C. Litka's Blog, page 22

Nine Years as an Author/Publisher Part 1

 

In last year's Eight Year in Publishing post I predicted - "I don’t expect my ninth year to come close to equaling it. Sales will certainly fade. They always do. In any event, I expect audiobooks will make up close to half of my sales, whatever it is." So How did Year Nine turn out?

Well, it was a good year. Not as good as Year Eight, as I predicted, but I can't complain. However, since this is going up on 1 May and I don't have the final sales figures yet, I will post all the numbers next week. This week I'll just talk about my publishing experience in the my last fiscal year - May 2023-April 2024.

I released one novel this year, Passage to Jarpara, on the 21st of March, the third and final sequel to Sailing to Redoubt and The Prisoner of Cimlye.  I am happy that it seems to have been well received, as it was a story that need not have been written, since The Prisoner of Cimlye was a natural conclusion to Sailing to Redoubt. It was, however, a story I wanted to write, and a story that I had more or less in mind, when I didn't have another story in mind, which is to say, it was a bird in the hand at the time. Thankfully, readers of that series seem to like it, but then again, I am preaching to the choir with the book - appealing only to readers who have read and enjoyed the proceeding stories. It will sell mostly to that pool of readers, which pretty much precludes a breakout hit like the stand alone success of The Girl on the Kerb. The very nature of sequels limit them, but I knew that going in. It was just a book that I had started back in 2022, and wanted it finished. 
I entered Beneath the Lanterns into the Self Published Blog Off 9 last May. I earned a nice review, but that was about all. I do enjoy discovering what people think of my books, especially ones who likely wouldn't have found and/or picked it up. Last year the contest was first come, first serve, but this year it will be a lottery, so that while I am considering entering Sailing to Redoubt, I likely would only have a one in three chance of getting it in. And I doubt it is the type of story that will greatly appeal to many hard-core readers of fantasy. We'll see what I feel like in two weeks.

I also conducted some experiments this year as a publisher without any outstanding successes.

The first experiment I tried was making boxed sets of my books, or omnibus versions as I called them, since I didn't want to fool around making an image of a boxed set. Eventually, I offered omnibus versions of most of my books. The idea was to make them affordable to non-US customers who did not have access to the free versions on Amazon.com. They did not really reach these customers in any great numbers, sales were under 25 for the year combined. And then, in January, Amazon stopped price-matching the free price in other stores for all but two of my books so the rest reverted to retail price. Now these omnibuses would've made them great deals in the US as well, but even so sales did not pick up. That being the case, I decided that there was no point in offering my books at a bargain price without it leading to an increase in sales volume to make it worthwhile to do so, I have withdrawn them as of today, 1 May 2024. 

I made one other minor change to my catalog. On the 27 April, I withdrew the one book I had in the Kindle Unlimited program the stand alone novella, A Night on Isvalar. I had that story in that program as a "signpost" to my other free books not in that program. However, with less than 50 copies sold in three years, I decided it too wasn't doing the job I had hoped it might, so I've now  pulled it from Kindle Unlimited and released wide and free like all my other books with a new cover. With any luck, it will act like a new release, and give me a second bump in sales this coming year, coming quickly on the heels of Passage to Jarpara.

A second experiment I tried this year, was getting my books converted to audiobooks for the Apple Book Store. At least trying to. This is done through Draft2Digital, and since I had to move my books from Smashwords to 2D2 to do this for Apple, I went ahead and moved all of them to D2D distribution as well. I didn't see this as a big deal, since D2D acquired Smashwords several years ago. However, this switch cost me all my reviews and ratings on Apple and Kobo, even though D2D was listed as the publisher on Apple. That sucked. It will, however, give me a chance to quantify how much reviews and ratings matter, since I made the move on 1 January, and I will be able to compare sales before and after, Apple to apple so to speak -reviews vs no reviews this coming January, using yearly sales totals for Apple on Smashwords. Early results suggest that the lack of reviews may not be significant, since ebook sales in the March and April averaged about 73 books vs a 2023 Apple sales total of 775. Of course, this is a small sample, but that figure doesn't include audiobooks, and early audiobook sales suggest that they will more than make up any sales drop.

However, what sucks even more, has been my the experience in converting my ebooks on D2D into auto-narrated audiobooks for Apple. While the process is simple - too simple, in fact - it has been a very poor experience. First of all, Apple offers no ability to choose narrators, to hear how the narration sounds and adjust how words are pronounced, unlike every other such program. And, while both Amazon and Google will produce an audiobook ready for sale in hours, it has been five months since I submitted my twelve books and five of them have still not been converted to audiobooks, with no explanation why this is so. The other seven were converted randomly over the course of four months. There is ready no explanation for this. If there were problems with the books, I should've been notified so that they could be fixed. It certainly can't be any technological hurdle that has Apple stumped, since other tech companies can do in hours and with more options. It seems to me that Apple is just being Apple - a company known for less than ideal treatment of its developers and suppliers. Moreover, unlike Google where audiobooks immediately exploded, my sales of audiobooks on Apple have been modest so far, though perhaps it is fairer to say, they've been in line with my level of ebook sales on Apple. Figures next week.

