decide what gets published, not the number of votes. But it needs some nominations in order to be looked at.
My book is called Alien Bonds. It's a science fiction romance set on a world in my ThreeCon universe. Here's the blurb from Kindle Scout:
Imagine Pride & Prejudice if Lizzie Bennett had gone to the dance, met Mr. Darcy, been overcome with desire, and gone home with him that night. Now imagine Mr. Darcy as an alien, and the party happening in the far future on another world. In Alien Bonds, two lives are changed in an instant. Dina Bellaire and Kuaron Du both know they can’t go back to the way they were before they met. They just have to convince the rest of the universe that what happened to them is real.
Okay, that's the romance. The science fiction part comes from my creation of an alien world where a person's looks don't matter. No one chooses a mate; biochemistry does the selection based on pheromones. It doesn't matter if you're short or tall or thin or fat. No one is gay or straight. People can still be beautiful, but no one is considered sexy. Pairing off is entirely a matter of being near the right person. Once the pheromone lightning hits, those two people are bonded for life. What impact would that have on their culture? Or actually, their cultures, since no world would ever have just one.
Anyway, Alien Bonds has 30 days to live on Kindle Scout. Please visit it, and click the "Show full excerpt" button. If you like it, consider nominating it (hit the Nominate button!). Remember, you can nominate up to three books if you see something else you like! If you have any questions about my book or the Kindle Scout program, leave me a comment, and I'll answer.
Every weekend of the year there's a science fiction convention somewhere in the US. Memorial Day weekend is Balticon and this year was its 50th anniversary, so it was a big event. The guest of honor was George RR Martin, and they also invited back lots of previous GoH's so the crowd was huge. Even though it's only an hour and half or so to drive (less if the traffic is good), we went to stay at the con hotel because that's a lot more fun. I went to a bunch of panels, participated in the Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading, and met a lot of friends. It was a lovely weekend! Here are some more photos of guests and panels:
Larry Niven
Jody Lynn Nye at the Broad Universe reading
Hikdy Silverman moderates Tales from the Slush Pile
John Picacio setting up for his Artist GoH presentation
Connie Willis explains where her story ideas come from
Brick Barrientos runs the science fiction trivia contest
And of course, we saw a lot of great hall costumes! I didn't get to take near enough photos because it was too crowded to be able to stop and block the aisle by taking photos.
I occasionally blog about book promotion, especially in reference to free books, but also about how hard it is to get a book in front of folks who might want to read it. One service I've mentioned often is BookBub, the gold standard of email promotion for ebooks, They have a website, but their marketing power comes form their massive email subscriber list. None of the other services compare in scope, and for this reason, BookBub is now extremely popular with traditional publishers who are running sales of ebooks. It's difficult for self published authors to get a slot in the BookBub list.
Now, the mighty BookBub might be getting some real competition. Today I got an email from GoodReads, the popular reader-centric site, which was bought by Amazon a few years ago. It looks like GoodReads will be offering a daily email of books for sale.
Once I logged on to try it, I was able to choose specific authors as well as genres, and also specify my preferred ebook platforms (Kindle, Nook, iBooks, etc), so they are not just offering Kindle deals.
What I don't know is, how does GoodReads know about these deals? Are they getting paid by someone to list the books, or do they just scour the web looking? Certainly they will money on every Kindle books sold, but what about non-Kindle deals? Or maybe they figure if they can cut into BookBub's business, they won't have to pay associate fees to sell the books.
One feature GoodReads has always offered is a "want to read" list. You can tag a book as "want to read," and now GoodReads will tell you when it's on sale. Likewise, they can tell you if an author you follow has a promotion running.
I wonder if GoodReads will expand this service to cover print books. While ordering a print book online night not have the immediacy of getting an ebook download, if you rely on online ordering for your print book needs, knowing about special offers, and price reductions could still be a great thing for you. But then Amazon probably already does that directly, based on your buying history.
Considering that my husband calls me a “Kindle evangelist,” I have spent a lot of time lately working on printing books. I just finished a semester-long class at my local community college. The course title was Desktop Publishing but really it was How to Use InDesign.
