Tobias S. Buckell's Blog, page 24

Reminder: How to Get Signed and Personalized Tobias S. Buckell Books for the Holidays, 2014

I’m bumping this back up, reminder, you have until the 10th (that’s Wednesday) to snag signed books for the holidays if you want them:

Winter’s coming! Which means we’ll soon be shopping for gifts for each other and doing our best, if we’re too far away from the equator, to keep coldwarm. And there’s nothing better than sitting inside a warm home with a book, right?

At John Scalzi’s excellent suggestion (he’s been doing this a few years), I’m teaming up with Jay & Mary’s Book Center, the closes...

Kindle Unlimited may be cannibilizing eBook sales. I’m unsurprised

Amazon is disintermediating general eBook sales with Kindle Unlimited:

When Kindle Unlimited launched in July, it was hoped that the increase in fees paid for loans would counteract the loss in income from authors not being able to sell their ebooks outside of the Kindle Store.

Sadly, a lot of authors are reporting that that is not the case.

(Via Author discontent grows as Kindle Unlimited enters its fifth month – The Digital Reader.)

Expect impacts due to Oyster and its like as well. For a canar...

Xenowealth: A Collection Kickstarter is halfway through. Some quick thoughts.

As of today we’re just over the halfway mark on my Kickstarter for Xenowealth: A Collection. I promised I’d burn some social capitol promoting this, but Thanksgiving break and holidays hit at the halfway point as well, so I’ve just been letting things go quiet.

When I built this Kickstarter out, I wanted to tweak some of the things I’d done in the past. For one, in the past I’d put the eBooks at too high a value. Lowering them to $10 seems to have boosted our numbers, and included some drive-b...

Juggling projects

I mentioned last night on twitter that I’m grateful I took the time a month ago to rethink my to-do list management.

Years ago I was using Things, but it stopped syncing to my iPhone reliably. Plus, managing the list was starting to crumble and take time. I switched to a simple piece of software inspired by paper lists called TaskPaper, which I’ve used for almost three years now.

It did the trick, but as project management started getting more and more complex over the last year, year and a hal...

My short story Resistance has been translated into Galician in Nova Fantasia

Was just notified that my short story ‘Resistance’ is now live at Nova Fantasia, where it was translated into Galician.

New covers for the METAtropolis novellas, which will be available as eBooks for the first time early next year (but much sooner for Kickstarter backers)

The METAtropolis series is the multiple Audie-award winning and Hugo nominated series that I wrote three novellas for. I am turning these novellas into eBooks that will go on sale early next year.

A lot of people have loved the audio versions, but wanted to have text versions to read, and not everyone listens to audio. I asked Jenn Reese at Tiger Bright Studios if she would work on the covers, and she came up with these. I love them:

I’m including these three novellas, which are only available...

Xenowealth Kickstarter update: tweaked stretch goals include free METAtropolis novellas (first time in text format for readers) & other updates

The Xenowealth Kickstarter is rocking it at 380% over it’s goal. 144 backers, and we’ve unlocked several stretch goals.

You’re all blowing me away.

One of my readers asked if I’ll include an essay about the origins of the Xenowealth and how I came to build it. I thought that was a great idea, and updated the Kickstarter and table of contents to include that I’d be doing such an essay.

But I’ll also open this up. I know some of my readers of this blog have read the books repeatedly in order to do...

Well, Xenowealth: A Collection had a heck of a first day on Kickstarter

I stayed up late the night before yesterday, and at 12:03 I launched the Kickstarter for Xenowealth: A Collection.

The last time I did this was in 2012. In 2011 I Kickstarted my Xenowealth novel ‘The Apocalypse Ocean,’ something that created a lot of buzz as it was still pretty rare more for a novelist at the time.

The last collection I did was Mitigated Futures, in early 2012. So I have those two campaigns to draw from and compare.

I launched at just past midnight to take advantage of evening W...

My latest short story collection, Xenowealth: A Collection, now live on Kickstarter

Wow, the last time I did this was well over two years ago. My crowd funding fu might be a little rusty. But here we go:

I’m using Kickstarter to take pre-orders and crowdfund my latest short story collection, which will be coming out as an eBook, paperback, and hardcover. And this is going to be something special to me, because it’s the collection of all the Xenowealth stories.

The working title as I planned this out and waited for the rights to all arrive was ‘Pepper Unleashed.’ So if you like...

There’s a new, high-paying short SF market in town from Motherboard. Some thoughts on Terraform’s launch

A new weekly short story and daily SF blog launched recently. Terraform, from Motherboard, the people from Vice.

Critics may argue about science fiction’s literary origins—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein! No, Gulliver’s Travels!—but the genre metastasized in the 1950s and 60s, through the vehicle of pulp magazine publishing, as fantastic short stories and serialized adventures. Short stories are the DNA of the genre; bite-sized futures and parallel realities designed to jar their readers into radi...