My third experiment was another audiobook opportunity, this time taking Amazon up on their offer to create virtual voice audiobooks for free, just as Google and Apple have done. In this case the process was just as simple as that with D2D, but you're given more options. You have a choice of 3 male and 4 female voices, with the promise of more and better voices coming down the pike this summer, including different narrators for different chapters - and the ability to change narrators when we care to. We can listen to our audiobooks before publishing them unlike Apple, and alter the pronunciation of words, as well as the speed how the word is spoken, and how the narrator treats dashes, unlike Apple. While this fall short of what can be done for audiobooks on Google, it is far better than what D2D/ Apple offers. One big plus for this program is that the audiobooks will appear in the Audible catalog, the largest audiobooks store.

There are, however, several limits to this program. It's an invite only beta program. Audiobooks in this program are limited to 27 hours run time - about 240K words, which means that my two most popular books, The Bright Black Sea and The Lost Star's Sea are too long to be converted into audiobooks. The second requirement is that the ebooks have a table of content. That was a problem for me until I downloaded their Kindle Create app, and uploaded my books using that app. It automatically creates a table of contents. Having done that, all my books but those two long ones are now available as audiobooks on Amazon and Audible. The other downside, for me, is that the minimum price is $3.99, which I think is cheap for audiobooks, but will limit the number of audiobooks I sell. Numbers to come next week as well.

Clearly, I'm bullish on audiobooks, as I think they will continue to grow, and producing them now, even with AI generated voices, is future proofing them. I'm also bullish on the technology behind AI generated narration - it will continue to improve over the next few years to a point where it will be indistinguishable from all but the most dramatic, and highly paid, human narrators and the narration of my books will keep pace with those improvements.

My big takeaway from this year is that in publishing, like in real estate, there are three most important elements for success. In real estate they are location, location, and location, while in publishing they are visibility, visibility, and visibility. Sales of The Girl on the Kerb exploded when Amazon began to promote it. And it has remained visible in the top 50 titles on Amazon's list of Free Espionage Thrillers since its release, and in the top 100 on its other list. And in a wider sense, my sales are driven by readers searching for "Free science fiction" or some such search term, with "Free" being the key. Out of the millions of books available, my books can be found by random readers searching for free books to read within the first 10 -20 search result pages. Enough to keep sales ticking along at more than a thousand copies a month. 

My other takeaway is that far more people than I realized read books on their phones, so that offering books to be read on phones, conveniently from stores on their phones, is the way to go for both ebooks and audiobooks. That seems to me to be the main reason for my success on the Google Play Store, and my hopes for Apple audiobooks.

I think that petty much covers looking back on my ninth year in the business. Next week I'll have all the numbers, and perhaps talk about what I'm expecting for my tenth year. Stay tuned!

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 45)

 

When Berthold Gambrel reviewed a short story by P G Wodehouse - Honeysuckle Cottage on his website, A Ruined Chapel by Moonlight I commented that I didn't think it was one of Wodehouse's best efforts. I wanted something with more of his trademark, witty, slang-filled dialog. He suggested that I try the book below. I did, and he was right, it had everything I love about P G Wodehouse's stories. It was a blast.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Jill the Reckless (AKA The Little Warrior) by P. G. Wodehouse  A-

This is a fairly early novel by Wodehouse, dating from 1921, but hardly the first. He'd been writing for nearly 20 years by this point. But it is early in the sense that it was not written to a formula that became his standard a decade latter. Many of the elements of that formula are floating around in this novel, but they haven't yet been hammered into place. I won't say that this story is a serious story, but it perhaps more realistic than his later Bertie and Jeeves, or Blandings Castle stories. And he throws in a lot more description of scenery and settings than he does in later books. 
And one of the most interesting feature of this book, is that he uses his knowledge of New York and the Broadway musicals of the time to great effect in this story. Between 1915 and 1919 Wodehouse collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton to write Broadway musicals. Wodehouse wrote the lyrics to the songs. He used this firsthand knowledge of the inner workings of the New York theater, and musicals in particular to great effect in this story, having the title character, Jill become a dancer in a Broadway musical. We get to see the life of dancers and singers, managers and directors of the musicals of that the period, from the show's first practice to its first performance. In addition to Jill, we have her pompous fiancée, his domineering mother, along with a Bertie Wooster type fellow, plus a down-to-earth noble male rival to her unpleasant fiancée, and Jill's con-man uncle, as well as an assortment of theater people, from lowly dancers to directors and mighty producers. 
All in all, a very entertaining story. My only criticism is that it relies a lot on coincidences to advance the plot. But, given the type of story it is, that's easy to over look. All in all, this book offers an entertaining window to the New York of a hundred years ago, and the theater in particular. 
The book is in the public domain and the ebook version is a free download from the Gutenberg project website here.