InDesign is an Adobe product that will handle page layout, and also allow you to export an ePub (ebook) file,. As I found out from the course, it will also export simple Adobe Flash files, for say, a series of click-through screens. And, it can export interactive PDF, if I ever need to do that. It's a very powerful but complex product, and I had had no luck in learning it on my own, which is my usual method with new software. InDesign has an incredible number of functions and as a result, the menus often have long list of unrelated options. Also, it use “tools.” That is, you change the function of what the mouse cursor does by picking a tool from a list.
The basic function is selecting things, but the software doesn't stop you from using menus if you have a tool other than the Select tool in use. This can get you in trouble! For example, I discovered that if you're using the Type tool when you place (paste in) a graphic file, InDesign creates that image as an anchored graphic that won't budge, no matter how much text you add in front of it, Who knew? I'm sure it's that way to provide a shortcut for people who know what they are doing with InDesign. Until recently, that was not me.
As you can see by the above image of a full print cover, I started small, with my only novella, Where Magic Rules. Because it's so short, I didn't even try to put text on the spine, but I'll do that with the next book. Once I have WMR ready to go, it will join Saronna's Giftas a paperback for sale on Amazon.
And of course, InDesign does the page layout beautifully. You can quickly and easily impose proper book format, with the first page of a chapter having its own unique layout. I love it!
If you've made the decision to self-publish, the next think you need to decide is whether to publish print books or ebooks or both.
POD
To self-publish in print, almost the only viable option, unless you are rich enough to invest the money needed to print several thousand copies of your book, is to use a POD service. POD stands for print on demand, a process that takes advantage of new technology that melds a high speed printer/copier machine with a book binder. So far as I know, the only commercially available one is called the Espresso Book Machine. Some bookstores have invested in these machines, but they are expensive, so they are not generally affordable for a small business. But several online companies are out there, including Lulu and CreateSpace (from Amazon) and Barnes and Noble, that provide a way to print and sell your book using their POD machines and their websites.
However, even the POD process requires that you format the manuscript properly, and create a PDF of the book interior that looks like a typeset book, with all the correct information on the title page (front and back) and with proper headers and footers, including page numbers. That is much harder than it sounds! Some people use MS Word templates from companies like Joel Friedlander's Book Design Templates. Other use desktop publishing software, like Adobe InDesign (which can also produce an epub file for the ebook version). But InDesign is complex and not free, so that's a real investment of time and money. There are commercial services that will format print books, just as there are for ebooks, but all of them have the same limitation: correction workflow. If you give a commercial services a word processing file, and they give you the a PDF to publish from, how do you correct that if you find an error later? Generally, unless you can edit PDFs, you have to ask them to make the correction for you.
Obviously, everything should be proofed carefully before you hand over the m.s., but it's difficult to be sure you got every single tiny typo. Correction workflow should be factored into your decision on how to produce the PDF.
Cover
You will need a full-color PDF of the entire cover (front, back, and spine), not just a front cover image, like you do for an ebook. The cover is even more important for print than for ebooks, so you will need to be sure it looks good. There are tons of graphic artists who will work for reasonable rates, but be sure you are dealing with a reputable one before you give them your money. Most of my covers were done by relatives with graphic design experience, but I have also used Nessgrahica. They are based in Croatia, so you would need to send the payment via Western Union, which you can do online.
Pricing
The per copy costs involved in producing a print book mean that you can't price it as competitively as you can an ebook. Amazon will let you set the price on a Kindle book as low as 99¢, but because they have to pay for paper and ink, they will not let you price a CreateSpace POD book at a loss; generally, a POD book will cost about the same as a commercially-published trade paperback. This is a significant drawback if you're starting out. One reason self-published ebooks sell as well as they do is that they are so much cheaper than ebooks from traditional publishers, who price them high to protect hardcover sales.
Selling
Another limitation is that POD books are not generally found in bookstores,. Even the B&N POD books are only at few B&N stores that have Espresso machines. This means online sales are your only retail outlet, unless you want to go around to bookstores and persuade the owners to carry your books on a consignment basis. Some people do this successfully, others not. Some authors carry extra copies of their books to conventions and sell them to people they meet. You need to decide what you're willing to do to sell your books.
The Payoff
Quite frankly, most self-published titles don't sell well in print unless they are by an author who was already well established before the self-published titles came out. However, even if you don't sell that many copies, having a print version of your book is an advantage. You can give away free copies as promotions and (hopefully) get reviews, and if you make contacts at conventions or readings, you have something available for those folks who just don't want ebooks. And you can hold book signings!
