Cliff Ball's Blog, page 23

Plotlines in “Don’t Mess With Earth”

I just thought I’d write a little about what is in my new novel.

I have King Arthur and Merlin as the advanced humans, Terrans, who come to Earth to have a little fun on the British Isles around the time that the Vikings, Danes, and Normans try to invade. Merlin uses their advanced technology to create Excalibur and uses computer technology to make sure the sword only comes out of the stone for Arthur.  The people then make Arthur their King, the Round Table is created with the Knights coming alo

My new novel now available

My second novel, “Don’t Mess With Earth” is now available for purchase. Can be found here: Amazon or here: Barnes and Noble. Here is a quick summary:

Advanced humans, calling themselves Terrans, leave a highly corrupt and mostly primitive Earth to search out a new planet to inhabit. Once on a new planet, they begin exploring the rest of the galaxy and begin watching over their more primitive human cousins back on Earth. Some Terrans are well known in human history, people such as King Arthur, Gal

My thoughts on Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (spoilers)

Since I’m writing science fiction, with a little bit of the whole Roswell conspiracy angle thrown in, I thought I would take the time to post what I thought of how George Lucas and Steven Spielberg approached it in the movie. If you haven’t seen the movie, then this contains some spoilers.

I saw it last week and I was looking forward to it, since I thought the “Last Crusade” was a pretty good movie. Too bad “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” came 10 years too late. If they had made this movie before

Obsessing over sales rankings

I don’t know about any other authors, but I’m somewhat obsessed with the sales rankings of my book on both Amazon and Barnes and Noble.com. I find myself looking at it at least twice a day, I guess because I bored or something. I watch how, at least on Amazon, my sales ranking goes up to a few thousand(around 100,000) and for a few days sinks into the millions, then out of the blue, jumps all the way up to like 80,000 or so. BN.com doesn’t seem to fluctuate as much as Amazon, I don’t know if the

Writing and author sites

If you’re a new writer and looking for websites to market your work or yourself as an author, searching for those places online takes a really long time, especially if you don’t type in the right keywords on google or other search engines. I thought I’d post sites all in one place so you can find what you’re looking for without searching for days on end.

http://www.writersmarket.com Online version of the book

http://www.writersdigest.com

http://www.helium.com Where writers can post articles, storie

Experience with self-publishing so far

I just thought I would take the time to post my experience with self-publishing so far. Since I published through Iuniverse.com, they post sales 2 months after the fact, so I just recently found out I only sold 7 of my novellas in February, making all of $2.34 in royalties. I guess I shouldn’t go wild and spend it all! ha ha. I have to wait until the end of May to know how many novellas I’ve sold off of Barnes and Noble.com or Amazon.com, or any other online store that is selling it. I’m learnin

Opening scene of next novel

I’m going to post the opening scene to my next novel, and I’m not sure if its weak or what. So, if a reader of this has an opinion on how it needs fixed or if it works, then please post! Anyway, the jist of my novel is about advanced humans leaving Earth around the time of Noah’s Flood and coming back a thousand years later, leaving, then coming back a few thousand years more, because they need help fighting aliens. Some of the “Terrans” take the place of actual humans in history and have advent

Marketing and all that Jazz

Since having my novella published, I’ve discovered just how hard it is to get noticed by readers. There are so many science fiction authors out there and just authors in general that the market is probably saturated with un-read books. I’ve done the whole online marketing thing, since that is where everybody seems to be these days. I have a profile on myspace, created an ad on facebook to get people here, and I’ve created a profile on every site that I can find that has readers on it, like goodr

The Process of Out of Time

So, you’re probably wondering how I came up with the story of Out of Time, at least that’s what I’m hoping you’re thinking ha ha.

I started out with thinking the whole US government-alien UFO landing conspiracy theories would make a good story. Then, I saw the movie Titanic in 1997 and thought it would be cool if I could include it, so it turned into a time travel story.  My villain, at first, was a guy who turned traitor and sold technology secrets to a terrorist organization. I had him hijack t