Last Chance For the Omnibus Editions

 

I will be withdrawing my three $.99 omnibus ebook editions of my stories currently on Amazon 30 April 2024. Over the past year I've sold less than 25 of them, and while I had no set expectations to be met, they haven't done what I set out to do, which is to significantly expand my non-US sales by offering my ebooks at as near to the free price as I was selling them at on Amazon.com. More over, in January, of this year, after some 8 plus years, Amazon stopped price-matching the free price of most of my ebooks. So be it. They gave me a chance to find an audience, and now it's time to leave the nest and fly... 

It has been my experience that any reasonable price more than free is not a large factor in determining sales. No matter what price you put on a ebook, it is a hundred times harder to sell than a free ebook. There seems no point selling ebooks at $.99 when you can sell almost as many of them at, say $3.99. Your increased royalties and royalty rate will more than make up the volume difference in sales.

In my case, I've an out of date idea of what things should cost. I used to buy real paperback books for $.40- $.50 back in the day, so that even $.99 seems high to me for a digital file. But the reality is that the paperback books I used to by at those old prices now sell for something like $8 today so that even my most expensive ebook, at $4.99 is a bargain. Less than a cup of coffee, as many author/publishers point out. So be it.

The lesson learned here is that visibility is the primary factor in sales. If potential customers never sees a book, they can't buy it. $.99 doesn't make books more visible. 

You can still download ebook versions of all of my books for free from Smashwords and at least read them for free from a host of other retailers. You can also listen to them for free on the Google Play Store, and (maybe some day) from Apple. 

It was a useful, but not very successful experiment. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. 

So, if you want those ebooks on your kindle, now is the time to buy! May first 2024 will be too late! Act Now!

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 44)

I'm taking a brief break from books this week to review an Amazon Prime TV series. Amazon recently gave me, no doubt out of the kindness of their heart, a free month of Amazon Prime, and with it Prime Video which gave me a chance to view this series.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Fall Out  Amazon Prime 8 part season one C+

First disclaimer - I am not a gamer and I haven't played any of the various Fallout video games, and thus I may not be its prime target viewer.

Second disclaimer - I am not a big fan of gore and violence.

This series is based on a video game franchise with something like half a dozen releases. It is set in a post nuclear war United States, and like many shooter style games, I gather that it has the usual quota of violence, blood, and gore.

The TV show is faithful to the game that inspired it - in that it has a lot of violence, blood, and gore. There are also many references - Easter eggs - to items and visuals in the game, and how the game is played, many of which I no doubt missed.

So why in the hell did I watch it?

The first reason is that I could, with my free month of Amazon Prime and Prime Video. Now, I could've finished watching Good Omens 2. I had watched a number of episodes of that show before Christmas when we paid for a month of Prime. I had stopped because I found that season pretty lame and boring. I didn't feel like continuing on with it.

The second reason is that Fallout looked visually interesting, at least in the show's trailers. The scenery, the look and feel of the world, looked intriguing enough for me to give it a look.

So, not being the intended audience either for the game or the type of story, and interested in it mostly for the scenery, what did I think of it?

It was not bad. Not great, but not bad either. It told a story rather than just patching often violent scenes together. A rather contrived, and incomplete story, but a story nevertheless.

I while generally I wasn't grossed out by the amount of blood, violence, and gore portrayed in the show though there is a lot of it - I assume it's there as a nod to the game play. The show takes a fairly lighthearted approach to the story - at least at times - making the gore and violence mostly of the comic book variety, i.e. nothing to take seriously, and thus, gratuitous. The only thing of consequence that was killed, was time that would've been better used to tell the story better and more cohesively. But hey, I'm not the target audience, so what do I know?

The story does try to get serious and meaningful, at times. Nevertheless, lot of this effort struck me as being rather ham-fisted - with a lot of close-ups of the faces of characters saying nothing, but clearly thinking something - I guess to save writers from having to actually come up with serious dialog, which was not their long suit.

The story starts rather simply with some sex and violence, and settles into a plot driven by two, count them, two McGuffins.

The basic premise is that some people purchased places in great underground fallout shelters, and now, several hundred years after a nuclear war, their descendants are still in them, waiting for the radiation to die down. There is however, all sorts of dystopian life on the surface, a dog-eat-dog/people-eat-people, society with plenty of mutant monsters and such. 

The first McGuffin has the daughter of one of the leaders of the fallout shelters leave the shelter for the surface to search for her father who was taken/kidnapped/tossed out by some gang of outsiders for mysterious reasons. We only learn why in the last couple of minutes of the last installment. Does the reason make a lot of sense? I'm not really sure, hence I consider it a McGuffin, but I suppose who cares? You're along for the ride, not the destination.

The second McGuffin has that some surface scientist injecting himself with a blue light something, (again we only find out what it is in the last episode - tying the two McGuffins together) and then goes on the run, with a number of people searching for him, including a knight & a squire from a surface military order and a ghoul bounty hunter. The girl from the fallout shelter, the knight's squire, and the ghoul repeatedly cross paths or get together throughout the story, stitching the story together.

There are also flashbacks to the time before the war which tie into characters motivations and builds a backstory for the present state of the world.

The show introduced a number of colorful characters along the way- usually they are the humorous parts - but often, annoying, mostly then kills them off. 

As I said above, it was its look that got me to look in on it. It is simply a good looking show. My only complaint on this score is how erratically the scenery seemed to change from story point to story point, so that the locales never seemed to be connected and time and distances between them vague. And often we seemed to be revisiting the same sets over and over again in supposedly different locales. Plus days go by and no one seems to eat. Minor points for sure, but little things like that catch my eye.

I was ready to DNF this after the first two episodes, but decided to push on, and I'm glad I did watch the whole season. Still, it only earned a C+ from me. Its reliance on violence and its rather lame attempts at seriousness lost it points on my report card. I think it would've been far better if it had just embraced the many quirky aspects of the story, characters, and setting. You know, give it the Jasper Fforde treatment. But that's just my opinion. Give it a try if it sounds interesting. It has been received pretty positively by viewers and critics and has been green lighted for a second season. 

A New Wide Release Coming April 27th 2024!

27 April 2024 is the release date for my novella, A Night on Isvalar, as a trade paperback book, a free ebook in all the usual ebook stores, and as a free audio book on the Google Play Store. While this is not a new story, this will be its first release in paper and the first time it will be available outside of Amazon.

I wrote the story as a serial story for the launch of Amazon's Vella platform in 2021, on the off chance that the service would be a massive hit. At the same time, I also decided to enroll a novella version in the Kindle Unlimited program. My thinking was to use it more or less as advertising on those platforms in the hope that if readers found and enjoyed this story on those venues, they would go on to read more of my wide-release books. While this may've occasionally happened, the numbers sold/pages read - under 50 copies in 3 years - suggest that it would do better a better job by being sold wide for free. I had originally planned to make that move this summer, but when I looked into getting it out of the Kindle Unlimited program, I found that it's automatically renew date for another 90 days was on 26 April, and that all I needed to do to unenroll it was unchecked the auto-renew box. I did so, and so soon the ebook  A Night in Isvalar will be free and wide, except Amazon. What makes this release extra special is that the 27th of April will mark the anniversary of the release of my first book, A Summer in Amber, which I published on the 27th of April 2015. So here we are, nine years and fifteen books later. Time flies.

As you can see, I'm taking a slightly different approach to its new cover this time around, going with black and white line art only. This reflects my dislike of its current cover and my desire not to have to paint a new one for it, as well as its long history, which included a comic book treatment of the story.

The setting, and small parts of this story, are lifted directly from the first science fiction story I wrote, The Hybrid Worlder, which I shopped around to magazines back in 1980, without success. Just for fun I returned to the story with a different plot for a comic book treatment some ten or fifteen years later. And then, three years ago, the Vella opportunity arose with only a couple of months lead time. I decided to use the story yet again by rewriting the (unwritten) comic book picture version with major changes in the details, that I reformatted the twenty installments for the novella. While I had penciled in the whole comic book story, I had only inked a few pages, enough, however to be able to adopted a number of the panels to use not only as the cover art, but also as interior illustrations in the paper book, just to make the slim book a little special. The ebook version won't have illustrations as they are too clunky in ebooks.

Long story short - you will shortly have an opportunity to read a newly freed  C. Litka novella. It's a stand alone story set in an entirely different "universe" than any of my other stories - the first one I wrote stories in - which features faster than light starships. It uses a "tea clippers in space" motif as the background to the narrative.(I was into tea and tea clippers at the time.) I doubt that I'll write any sequels, though the story, like all of my stories is open ended.
The A Night on Isvalar blurb;

It was supposed to be a quiet night. It was anything but.

Riel Dunbar grew up and,  for many years,  sailed out of the little moon of Isvalar, the interstellar port of Aeroday. But then the restless life of a starfarer carried him away for decades. Chance had now brought him home with a promised long leave ashore. But, it turned out, that was not to be. Instead he found that he had only a few free hours to spend on Isvalar.

His plan was simple. He’d dine at an old haunt of his youth, and then, after a brief nap, he’d visit the starfarer dives of Isvalar for a real spree before sailing. But Riel hadn’t counted on crossing orbits with Cera Marm, the powermate of a rival ship. Somehow he found himself entangled in her plans – plans that included not paying a gambling debt to a very persistent bookie and his collectors. Riel’s night on Isvalar turned into a hectic series of chases and escapes across the little moon, encountering neuro-blade wielding thugs, a snake obsessed shadow-rat gang, an auton enforcer, and the bookie himself. It didn’t end well.

A Night on Isvalar is a 26,200 word novella. 

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 43)

 

I vaguely knew that Charlie Sykes was a rightwing AM radio talk show host for many years in Milwaukee, though I was neither an AM radio talk show, or rightwing type of fellow. More recently Sykes evolved into a Never Trumper, and critic of MAGA, and had aYouTube channel that came up on my feed. I watched a number of his YouTube segments, and in his last episode - I gather that he's now moved on to MSNBC - and in the course of thanking people, he thanked and named his novelist wife for proofreading his copy every morning. Curious about this novelist wife, I tracked her down on Amazon, and found that she has written a series of four, and soon to be five books set in Wisconsin's Door County - the peninsula or "thumb" of Wisconsin between Lake Michigan and Green Bay, and Washington Island - just north of the peninsula. Door County is the Cape Code of Wisconsin; a summer resort destination, with all the touristy things you expect, but with an old time flavor. I have fond memories of Door County, having spent weekends and several week long vacations up there in tourist houses on the lake shore. So, to make this long story short; I checked at our library and found that ebook copies of these novels were available, and put my name down for the first one, which followed in a few days.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

 North of the Tension Line by J. F. Riordan  B-
If you take the stories of Molly Clavering, or D E Stevenson, send them 80 years into the future and across the pond to the middle west of America, you might well get North of the Tension Line. I am not quite sure what chic lit is, but I suppose this book would likely fall under that genre. The story concerns the adventures and romances of two 30 something year old single women, Fiona, an ex-reporter, now a freelance writer, and Elizabeth, the owner of an art gallery in Door County.
The story begins in the resort town of Ephraim on the "Busy Side" of Door County, which is to say the Green Bay side of the peninsula, where Fiona is living. We meet Roger, the coffee shop guy, and Elizabeth. During a day trip to Washington Island with Elizabeth and Rocco, Elizabeth's German shepherd, we see the sights of the island, one of which is a house that catches Fiona's attention. A few days later, she finds that the house is for sale, and proceeds to buy it on a bet that being a big city girl, she couldn't survive a winter on the little island of Washington Island. 
The rest of the story recounts Fiona's efforts to deal with the problems that arise from this rash decision, which include making repairs to the house, dealing with spiders, mice, and an unknown creature in the walls, as well as with a troublemaking goat that was given to her as a gift by Roger, plus a evil neighbor who wants to drive her out of the house, and getting to know the small town community of Washington Island, and winter in Wisconsin. A lot of things. There is also a second story line involving a romance between Elizabeth and Roger. 
I like these types of stories, though I had several minor issues with this one. Fiona's problems and adventures are played for lighthearted amusement, a stranger in a strange land sort of thing, but I didn't like the totally evil neighbor bit and all her problems with Robert, the goat, got old quickly. You need problems and antagonists, I guess, for a story, but perhaps these antagonists were a little over the top, and I felt that the story went on a mite too long.
The other thing I found interesting, is that Fiona as a freelance writer of non-fiction articles never seems to spend much of her time writing. And whatever she does write, it seems that all she needs is the internet, since she never travels anywhere to interview anyone, or investigate anything or any place. And yet, somehow, she has plenty of money, not just to buy a house on a whim, but spend it on single malt scotch, Italian shoes, and basically anything else she needs, without giving it much of a second thought. The only sacrifice she makes because of a lack of money is that she couldn't go home for Christmas. In short, in this story, being a freelance writer is nice work, if you can get it. However, knowing a little bit about how well freelance writing pays, or doesn't, I found her free spending lifestyle very hard to believe. But then, maybe what I was seeing is how many people live; they spend up to their credit card's limit and perhaps that was how she was living. Or maybe that's how the world can work in fiction.
So, all in all, not a bad story. I don't know if I'll go on to read more of her adventures, but I might, if, this summer, I find that I want to take an imaginary vacation to Door County.

What the (distant) future holds...

It's Tuesday night, and I haven't a clue as to what to write for my Wednesday blog post. And if I don't write anything, everyone will think I'm dead. I'm not, at the moment, However, I do have a dentist appointment tomorrow morning, i.e. right after I post this, and those are always touch and go...

So how can I fill up a few paragraphs with nothing? What's more nothing than books that you plan to write? So I'll run with that. Here's what I hoping to write now that I pushed Passage to Jarpara out the door.

My first priority is my 2025 novel. I happened to have spent all last summer dreaming up a story, with something like a plot. I decided, however, that having spent all summer dreaming up this story, to then go on and write it, might have been too much of it, and I'd get tired of it halfway through writing it. So instead, I put it on the back burner and finished Passage to Jarpara, which needed finishing. However, as a result, I actually have a story ready and waiting to be written now that I've finished Jarpara, which is something that's gotten very rare in my writing life these days. Needless to say, this story is my next project. 

What is it, you ask? Well, I'm not going to tell you much, except to say that it will be a slow paced, post-magic, slice of life, fantasy story with a little mystery woven into it. I'm planning to sell it as the perfect antidote to a grimdark/epic fantasy overdose. It'll probably be very boring, but I don't care. I'm pretty content to let  things be what they be.

Ideally, I would like to then write a novella to finish off Litang & Cin's story, one that would follow The Lost Star's Sea. The thing is I have an actual idea -- Litang, who, at the end of The Lost Star's Sea, was going off to visit the inner islands for a year or two, giving Cin time to finished up her mission. We'd pick up the story as he starts on his way back to her by hitching a ride aboard the Order's courier ship, the one captained by his old friend, the one who took them on the last mission - you know who I mean, don't you?  I could go back and research this, and come up with actual names and such, but, I'd have to get up, walk several steps to get the book, and then page through it... eh, it's just a bird in the bush at the moment, so why go into all the details? Anyway, the idea is that along the way they... wait for it... run into a storm and get shipwrecked on one of those floating islands. Except that this island doesn't seem to be merely floating -- it almost seems to be flying like an island-sized bird, using parts of the island like vast wings... So, is it actually a vast living creature so big that there is a jungle growing on it?, Or is it some sort of vessel piloted by someone, or some thing... Or just three islands connected together with webs of vines that are moving in the wind?  Who knows? I certainly haven't a clue. Which explains why it hasn't been written in the last six years.

Beyond that. I always planned to write two more novellas set on Mars, to make Keiree into a full novel. I even started writing one, but the idea I had at the time, didn't work/didn't excite me, so I put it aside, and haven't had any better ideas since then.

Both those ideas are, however, sequels, and I've vowed to write no more sequels, so I'll have to see what new story I can dream up for 2026. That will be my summer project. In any event, any story I can dream up will always be set in an imaginary land - so I don't have to do any research - but it will not be marketed as science fiction. It'll either fantasy, or another genre based on the story line, rather then on the place or time.

Okay. I just spent an hour typing this up. Looks like enough. I'll see if I can come up with something more substantial to write next week. In the meanwhile, I have at least a month's worth of my Saturday book review in the can, so there's always that.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 42)

 

There was a reason for rereading and, last week, reviewing Shades of Grey. And that reason is that I was preparing myself for the arrival of a book that I had never to expected to read. I actually never expected it to be written, since years ago I had learned that the planned last two books in the Shades of Grey trilogy, Painting By Numbers, and The Gordini Protocols had been cancelled due to the disappointing sales of Shades of Grey. But apparently the book slowly developed enough of a following, that a single sequel was greenlighted, and after the usual set of delays that seem to come with every Jasper Fforde book, it was in the mail. 

I had pre-ordered it from Amazon UK, as the last two of his books were either not released in the US or arrived a year later. But I see that this one is available from Amazon in the US. But it's here, and I've read it. Was it worth the wait?

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Red Side Story by Jasper Fforde  A

While this book has the same delightfully clever and witty writing of the first book, as indeed, do all of Jasper Fforde's work, it tells a much darker story, in keeping with his last two books, Early Riser and The Constant Rabbit. Given the discoveries of the first book, this story was always going to be a little darker, so it should have come as no surprise. What was surprising was just how harrowing the story turned out to be. In Shades of Grey, the narrator, Eddie Russett is a pretty naïve young many when he arrives in East Carmine, on the fringe of the Chromatacia, the society organized along what colors, and how much of those colors, an individual can see. Over the course of that story, he discovers, with the help of Jane, things aren't quite as they seem, which causes them not only to question everything, but to discover some of the answers and even more questions. Those answers come at a price. And they are determined to find the whole truth. In this book the truth comes at an even higher price.
This story takes place just a week or two after the events of Shades of Grey, with both Eddie and Jane awaiting trial for what they are suspected, falsely, of having killed the son of one of the powerful people in power in East Carmine. Even though the story flows seamlessly from the first, I have to wonder if this was the original continuing story  which Fforde had planned to tell in those cancelled two volumes compressed into one book. In some ways, it seems like this is the case, with Eddie and Jane quickly and rather effortlessly finding out a lot about the inner workings of the Choromatacia, much of which had been even hinted at in the first volume, much of it  simply told to them, rather than having them uncovering it themselves. This suggests to me that Fforde was pressed for time and plot, fitting two books into one. But on the other hand, there is one important character and one important plot line that looked to be an important part of the story going forward that is completely missing in this book, suggesting that the plot was significantly altered. 
In any event we discover many facets of this peculiar society - and hints of what lies outside of it - while Eddie and Jane await their trial, the result of which is a foregone conclusion, and not in their favor. And the more they discover, the more dangerous this knowledge is, to them, and everyone around them. Suffice to say real bad things happen.
When this book was first announced, Fforde was saying that this, and the next Thursday Next book were books meant to wrap up each of these series. And to a fairly good extent, this book wraps up the Shades of Grey series - not with all the answers, but with most of them. 
But wait a minute. After reading the book, I recently came across a YouTube video from the British SF bookstore Forbidden Planet, where they interviewed Jasper Fforde after a book signing. In that interview he talked about Red Side Story. He said that Shades of Grey was a book where he wanted to use characters of his own creation, and that he let himself go well, wild. However in Red Side Story, he wanted to rope the story in a bit, though it still seemed every bit as out there as ever to me. But with a much darker tone, not only because of the death sentence hanging over Eddie and Jane, but because their efforts to find the full truth put many more people at risk - for the more people know of the truth, the more dangerous it is for them. And then Fforde went on to say that he is now planning a third book. What? While it is certainly possible, given the revelations at the conclusion of the story, it would have to be a very type of different story - but apparently he has a good idea where he wants to take the story - I guess to its ultimate conclusion. That story is slated to be written after the Thursday Next book, and a stand alone book, which given Fforde's writing pace means that I can expect it sometime around March of 2036, so I'm not holding my breath.
So, what's the bottom line on Red Side Story? I think it's essential reading for readers who enjoyed Shades of Grey. It is every bit as entertainingly written as all of his books, and that earns a score of an A from me. However, I must confess that I don't see me re-reading this book half a dozen times like I did Shades of Grey. It is simply too dark of a story to fall in love with, for me to read again and again, no matter how clever it is written. If I ever reread Shades of Grey, I might go on to read this one too. But simply knowing the truth may be enough for me.

C. Litka Audio Books

Most of my books are now available as audiobooks on the major audiobook platforms. All of them use "auto-narration"  or "virtual voices" for their narrator for the simple reason that my publishing business cannot justify the cost of  hiring human narrators at between $100 to $500 per the run time of the book, For a book of 100,000 words the run time is around 12 hours and would cost between $1,200 to $$6,00 per book depending on the skill of the narrator. The fact that I can produce acceptable audiobooks for free, and sell them for that price as well, when the store allows, highlights the appeal of AI to producers of products. The fact that I would never consider hiring a human means that I'm not taking the break out of the mouths of starving audiobook readers. But it does illustrate the appeal of Ai to companies that can replace humans...

In any event... 

GOOGLE

All of my audiobooks are available on the Google Play Store for free. You can find them here. Google offers the most voices - I used a British voice for my narration - as well as the most options for editing, including text and using multiple voices within the narration. Its audiobooks are available hours after you hit publish.

APPLE

Some of my audiobooks are available on Apple, also for free. You can find them here. Apple offers the fewest choices, i.e. as in none at all. They also take forever to produce. All of my books were uploaded for conversion on the 1st of January, 2024, and of this posting. only 8 of the 13 books I uploaded are audiobooks. I have no idea why it takes so long. Hopefully more will be coming down the pike shortly. 

AMAZON/AUDIBLE

And finally all but two of my books are available as audiobooks on Amazon/Audible for the price of $3.99 - the minimum price set by Amazon. You can find them here. Amazon offers a limited choice of voices - and the lability to edit how words are pronounced, as well as adding pauses and adjust how fast a word is spoken. The audiobook appears within hours of publication. Two of my books, The Bright Black Sea and The Lost Star's Sea are too long for Audible, at least for this program. They run 34 hours plus on Google, but Audible is limiting run time to 26 hours or about 240K words. I am thinking of offering them in two volumes just for the audiobook version, though I would have to publish the two volume novels as ebooks, i.e. offering two versions of the same book. I'm still thinking about that.

I am a firm believer in audiobooks, even though I never "read" them myself. The audiobook market continues to grow. And I think, in this multi-tasking world, they will continue to grow, as they allow people to "read" books when doing things like driving to or for work. And I have no doubt that the technology that powers them will continue to improve to the point where they will become indistinguishable from your bog standard human narrator. Of course there will always be better, more dramatic human narrators - the super stars you will find in every field of endeavor - but they will always be rare. And expensive. All in all, I believe I am as well positioned to take advantage of this market, and reach more readers which is my publishing goal. And to that end, I'll keep an eye out for other audiobook platforms like Spotify, should they also offer this service in the future. Stay turned. 

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 41)

 

I've set myself up for an impossible task - describing, reviewing and recommending a book that I've read maybe six times over the last thirteen years, making it perhaps my favorite book of all time. The book is not Anne of Green Gables. Or anything like it. Instead, it is a strange, silly, satirical, mystery/post apocalypse novel. It's a slice of live story that only covers just four days. But a lot happens in four days. I recommend it to everyone, knowing that it's not a book for everyone. I will say, however, that I think most people who have read it on my recommendation have liked it, though not to the extent I do. So, without further ado, tallyho! 

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde   A+

I think I'd best start with the writing before I get to the basic premise of the story. This book offers exactly what I value most in a book; a small story (though with big implications), a first person narrative with a focus on characters, which is written with a great deal of clever wit and humor. I'm not a lad for silly stories, as a general rule. Silly, slapstick humor doesn't have a great appeal to me. But having said that, this story has a great deal of silliness in it that is handled in a matter of fact way. It's part of the humor. What redeems it for me is that all the silliness is grounded in the premise of the society the story is set in. It is not silliness just for the humor of silliness. It only seems silly to us because we are peering into this world from our own. Everything is very real to the characters in the story. Wodehouse was a master of this; while you couldn't take his characters, and the situations they get themselves into, seriously in our "real world", they are, however, entirely believable within the make-believe world he creates; a world that is just next door to our world.  

Part of the charm of this book is that it is a mystery on several different levels. We are dropped into this world without an info-dumps. You have to just sit back and go with the flow and abandon the desire to make immediate sense of the world. Fforde builds this world step by step throughout the entire story, and slowly you get a picture of a very closed, hieratical society where stasis and stability are the goal with human characters who are not quite like us. The second mystery is what lies behind the curtains of this society. It is the mystery that our narrator, Eddie Russet, slowly discovers, or rather discovers its existence, because he is a mite too curious. 

The basic premise of the story is that the humans of this society can usually only see one or two primary natural colors, if that. What colors they can see, and how much of that color they can see, determines their place in this very regimented society; a collective ruled by an elaborate set of rules and the highest color seeing members of the collective. There are, however, synthetic colors that everyone can see. Seeing color is one of the great desires of these humans. Showing off one's predominate color using these synthetic colors is a status symbol. The story is a post-apocalyptic on set some 500 years after "Something Happened," though what happened is not known. 

Our narrator, Eddie Russet, (everyone has the last name of related to the primary color they can see) has been assigned to conduct a useless task -a chair census - for a month in a remote town in Wales as punishment for a practical joke he did. Or so he believes. His father accompanies him as a replacement swatchman. Swatchmen are the doctor to these types of humans; curing various ailments by showing a specific synthetic color to the patient. (Think of the pantone series of color samples, if you're familiar with them.) They find that the collective's own swatchman has died under mysterious circumstances, and nothing is quite as it seems. This town is on the fringe of society and the rules are rather loosely interpreted. The story covers only four day as Eddie uncovers a deadly secret with the help of Jane, a "grey" girl i.e. someone who can't see any colors, and are the manual labors of the collective, making enemies in the process.

Enough. 

Here's the opening paragraphs to give you a taste of how the book reads;

It began with my father not wanting to see the Last Rabbit and ended up with my being eaten by a carnivorous plant. It wasn't really what I'd planned for myself  - I'd hoped to marry into the Oxbloods and join their dynastic string empire. But that was four days ago, before I met Jane, retrieved the Caravaggio and explored High Saffron. So instead of enjoying aspirations of Chromatic advancement, I was wholly immersed within the digestive soup of a yateveo tree. It was all frightfully inconvenient.

But it wasn't all bad, for the following reason: First I was lucky to have landed upside down. I would drown in under a minute, which was far, far preferable to being dissolved alive over the space of a few weeks. Second, and more important, I wasn't going to die ignorant. I had discovered something that no amount of merits can buy you: the truth. Not the whole truth, but a pretty big part of it. And that was why this was all frightfully inconvenient. I wouldn't get to do anything with it. And this truth was too big and too terrible to ignore. Still, at least I'd held in my hands for a full hour and understood what it meant.

I didn't set out to discover a truth. I was actually sent to the Outer Fringes to conduct a chair census and learn some humility. But the truth inevitably found me, as important truths often do, like a lost thought in need of a mind.